Homesickness

by Janine Mikosza

Ultimo Press

ISBN 9781761150234

Reviewed by FERNANDA DAHLSTROM

Homesickness is a memoir that strives, as Emily Dickenson urged, to tell all the truth, but tell it slant. Memoirs are reconstructions that seek to capture the voice and perspective of one or more of the writer’s younger selves. Their truth claims are subject to dispute, challenge, and counterclaim. But Melbourne artist and sociologist Janine Mikosza takes a more oblique approach to her subject and the result is a soaring view of the emotional trajectory of her life and of the philosophical questions that its telling raises. When Homesickness opens, she is having cake with a nervous and sometimes hostile woman who tells her to call her Jin as ‘It’s better than Janine.’ After she gets permission from the woman to write her story, it becomes clear that the two women are different iterations of the same person: the narrator is the memoirist, while Jin is the woman who lived her childhood trauma and is still struggling to process it. The book unfolds as a dialogue between author and protagonist, with the two often at cross-purposes, as Mikosza struggles to balance writing about the past with recovering from it.

Jin takes Janine on a tour of the many houses she lived in as a child, hinting at the trauma and violence that is intimately linked to their rooms. We are not given details of what occurred or who the perpetrator was. Jin doesn’t want to reveal everything and ‘add to the literature on family violence piling up like dead bodies in bookstores’ (p. 16). Rather, the spacial dimensions of Jin’s trauma are alluded to via a serious of floorplans. She does not answer the question ‘What happened in those rooms?’ (p. 109) but alludes to a terror of bathrooms, which she repeatedly omits from her sketches. In this way, Mikosza maintains privacy and avoids neatly playing into the trauma genre. The two characters’ disagreements highlight a lot of the questions memoir raises – who is more qualified to tell a person’s story, the elder or younger self? To what extent should a structure be imposed over the messiness of lived experience? How much do factual details matter to the emotional truth of an event? Why should a person entrust their story to a memoirist and what happens if they get it wrong?

Mikosza also presents an indictment on systemic failures to deal appropriately with trauma. When the conversation turns to sex offenders in the priesthood, Jin rails against ‘those fucking men and their supporters’ (p. 123), and weeps when describing how their victims were treated, though she says she was not one of them. When relating the birth of her son, she remembers the obstetrician’s insensitivity, his failure to ask permission before cutting her open, and refusal to respect her concerns about being retraumatised by a vaginal birth. At other points in her story, she resists the memoirist’s cross-examination, refusing to give up control of her own experiences:

Don’t you trust me enough to tell me some more?
Haven’t I given you enough already? she replies.
Not the important parts.
How do you know what the important parts are?
Will you trust me with your life? Please?
Depends what you’re planning to do with it, Jin says. (p. 98)

In Mikosza’s self-talk, we see her simultaneously presenting as a competent professional and as a young woman as incoherent as any client telling her story for the first time. The author strives for specific, quantifiable, and linear claims, impulses associated with the evidence-based disciplines of science and law, and which the survivor thwarts. At times, the dialogue also evokes aspects of the therapeutic relationship, reminiscent of what therapists call ‘reparenting’: consciously giving oneself the nurturance, empathy and protection that was not received in childhood. The duality captures the paradox of survivors of trauma: one can simultaneously be a high-functioning adult and a deprived and terrified child. And coming to terms with the past may be the key to reconciling these selves.

When the conversation reaches Jin’s adult life, the narrative relaxes into a more traditional form, as she finds more recent memories easier to tolerate. The narrative pace picks up and becomes more accessible, the introspection less dense, though the voice of the author still comes in regularly. Here, too, we can see the long-term effects of Jin’s early trauma in the choices she makes and in how her adult relationships play out.

Mikosza said in an interview with The Leaf Bookshop that she did not write Homesickness as a memoir, but as creative non-fiction. However, Ultimo Press marketed the book as memoir, meaning that the author’s stylistic liberties read as a deliberate statement about and subversion of the genre – perhaps more so than she intended. Her book ditches the egocentrism implied by memoir – on the first page she declaims, ‘nobody writes a nobody’s life’ – offering a personal historiography rather than a personal history. When the fractured story resolves into a more unified narrative, it reflects the life arc of a person who has struggled through an unstable childhood, reaching a semblance of stability only later. Her chronic preoccupation with the past is the legacy of her trauma, its unravelment a lifelong project. In revisiting childhood homes, survivors seek a tangible verification of events that have long been in contention.

If Homesickness calls to mind any other work, it is another deeply unconventional trauma memoir, Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? (Marina Books, 2012). Like Mikosza, Bechdel presents a psychological deep dive into the long-term effects of her trauma, though in the form of an intensely introspective graphic memoir, much of which deals with her experiences of psychoanalysis and exploration of various psychological theories. Another level of self-referentiality is added by Bechdel depicting herself working on a memoir (her earlier work, Fun Home) as she undergoes therapy and grapples with her past.

The writing of life stories has assumed different incarnations since the traditional, chronological, exhaustive (and under-theorised) mode of biography. The more selective and reflective mode of memoir experienced a renaissance from the 1990s, with the proliferation of confessional tales of newly destigmatised experiences like drug addiction and mental illness. Writers like Bechdel and Mikosza are now pioneering a new wave of life writing: hyper self-aware, meta-non-fiction that foregrounds the telling of the story.
 
 
FERNANDA DAHLSTROM is a writer, editor and lawyer who lives in Brisbane. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, Overland, Feminartsy, Kill Your Darlings and Art Guide.

Nostalgia Has Ruined My Life

Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle

Giramondo 

ISBN 9781925818772

Reviewed by JOSHUA KLARICA

A technique commonly employed by poets is the announcing of the setting or theme of the piece in its title. Consider T. S Eliot’s poem ‘In a Station of the Metro’, whose title functions as a covert, preliminary line that allows the poem to maintain its effective couplet form. This device eliminates exposition in the work, and plants the reader in the thick of it immediately. Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle, the New Zealand writer whose first book Autobiography of a Marguerite takes the long poem form, utilises this same tactic in the title of her second work. Before we encounter the first words of Nostalgia Has Ruined My Life, the thesis has already been rambunctiously stated. Butcher-McGunnigle, it seems, insists that we view the impending labours of the unnamed protagonist through this prism, managing our expectations – ensuring we understand – before we read and, inevitably, pass judgment.

At once a dark, meandering comedy, at once a documentary of the stultified millennial, Butcher-McGunnigle’s second work follows the deadpan joys and luckless U-turns of a young woman navigating the trials and illusions of youth in an age where ennui seems a rite of passage. She idles time on dating apps, reads online horoscopes, and attempts to apply for jobs before reaching the cover letter and thinking “I can’t be bothered, I don’t care about this at all”. (p25) Any successes are swiftly undone, while any misfortune is short-lived: this is the recipe for getting by. 

While the denouement of the text revolves around securing an administration job at a bakery through a short-lived ménage à trois, the source proper lies amid a series of events not particularly concerned with forming a narrative at all. The text consists of short bursts of commentary, noting moods, whims, and events, usually little more than a paragraph in length, although on rare occasion these break onto a second page. This book of vignettes, although this is a loose term here, might be an exercise mandated by her therapist. They chart, comment, and record the events of a life waiting to get going. 

It is initially challenging to determine whether this is boredom palpable, or rather a languishing attributable to the rising challenges of mental health. There is dry pathos here: “I’m still experiencing cognitive dissonance regarding the heater I bought” (p8). This same humour is bundled into a cry for help: “I’m trying to stop sleeping with a towering pile of clothes on my bed so now I’m sleeping with a towering pile of clothes on the floor instead”(p48). As the notes pile up, the narrator reports suffering from depersonalisation disorder and depression, the intense feelings of being outside of one’s body: watching instead of driving. This recasts any initial suspicions that this was an entitled, bored millennial moping and milling, but still, dealing only in sharp statements, Butcher-McGunnigle never truly invites the reader to know the subject.

Instead, the collages of text become confessions of one simultaneously trying to appraise and make sense of a situation. Not many can say with confidence that they “want to pick blackberries on a farm and then die”(p8), or that they want, this moment, to have scabs on one’s knees(p39). Yet for all their darkly droll commentary, these confessions give way to more sincere, and serious, realities. If having scabs is proof that we have lived, the gaining of that experience is another case altogether. Later, during an interview, our protagonist suddenly “can’t concentrate on anything” because her intrusive thoughts have inexplicably fixated upon her “ankles (being) gnawed open and bleeding, bones exposed”(p44). There is bravado in these lines, but it gives way easily. 

If one joy of the reading experience can be found in plugging the gaps and discerning what happens outside of the story presented, then there is an entire world that carries on beyond these short monologues, making the task of the literary synapse jump a rather difficult one. This isn’t to say that such a limitation necessarily works against Butcher-McGunnigle here. While the fragmentary, oscillating nature of narration might not appear particularly cohesive, the blunt imagery claiming the protagonist’s days is thoughtful. Late one night, for example, while fending off the internal machines that question what she is doing with her life, she is struck by an ad for a mop. Later, she feels compelled to mop up a mess herself, or sweep dust into a pile. It might seem ridiculous, like wanting to walk down a very long driveway, but at least it is something to counteract, through any means possible, the feeling of uselessness. Throughout the text, Butcher-McGunnigle is deftly at work arguing that almost anything can have purpose, so why is it that we can struggle so much to find it?

Another equally dark and unnamed heroine suffering a similar anxiety can be found in Otessa Moshfegh’s much appreciated 2018 novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation. Only, where Moshfegh’s protagonist ends up losing a year, Butcher-McGunnigle’s is so helplessly aware of each ridiculing second as it takes an age to pass. This is a take on modern anxiety that exceeds Moshfegh’s effort, in part (and noting that the heroines are separated by two decades), because Butcher-McGunnigle makes it clear that life, irresistibly, goes on elsewhere. One of the great strengths of Butcher-McGunnigle’s subtlety is the way the external cast – a host of nostalgic-laden folks including ex-boyfriends, high school bullies and siblings – become osculating matter in the protagonist’s orbit, whose episodic appearances work to chastise her own effort at getting on with it, while reinforcing the absurdity of doing just that. Butcher-McGunnigle unveils the hilariously twisted idiosyncrasies employed to handle the increasingly native experience of lackadaisy, like scamming Airbnb or securing one’s place in an elusive pyramid scheme.

This mode of commentary is calculated, refined so it reflects a persona under siege of review and hyperaware of its own subjectivity. It is life in the internet age – bite-sized content that excels at the entertaining and the forgettable. In an endemic example, our protagonist is ovulating, and laments that

[n]o one’s giving me any attention so I make an apple pie at midnight. I spray multi-purpose cleaner on the pie and it shines and then it gets soggy. Last week I had sex with an orphan. But we fell out before I could give him his birthday gift. (p38)

Beyond the jocular and the intimate, for better or for worse, this is how she wants to be seen. Reading these episodes becomes an exhibition, and so hints at the works compelling theme: in what spaces do we exist, and what dictates them? Horoscopes, Tarot readings, Myers-Briggs personality tests, and a litany of online chats informs Butcher-McGunnigle’s protagonist of a particular sense of self, and how she and others view it. 

There is much space between these episodes to which we are not privy, meaning these episodes, their scarcity, their intensity, is highly selective. As a result, Butcher-McGunnigle’s work tussles over the roles we should be performing, but not necessarily those that we do. Sure, there are the more obvious episodes Butcher-McGunnigle wants us to note on the matter: “When he’s fucking me I am thinking about what would be an easy but nutritious lunch option for him” (p15). Then there other, subtler evidences of her poor, somehow inaccurate performances of being, like when the Mystery Shopper she is sleeping with insists they can’t both be INFP’s, or the interviewer for a teaching role suggests they instead brainstorm some other vocations for which she might be suited. Yet our heroine has all the attributes that suggest she should be, or at least can be, successful. A writing career, even though it has stalled here; pregnancy, though not seen through; a deep and very mixed bag of suitors that find her attractive and endearing but succumb themselves to obnoxity and online currency; her own intelligence, in spades that can’t find the matching outlet – she is sharp and useful as a blade kept behind inch-thick display glass. So, it isn’t so much a matter of finding someone to say I love you to, but rather in finding a way to value the act itself. 

Before we begin Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle’s second work, we are asked to assume that nostalgia has to some effect shaped the story that follows. Be it warm liminality or useless retreat, we are immediately called upon to approach the text with our prejudices for or against nostalgia in hand. But by works end, this initial outpost seems rather ham-fisted, for nostalgia in these pages cannot simply reference halcyon throwbacks. Rather, it reflects a time when we were unencumbered by the dictates of our performance. 

Nostalgia emerges when we look back. It is difficult to unsee. “I just want to be in a ball pit in a McDonald’s playground,”(p80)admits the young-but-too-old female in the closing passages. Yet the way is shut, and now even the longing for this kind of easier, familiar passage becomes its own performance. But everything is fleeting, we know this much, which has both a kind of crestfallen truth and surprising optimism to it: this too shall pass.

Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray

by Anita Heiss

Simon and Schuster     

Reviewed by BRENDA SAUNDERS

In the ‘Prologue’, to her novel, Heiss introduces us to Aboriginal tribal life at the onset of colonial expnsion in southern NSW. This is Gundagai in 1838. She provides the historical setting for the action and events to follow. At this time Wagadhaany, the central Aboriginal character in this novel, is a small child living with her family along the Marrambidja Bila (Murrumbidgee River). She hears the adults complaining about the changes, the loss of their land, the clearing of their hunting grounds. They don’t understand why the settlers won’t listen to their advice. Heiss introduces the reader to Wiradjuri words and names, which give greater authenticity to her description of the river people and their culture. There is a glossary of Wiradjuri words and reference notes included at the end of the book.

The novel opens and ends with two dramatic events, two tragedies caused by the great river. In 1853, Wagadhaany is now a young woman working as a domestic for the Bradley family. She is allowed to visit her family camp on Sundays, where she joins in celebrations by the river, speaking her own language freely. In English her name means ‘dancer’ and she readily joins in camp celebrations. The river becomes a metaphor for the power of the natural environment: respected by the local clans, misunderstood by the white settlers, it is both a danger and an essential element for survival.

In the first chapter, Heiss takes us to the historic great flood, when the small trading town of Gundagai and low-lying properties were completely inundated by rising river currents. Many people drowned, but several were rescued by the bravery of local Aboriginal men.

Wagadhaany and two Bradley brothers are saved by her father Yarri during the flood, but their parents and siblings are lost. During the town celebration, when Jacky Jacky and Yarri are given breast plates in recognition of their bravery, she wonders:

‘why… don’t they give the people on the river some more blankets and food. The breastplates will not keep them warm from the frost that continues to settle each night and early morning…hunting does not always bring enough for the entire camp.’

After the tragic flood the younger son James, becomes infatuated with a young widow, Louisa, a Quaker with strong views about women’s emancipation and Aboriginal dispossession. After their marriage, she is kind to her young servant and the two become unlikely friends. Unfortunately, she has no capacity to see the devastating effects on Wagadhaany when she is forced to leave her Wiradjuri family when the Bradleys move to a new property near Wagga Wagga.

Although a work of fiction the story of Wagadhaary is told in a narrative style, following the results of historic events due to the expansion of the pastoral industry in NSW. Heiss has brought into focus the struggles and the dignity of this Aboriginal woman, trying to survive between two cultures. Her character is intelligent and lively, her observations on the White community both wise and at times amusing.

She has become increasingly aware that White people live very separate lives to each other, and even simple sharing of food among families is not common.

Away from the problems at the cold Bradley homestead, Heiss shows us a different world at the Wiradjuri camps along the Murrumbidya, at Gundagai and Wagga Wagga; camps with many children, old aunties, cousins and a warm sense of belonging.

The introduction of Louisa’s character into this story serves to highlight the great dichotomy between the two cultures; between white middle class values and traditional Aboriginal customs. This lack of understanding, of listening is the grit of the novel. Louisa seems unaware of the social mores of the town, who regard Aboriginal people as uncivilized. Rather, she imposes her own high ideals of racial equality on her own terms. One example is the scene at the river when Louisa demands a visit to the river to see the children, suggesting they learn to read the bible!

Wangadhaany is the observer, registering the gradual changes, the conflicts and domestic violence in Louisa’s marriage. Louisa however does not observe the changes in her friend. She is unaware of her relationship with the successful drover Yindy, from the local river people. So when she becomes pregnant, Louisa is devastated, as she herself is childless.

Louisa drops the cup she is holding and it smashes on the hard floor. Pregnant? How can you be pregnant? You and Yindyamarra aren’t married!

For many years Wagadhaany has been grieving to return to her Wiradjuri people, so she tries to flee her situation. The NSW law gave the settlers complete control over the Aboriginal clans along the river, who were bound to them for life, as stockmen or domestics (The Master and Servant Act, 1848). Despite this, Yindy, Wagadhaany and their three small children decide to travel along the river to her own ‘miiyagan’.

But the journey ends in tragedy. While they are enjoying the freedom of river life, their baby daughter Miimi drowns on the strong current. Once more the Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray has become a Bila Mayilgan, a river of death.
 
 
BRENDA SAUNDERS is a prize winning Wiradjuri writer and artist. Her third poetry collection, Inland Sea was published in 2021 (Ginninderra Press) and her poetry and reviews appear regularly in anthologies and journals both on-line and in print, including Australian Poetry, Plumwood Mountain, Overland, Westerly, Best Australian Prose Poems 2020 (Melbourne University Press) and Best Australian Science Writing 2020 (NSW Publishing). Her prose poems and microfiction have featured as short films, (Voices of Women 2021) and audio projects such as ‘Sonic City’ (Spineless Wonders 2022). Brenda is Convenor of Round Table Poets at Writing NSW.  

Daisy and Woolf

by Michelle Cahill

Hachette

ISBN: 9780733645211

Launched by SOPHIE CUNNINGHAM

I felt some trepidation when I heard that Michelle Cahill had written a novel about the Woolfs because I’ve been researching a book about Leonard Woolf, but, inevitably, about Virginia and other Bloomsbury sorts, for more than 15 years. I, like Michelle, began my novel because I’m interested in postcolonialism, in race, but over the years of writing had come to realise that unlike Michelle, the experience of, the story of, the colonised body was not mine to tell. And that her book, Daisy & Woolf, is not ‘about’ the Woolfs. It’s about Daisy Simmons, an Anglo-Indian woman, one of the ‘silly, pretty, flimsy, nimcompoops’ with whom Peter Walsh spent time with while in India, and in the case of this particular women, had fallen in love with. Her name, unless I’m mistaken, is first mentioned as an aside, in brackets. Michelle has undertaken the task of giving Daisy Simmons a voice and body. Retrieved her from erasure.

My trepidation disappeared as I read Daisy & Woolf and got to revel in the glories of its language, its confidence and control. None of us can write a story which considers all angles, which gives voice to all experience. Yet none of the stories we tell are whole if there is not a body — that word again — of work that, collectively, gives voice to the experiences of those that have, historically speaking, been written out of history. Virginia Woolf ’s racism, and, frankly, the racism of the British in general, cannot be allowed to stand unchallenged. Being brilliant with words does not excuse Woolf. In fact, it makes one even angrier — that a woman, so intelligent, so extraordinary with words, was uninterested in even attempting to release Daisy from the brackets that imprison her.

My delight — perhaps counter-intuitively — grew as I began to read Daisy & Woolf and, in its opening pages, read Mina’s description of her mother. (Mina is the contemporary narrator, of sorts, of the novel. She’s wonderful). ‘She [the mother] was like some ancient still-breathing artefact locked in a long glass cubicle in a dusty room in the British Museum – before it became corporatised, before they added the café and the souvenir shop –‘ (p14 ) Mina’s creative journey and her personal journeys dodge each other, weave together, they blur, sometimes in the same sentence, always in the same paragraph, with research, with stories of Virginia Woolf ’s writing. For Mina, for Michelle, are not just connected to Daisy through heritage but to Virginia Woolf herself. They share a writer’s heritage. Woolf can be cruel and dismissive. Mina interrogates herself for similar qualities. She talks of history waiting to fault her for writing Daisy’s story. I understand that here Michelle is describing is a specific experience — that women, that women of colour, — have to tread more warily when taking risks, when being audacious. That they are more likely to be attacked (literally, as Mina is, but also using words) but in that phrase, and indeed in Michelle’s description of the writing and creative process Daisy & Woolf is just wonderful at capturing the complicated narcissism and ruthlessness of creative process, a process that sits alongside a requirement that the writer erase the self, their selves if they are to succeed. . .

Mina pursues narrative and the cost is high (a loss of relationship with her son, the loss of her job, the guilt of not being there for her mother at the end). Daisy is attempting to make her mark on the world by pursuing love. By insisting on herself as a romantic and sexual being as well as a mother, and a wife/servant. The losses that Daisy endures in this pursuit are profound and the description of her voyage from India to England is harrowing. The loss of her daughter takes us deep into grief. Showing us the poetic power, the control that Michelle, always a poet, has over her writing in this novel. This is the quality, indeed that a poet can bring to a novel.

This can be harder to read because we know that Peter Walsh, the man she loves, doesn’t just love another (Clarissa Dalloway) but does not, in fact, register her being with much more interest than Dalloway, or Woolf do. Daisy’s attentions irritate him. He follows women randomly on the street. Walsh’s shrugging off of the relationship in Daisy & Woolf is masterful: Daisy has lost her children, her old life, to work as a governess.

I loved Daisy and in Daisy’s yearning and longing and optimism I could feel my much younger self. Of course Daisy’s future would be far more constrained than mine will ever be.

Daisy also has a self-awareness; a presence of mind, that makes her heroic. Her chaste acceptance of the attentions of men on the voyage over speak not to fecklessness but to wisdom. An understanding that she will need a protector. An intuition that Peter Walsh cannot be trusted. Daisy is no fool. Michelle, Mina, make it clear that Daisy’s story— including its trauma and tragedy — does not belong to Mina and most certainly not to Virginia Woolf . We lose sight of Daisy towards the end of the novel because she belongs to herself and will, bravely and boldly, wrestle her fate to the ground.

‘A meditation on art, race and class in a postcolonial world, Daisy and Woolf is a masterpiece of postmodern fiction to rival The Hours or Wide Sargasso Sea. Powerfully reentering those in the margins of Anglo-centric histories and fictions, its exquisite telling demands we listen.’ The comparison with Wide Sargasso Sea is not a stretch. The language in this novel is extraordinary: the art of a poet between the covers of a novel.

Another comparison that came to mind — Pachinko. What becomes of stateless brown women.

I’m so pleased that Michelle Cahill wrote Daisy & Woolf, that she generously gave me the chance to read it, and that she did me the honour of asking me to launch Daisy & Woolf. I look forward too, for the conversations we’ll have about our books. About the way they speak to the other, and the ways in which they pursue agendas. And our shared interest in, and passion for the writer’s life.

 
 
 
SOPHIE CUNNINGHAM’S latest novel, This Devastating Fever, is forthcoming in September 2022 with Ultimo Press. She is the author of seven books, across multiple fiction and nonfiction, children and adults and include City of Trees – Essays on life, death and the need for a forest, and Melbourne. She is also editor of the collection Fire, Flood, Plague: Australian writers respond to 2020. Sophie’s former roles include as a book publisher and editor, chair of the Literature Board of the Australia Council, editor of the literary journal Meanjin, and co-founder of The Stella Prize celebrating women’s writing. She is now an adjunct professor at RMIT University’s non/fiction Lab. In 2019, Sophie was made a Member of the Order of Australia for her contributions to literature.

Where We Swim

by Ingrid Horrocks

UQP

ISBN 9780702263408

Victoria University of Wellington Press, NZ

Reviewed by GEMMA PARKER

Where We Swim by Ingrid Horrocks is a hybrid work of creative nonfiction, an exploratory memoir that combines travel narrative and nature writing with meditations on ecology, community and responsibility. These meditations revolve around a series of immersions in waters both local and foreign as Horrocks and her young family swim in their native Aotearoa New Zealand, as well as abroad, in Colombia, America, Australia and England. In each of these journeys, Horrocks interrogates and urges exploration of the world and of ourselves in order to begin to imagine other futures, other ways of being. Horrocks connects the waters in which they swim to deeper ecologies, and embeds her narrative in family and domestic life. This book navigates the author’s despair about a near-future that will be devastated by the effects of climate change, but also the importance of connection, community and courage. 

Where We Swim begins with a solitary morning swim at Mōkau at the mouth of the estuary in the early autumn of 2017. Horrocks quickly refutes some possible presumptions we might have about this swim, about her, about this journey, about the book – she is not a strong swimmer, this book is not about mastery, but also, this is not a straightforward travel narrative. The author explains that her original plan for the book was to write about a series of swims from Wellington to Auckland, framing her search as looking at why we swim, but that she abandoned this as too rigid, too traditional. “At some point in my solo swimming journey,” she writes, “I felt there was a problem with it. It sectioned off swimming and water, and ecology, from daily life. Swimming alone seemed not to get fully to the heart of things” (p. 5). And so rather than why we swim, Horrocks weaves for us an intimate journey as she interrogates not only the waters in which we swim, but also the we, and the where.

The book is structured in chapters that revolve around family and travel, and immersions and submersions in other ways of being – other climates, languages, cultures, societies and environments. These immersions and submersions are often risky, slippery and dangerous, as Horrocks finds with her first swim at Mōkau. But they are also necessary – and it is this element of necessary risk and necessary immersion that forms the heart of the book. 

After the initial swim, the book offers a series of vignettes and reflections from daily life: a visit to her parents and a swim at a local beach that hinges on a meditation on intergenerational tensions, ageing and illness, and a waterlog journal that revolves around the excitement of a whale in the local harbour. Horrocks offers a complex portrait of identity and personal responsibility, and the imperative the author feels to submerge herself in the environmental crisis – to put her body on the line, whilst embracing and interrogating the networks of knowledge and myth and the families and communities that sustain her.  

The book is at its richest when Horrocks depicts her young family abroad. Travelling overseas with children is often exhausting and confusing, and Horrocks immerses us in the discomfort and anxiety of her journeys whilst allowing the travel and the place to push her into new currents, new experiences, new ways of seeing.  In the Amazon, they are confronted by how little they know or understand about the journey they have undertaken. What they had assumed was a five-minute walk to their accommodation turns into a two-hour hike, without sunscreen, water or insect repellent. A chartered boat ride reveals itself to be a rickety canoe without life jackets on choppy waters. Horrocks captures these painful moments of anxiety in generous detail. Once the moments of perceived risk pass, the beauty of their surroundings floods in. The writing continues to switch like this with dizzying variety, between poetic description of the exotic locations they travel through, meditation and reflection on the ethics of adventure tourism, and Horrocks’ own navigation between allowing her children to experience the world as it is whilst trying to protect them from harm. 

Where We Swim is partly about questioning our roles and responsibilities to each other and to the planet, but it is also very much about our ability to bear witness and to be curious about other ways of being. The trip to Arcosanti in Arizona is part of that quest, and Horrocks takes the time to present a complex portrait of this experimental community in the desert. Horrocks and her husband stand in the gift shop waiting for their souvenir to be wrapped as the attendant, a member of the community, begins to tell them about the charges of sexual assault that have been levelled at Arcosanti’s visionary founder, the Italian architect Paolo Soleri. They listen carefully to this young man whilst keeping an eye on their twin daughters who are wandering around the gift shop, hoping to shield the girls from this complex testimony, whilst also committing to bearing witness.

The trip to Perth involves deeper investigation into Horrocks’ research into solastalgia, environmental catastrophe, precarity and ways of writing the apocalypse. After a return to the English coastline where she once lived and studied, the book returns to the local waters of Aotearoa New Zealand, to ageing and illness, the passage of time, what we love and what we stand to lose. In the final pages of the book Horrocks is on the shore, contemplating an evening swim, and finds herself reluctant to get into the water. She asks: “Why do this – why take off layers, casing, seal? Why make oneself? Why even consider exposing limbs and hair and goosebumped skin to the sea? Why hold out my breathing life – and that of my family – like this, when one could just have stayed at home?” and then goes on to conclude: “But it has turned out that I need this – this stripping down, this immersing. It feels necessary to keep attempting it. It doesn’t now feel possible to live a life of only footpaths beneath one’s feet” (p. 194).

One of the most satisfying elements of this book is the fact that the author finished it just as the pandemic began, in 2020, and yet the final section, ‘Coda’, feels completely integrated into the entire text, the inevitable conclusion to this meditation on community, environment, travel, family, responsibility, empathy and courage. Horrocks includes a variety of scholarly and literary sources throughout the book. Some are explored over the course of pages, while some seem inadequately presented, such as Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal and Pip Adam’s The New Animals, which are only tantalisingly introduced. The incorrect claim that Adelaide is built on the north side of the river Torrens (p. 118) has no impact on the quality of the writing, but it does undermine the reader’s faith in the accuracy of the details that underpin the work.

Nevertheless, Where We Swim is both brave and rebellious. It grapples with ecological despair, with the complex demands of identity and responsibility, and deals honestly with the dubious ethics of tourism and travel, with hypocrisy and contradiction. It is an honest attempt at exploring the world and waters beyond the comfortable limits of a life – an especially comfortable life, as Horrocks admits. There may be elements of this book that seem under-developed or incorrect, but the core project is admirable: the author is committed to her responsibility to immerse herself, and her readers, in waters despite the risk, the danger and the discomfort. 

GEMMA PARKER is an award-winning poet, teacher, PhD candidate and student member of the J M Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice at the University of Adelaide. Gemma is one of the co-founders and managing editors of the new Adelaide literary journal The Saltbush Review. She lives and works on Kaurna Country in Adelaide after many years abroad.

Nothing to See

by Pip Adam

Giramondo

ISBN 9781925818680

Reviewed by FERNANDA DAHLSTROM

Pip Adam’s third novel, Nothing To See, deals with female identity, addiction, digitization and impending climate disaster. Penny and Greta sleep in the same room in a shared flat. They reflect on sobriety, share clothes, receive help from the Salvation Army and get into the occasional fight. In many ways, they operate as a single entity and their flatmates, Heidi and Dell, who they met in rehab, operate similarly. It is some time before this twinning is explained. One night in the early 1990s, a small number of young women, among four avenues in an unnamed New Zealand town, in the depths of trauma and alcoholism, split into two identical women, who share the same memories but have separate thoughts and experiences. The novel is divided into three parts, set at twelve-year intervals, and challenges the reader to reinterpret its protagonist’s dilemma in each decade. 

The first part of Nothing to See is set in the pre-digital landscape of 1994. Adam vividly evokes the squalor and monotony of impoverished youth with the women scraping together enough coins for a bus fare, having sex with men for money and eating baked beans for dinner. The language is loose and imprecise, reflecting the ineptitude of the young characters. The women have sex with each other (though they reflect that this is really masturbation) as well as with other women, while receiving a sickness benefit, learning to cook and trying to replace drinking with talking about drinking. At times their shared identity causes confusion, but mostly other people just want to avoid looking at women who ‘looked exactly like each other because they’d been caught being sluts and drunk in a moment when none of their friends had been.’ (p. 128) We read the women’s separation as the legacy of addiction and sexual violence, the physical manifestation of their brokenness. 

In the second part, it is 2006, and the internet has encroached on more and more areas of life with simulations increasingly replacing originals. Heidi and Dell’s relationship has deteriorated, and they no longer live together. The general population has ‘perfected its blindness to the women who had divided’ (p.162). The characters’ division now references the difficulties faced by the unclassifiable citizen who falls through bureaucratic cracks. Peggy and Greta have a job in a call centre, where they take turns working as they only have a single tax file number, and where they are required to be more of a machine than a person. They take the train as the transport authorities will not issue a single licence to two people. The language is tighter, the vocabulary more sophisticated. As the women navigate the world of the tech-heavy 2000s, they spend more and more of their lives online. Then one day, returning home after buying vegan hotdogs, Greta and Peggy find themselves back in a single body, though this situation doesn’t last. Their identities continue to morph and take on different configurations.

We then move forward to 2018, when digital technology has become even more ubiquitous. Peggy and Greta get a job classifying content for a video sharing platform, resigning themselves to making money watching nauseating sexually violent footage. They are angry about the government, and go to protests, despite being too old to believe it will make any difference. Heidi has a wife and a child who is referred to as ‘they’, the pronoun that usually signals nonbinary gender also hinting at a possible pluralised self. A Tamagotchi phone appears, through which the women receive text messages from an unknown sender. Dell’s status and motivations become murkier. The women’s identities continue to replicate as questions arise about the nature of the reality they inhabit and who is pulling the strings. The shifts between single and dual existence are at times discussed in the familiar terms of relationships and separation. Heidi has left Dell, but some other acquaintances, Carol and Lotte, are still together. 

While Nothing To See hints repeatedly at the identity markers of women who choose women as their sexual and romantic partners, Adam neatly avoids applying labels and does not engage with discourses surrounding LGBT identity. Instead, she explores the subtleties of solo and shared life, leaving the reader to extrapolate meaning from the various permutations. Men are rarely seen and usually play a role that is limited to being a source of income, as clients or employers, or else are potential abusers. The fractured sense of self the women share can be seen variously as the dissociative result of cumulative trauma, as a fabricated and replicable digital self, or as co-dependency in a couple relationship that is never truly over. The resolution of the divided women’s lives back into a unified self is uncertain and non-linear.

Adam’s treatment of the alienated individual in the face of dehumanising digitisation and impending climate disaster is reminiscent of Richard Flanagan’s The Living Sea of Waking Dreams (2020), in which the adult children of a terminally ill mother experience the disappearance of body parts, while plugged into social media, with the world burning around them. Characters in Nothing To See elude to the world ending from time to time, but it is only in the final pages that Adam makes this explicit: ‘the beaches were full of jellyfish and things were igniting…the heat felt too slow, like the end would come too slow’ (p. 362). 

Ultimately, Nothing to See is a complex and mind-bending exploration of the challenges of staying together. It presents three decades of life on the margins of advanced capitalist society, combining gritty realism and magic realism and deftly capturing the existential despair of the pre-apocalyptic era. It invites readers to consider the many ways the developed world is fragmenting and dividing women. 

FERNANDA DAHLSTROM is a writer, editor and lawyer who lives in Brisbane. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, Overland, Feminartsy, Kill Your Darlings and Art Guide.

Writing Through Fences: Archipelago of Letters

Southerly 79.2

Brandl & Schlesinger 

Reviewed by MATTHEW da SILVA

It was while reading this issue of Southerly 7.2 Writing Through Fences— Archipelago of Letters that news emerged of the Australian government’s decision to allow some refugees in its care to resettle in New Zealand and for others to be released from a Melbourne hotel. It was as though the entire country gave a sigh of relief, attacks on the government coming thick and fast. Then the question of why it hadn’t happened sooner was overshadowed by Britain’s government announcing that it would establish an offshore processing regime with Rwanda as the linchpin. The problem of inequality had raised its head once more as another country tried to come to terms with its own attractiveness. It seems like the flow of migrants is unstoppable. Politicians’ job is to deal with it. 

But they have help from the community, who are the ones, in the final result, who put them where they can make a difference. While lives – like those of the people featured in this issue of Southerly – had been damaged, the damage to Australia’s reputation remains unequal to the task of dimming its allure. 

On social media, people have become hardened around talking points. Emotions are raw and feeling runs high with every indication that it will continue to do so. But is art the same thing as politics? I often wonder these days because the lines seem to blur and I worry that we’ll forget the reasons why we need art.

A Slate tweet of 21 March (7.04am) contained a headline and a comment: “200 Priceless Paintings That Belong to Russia Are Stranded in Paris. Will France Give Them Back? Art isn’t politics, but what if Putin wrote the preface to the exhibition’s catalog?”

Art isn’t politics, indeed.

Or Jay Rafferty’s tweet at 6.31am the same morning that went, “Bukowski affected my work a lot when I was younger, I think “The Laughing Heart” was one of my formative poems. But I, as many of us, have wised up. No hesitation in saying he was a dickhead with a few good poems and that’s probably the best compliment I can give him.”

Poor Charles, removed from his pedestal after all these years.

Can you still be a poet without being Virtue’s exemplar? Can you implement policies designed to stop drownings at sea and still stay friends with half the electorate? And what do we really want from art? Don’t we want it to answer questions for which conventional responses cannot serve? Questions that journalism, for example, cannot answer. What sorts of questions? Questions about that thing we easily label as the “soul” or those about the less easily described characteristics of a universe, the nature of which appears intent on releasing its last secrets slowly? Where, to posit the biggest one of all, did it all start?

Are poets to be limited, like 18th century’s Alexander Pope, to things pertaining to humanity, or do we risk considering other possibilities? Pope, for his part, didn’t accurately anticipate the liberation that sat on his doorstep but we seem to think we can see the future.

On the other hand I think about the possibility that Southerly’s appearance at this time (issue 79.2 came out last year) presumed a change of policy by Morrison and his colleagues. Are the publication and the refugee resettlement announcement somehow linked? When you read in this magazine accompanying material that illustrates the depth of the problem facing the government you come across evidence why their switch might be advised. A passion from such a deep reserve coming so close to the surface – printed on paper and distributed by mail to thousands of letterboxes – must give the authorities pause. 

Discussions about Aboriginal sovereignty stand as a rebuke to politicians of most stripes. While the works featured in this issue of Southerly are not all of equal quality, this reviewer welcomes conversations, even those which are subversive. Hatred cannot be allowed to overcome collegiality, otherwise we’d all be invading others’ households without even knocking on the door, putting our feet up on the coffee table and asking rent for what isn’t ours. Like some son of the Vikings. 

We have to respect diversity and its rules. Diversity is in fact a strength, and the ability to entertain multiple solutions to pressing problems is a hallmark of pluralistic democracy. The mainstream must always tolerate the margins.

Each of us has a voice. The voices you hear if you read this issue of Southerly are however normally silenced, and this is part of the beauty of this issue, curated by former detainees Hani Abdile, Behrouz Boochani, translator Omid Tofighian and refugee activist Janet Galbraith. Even the editorial voice is worth reading, though it’s (hopefully) not the reason why you’d buy the magazine. Editors must be wary of attempting to train reluctant voices into a chorus or of conscripting a contributor to approve a view they didn’t themselves hold. Melissa Lucashenko walks this balance valiantly.     

I found pleasure in reading Hani Abdile’s ‘Oooh Old Friends’ though I couldn’t work out who the “friend” was, the poem skirting round the outside of names playfully. I think it was this aspect of the poem, which is regardless quite short, that drew me to it. Also short and elliptical is Mohamad Haghighi’s ‘Rainbow’ where the thing or person the poem is addressed to slips out of the reader’s view like a dream upon waking.

Sabaa’s ‘When?’ sits on more familiar territory (“When will I be free from detention? When will I see life outside the fence?”) but pinpoints the essential problem faced by legislators and advocates alike (“When will my country become a better place to live?”). There are occasional glimpses of the same ideas elsewhere, as in M.D. Imran’s ‘Lifelines’, which contains anecdotal evidence of the kinds of mistreatment causing refugees to go overseas to live. Imran is originally from Myanmar but now lives in Chicago, in the United States, following a period in exile in detention funded by the Australian taxpayer. 

The depth of feeling that animates his journalism finds echoes elsewhere in the volume, for example in Sad Proof’s ‘I Love You’ where the country known as Australia (which the editors are careful to characterise as stolen land) is posited as finding its lover in the refugee (“I want to tell you I love you, Australia”) who will fight for its rights “and not give a chance to make [it] poor like my country”. Reading poems like this person’s made me think of the way that deaths at sea have played out in the media, especially on television, which brings me to considering the ways that politicians on both sides have sought to formulate refugee policy. 

But there is little acknowledgement of these issues in the collection. Taking a leaf out of the playbook of more progressive elements of the commentariat, ‘Which Way to Go Back?’ asks Farhad Shah, and reading his poem you can understand a little more of the refugee experience. Less aggressive than some of the work in the book, ‘Which Way to Go Back?’ contains worlds and presents the comfortable reader – the sort of person who buys Southerly, who even bothers with poetry in the first place – with additional puzzles. 

Its way of creating a dialogue made resonances with other poems, as though it were a familiar trope. It would be refreshing to think that the book was able to set up a dialogue, and perhaps this stage has already been reached.

The best poems in this book, like Abdul Samad Haidiri’s ‘Home – Where Else to Go?’ contain more than just a complaint, though always there is the bitterness of the outsider to flavour the work. In such poems you get to see something essential about the species, for having a home is an essential part of being human, in fact not only animals but even plants favour certain types of habitat over others, or even can only survive under certain conditions.

Adaptation is part of the refugee’s game plan however, as we see in Mabsud Masan’s ‘To Corrupt the System Is to Have Compassion’ which uses elements of Pidgin in a creole designed to give a taste of life on Manus Island. It’s a bit rebarbative but entirely comprehensible, our discomfort – it would be strange to eliminate all traces of the voyage – enhancing the experience of reading the journalism. A short piece by notable advocate Behrouz Boochani demonstrates this writer’s ability to pack a punch into a smaller space.

Farhad Bandesh (with Melita Luck) uses poetic language that draws heavily on the natural world to create a picture of the refugee experience that adds lustre to the whole. It’s as though because the desire for the goal is so complete there are few ways to communicate the depth of feeling that constitutes reality for someone in his position. Absolute joy, complete abandon. Hatred, fear. Like in a Hollywood gangster movie, or some rich concoction where the fate of civilisation rests in the hands on a renegade hero, and the only way to secure it is through extreme violence, we’re able with these poems to get down to essentials. But the experience is no less rich for the simplification that takes place. As in Shiharan Ganeshan’s gentle story (short fiction rare in the book) titled ‘Flute’, which is a kind of fable about class, art, meaning, and fate that is laced, as in an old Arabian-night story, with magic and with its own brand of suppressed yearning. 

I wish that every person who wanted to come to this country had easy passage, and in fact on a blog years ago suggested opening up a refugee processing centre in Jakarta. Unfortunately I probably lack requisite experience and insight and can only write meagre reviews of wonderful books of poetry and prose – with a few delightful artworks added for good measure – but if I can encourage one person to read this issue of Southerly I’ll be happy.

MATTHEW da SILVA was born in Brighton, Victoria, and grew up in Sydney. He has Bachelor of Arts and Master of Media Practice degrees from the University of Sydney and lived for just under a decade in Tokyo. He has two adult children and lives in Sydney.

The Pigeons Are Taking Over: The Kindness of Birds

by Merlinda Bobis

ISBN 9781925950304

Spinifex Press

Reviewed by WINNIE DUNN

Ibis

The beloved bin chicken is always feeding off scraps of bread whenever I walk to Fairfield station. Because it is a sin to throw away the sacredness of bread, those leftovers become a well-meaning gesture shared by members of the south-west Sydney community. I clutched my copy of The Kindness of Birds (Spinifex, 2021), a short story collection by Merlinda Bobis, as I watched the ibises peck peacefully between pigeons for crumbs. 

Short stories are like ibises. Ibises are displaced from their homes due to global warming yet they still choose to stay in large groups and consistently work towards common goals. Likewise, short stories are in themselves self-contained. But when interconnected, their morals, moments and memories take over time and space in a deliberate way for the reader. Short stories aggregate like a flock (Bobis’ collection has 14 individual stories) and yet are shunted to the margins when one thinks of books (short story collections are the least sold or noticed in our industry). 

It is the image of the ibises gathering together which I carried into my reading of Bobis’ latest work. Her collection is a series of small gestures, revelation of cultures and feathered symbolism that make up the book’s overall theme – kindness and its many forms in the face of adversity. 

Pigeon

The title of this review takes inspiration from Vietnamese-Australian writer, Shirley Le. It was her narrator’s opening line in our co-written play, Sex, Drugs & Pork Rolls (UTP, 2021). Used as a symbol for British colonialism, the pigeons flock at the narrator’s Yagoona home window, leaving  dirty marks on the glass. Yet, the pigeon is remarked by the narrator’s mother as “much nicer” than the native magpie – the magpie in this sense being used as a symbol for First Nations people’s sovereignty, which was never ceded. As migrant settlers who are writers, it is a constant privilege to know how best to respect this sovereignty, when and where to tell our own stories, and when we are taking up too much space. 

In this way, Bobis acknowledged and paid respect to First Nations people’s sovereignty throughout her collection. The stories ‘Candido’s Revolution’ and ‘My Tender Tender’ especially speak to the complex history of colonialism, migration and sovereignty on this continent. 

It is the singing of a folksong, reimagined by a Filipinx poet named Remy, that stays with me as I read ‘Candido’s Revolution’. An infamous Manilaman pearl diver hums from atop a tree, “Dandansoy bayaan ta icao” (p54), capturing the attention of Mary (1893 Australia would simply refer to her as “a native woman”). Without a shared language between them besides the complimentary phrase, “Can-do good song” (p55) they still look at each other through the trees. The initial allure they shared is eventually cut short by racist laws and the call for a revolution in the Philippines. For The Kindness of Birds, this interaction marks the historical beginning of inter-cultural dialogue between First Nations people and Filipinx migrants – a connection that is often left unrecognised. 

This connection continues in the short story, ‘My Tender Tender’. One of the main characters Uncle Freddy Corpus, swears on the Bible when he tells Nenita of their shared Asian ancestry – she Filipina and he Filipino and Yuwuru. After telling stories to Nenita of miraculous feats of diving to survive the perils of colonialism, Uncle Freddy Corpus eventually “takes out various memorabilia from [a] satchel. He opens one: it’s a copy of a marriage certificate of his Filipino grandfather Servo Corpus Felipe and Yawuru grandmother Maria Emma Ngobing. She’s speechless, honoured […] touched by this gesture affirming their Philippine connection.” (p82) In this way, Uncle Freddy and Nenita’s intercultural dialogue shows how us settlers should act as we walk on stolen lands – nothing but intent listeners, sharing only when asked and only when it will foster healing. 

Colonialism would have us all believe that there are only pigeons at the centre of history, Bobis’ writing shows us how wrong that is. 

Common mynah

In Tongan culture, an omen of death arrives in the form of a bird entering our houses. One summer, a common mynah flew into the open doors of the top-storey balcony and flittered in circles on the living room ceiling. Even with the doors wide open, the petite brown blur still struggled to find the exit again. ‘Shoo-shoo-shoo!’ my aunty Lahi pleaded, her doughy belly rolling as she battered a straw broom above her head, hitting the plastic chandelier as she did so. ‘Fuck!’ Lahi swore, sweat dripping from her short strands of brown-black hair and into her freckled and frumpled face. Hearing someone swear, (that someone being technically my mother in Tongan culture), made me stifle a giggle. The mynah gave a series of squeaks before finally finding the open balcony. I watched as its fluffed mass disappeared over the streets of Mt Druitt. 

Within the short story ‘When the Crow Turns White’, a half-dead bird is carried into parliament injured from the hailstorm raging outside. Two cleaners of Filipinx heritage, Orla and Corazon, wrap the crow in white cloth remarking, “Climate change is scary.” (p14) Throughout their debates in the empty chamber rooms about legislations, the constant arguing of old white men and the winds of change with the first Aboriginal woman elected into the house of representatives, Corazon holds a secret. She is a descendant of crows, a unique culture connection that makes her a born healer. From acts of miracles long ago, she still has memorised the chant, “Ilayog, ilayog ang ilo sa bagà. Ilayog, ilayog ang sakit ni padabà. Fly, fly away the poison in the lungs. Fly, fly away the pain of the beloved!” (p20)

So what happened when the mynah visited us? My grandmother died a week later from a heart attack. 

And what happened when the crow flew up in a bundle of white cloth within our parliament? A series of “bipartisan”, “polite” and “caring” (p25) MPs across the political spectrum seemingly overnight. 

Why? Only the birds know.

Bat

The mammal (not a bird) that started COVID (racists love to use this as an excuse to call east and south-east Asian people “dirty”). The pandemic is threaded throughout Bobis’ short story collection – a grandmother and grandson are quarantining in an apartment together after returning from a trip to the Philippines (‘Grandma Owl’), a lover’s well-meaning yet blasé attitude towards mask-wearing (‘My Love, My Nerūsē’) and a nurse holding a pained patient’s hand even as it went against protocol (‘Angels’). It is these small gestures, hidden between dialogue, that readers should pay close attention to when reading The Kindness of Birds. Bobis’ work on the subject reveals it was not COVID that reshaped our society but rather all the small acts of kindness individuals chose in order to look after each other. 

Pelican

The only school assignment my father ever helped me with was a cardboard presentation about pelicans I did in Year 2. We printed out blurry Google images of the impossibly large white birds and glued them (using a mixture of flour and water) onto purple cardboard we bought at the Plumpton Newsagency for two bucks. 

My favourite story in Bobis’ collection is ‘My Father’s Australia’. Nenita (a recurring character), stares at the tailored suit she had once bought for her father. The suit, a pasalubong (homecoming gift), was given to her father with the intention that he would wear it when he took his first steps in Australia. In its navy hues, Nenita remembers how her father lived “on tilted earth” (p91) at the base of volcano in Legazpi, fixing people’s aircons in order to provide a better future for his children. In the suit, Nenita hears the memory of her father reciting in English, “To Oz, to Oz”(p92) for a trip that would never eventuate. 

The love between Nenita and her dad reminds me of the only time in my childhood when my father was not existing in survival mode (being a Tongan man with eight children would do that). When we spoke of pelicans, he seemingly had all the time in the world for me as we took our first steps in my education together. ‘To uni, to uni,’ my father, who dropped out of Year 12, would remind me after each school year ended. 

In this way, ‘My Father’s Australia’ is the standout of the collection. 

Blue-and-gold macaw

It was only when I moved to Fairfield in south-west Sydney that I saw the native parrot of South America. The suburb is home to a small yet strong Latinx Australian community. But it still didn’t make sense to me how the blue-feathered bird the size of a small television was caged away in a dilapidated second-storey balcony. 

What I found the most striking about Bobis’ writing, was how effortlessly she was able to reflect the true diversity of Australia without it ever feeling like it was forced or there simply for the sake of it. A woman Nenita passes by when swimming at the beach yells out “Jidoo!” (p222), Grandma Lou’s Chilean neighbour Matilda is the only person that calls Lou by her real name “Luningning” and reminds readers that as people of colour we’re always being interrogated for our skin, our accent and our names (p174). Nenita with her Latvian partner, who is always leaving her sweet notes like, “Gone walking. ♥” (p138) – a gesture that makes all the difference when choosing to grow old with someone. All realistic depictions of the inter-cultural connections we all share with neighbours, friends and even family. 

Halfway through my reading, I took a break and went outside onto my own second-storey balcony. I stared at the yellow underside of the parrot. Still wondering why on Earth a giant South American bird was flapping its wings with the sound echoing off the brick and concrete of endless rundown apartments. Laughing as I realised I was standing beside my own cultural marker – a potted frangipani tree.  

Rainbow lorikeet 

To me, the lorikeet is the kindest bird there is. Eternally squawking in bushes as if laughing. Eating with such fever and frenzy because they’re so cheerful that they hardly notice what is in their beaks. Darting in pairs across busy streets. Flocking in the afternoon sky so fast they become little black spots, dotting the daytime like stars. From Orla and Corazon, Lou and Matilda, Ella and Nenita and finally Remy and Belen – it was the sacred sisterhood of the women characters Bobis’ paired together that carried this collection. Remy put it perfectly in ‘The Air of The Times’ when she penned in poem: 

“So enter, sister,
without gun or armour,
still magnificent.” (p52) 

If the ibis is what I took into my reading of The Kindness of Birds, the Rainbow lorikeet is what I took away from it, long after I had turned the last page.

WINNIE DUNN is the General Manager of Western Sydney based literacy movement, Sweatshop. She is a writer of Tongan descent from Mount Druitt and holds a Bachelor of Arts from Western Sydney University. Winnie’s work has been published in the Sydney Review of Books, Griffith Review, Meanjin, SBS Voices, The Guardian, Huffington Post, Red Room Poetry and Cordite. She is the editor of several critically acclaimed anthologies, and currently working on her debut novel as the recipient of a CAL Ignite grant.

Love & Virtue

By Diana Reid

ISBN 9781761150111

Ultimo Press

Reviewed by CLAIRE QU

The prim and vaguely Austenian title of Diana Reid’s debut novel offers a tongue-in-cheek self-description consistent with the book’s plentiful irony. Many labels could be applied to it: campus novel, bildungsroman, #MeToo novel, story of contemporary female friendship. Perhaps that is why it is so constantly self-aware, so unremitting in its parody of all the stock characters – the insecure freshmen, urbane professors, greasy suitors, and smugly ‘liberated’ women – that people these genres. It isn’t satire alone which saves Reid’s book from vanishing into the slew of Millennial Novels however; crucially, it also has heart. Though no sweeping epic or philosophical heavyweight, Love & Virtue is winning, clever, and self-deprecating.

The novel captures the first year of Michaela’s university life among elite Sydney high school graduates. At its frothy beginning, I’ll admit I shrank from what seemed a somewhat stale montage: house-parties, drunkenness, and superficial friendships. Modern social alienation, that increasingly common theme, crops up abundantly at the start of Love & Virtue, in wry narratorial observations. ‘Alcohol was useful for making friends,’ Michaela notes, attractive, ‘liquid-limbed’ friends who are ‘intelligent enough to realise that nothing is sexier to a young and fragile man than not understanding what he is saying’ (14, 17). The sheer, drug-addled stupidity of O-week hijinks is vividly evoked, along with a brutal projection of where it all too often leads: these bright young things ‘will grow up to work in banks, and then cheat on their wives with their secretaries, and have a panic attack when they realise they don’t have an inner life’ (48). Even throughout the scenes of fun, Reid peppers reminders of class privilege and ubiquitous sexism, a sweet-and-sour formula that could have rendered the novel dryly moralistic were it not for the heady and complex female relationship blooming at its centre.

Eve Shaw is the archetypal ‘frenemy’, and the whole novel is framed by her ambivalent friendship with Michaela. This fact alone merits praise in a world where significant literary relationships between women, while on the increase, are still a rarity. More importantly, the individual characters of Eve and Michaela, as well as their tense chemistry, are realised with rare charisma and authenticity. ‘[I]n spite of everything,’ confesses the latter of the former, ‘I’m still a bit in love with her’ (2) – and so am I. Despite being in many ways a caricature of the hypocritically ‘woke’ undergraduate, with her performances of selfless erudition and willingness to mine painful situations for ‘broader social benefit’ (292), Eve is eminently seductive. Her warmth and physicality permeate the novel, and her flashes of humour, generosity, and infuriating egotism are the rhythm the plot responds to. Michaela’s regard for Eve is, for me, one of the most unexpectedly likeable things about Love & Virtue. For, though we recognise a hollowness to Eve in the importance she attaches to being ‘both a person and an idea of a person’ (10), her own belief in ideals of aesthetics and ethics (also the name of a subject she takes) feels genuine. And if Michaela, cynical with our times, doesn’t appreciate Wildean self-invention, at least readers may.

It is Eve, too, who stands in the shadow of the novel’s twin dramatic centres, plotlines which at first appear to gravitate around two men. In this triangle of desire, triumph, and irritation lies Reid’s greatest achievement. Turning the marriage plot on its head, she presents instead a fiercely competitive homosociality between Eve and Michaela in light of which heterosexual romantic entanglements seem contingent. Through Michaela’s messy sexual encounter with a peer and her developing relationship with an older man, Reid explores issues of consent and power imbalances with unusual attention to the finer shades of guilt, pride, self-consciousness, and shame. Eve’s part in these episodes further refines the book’s nuanced discussion of consent, and it is her secondhand involvement in Michaela’s sex life which makes Love & Virtue’s treatment of the topic so fresh and believable. In the one case, Michaela’s anticipation of her friend’s shock and envy at being ‘if not beaten, then at least passed over’ (169) is deliciously vitriolic; in the other, Eve’s betrayal takes the words out of Michaela’s mouth, leaving her to mourn ‘[her] own version of events’ (294).

Personal crises, political and philosophical musings, and the affected gloss of first-year banter – Reid handles all these in unpretentious prose which warms from flippancy to eloquence as Michaela forges deeper emotional connections. The dialogue, in particular, is a stand-out, treading the line between stiffness and excessive glibness admirably. Reid’s experience with writing for theatre shows in the remarkable inflections of intimacy and attitude that she is able to give with conversation alone. It is also to this deftness with dialogue that we owe the sympathetic, three-dimensional image of Michaela; readers experience her wit, worldliness, generosity, insecurity, and occasional pettiness through her conversations with others, rather than learning of them by way of clumsy self-description. 

Reid has cited Donna Tartt’s classic campus novel, The Secret History, as a major inspiration for Love & Virtue, an influence perceptible in the aura of dark drama surrounding the mutually vengeful relationship between Michaela and Eve. Reid’s novel doesn’t quite achieve the symmetry between academic discussions and the surrounding plot so successful in The Secret History. An exchange between Michaela and her Philosophy professor hints at a theoretical understructure to the book’s critique of campus culture:

‘So Michaela, from where are we deriving moral knowledge in week ten, semester one?’                ‘I want to say “social constructs”, but that depresses me.’ (117)

The discussion stops there, curtailing the book’s generic potential for a blend of the abstract and the concrete. Excepting this minor shortcoming, however, Love & Virtue is to be lauded for its difference from its model. Reid has created her own kind of campus novel, candid and irreverent – a far cry from earnest dark academia stylings. At once typically Australian, with its Bondi panoramas and unsophisticated college party scenes, and crushingly universal in its dissection of institutionalised sexism, class privilege, and new adult identity formation, Love & Virtue is a poised debut offering. Reid’s novel is a timely reflection on the manifold ways in which the #MeToo movement has failed and a lively intervention in the ranks of increasingly apathetic Millennial fiction – and most importantly, it’s a really fun read. 

—

Cited:

Reid, Diana. Love & Virtue. Ultimo Press, 2021.
Tartt, Donna. The Secret History. Penguin, 1993.

CLAIRE QU recently graduated from an honour’s degree in English at the University of Melbourne and is looking forward to continuing her studies overseas. Her interests include the Gothic, ecocriticism, and women’s writing, topics she hopes to explore in her postgraduate thesis. 

Born Into This

by Adam Thompson

ISBN 9780702263118

UQP

Reviewed by DAVE CLARK

As a technique pioneered and refined over the past hundred years, keyhole surgery involves a surgeon making small incisions in the skin, so tiny that at times it is hard to tell afterwards that something significant has taken place beneath the surface of the patient. It is a method used to diagnose health conditions, as well as to begin treating them.

From the first short story in Born Into This by Adam Thompson[i], I felt that I was in seasoned, steady hands. As the stories unfolded, each one was a penned incision, surgical and precise, cutting beneath the surface, diagnosing the ongoing impacts of colonisation/invasion. The writing within these sixteen short stories deftly slides beyond the synapses and impacts the heart.

I was surprised to learn that this was Thompson’s debut book. I was not surprised to see that this collection was shortlisted for multiple awards, including the Queensland Literary Awards 2021, the Age Fiction Book of the Year 2021 and the USQ Steele Rudd Award for a Short Story Collection. If his name isn’t familiar in your writing and reading circles, that will change once you get hold of his work.

Adam Thompson is an Aboriginal (pakana) writer from Launceston. He has worked for almost twenty years in roles caring for Lutruwita (Tasmania) Country and preserving culture and heritage. His passion for these endeavours clearly influences his writing and themes. His writing career has been gathering momentum over the last five years, with some of his short stories being recognised with writers’ festival awards. Born Into This is his first full collection of short fiction.

The sixteen stories in this book traverse across Tasmania, taking place on tiny islands, beaches, the streets of Launceston, in forests, at a funeral, in a school and a pub and suburban houses. Tasmania is a part of Australia not often captured in contemporary fiction. It is a refreshing insight into an often-overlooked region.

The characters within his book are blistering and humorous, compassionately created. Many of the characters are engaging enough to justify an entire book. The stories are fierce and political, leading to a collection that sizzles. It confronts. It takes tropes and myths and shreds them in an accomplished manner. It mixes world-class writing with his unique take on each character’s inner world. This is contemporary Australian fiction at its most impacting, sitting comfortably alongside the works of Tara June Winch, Melissa Lucashenko and the poetry of Evelyn Araluen.

Thematically, Thompson looks intently into the ongoing impacts of colonisation in current day Tasmania. As Noongar author Claire G. Coleman writes about in her recent book, Lies Damned Lies, colonisation/invasion in Australia was not an event. It’s ongoing.[ii] Any current writing about it needs to acknowledge this and challenge the power, privilege, and the very Anglo understandings of history. Thompson doesn’t tiptoe around this. The elephants in the room are pointed at and prodded. He does it with clever turns of narrative that lead the reader to see the world in personal ways that whiter parts of Australia can often turn a blind eye to.

For example, the second story, ‘Honey,’ looks at the commodification of language and how Aboriginal culture matters only to some when it can generate them a buck. The fourth story ‘Invasion Day’ takes places during a protest and has the line,

‘Looming above, like a love sonnet to colonisation, stood the sandstone monstrosity of Parliament House’ (p49).

Stories like ‘Jack’s Island,’ ‘Black Eye’ and ‘Time and Tide’ stride into the devastating, way-of-life-altering impact that climate change is having on the characters’ connection to Country. ‘Descendent’ wrestles with who gets to decide Indigenous identity and the persistent myth that Indigenous people in Tasmania died out with Truganini. The story seems to be saying that we were invaded, but not erased. Still here.

The experience of characters as minorities in their region often see them facing racism. As someone who has lived in Alice Springs (Mparntwe) for twelve years, I see and hear many acts of racism towards Arrernte people most days. Some of the acts are personal. Some are in way they are policed and treated in court or in the local shops, the societal structures that continue to try to kick them down to the bottom rung. It’s horrible to witness people and their families being targeted, based solely on their skin colour and culture. Those of us who are privileged will never fully understand what it is like and just how resilient people are living in the face of such ongoing injustice.

Acts of racism – the ‘in your face’ versions, the far-reaching political decisions, the removal of agency and the subtler, pervasive microaggressions – are shown and felt in many of the characters’ stories of Thompson’s book. The story ‘Sonny,’ about a white man who yells out ‘Run, Darky, run,’ (p101) to his friend on the footy field, sat heavy in my gut for days, sounding all-too familiar to instances around town.

It is deeply confronting – and necessarily so – to see how explicit and implicit forms of racism are still so prevalent. If, as a white reader of this book, we don’t feel sick and embarrassed and angry by Australia’s past and present, then we aren’t hearing the beating heart of this collection.

Tokenistic and paternalistic responses to colonisation/invasion are on display in these stories. ‘The Blackfellas From Here’ bitingly looks at the shallowness of acknowledgement of whose land it is, with Kat challenging James to hand over the deed to his house. It asks the question of what a deep acknowledgement of the past and present would look like. It shows that current political responses are still largely like acknowledging that someone has a flat tyre, but then just walking on by and doing nothing about it. Acknowledgement must be more than a cursory nod towards someone’s experience.

As a whole collection, there are many standout stories, including ‘Kite’ and ‘Born Into This’ to go with the ones already mentioned. On both the first and second readings of the collection, I felt however that the power of the book drops away in two of the final stories. As their own entities, ‘Time and Tide’ and ‘Morpork’ would find happy homes in many publications. In contributing to the overall theme though, it felt that these lingered in comparison to the crackling nature of the rest of it.

One subject that crops up regularly in the book is around survival. An example of this is the character Kara, secretly planting young eucalypt trees in areas that have been hacked away by forestry and mining companies. She contemplates this as she tends to the trees,

‘Natural survivors, like her own family, born into a hostile world and expected to thrive’ (p40).

Plants survive Tasmania’s climate as well as the brutality and the upheaval of exploitative human damage. These delicate pictures of flora and fauna are placed in many of Thompson’s stories, alongside their human equivalents. They are beautiful and telling reminders of people and culture that are deep-rooted, living and breathing in the present. Finding ways to survive, and thrive, even amidst significant change, Thompson weaves in his theme of hope. The reader is not left depressed, but more so, impressed upon: that there is horror in this country. And there is hope.

Several websites and interviews refer to Adam Thompson as an emerging writer. With a book this good, with prose and dialogue this splendid, ’emerging’ seems to be a misguided stamp. With Born Into This, he has well-and-truly added his works to the strongest writers in Australian contemporary fiction. To tackle content as heavy as the themes of racism and survival, and to do so elegantly and originally, is a remarkable achievement.

Notes:

[i] Thompson, Adam 2021, Born Into This, University of Queensland Press, Australia.
[ii] Coleman, Claire G 2021, Lies Damned Lies, Ultimo Press, NSW.

DAVE CLARK is a writer-poet with CFS who lives in Mparntwe (Alice Springs). He works as a counsellor and enjoys reading, photography and giving voice to quieter stories. His works have been published in Mascara, Imprint, Pure Slush Books, Adelaide Lit, Quillopia, Slippage Lit, Melbourne Culture Corner and Right Now. Twitter @DaveClarkWriter