Girls gone wild without a mother’s guidance

This review contains spoilers

Salt Creek Lucy Treloar 4*

     Women dying far too young, either in childbirth or worn out from having too many children, is regularly visited in stories set anytime before reliable birth control was put in to women’s hands. Even in the 1950s, especially in Catholic families, women’s health suffered through having more children than their bodies could cope with.

     So it is a familiar scenario in Salt Creek, when Mrs Finch dies giving birth to her tenth (I think this is correct) child. As so often happened, the eldest girl, fifteen year old Hester, takes over the domestic chores and plays the role of ‘mother’ or should that be housekeeper. 

One of Treloar’s telling moments is the father’s comment that Adelaide, the younger sister, has run wild without her mother’s guidance. We wouldn't necessarily recognise this attitude today as men take a much greater role in their children’s development. But in the past, even recent past, orphanages were filled with motherless children because their father would not or could not, look after them. I can recall at school a girl ‘turning bad’ because her mother had died and some children were not allowed to play with her because she was now less respectable. This is despicable, but such were social mores. Society may have changed, as has the role of father, but it is still sad to hear of children without the close emotional involvement of their parents.

     I had a few reservations about Treloar’s depiction of the Finch patriarch. He is a very negative character and gradually turns into a hypocritical monster. Although this was probably done by the author to develop the story, this depiction seems unbalanced. In the 1850s when the novel is set, expectations of men were extremely demanding in an unknown world. They had to provide for their many children and be a protector. They had to be physically and mentally strong, and hid their own insecurities by being aloof. Emotional guidance was the mother’s role so many men, faced with bringing up children alone, did not know what to do. It is still fairly recent that men have been expected to do ‘women’s work’ such as child care and domestic chores. Men were and possibly still are, ill equiped to deal with a girl’s sexuality.

     Men’s or boys sexuality was often seen as animalistic with an inability or desire to restrain themselves, for the preservation of their wife’s health. In Salt Creek, the Finch sons and their father consort with aboriginal women without conscience yet for the daughters, sexual risk-taking has profound consequences. I guess this is the heart of the story. In the 1850s, options were limited and society was judgemental. Women had little control over their own lives.

Robe Streetscape

     I didn’t enjoy the opening scenes of the story and was about to discard the book when I found myself involved and interested. Once I reached the conclusion, I reread the first pages and found them more accessible. The historical detail provides a solid background and the story of the Chinese who went to the gold fields via the Coorong and Robe is well, if slightly, woven in. I have read some criticism that the history is not fully accurate, but I didn’t notice any glaring errors.

     The Coorong is a beautiful, wild setting, well described by Treloar without overdoing the description or allowing the setting to take over from the action.

Salt Creek is well plotted, romantic despite the tragedies and well written. I didn't give it five stars because it was not multi layered, but told on one level. I still enjoyed it and recommend it to those who like a good story.

     

The Chinese, unpopular in Victoria and NSW found a route to the gold fields via the Coorong and Robe. Robe still has many historical buildings and a Chinese presence.

Old Customs House Robe 1863

Peter Goldsworthy’s Darwin. Maestro's setting, vibrantly alive, is a character in its own right.

Darwin circa 1967 may seem an unlikely place for literary inspiration, but Peter Goldsworthy’s, Maestro, with its exotic setting and the emotions he attaches to it, is an irresistible combination. Music infuses the story and it is at a piano lesson, that the teenage Paul Crabbe, a recent arrival from the south, encounters the maestro, a refugee from Vienna with a shady past.

I hoped to experience Darwin the way his protagonist, Paul, experiences it. There’s a risk involved in seeking out novel settings and the locations within because they may not be real and if they are real, may disappoint. Writers usually get the detail correct through research, but unless they have lived, even temporarily, in a place they write about, their pages are not imbued with the warm rain and wet earth smearing itself with greenness, like Goldsworthy’s prose is. Like the Crabbes, the Goldsworthy family moved to Darwin in 1966. Would the written Darwin mismatch the real thing or would I understand why Paul loved the tropical hothouse blooms where everything grew larger than life as I walked the streets of this lush and isolated town, a mix or orient and outback, a port to where immigrants drifted as a place of refuge.

Visiting a novel’s setting can be disorientating and laden with a ‘where am I’ aura. The heavy embrace of Darwin’s scent laden air strikes the minute the plane doors open and there’s no mistaking, this is the tropics. Ominous black clouds loom on the horizon and thunder rumbles away in the background waiting for that almighty moment when rain clouds burst, releasing moist compost air, sweet and sour, just as Goldsworthy describes. 

Some novels can be transported to different cities without affecting the overall story, but some narrative locations are inherent in the story and should the action be moved, the story would be different. Maestro, published in 1989, amusing, wise and enormously entertaining, sweeps effortlessly into 1960s Darwin, a tropical backdrop that becomes its own character.

There’s nothing insipid about Darwin and the two seasons, the wet and the dry, provide a dramatic backdrop to even the most bland of locations, a 1960s designed, form matched to function, school. Darwin High School, where Paul took refuge in the music room from bullies, still overlooks Mindil Beach and Darwin Harbour from the headland of Bullocky Point. Not as isolated as it was in the 60s, it now forms part of East Point Reserve a beautiful place for walking where you may spot red-tailed black cockatoos and wallabies and, depending on the season, witness magnificent sunsets or spectacular lightening displays.

Mindl Beach

The Botanical Gardens, where Keller arrives drunk during a concert arranged by the Crabbes, are now a heavenly brew of monsoon vine forest, coastal dunes, mangroves, woodlands and plants that have survived cyclones, wildfires and World War 2.  Concerts continue to be held in the amphitheatre.

The Swan, the fictional crumbling pub where the maestro, Keller, lives in his darkened room above the bar, shuttered against bright sunlight and the noisy locals below, is surely based on the colonial style Victoria, a heritage listed pub built with local stone in 1890. Before Cyclone Tracey hit in 1974, pictures show a large weatherboard accommodation annex, perhaps the inspiration for Keller’s room in the warren of crumbling weatherboard where Paul took his music instruction. Bougainvillea has grown in the courtyard since 1890, but sadly, although the monsoons of beer remain, I’m told the bougainvillea has been removed since my visit. 

Writers capture fleeting moments and no location remains intact forever. But the geography of the setting, the place on the map, its droughts, flooding rains and distant horizons do largely stay the same within the Australian landscape. Our literature often has a complicated, complex relationship with landscape, seeing it as menacing, a place from which we are often estranged. The young Paul’s enthusiastic embrace of Darwin, isolated at the Top End, with Asia to the north and the vast outback to the south, is so infectious, as a setting it becomes a must see.

Victoria Hotel in 1950s, the model for The Swan

Rural fiction with soundtrack. Take two minutes to listen to Dimming of the Day.

https://m.youtube.com/channel/UC-mwZmMkVzpXQua35mGfrQg

Fever of Animals

Miles Allinson raises some interesting ideas in his novel, Fever of Animals. I particularly liked the theme of art and the artist and for me the strongest scene was when the young artist realises his own art is just not good enough and he will never make the grade. The low point of the story was the repeated denigration of landscape art, as though it is a lesser form. But I guess this was also a comment on the egotistical nature of some artists. He shows how pretentious and insecure creatives can be.

The story held my interest most of the time, but I did start to drift away from the middle chapter and his travels in search of Emil Bafdescu. This is where I felt the writer was trying too hard to create "meaning" rather than letting the prose work alone. It just felt too forced.

There is the potential for two separate novels, the Bafdescu/Romania story and the other, first love/artist's struggle etc, though the character of Alice was very unappealing. As is, combining the two didn't work for me.

Miles Allinson clearly has talent as a writer and hopefully will reach full potential if he refrains from trying to inject literary significance, but instead lets it develop naturally. 

Writing as compulsion

    Writing is a compulsion for me, but where does that force within come from, I wonder. I’ve never tried to explain it before, but perhaps it stems from reading. Librarians and teachers of literacy often express a desire for youngsters to “discover the joys of reading”. I’m guessing that joy of reading is behind my urge to write. 

An adventure into another world.

     It is not a desire to recreate the great writers (as if) but to recreate the feeling reading those writers gave me, of entering a different world, a subconscious world, an imaginary world . From those earliest days of my own literacy, I was able to enter other lives, whether it be from the simple story lines and characters of school books to my mother’s magazines which seemed always to feature stories about exotic lives lived on tea plantations in Ceylon or India. Reading was mind expanding and other worldly. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, read as a child in Australia, opened a door to the world that has never been shut, as did Heidi, the story of the little girl who lives with her grandfather in the Swiss Alps. 

The Swiss mountains were a long
way from the Australian bush.

     In retrospect, the revelation of the inner lives of those and other characters, had a profound impact and influences the way I write and what I write about.

     Then there is inspiration. When I first read Faulkner’s, The Sound and the Fury, I remember closing the last page and thinking, wow, how did he do that. It was one of those profoundly moving novels that imprint themselves on the psyche; long after you have forgotten the plot details, you remember that moment of revelation; this writer is different to everyone I have read before. I think it inspired me in many ways to want to be a writer. Not so much to “write” like Faulkner, but to recreate the moment. It’s hard to explain.

     Writers come fairly quickly to the realisation they will not reach parity with the great writers of literature, but that does not stop them persisting, perhaps in a desire to find “the moment” or in an attempt to clarify their thoughts. As Faulkner said, ”I never know what I think about something until I read what I’ve written on it.”

This post was first published at http://booksbywomen.org/writing-as-compulsion/

May Gibbs imagery creates a Stella Spark

     When writing a short story about a family in Australia during the Great Depression, I recently found myself referencing, almost subconsciously, books I’d read in early childhood. Beatrix Potter, author of The Tale of Peter Rabbit and May Gibbs, author of Snugglepot and Cuddlepie both came to mind as I related the differences between a childhood set against an English landscape to that of an Australian childhood spent in the bush. Thinking about those influences a little harder, I realised many of those early experiences of storytelling are still informing my writing now.

     I didn’t notice these were female writers at the time; that came later, and when these classics were published, many females wrote under male pseudonyms, even when writing specifically about and for girls. But women write differently to men and though I read many books by male writers too, the ones who really reached me were the female voices.

     Intertextuality has been an aspect of writing and reading I really enjoy, so when I was describing in Place of Many Birds, a scene at Sandringham beach, in which two children find a seahorse, May Gibbs’ imagery leapt into the picture as if conjured from another sphere.

“We look at the big belly of the sea horse in the palm of my hand, turning it over and over and holding it to the sun to see inside. The sea horse’s body, yellowish and leathery beneath my fingertips, is dry and hard, blending a thick neck and curving tail encased in bony rings. At the end of its horse-like tubular snout, the dead eye of the sea horse stares back at us. I think of the dead seahorse, ridden by a sea fairy, floating gracefully through the waves. Reins made of seaweed hang from its mouth. The fairy escapes just in time from the mouth of a giant fish.” Place of Many Birds

     Even that fish has its roots in the Gibbs’ stories. The giant fish, John Dory, puts Snugglepot’s head in his mouth. Those vivid images, whether of terrifying Banksia Men or sweet little Ragged Blossom in her fraying blossom skirt, are imprinted so deeply, they are still able to appear unannounced.  Rather than lighting a spark, they ignited a love of literature that continues to burn. Can anyone walk past eucalypts drooping with pink blossom at this time of year, without recalling Gibbs.

New 5* review for Place of Many Birds

“Place of Many Birds” by Jan Merry is an exquisitely-written collection of short stories that takes place in a span of time from the late 1800s into the mid-20th century in Australia. The landscape of Australia becomes the primary “character” and common link among all of the short stories: the danger and struggle it imposes on its inhabitants as well as the vast beauty in which birds provide the soundtrack that become an integral part of the characters.
The core family plays a large part in many of the stories—“Before Winter Comes” is a particularly poignant tale of the delight an unexpected sponge cake brings to a sister and her two younger brothers whose mother has passed away. Loneliness is another theme found throughout: In “Killing Time,” Maurice piddles away his days, stretching out tasks, and taking long bike rides. He feels like he’s in the way of his son and daughter-in-law who live with him.
The title story, “Place of Many Birds,” reads almost like a stream of consciousness in which the narrator takes us through his family’s life out in the country, where he, his brother and mom stayed behind while their dad and older brother go to the city to prepare a life for the whole family there. His mother misses city life as she grew up in a quaint town in England with cobblestone paths and busy shops. The narrator becomes intricately tied to the land. As inconvenient as the dust, heat and flies can be, it’s something that will always stay with him. “All along the dusty edges of the road, we pass wattle trees, bottle brush and flowering gums where tiny creatures dressed in gamnut hats and ragged blossom clothes live.”
“Place of Many Birds” is an excellent collection of short stories. I highly recommend it for someone who wants to take his or her time and delve deeply into the characters’ thoughts as well as the vast landscape of Australia.
http://www.amazon.com/Place-Many-Birds-Australian-Stories-ebook/dp/B00BZ4O9MK/ref=cm_cr-mr-title#customerReviews

The Break Away an extract from Place of Many Birds short stories

     When writing about the past, about family, about true events, what does one leave in and what should be kept for posterity? The Break Away is based on a true event which resulted in the death of John Ickeringill in Australia, in 1891. I don't know about his personality, nor that of the others who witnessed the incident, so their characters are fictional.  What I could comment on truthfully was the 1838 Battle of Broken River which forms part of the narrative.

 
         “Eight men were slaughtered in the skirmish. In revenge, a hundred Aborigines were killed. There were many reprisal killings, a long time ago, nearly fifty years ago. It’s known as the Faithfull Massacre because the Faithfull brothers owned the sheep. Some call it the Battle of Broken River.”

Firelight flickers on the smooth trunks and writhing branches illuminating the ghostly whiteness of the trees in the moonlight. Long ribbons of shedding bark dangle in the soft wind coming off the river. Trees sway in a stealthy dance, like spirits from another world. How long does it take for ghosts to be laid to rest, I wonder. Is fifty years long enough?

“Their bodies are buried out here, but no one knows exactly where,” says Berry, the cool wind at our back and the warm glow of the fire in front.

“They didn’t attack because it was a hunting ground, but because it was ceremonial ground, a kangaroo ground.”

A coroner's inquest was held into the incident involving Ickeringill and his friends who set out one Saturday afternoon on a hunting expedition. 
 Place of Many Birds is available on Amazonhttp://www.amazon.com/Place-Many-Birds-Jan-Merry/dp/1500608947/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8 and http://www.amazon.com.au/Place-Many-Birds-Jan-Merry-ebook/dp/B00BZ4O9MK

Quiggan Brothers store Shepparton 1890s

Time for a Highland Fling

     Scotland and England are so different it is a wonder they have been joined together at all. Hadrian's Wall says a lot about the relationship and explains some of the resentment Scots hold towards England. The remains are not nearly as impressive as the original which was six meters high and three meters wide and stretched across the country for 117 kilometres. Designed to keep out the Picts (a kingdom of northern tribes occupying eastern and northern parts of Scotland) and built by the Romans, in many ways it defined the relationship. The wall was guarded and patrolled for almost 250 years and though the Romans upped and left, the wall remained; a dividing line reminding those in the north they didn't belong in the south unless they left their tartans and chiefs behind.

Hadrian's Wall near Birdoswald

Ancestors of David Cameron, British Prime Minister, are descendants of Clan Cameron from the Western Highlands, a spectacular place for walking and getting away from it all. On Knoydart peninsula the Old Forge pub is the most remote in the British Isles. Expect to find lots of music and rowdy locals enjoying the long summer evening on Inverie Ho. Reached only on foot, or by boat you can't ask for a more special destination. If you are looking for somewhere to stay, The Old Byre is highly recommended. Once a dairy, and now described as a bunkhouse, it has very comfortable with stylish accommodation.

The Old Byre Inverie on the Knoydart peninsula

Wild and remote, Inverie is reached by boat from Mallaig or a two day walk from Kinlochhourn. 

Cats of Montenegro