Shirley Walker
Shirley Walker reviews ‘Learning To Dance: Elizabeth Jolley – Her life and work’ edited by Caroline Lurie
Elizabeth Jolley’s many admirers will be delighted with this new collection of autobiographical fragments, philosophical pieces, short fiction (some previously unpublished) and a number of rarely seen poems. It is designed, according to its editor, Caroline Lurie, to demonstrate the ways in which Jolley channelled her life story into her fiction, creating ‘something more revealing, more artistically truthful than a conventional autobiography’. Given Jolley’s age and circumstances, this collection could well contain her final comments on the writing process, as well as on the larger questions of exile, love and loneliness.
... (read more)Shirley Walker reviews 'Out of Place' by Jo Dutton and 'Beyond the Break' by Sandra Hall
These are both second novels by previously successful authors. Each has an atmospheric sense of place and a dominant female figure. In Beyond the Break, it is the flamboyant and dangerous Irene. In Out of Place, the matriarch Eve, a postwar Italian migrant, keeps her family together through her insistence upon the traditions and the healing rituals of the old world, including especially the cooking.
... (read more)Shirley Walker reviews ‘Across the Magic Line: Growing up in Fiji’ by Patricia Page
In Across the Magic Line: Growing up in Fiji, Patricia Page comes full circle, returning with her sister Gay after an absence of fifty years to the enchanted islands of their childhood, reliving their memories and examining the very different Fiji of the present. Despite changes everywhere, the astonishing beauty of the islands remains, and the kindness of the Fijians is constant.
... (read more)Joy Hooton reviews 'A Wealth of Women' by Alison Alexander, 'Eating the Underworld' by Doris Brett and 'Roundabout at Bangalow' by Shirley Walker
Long term readers of Thea Astley have come to expect novels and short stories of finely tuned social satire which have increasingly employed Astley’s individual idiom: a richly textured and often baroque language of compressed meaning, of striking and original metaphor, of the incisively apt phrase which encapsulates character.
Her satiric themes have almost always focused on Australian society or that of the Pacific region – that ‘tropic cliché’ which she identified in her Herbert Blaiklock Memorial Lecture – ‘Being a Queenslander: A Form of’ Literary and Geographical Conceit’.
The favoured Astley microcosm is an enclosed or isolated community, the small northern town of many of her novels, or the tropic aeland of A Boat Load of Home Folk and her latest novel Beachmasters. Within this environment she is apt to place an isolated and vulnerable individual – perhaps an adolescent like Vinny Lalor of A Descant for Gossips or Gavi Salway of Beachmasters – who must, under the pressure of the social dialectic, learn the complexity of human response.
... (read more)In Dove, the familiar Barbara Hanrahan ingredients – acute realism and the fantastic, the grotesque – are combined once again to produce yet another powerful and moving novel. The scale of realism and fantasy is, as always, finely balanced. The various locations of the novel, for instance, are beautifully realised. Hanrahan has the eye of the graphic artist for the broad canvas, the sweep of light and sky, and the telling detail. Her eye ranges from the Adelaide Hills to the suburbs of ‘pebble dash and pittosporum’ to the Mallee: ‘an antipodean jungle of stiff splintered branches, a mysterious pearly-grey gloom’ interspersed with the ‘faraway rash of green’ that is the wheat. Yet there is more to landscape than this; place is used throughout to evoke psychic states. Appleton, for instance, suggests beatitude and primal innocence. Arden Valley the fairytale potential for the transformation of life, and the Mallee the promised land of plenteous crops and realised love.
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