Australian Fiction

I had fun imagining Sonya Hartnett and Isobelle Carmody indulging in a little pre-publication chit-chat:

IC: What are you working on now, Sonya?
SH: A children’s story about two orphaned brothers battling for survival in a world turned upside down; talking animals; themes of freedom and loss. What about you?
IC: A children’s story about two orphaned brothers struggling for survival in a world suddenly turned alien; talking animals; themes of resilience and loss …

The result is two different novels, but the marketing meetings at Penguin must have been interesting.

The Body in the Clouds, Ashley Hay’s scintillating and accomplished first novel, is in fact her fifth book, its predecessors all being non-fiction. There was the Lord Byron book, The Secret: The Strange Marriage of Annabella Milbanke and Lord Byron (2000), Gum: The story of eucalypts and their champions (2002), Herbarium (2004) and Museum: The Macleays, their collections and the search for order (2007).

The title of Sarah Hopkins’s second novel, Speak to Me, is an exhortation: bridge the gap between us. It is also an expression of hope, however misguided, that such a gap can be bridged: if only we could speak, we could heal.

Julia moves to Lovely, a fictional country town in Victoria, with her yoga-teaching husband, Bryant, and their two children. The place is dismal; Julia can’t find a decent cup of coffee; the local plumbers won’t come to install her espresso machine; and she misses her ballet-dancing friends back in Melbourne.

Soon after arriving, she meets Tom, a young man who can see auras and hear people’s ‘inner songs’. Julia can also hear Tom’s ‘song’, and they are inexorably drawn to each other. Bryant, similarly drawn to Tom, decides to heal his troubled soul. New Age spirituality infuses Milk Fever, at times to the detriment of the narrative. Tom and Julia’s attraction is so heavily linked to spiritual resonance that their eventual relationship seems based on little more than cosmic codependency. This is a pity, because there is much here to suggest that the author understands the complexity of relationships, self-doubt and the past’s influence on the present.

The Byron Journals is organised into short, eventful chapters detailing several months in the life of Andrew, its protagonist. Andrew sets out from Adelaide on a schoolies’ trip, hoping to escape the weight of expectation and the fallout from his parents’ personal and professional lives. In Byron Bay he joins a group of street musicians. His prolonged holiday becomes a lost summer of drugs (consumed, cultivated and sold), alcohol, sex and music. Andrew is drawn into intense relationships with the members of the group, particularly with the captivating Heidi, who has herself come to Byron to escape a troubled past.

Kally Palamas is an Australian of Greek descent; a trained and published philosopher barely coping with a personal tragedy in the man-made caves of Cooper Pedy. Estranged from her lover and living a solipsistic life, her world is disrupted when she travels to Greece to deal with the ceremony of her father’s death.

Her father, Akindynos Palamas, had been one of the many Greek migrants to travel to Australia in search of freedom and fortune. However, after achieving success in his adopted land he succumbed to the lure of the myths of his old country while his family continued their lives in Australia.

Lost children appear (or disappear) everywhere in literature and film: in Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones (2002) and Clint Eastwood’s Changeling (2008). Wendy James’s new novel, Where Have You Been?, concerns a lost teenager, and Carmel Bird’s Child of the Twilight (which I reviewed in last month’s ABR) explores the mythic status of the lost child. However, Stephen Orr’s novel Time’s Long Ruin goes to the harrowing core of one of the most disturbing mysteries in twentieth-century Australia – the disappearance of the Beaumont children.

Stealing Picasso is an art heist caper based on the sensational theft in 1986 of Picasso’s Weeping woman from the National Gallery of Victoria. The crime, attributed to a nebulous gang of militant aesthetes calling themselves the Australian Cultural Terrorists, remains unsolved. Anson Cameron, a Melbourne writer best known for the novel Tin Toys (2000), takes this historical loose end and runs with it, discarding all but the most cursory details of the source story.