Tag / Australian Literature

by Melissa Watts

Deborah Burrows – A Time of Secrets

On reading selfishly.
 Secrets
I’ve just finished reading Deborah Burrows’ A Time of Secrets, a novel that I picked up because…well…the cover caught my eye. So yes, I did judge a book by it’s cover, but for very good reason. The woman on the cover is wearing a WWII era AWAS (Australian Women’s Army Service) uniform and I am currently working on a PhD which will be a novel and exegesis focusing on some AWAS members. So of course I plucked the book off the shelf and added it to my ever growing ‘to read’ pile. At this stage of my PhD the majority of my reading has been non-fiction so it was wonderful to come across a novel set in the same era with similar themes.
A Time of Secrets is set in 1943 in Melbourne, with protagonist Stella Aldridge who is an AWAS sergeant working in the Australian Intelligence Bureau. Stella has two important mysteries to solve –  In chapter one she overhears some soldiers discussing a plot for a revenge killing which she determines to investigate, and then her work leads her to another mystery – who is leaking information from the Intelligence Bureau to the enemy? Weaved around these two key plots is romance, murder and the ongoing sense of good-guy/bad-guy with the reader constantly switching loyalties between Stella’s friends and love interests as more secrets are exposed.
This novel was a chance for me to read selfishly. While I read historical fiction quite widely and always take note of how research is woven into the text, I haven’t read any books that draws from the same (or similar) pool of research documents. The women I will be focusing on worked in the Survey Corps in Bendigo, so while there is a big difference in our plots and characterisations it was great to absorb the general mise en scene of WWII Melbourne – the rations, the music and of course, the Americans.
It also got me thinking about the publishing trends for a novel of this type. I’ve been lamenting the lack of representation of women’s war experience in Australia, in both popular culture and formal histories (by ‘lack’ I don’t mean that there is no representation, I just mean that it is minimal – but that’s a post for another time). So it was great to see that there was some shelf space for a novel like this and gave me some hope that mine might also find some space there one day.
Deborah Burrows, A Time of Secrets, Pan Macmillan Australia. 2015.
by Melissa Watts

Writers Festival in July

death-in-july-web-header

I’m pleased to announce that while I have resigned from my duties at Ballarat Writers this year, I’ve agreed to help out with publicity for the fantastic upcoming Death in July Festival.

Ballarat Writers have a strong reputation for informative and industry specific writers festivals. This year is a break from the CYA and is focused on Australian Women’s Crime Writing. The event is partnered with Sisters in Crime and M.A.D.E.  Continue reading →

by Melissa Watts

I’m talking at the Melbourne Writers Festival

I am very pleased to announce that I will be a panellist and an interviewer at the 2013 Melbourne Writers Festival.

I spent some time helping the team from MWF as part of my role at Ballarat Writers and now I can announce that I’ll be involved in 2 events.

My first event is on Saturday as part of the M.A.D.E. by Writers Panel. I will be discussing how my life as a writer interacts with the ideas of freedom, power and democracy. I’ll be sharing the panel with some great writers and must confess to having what singer/songwriter Paul Kelly calls ‘the pretendies’.

On Sunday I’ll be hosting, In Conversation with M.J. Hyland. I’ve written about her work before and a few years ago participated in a workshop that she was running.  I’m looking forward to this event as it closes out the weekend of events and I’m hoping will have some great audience participation.

So let me know if you’ve got any advice, or any questions you’d like me to ask.

If you’re in Ballarat please come along to some of the events. It’s a great chance to encourage Melbourne arts groups to run regional events.

There are heaps of workshops and panel discussions so please book in.

by Melissa Watts

Place as Character – Toni Jordan Nine Days

art-353-Nine-Days-300x0-184x280 I’ve seen Toni Jordan speak at quite a few events, and I was fortunate enough to hear her again towards the end of last year at the Ballarat Mechanics Institute. It was just after the launch of her latest novel, Nine Days.

I knew about the general premise of the book before I bought it – that Jordan was inspired by a photograph from the Argus records. (The image is on the cover of the book) But what I didn’t know was that the nine days of the title, refers to the plot structure. The novel tells of nine days, spread across seventy years, which transform the lives of each member of the Westaway family.  Each chapter is narrated by a different member of the family as they face their transformative day. However the plot is not structured chronologically. This device is a wonderful tool for driving the plot. Readers are left to fill in some blanks when the novel jumps from 1939 to the weeks immediately after the September 11 collapse of the world trade centre in 2001. We wonder who the new narrator is and how is she related to Kip, the character we’ve just grown to love in chapter one. This continues through the book, and it’s Jordan’s skill as a storyteller that ensures that readers don’t feel dislocated, instead urging them on with a new character who is just as fascinating as the one before. Continue reading →

by Melissa Watts

The Mint Lawn – Gillian Mears

I have a confession to make.

It has taken me 5 months to read Gillian Mears’ The Mint Lawn.

In that time Mears has been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin and won the Prime Ministers Literary Award for Foal’s Bread.

And I was still plugging away with The Mint Lawn.

There are several plausible reasons for this. I have a 7 month old baby. I’m not getting a full night sleep. I’ve been busy with Ballarat Writers events….etc. etc.

But the honest reason is because of the book itself. It’s strong. It’s thought provoking. It requires energy and attention. It requires a slow read.

The Mint Lawn follows the life of Clementine Eastern nee Young. It’s not structured chronologically, so the novel begins with Clementine exposing her own affair to her husband and wondering if this is how it happened with her mother and father. From the opening page we understand that this will be a novel where familial bonds, and neuroses are examined. The examination is clinical, truthful as it looks at the legacy left by a dead mother to her three daughters, in relation to marriage, intimacy and sexuality.

The first 75 pages are told in the first person by a 25 year old Clementine, which firmly roots the reader with her, we are excited by the passion of her affair with the creative Thomas, we see the legacy of her childhood with her relationship with her adult sister and above all we see her characterisation of her husband. The first few paragraphs display Hugh crying over the exposed affair, “his crying is a high, unlikely whine…he is crying with his mouth stretched so wide I can see, against my will, years of coffee stains etched on the underside of his front teeth.” A paragraph on he licks her face while kissing her and Clementine informs us that, “later, the smell of Hugh’s dried spit is awful and ordinary Sunlight soap won’t do the job. I have to wash it away with the knob of Coal Tar that sits by the washing machine for extra persistent stains.” Hugh’s characterisation is complete by the bottom of page 2, and we will spend the rest of the 405 pages mentally urging Clementine to pack her bags and go.

Not all the novel is narrated in the first person present tense. We have sections of childhood told in third person, which allows us to examine the domestic scene closer, with our own adult perspective watching the three Young daughters interact with their mother, who we know will die, and we know already some of the character traits that her daughters will develop. This changing perspective and timeframe creates an ability for the reader to analyse the family in a way that wouldn’t be possible if the novel retained one perspective, or was chronological. And this is what requires the energy. The reader is placed almost as another daughter, watching the machinations of domesticity, aware of which traits will be picked up and continued through the daughters, and which will cause problems.

The Mint Lawn was Mears’ first novel and it won the 1990 Vogel award.  To consider the complexities of the book with its length (405 pages) it’s hard to believe that this was a first novel. I can see similarities with Christina Stead’s, The Man Who Loves Children, with the suffocating sense of the household replaced by the small town (a character itself) in The Mint Lawn.

 I felt that the novel is crafted brilliantly and reads like it has been created by someone who has published several novels before. With this in mind I did some research and discovered that sections of the book are biographical. In an interview in 2011 with Linda Morris for the Sydney Morning Herald, Morris notes that:

Mears, however, well understands the paradox of country life: the barefoot freedom and the claustrophobia of living in a conservative country town. At 18 she caused a scandal, falling in love with her history teacher. When they divorced, she rebelled in the sexual abandonment of carefree Paris.

Mears poured so much of her pre-divorce anger into The Mint Lawn that for a coming 20th-anniversary release, she edited out narrator Clementine’s more ”unsavoury observations”. Her past lovers, male and female, sexual trysts and life’s ”bad weather” are all matters about which she has been searingly honest.

Long ago, however, she reconciled with her former husband and family, with whom she fell out over looted memories. As she grows older, Mears has come to realise how deeply she can cherish ”certain aspects of even a marriage gone rotten”.
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/interview-gillian-mears-20111117-1njp5.html#ixzz2AMK7bQnY

The novel begins to make more sense to me when I realise that it has autobiographical elements to it – I’m glad I read it before I knew that, however it’s left me wondering if that’s where its power lies. Is it possible to create a novel that intense without an autobiographical element?

If you are interested in reading more on this there is a great article available online which was originally published by The Australian by Murray Waldren: http://users.tpg.com.au/waldrenm/mears.html

Gillian Mears, The Mint Lawn, Allen and Unwin, first published 1991.

This review forms part of the Australian Women Writers Challenge.

by Melissa Watts

Dulcie Deamer – The Queen of Bohemia

As the old adage goes, you should never judge a book by its cover. Which is exactly what I did when I picked up Dulcie Deamer’s autobiography off a small book stall at last year’s Clunes’ Booktown. I couldn’t help myself, the title suggests excitement and adventure, and the accompanying image had me intrigued. A 1920’s sepia toned image of Deamer, arms spread to the heavens, draped in a leopard skin revealing legs, yes legs – I’d almost forgotten women of that era had legs with the usual sepia photos I’d seen. If the cover wasn’t enough for me then the blurb on the back had me convinced that I had to buy this book:

 “In the wild parties that characterised Sydney’s writing and artisitic community in the Roaring Twenties, Dulcie Deamer was undisputed “Queen of Bohemia”. But there was more to her fascinating life than performing the splits in a leaopard skin.”

Dulcie Deamer’s autobiography explores her life as an artist. Beginning as a child in New Zealand and her early success with a writing completion and continues to the 1960s. The book looks at her writing, her acting career, her early marriage and the international travel that accompanied it, her divorce and then spends several chapters focusing on the 1920s in Kings Cross, Sydney.

Her writing career is admirable and it is enjoyable to read the perspective of a single woman who was able to scrape by with a career in writing. But her bohemian parties and her list of names that are almost catalogued like a who’s who of bohemia left me with questions – where are her 6 children and who is feeding them? Surely they can’t be living in the one room flat she rents. Why is she so reluctant to mention them? From a readers perspective the pages dedicated to her career only widened the chasm between myself and Deamer as I wondered how a woman of that era could function as a single mother with 6 children.

The 1998 publication of the autobiography comes with an introduction by Peter Kirkpatrick and an afterword by Deamer’s daughter Rosemary Goldie. I was thankful for the afterword which explained all of my questions. The children were taken care of by Deamer’s mother, who moved from New Zealand to Sydney to care for her grandchildren. Some of Deamer’s children did not survive childhood, and another died in the first world war. I wish these facts had of been included in the autobiography and not attached as an afterword, although perhaps it says something of the culture of 1920s bohemia. I can understand that her objective was to focus on her career in the autobiography, but I felt that I was investing so much time getting to know and like her friends, that I wanted more.

Her autobiography was a great insight into Sydney of the 1920s. The tone was jovial, making it accessible and an enjoyable read. But Deamer was such an interesting narrator that I couldn’t help but want to learn more about her, and was only satisfied by the afterword written by her daughter.

In all Deamer wrote 7 published novels, 4 plays, published 3 verse poems and had continual work with The Bulletin and the Women’s Mirror. She also left a substantial collection of manuscripts now housed with the Mitchell Library Sydney and the National Library of Australia.

Dulcie Deamer, Queen of Bohemia. University of Queensland Press, 1998.

This review forms part of the Australian Women Writers Challenge.

by Melissa Watts

International Women’s Day Inspiration

Today is International Women’s Day and I’ve been inspired by Whispering Gums to think of texts by women which have inspired me.  I’m busy today, running off to a Ballarat Writers event, which for the last year has had a committee of only women (this AGM we managed to get one male committee member) so my list will be brief.

Kate Jennings: I’ve written about Kate Jennings before. I found her collection of poetry Come to me my Melancholy Baby, when I was about 15 and just learning about poetry. The literature texts at school were very male focused, Shakespeare, Wordsworth etc and David Malouf novels for the Australian component. So when I came across her poetry, punchy, raw, emotive – full of sex, swearing and brutal Australian-ness I loved it. I’ve since collected all of her works.

Judith Wright I fell in love with Judith Wright’s poetry and again used it to balance the male poetry that I was fed at school. I had a great literature teacher who would include non-curriculum texts into the mix for us. I’m pregnant now, and occasionally get lines of Woman to Man floating through my head.

Jean Sasson I was given Princess and Daughters of Arabia to read from my mother when I was about 15. I passed these onto my friends and they stirred many discussions. While we still giggled on sleepovers about boys we also discussed arranged marriage, female circumcision and a whole range of issues we would never have learned about growing up in rural Australia.

Rosa Praed I wrote my thesis on the works of Rosa Praed, which look at whole range of female issues in early Australian life. But it was her life which fascinated me the most. In short; a female Australian author who wrote 23 books published from 1880 to 1916 – we should hear more about her.

Mary Wollstonecraft: I first encountered the Marys – Wollstonecraft and Shelley at University. I’ve recently spent some time studying The Vindication of the Rights of Woman for work in my novel. It’s such a magnificent work and one that I find myself yelling ‘yes’ to out loud, despite the fact that I’m a gen Y and this was written in 1792 – goes to show that sometimes generational change doesn’t exist.

 

by Melissa Watts

The Pines Hold Their Secrets

Jill Blee’s historical fiction always grabs a reader early because of its setting, and The Pines Hold Their Secrets is no exception.

Set on Norfolk Island when it was a Penal Colony the novel examines the key elements of politics, religion and social conventions of the time. This is something of a ‘rites of passage’ book, following the protagonist Elise Cartwright on her journey from Hobart to Norfolk Island to join her father who is deployed there as a Super Intendant of Agriculture. His role is a demotion from the profile they had in Hobart, and the motivation for this leaves an outstanding question throughout the novel. Continue reading →

by Melissa Watts

Tim Pegler

Over the last few months I have been helping Ballarat Writers to prepare for the Ballarat Writers and Illustrators Festival for 2011. As part of this I have prepared by reading  the novels of young adult author, Tim Pegler. Continue reading →