Matilda

It happens to all of us who love books and possess a few. One day we are discussing some matter, and find our selves saying, "By the way there's something about it in that book by X. I'll show it to you." We go over to the right shelf, put our fingers on the right spot (for we could find the book in the dark) and draw out something very like a vacuum. No, there was not exactly a physical gap on the shelves, or we should have noticed our loss before. The book is gone but its neighbours, with perhaps some obscure humanitarian impulse, have closed in making an unbroken row as if all were well. Yet all is not well! That apt allusion in X's book cannot be verified to-day, nor for many days. The next following discomfort will be some "long, long thoughts," as you try to remember who on earth ever borrowed precisely that book. The general result is a feeling that if X's book can go without warning, we live in a shaken and unsure world, not to say universe. Why, we ask, did we ever consent to lend any book at all!

Well, why did any book lover ever lend books that were loved'? Simply because he loved them, and because he was delighted to find some one who seemed eager about them. The impulse is so natural. A garden enthusiast, going round his beds with a friend, nearly always enjoys taking scissors and a basket and giving the friend an armful of flowers. It blesseth him that gives, for plentiful flowers should not die on their stalks. In the same way, books left standing on their shelves gather nothing but unhousewifely dust. If passed from hand to hand they seem to live again, so, when a friend comes glancing along my shelves and suddenly pounces on a book, crying, "Well, I   didn t know A.E. had collected his early prose into a book!"' I am delighted. The one reply is "Please borrow that book for as long is you like. I want it back some day, for reference, and because it completes a small group of Irish books.   But there is no hurry." That is what you feel, very sincerely. Rather than let a book stand uviisited for a long time you would let it be perilously promenaded in your friend's pocket or even worn out a little by being read in trains. For a book is less than a book if it is not being read.

A Fallacy.

Gazing, though, at that new lock on your shelf, you wonder what made you ever imagine that all books, when lent out, would return. Your root idea, as lender, was that all borrowers were book lovers, and all book lovers had book consciences. Yet you knew that book-borrowers are merely human. They do not steal books, they use them, they pass them on temporarily, to other friends, who do the same... Sometimes they love a book outright, simply that. As for your loss, all lenders of books have had the same experience. Charles Lamb complained of it, though he just managed to forgive Coleridge on account of the splendid marginal notes he added to the books he borrowed. If and when the book did return home, these notes would have increased its worth. Other book-lovers have written of their losses, sometimes even attempting a rueful complacency. One said, thanking his borrowers -

   For oh, they've eased me of my Burns  
   And freed me from my Akenside.

Any one who could fun, while in such woe would surely dance at his own funeral.

Returning Borrowed Books.

Most of us have occasions when we rouse ourselves to plan the recovery of our lost treasures. Sometimes it is worth the attempt. The first thing to do, and it is best done in the salutary days near the 1st January, is to purge your own shelves of borrowed books. There is no need to go to extremes in this act, sending back half-read books that you borrowed only last week. The thing is to go through your shelves and make sure that none of your friends' books are mildewing on your shelves when they ought to be mouldering on their own. A borrowed book is a visitor not a resident, not even a "permanent" boarder.  Clear all borrowed books off your conscience then. Next, renew your annually broken vow to keep a list of all the books you lend and the names of the borrowers. This is a repugnant job, but it will save you an excess of brain-cudgelling before the year is out. Next, why not try to reclaim some of the books you lightly cudgelled your brains over last year? Perhaps you can suddenly remember, now, who it was that went away with De Regnier's poems about Versailles tucked under her arm. Perhaps some train of reasoning will make it clear to you what friend's friend will be now in possession of those out of print poems by Vaughn Moody!' But who could possibly have taken that signed novel given you months ago by your friend who wrote it?

Missing Books.

Yet your sifted memory and your borrower's memory may both fail to reinstate such and such a book on your hungry shelf. I once tried something systematic, but don't recommend the experiment to any one else. Missing some books that I both desired and needed, I thought I would send my bookish friends a round-robin, not through the post, but using the power of the Press. It was hard to decide which column of the huge daily would best receive my modest advertisement. I thought of board and lodging, for indeed I had house room to offer my strays. Then the wanted columns beckoned, but they all wanted to buy or sell. The lost and found? But my books were neither. At last I decided on "Missing Friends," the agony column! I simply asked if friends who had borrowed any of my books would return them before I moved away. There was only one response, and that a harrowing one. A rather new acquaintance, to whom I had lent some unimportant and ordinary novels only a week before, returned them all by next post, and of course never borrowed anything again. Meanwhile the lost and necessary books, the rare and irreplaceable ones, remained where they lay, too many of them (as the sad- dest of phrases puts it) "forgotten like a crust behind a trunk."  

Unreturning Books.

There is, of course, one simple way out of it all, One of the New Year resolutions could be to lend no more books on any account. That would attack the trouble at the root. The answer is that it is not worth it. The prospect would be unbearable. Imagine showing a friend round your bookshelves and never dropping into the natural old form of words: "Do please borrow anything that interests you." In saying those words, of course, you know that you are pronouncing the death warrant of a percentage of the books that pass out through your door. Yet you know too, that such books as survive will be living more fully than if you hoarded them undisturbed behind glass doors. The Melbourne Public Library has a Latin epigram in praise of books stamped on every bookcover. Its last word is "peregrinantur": books are meant to wander, to go on pilgrimages. Even if some fall by the wayside and are lost, they will have escaped from oppressive indoors, care that is only a dignified form of neglect. Ask any decent book, with its covers still holding it together, and it will certainly tell you that it wishes, in Nietzsche's phrase, to "live dangerously." Let us all lend our books then, and sometimes even borrow them! 

First published in The Brisbane Courier, 5 February 1927

[Thanks to the National Library of Australia's newspaper digitisation project for this piece.]

The Digger's Rest Hotel Geoffrey McGeachin Penguin 2011

In 1947, two years after witnessing the death of a young Jewish woman in Poland, Charlie Berlin has rejoined the police force a different man. Sent to investigate a spate of robberies in rural Victoria, he soon discovers that World War II has changed even the most ordinary of places and people.

An ex-bomber pilot and former POW, Berlin is struggling to fit back in: grappling with post-traumatic stress disorder, the ghosts of his dead crew and his futile attempts to numb the pain.

When Berlin travels to Albury-Wodonga to track down the gang behind the robberies, he suspects he's a problem cop being set up to fail. Taking a room at the Diggers Rest Hotel in Wodonga, he sets about solving a case that no one else can - with the help of feisty, ambitious journalist Rebecca Green and rookie constable Rob Roberts, the only cop in town he can trust.

Then the decapitated body of a young girl turns up in a back alley, and Berlin's investigations lead him ever further through layers of small-town fears, secrets and despair.

The first Charlie Berlin mystery takes us into a world of secret alliances and loyalties - and a society dealing with the effects of a war that changed men forever.

Reviews

Angela Savage on her weblog: "The characters are brilliantly drawn, not only Berlin and Green, but a large ensemble cast, which includes the hotelier's family at the Diggers Rest, soldiers in the Bandiana barracks, a dodgy tent boxing troupe, Wodonga's alcoholic doctor, a resident Chinese family, the local constabulary, and others like Berlin, permanently damaged by a war whether they fought in it or not...If I have any criticism of the book it's that Berlin is too much of a good bloke -- his exchange with Neville Morgan, the Aboriginal war veteran, seemed a bit too enlightened for the era. Then again, it's Berlin's depth and decency that enables McGeachin to deliver such a heartbreaking finale to this wonderful book."

Christopher Bantick in "The Weekly Times": "Authentic is a word that comes to mind with this very dyed-in-the-wool novel...McGeachin has an ear for Aussie lingo and he blends it seamlessly into a bottler of a book...This is a book that is hard to fault."

Karen on the "AustCrime" weblog: "The information that came with this book highlights how the author has used the stories of his own father's wartime experiences as both an airman and a POW in Europe, as well as his childhood recollections of growing up in country-town Australia. It's a very realistic portrayal of country Australia - be it in the late 1940's or even more recently (well in this reader's memory anyway). Balance that small-town, closed environment, and the changes that are coming over a society traumatised and profoundly changed by the war and those who did and didn't return, against the individual story of one man who was so profoundly affected by events in Europe, and well, you end up with something that's entertaining, moving and affecting."

Bernadette on the "Fair Dinkum Crime" weblog, about reh audiobook version of the novel: "The historical aspects of the novel are extremely well done; feeling authentic through the use of interesting details but not overblown with evidence of the author's research. Everything from the rationing that the country was still experiencing to the kinds of foods that might have been served in a country pub at that time to the photographic equipment and techniques utilised by the adventurous female photo-journalist that Charlie encounters during his investigation are both accurate and woven into the story seamlessly. Some of the less pleasant aspects of life during the time are also well depicted including the fairly shabby treatment of anyone who wasn't white. It really did feel like I was transported back to the time, a factor helped I think by the excellent narration of the audio book in which the language and slang were pronounced to fit in with the period...With down-to-earth, very believable characters and a strong, enveloping sense of place and time The Digger's Rest Hotel is a top notch work of historical crime fiction."

Interviews

Kieran Weir on 891 ABC Adelaide.

Joseph Thomsen on ABC Radio Victoria.

Other

You can read an extract from the novel on the publisher's website.

Sir, -- An item in the issue of the Queensland "Worker" of 30/6/47 interested me, as I consider I am connected with the origin of the word "Wowser."  

My version of the word's origin is that it came to light in 1898. There was a huge number of unemployed in Sydney and through the country. The Government Labour Bureau was in Chalmers St., close to the Chalmers Church, and opposite the old Exhibition Building in Prince Alfred Park.

Men mustered at the Bureau by the hundreds like forlorn sheep. Many of us joined the Surplus Labour League, and held meetings in the park and addressed the crowd of unemployed.  

A committee of 10 was elected, five were a working part, and when any one of the five got work others of the committee stepped up and filled the vacancy.

Mr. G. H. Reid was Premier, and received many deputations. To the first one he gave us £500 for food, and at a second another £500-- £1000, 200 pairs of blankets, and sent hundreds of men to the country clearing the Boganj Scrub on railway work and other places.

I got work for a couple of months and went back to the Bureau, and one morning was conversing with a man behind the church who was very dissatisfied with the actions of the committee and condemning them tooth and nail. I asked him where they did wrong and what they should do to improve conditions. I told him there would be a meeting in an hour's time and asked if he would be there. He said, "Yes." I found out his name. I was the third speaker, and after generalities I came round to those who would not help to make things better. I looked at the man and asked if there was a Mr. Phillips in the crowd. He did not answer. I looked in a different direction and repeated the question with no reply. I looked again in the direction of the man, adding, "I know he is here as I am looking directly at him," and he answered, "Yes."

I asked if he remembered the conversation we had behind the church that morning. He said, "Yes."

I said, "You complained that the committee had done nothing right and you mentioned things they should do, and I am asking you to come on the platform and tell the crowd what they should do to better conditions."

I asked him to come up several times and he refused. I then opened out on him, describing him for what I thought he was, and finished up by telling him he was not a "betterer"-- one who helped to make conditions better -- but that he was a "worser," one who made conditions worse.

We had a freelance who reported our meetings to the press, and whether the word "worser" was blurred and not plain and distinct I do not know, but the word came out WOWSER, maybe a printer's error.

I have heard Mr. John Norton many times while delivering election addresses using the word "wowser," and admit he popularised it.

The late Mr. C. J. Dennis also claimed he had something to do with its origin, stating he had used that word more than two years before Mr. Norton. My uttering of the word "worser" was in 1898, and I can place the time by an entry of wages in a book I have.

WILLIAM OSBORN.

Broadwater, Richmond River, N.S.W.

(P.S. -- I feel very pleased to say I am a member of the grand old A.W.U. since the amalgamation of the Rural Workers' Union, and my ticket number is No. 47004.)

First published in The Worker (Queensland), 18 August 1947

[Thanks to the National Library of Australia's newspaper digitisation project for this piece.]

As Peter Carey's new novel, The Chemisty of Tears, hits the bookshelves, he is interviewed in "The Age" by Simon Mann:

These days, anything written about Carey inevitably carries the label ''dual Booker winner'', noting the fact he is almost alone in twice winning Britain's top literary accolade, for Oscar and Lucinda in 1988 and True History of the Kelly Gang in 2001. They and his load of other trophies might add uncomfortably to the weight of expectation success brings. But Carey says he is only aware of the self-imposed pressure, that doing what he does always ''feels risky and difficult''.

''Writers, at least writers of fiction, are always full of anxiety and worry,'' he says. ''It's never any different, because in the end what you do is make the difficulty for yourself, which is the novel.''

Reflecting further, he adds: ''The real anguish is just making the thing and then, after that, well, it's awful to be criticised and it's awful to be not liked, it's awful to be any of those things. Basically, the writer of fiction is the person who comes in every day and puts his head up his bum and goes to work.''

It is on record that once, when in England, William Morris Hughes was asked what the Australian climate was like. "First tell me," he rapped out, "what the climate of Europe is like!" Put the Australian landscape in place of its climate, or beside it, and you have the case for a poet or artist who has to deal with its extraordinary varied problems. What is the Australian landscape? Is it that of Tambo or Ballarat or the Blue Mountains or Broome? As well ask if the European landscape is that of Brittany or Spain! When a poet, therefore, is known as an interpreter of our landscape, we may well ask, "Which landscape?'" and be glad to hear that he has confined his aims, to the treatment of one region. That is task enough and to spare. Henry Kendall was the first and most eager of our definite landscape painters in words, and it is important to remember, as Mr. A. G. Stephens points out in a recent critical review of this poet's work, that what he absorbed was "the natural spirit of the southeast coast of Australia, between the mountains and the sea." Kendall knew that country in New South Wales especially, but all his descriptive work would be at home in the same kind of seaboard country in Southern Queensland -- what is known as the South Coast and the North Coast. (This naming seems to me unfortunate as it is in New South Wales, too.)   When I told people that I lived on the North Coast in Queensland, they began looking at the map near Cape York!  At the same time it is droll to hear Queenslanders speaking of the "Northern Rivers," just south of the Queensland border).

Kendall's Bush.

For the moment I do not intend to look at Kendall primarily as a poet, quoting his work that was highest as poetry. What I want to follow is his skill in rendering a landscape that was his to interpret for the first time. Before him, Harpur had done some astonishing and vigorous work, but the field was hardly touched by him. Enter Kendall, born at Ulladulla, in the timbered ridges, a dozen miles from the sea; he was taken later to the watered district of the Orara and the Clarence Rivers. He knew the harshness of the timber-getters' lives and the realities of sheep farming; but the whole scene was for him impregnated with beauty. His first boyish poems evoked a scene that was full of waterfalls, fern gullies, birdsong, and brilliance, brilliance without harshness. This is from "Morning in the Bush":

So Kendall wrote in his youth, full of zest and enthusiasm and a straightness of purpose. It is pleasant, too, to see the length of those lines, which happened to suit the purpose of this poem. He had evidently never heard of payment by the line, a habit which causes so many verse-makers to split each line down the middle, so as to make it two! Just try splitting the lines in this poem, and printing each one as two, and see how the whole verse thuds and thumps along. In quoting these particularly vibrant lines I have hardly suggested the most characteristic Kendall, the Kendall who wrote in lyrical metres of bellbirds and mountain dells, and who used the sweetest and most liquid of the native names to make refrains for his songs. I use the expression "mountain dells," not that it is the best for our landscape, since the word "gully," with its association of depth and contrast, has replaced it in Australia; I use it because Kendall used words like "grove" and "glen," and "dell" so often. His tools, after all, were those of another country. The marvel was that with them he shaped a landscape that we can all recognise. I am not sure that Kendall even used the word "bush" as we do when we say "the bush." Yet it is an old enough word. You'll perhaps remember that it was used by no less a talker than Mrs. Nickleby herself when she once became reminiscent about one of her early admirers: "And he went to Australia and got lost in a bush with some sheep. I don't know how they got there. . .-"So Dickens knew of "the bush" since he allows his Mrs. Malaprop-Nickleby to trip over it. But if Kendall does not master the use of indigenous words and terms so as to drench them with poetry and draw them into his singing lines, he has, after all, mastered the landscape itself:

Those lines he wrote, in a famous sonnet of despair, using them to name the themes that he had once hoped to render. But the lines are more than names, they are a poem in themselves; such a poem, to be impressive, need not be long.

    In small proportions we just beauties see.

Our Own Poet.  

Poetry does two things for us. It brings beauty to us from everywhere, from Xanadu, Cathay, Avalon, from the skies: it also brings us to beauty, showing us what is in the life around us. Just now I was reading another sonnet of Kendall's, and its simple words seemed as if spoken by some one with a poet's heart, beating anywhere, let us say, between Noosa and the Tweed. Here it is:--

There are indeed such secret glens in our coastal ranges for those who will take time to seek them out. Their lovers will say their names over, beginning, maybe, with Bon Accord Falls, that place of superb contrasts -- dizzy heights, and finest ferny detail; delicate birdsong, and the soaring of a wedge-tail eagle over the gorge. But each of us can find different names for the secret glens, or remember others that are nameless. In doing this we have touched the very sources of Kendall's poetry.

First published in The Brisbane Courier, 13 October 1928

[Thanks to the National Library of Australia's newspaper digitisation project for this piece.]

All That I Am Anna Funder Penguin 2011

The gripping first novel by Anna Funder, the acclaimed author of Stasiland, based on a true story. All That I Am, is moving and beautifully written, equal parts a love story, thriller and testament to individual heroism. It evokes books like Irene Nemirovsky's Suite Francaise, Bernard Schlink's The Reader and William Boyd's Restless - intelligent, powerful novels that appeal to a wide audience.

'When Hitler came to power I was in the bath. The wireless in the living room was turned up loud, but all that drifted down to me were waves of happy cheering, like a football match. It was Monday afternoon . . . '

Ruth Becker, defiant and cantankerous, is living out her days in the eastern suburbs of Sydney. She has made an uneasy peace with the ghosts of her past - and a part of history that has been all but forgotten.

Another lifetime away, it's 1939 and the world is going to war. Ernst Toller, self-doubting revolutionary and poet, sits in a New York hotel room settling up the account of his life.

When Toller's story arrives on Ruth's doorstep their shared past slips under her defences, and she's right back among them - those friends who predicted the brutality of the Nazis and gave everything they had to stop them. Those who were tested - and in some cases found wanting - in the face of hatred, of art, of love, and of history.

Based on real people and events, All That I Am is a masterful and exhilarating exploration of bravery and betrayal, of the risks and sacrifices some people make for their beliefs, and of heroism hidden in the most unexpected places. Anna Funder confirms her place as one of our finest writers with this gripping, compassionate, inspiring first novel.

Reviews

Rachel Cusk in "The Guardian": "Anna Funder's first book, Stasiland, was a work of great originality and interest. An account of life in the former German Democratic Republic, it sought to delineate individual and national states of being in the wake of the trauma of totalitarianism, and particularly to inquire into the mental state of a society that has suffered an absolute loss of faith in personal morality...There will, of course, be many readers for whom a remarkable story told with clarity and precision, along with the moments of insight and literary grace that couldn't not occur in Funder's writing, will be a very welcome pleasure."

Joanna Kavenna in "The Observer": "Funder's prose is clear, easy to read, scrupulously lacking in stylistic idiosyncrasies...Clever, intriguing, incoherent, All That I Am is cinematographic pseudo-realism, a studiously researched fantasy about the past that stages an almost self-annihilating debate about reconstruction."

Rachel Hore in "The Independent": "The Australian writer Anna Funder follows her Samuel Johnson Prize-winning Stasiland with a novel challenging the frontiers between historical fact and the creative imagination...Funder became a friend of the real-life Ruth Wesemann in Ruth's later years in Sydney, and her notes on sources indicate how closely she's tried to base the novel on what is known. At the same time, the book is far more than "faction"; she has successfully transformed the material into a narrative of individual endeavour and survival, that examines universal human themes."

David Marr in "The Monthly": "Though set in an earlier time and in a different struggle, All That I Am takes us back to the territory of Stasiland (2003), Funder's brilliantly successful account of the turncoat regime of East Germany. In both books - one fact and one a kind of fiction - moral strength is her core concern: the strength it takes to refuse to fall in with an evil and apparently triumphant regime. She knows how little it takes to fail. Being wanted, being useful, can be temptation enough...Funder's prose has a clarity that's at times arresting. In language of admirable simplicity she explores the shadowy ambiguities lurking in her characters - ambiguities that have always fascinated her: the good that comes with bad and the bad with good."

David Sornig in "The Adelaide Review": "Between Stasiland and All That I Am Funder asks an important question about how we tell stories of other people's moral courage: how can an author properly navigate the line between invention and truth? The famously cool reception of Stasiland in Germany, particularly in East Germany, revealed some anxiety about Funder's own answer...In All That I Am, Funder achieves the right balance between truth and invention to pay tribute to those people who tried to get the message out about what shape the future would take under Hitler. That their warnings were ignored for so long was a tragedy, one that we ignore at our own peril. Funder reminds us of this truth with certainty and moral force."

Interviews

Anna Funder in conversation on Slow TV.

Catherine Kennan in "The Sydney Morning Herald".

Jonathan Derbyshire in "New Statesman".

Ridhcard Fidler on ABC Radio [audio].

Other

Anna Funder discusses the novel on Youtube.

The first half century of Australian history produced little creative artistic work. Wentworth, when he was at Cambridge, wrote a very fine poem, in which he sounded a note of Australia's future greatness, and predicted the rise of some "Austral Shakespeare, whose living page, to nature true, may charm in every age." That poem, however, beautifully correct as it may be, lacked any emotional impulse. The first really genuine poetic piping was heard in 1845, when Charles Harpur, a native of Goulburn, the city that has just celebrated its centenary, wrote a little book of sonnets. The sixties saw the rise of Gordon and Kendall. They were two poetic stars that burst out of the literary darkness about the same time, the one in Victoria and the other in New South Wales. Brilliant as Gordon was, revealing the influence of both Swinburne and Browning, he was not so musical as Kendall, and not so subtle and humorous as Brunton Stephens, who, like the rich and delicate Essex Evans, belongs to a later period. Henry Kendall is probably the most musical of Australia's poets. It is nearly sixty years since he began to sing his brave woodland notes. His poem "To a Mountain" is Australia's   masterpiece. No other Australian poet has reached the towering heights of arcadian grandeur that Kendall trod, nor has any other poet touched our woodland scenery with the same exquisite colouring. He wrote in an age, however, when Australia had little inclination for art, and he felt the hardships occasioned by a small and always insecure income until in his later years the late Sir Henry Parkes, one of his first admirers, secured for him a position in the Government service which was both congenial and remunerative. Unfortunately Kendall did not long enjoy his ease, falling a victim to consumption in the year I882, at the age of 41 years. At different times Kendall's poems have been published in different sections in different volumes, but these have now been gathered into one very fine edition, entitled "The Poems of Henry Kendall" (Angus and Robertson, Ltd., Sydney), to which Mr. Bertram Stevens has contributed a short biographical note. The new volume contains the poems included in the three volumes published during Kendall's lifetime, those not reprinted by Kendall, but included in a collected edition of 1886, and a number of poems now printed for the first time, having been secured from the Kendall manuscripts in the Mitchell Library. The new volume contains nearly 400 pages, and although all the poems are not of the same high standard yet Kendall mostly wrote with the inspiration of the true artist, and his best pieces will certainly have an enduring place wherever English poetry is read. Our copy is through Mr. J. H. Thomson, Queen-street.

First published in The Queenslander, 6 November 1920

[Thanks to the National Library of Australia's newspaper digitisation project for this piece.]

In 2011, in not a single course in the whole country were students asked to read Henry Handel Richardson's The Fortunes of Richard Mahony. This is the equivalent of not one Russian university teaching Anna Karenina, of Madame Bovary going untaught in France. It is a rampageous scandal, to borrow a coinage from HHR herself. If I tell you that Patrick White's The Tree of Man was prescribed on two courses last year, or The Man Who Loved Children, which MUP recently put back into print, on just one, you start to see the extent of the problem.

Such educational poverty is consistent with the views expressed in 1935 by G. H. Cowling, professor of English literature at Melbourne University, who told readers of The Age that: ''The rewards of literature in Australia are not good enough to make it attract the best minds ... Good Australian novels which are entirely Australian are bound to be few ... Australian life is too lacking in tradition, and too confused, to make many first class novels.''

The number of Australian women writers is no less remarkable than their virility. With the possible exception of Ethel Turner (Mrs. H. Curlewis), who has not published a book for some time, most of those who were writing well twenty and more than twenty years ago are producing good work still -- Mary Gilmore, Stella Miles Franklin, Louise Mack, Mrs. Ada Holman, Dora Wilcox; and of a younger generation of writers, Dulcie Deamer, Vera Dwyer, Ella McFadyen, Nina Murdoch, and Katherine Susannah Prichard, to mention a mere handful.

Many of them began to write as children. At sixteen, Dulcie Deamer leapt into fame by winning a prize for a short story competition. Her novels, historical (not Australian), have been serialised by the Hurst Syndicate, and she, too, continues to write as well as ever; in the case of her verse, with gradual improvement. Katherine Susannah Prichard was born in Fiji, educated along with Elsie Cole and other women writers when young, at South Melbourne College where poet Bernard O'Hara taught her. She won Hodder and Stoughton's prize for a novel, "The Pioneers," in 1915, and her work his steadily increased in power since "Coonardoo," which won the first "Bulletin" novel competition with "A House is Built," is, possibly, her finest piece of work.

Vera Dwyer, a protegee of Ethel Turner, as are Ruby Doyle and otherAustralian women   writers, was a remarkable child writer. In a recent novel, "In Pursuit of Patrick," despite immature passages in it, she proved that she can write a successful adult story. Hitherto her work was mainly for children.

SUCCESS ABROAD.

Many Australian women, who started well at home, have done even better abroad -- Helen Simpson and Alice Grant Rosman, for instance, Dorothy Cottrell, one of Mary Gilmore's several "discoveries" -- (Daniel Hamlyn, a winner in the second "Bulletin" novel competition and a promising woman writer-is another), wrote her successful novels 'Singing Gold" and "Earth Battle" here. Colour is the chief characteristic of them, and her first attempt, "Singing Gold," is distinguished in this respect.

Other Australians have published abroad without leaving home. One of the most interesting of these is the daughter of Dowell O'Reilly, Eleanor Dark, who wrote originally as Patricia O'Rane. She is still very young, and though the wife of a busy doctor, manages to keep the torch of a little literary group burning brightly in Katoomba. Nina Lowe, an excellent short story writer, who during the war edited a cookery book for the Red Cross, which netted £500, is a member of the group. Mrs. Dark's last book, "Prelude to Christopher," was published here. Mary Kelaher, whose novels were first serialised in the "Woman's Mirror," and who almost might be termed a "dlscovery" of the late editor, Mr. Bert Toy, is station bred and has given us people of a life she knows. Another young writer, Georgia Rivers of Melbourne, has produced many novels. "The Difficult Art" (of a young girl growing up) is a most unusual book. Jessie Urquhart brought out her first book here many years ago, and is now publishing in London; but she will not, I think, do her best work until, like Alice Grant Rosman, she relinquishes journalism for fiction. Amongst new names, Mary Mitchell's stands out. She achieved a London success with "Warning to Wantons." But this book is not Australian and is of little importance to us here. She could write, I imagine, a good Australian society novel, for which there is a waiting public.

LITERARY COMPETITIONS.

Recent literary competitions have revealed some new women writers, chief of these being Velia Ercole, Marjorie Barnard and Flora Eldershaw, the latter joint authoresses of "A House is Built."

Henry Handel Richardson was introduced to Australlans by Nettie Palmer, herself an able essayist and critic. Born in Melbourne, the daughter of an English doctor, and educated at the Presbyterian Ladies' College there, Henry Handel Richardson went to London, when she was eighteen, to study music. She took up fiction writing instead and for years worked and published practically unnoticed save by her own contemporaries, few of whom, in the realm of fiction, have equalled her in style and form of production. Fame came with her last book, "Ultima Thule." This is by far her best effort, lucid and sincere. It completes a trilogy of books dealing with the fortunes or rather misfortunes of Richard Mahoney, a doctor who did not like being a doctor. There are faults to be found from an Australian point of view with "Ultima Thule," the whole action of which takes place in Australia; but few in the presentation of it. The writer, unlike Galsworthy, who never rises above blood-heat, allows each of her characters their own temperature. Many may, however, question the worth of such details of a failure's life. But the writer is not at home outside tragedy. "The Getting of Wisdom," a look for girls, fails to awaken interest.

ETHEL TURNER.

Because of the influence of Ethel Turner, Australians have done well in the portrayal of children. Too much stress cannot be laid on the fact that Ethel Turner, from the moment she opened the door of an Australian house and showed the world what we were really like, has been a guiding star for the best. She has not been able to give us adults as real as her children, but the germ is there. Born in England, Ethel Turner came as a child to Australia and was educated with her sister, Lilian and Louise, and Amy Mack, at the Sydney Girls' High School. She was very young when "Seven Little Australians" first appeared.  The children in this book are, in their way, as immortal as "Alice," and it is only some inferiority   complex of Australians that has not recognised it, nor realised how much more real the children of "The House of Misrule" are than Anne of Green Gables. Many women have followed Ethel Turner -- Mary Grant Bruce, Constance Macanass, Elizabeth Powell, a younger writer, May Gibbs found a little fairy world all her own. Of late years, Dorothy Wall has achieved some recognition.

A number of imaginative women writers are immersed in journalism. Myra Morris, Nora Kelly, Margaret Fane, E. M. England, Lyn Lucas, a relative of E. V. Lucas, D. L. Waraker, being a few. The two latter have produced good one-act plays. Miss Lucas, a Brisbane writer, won Carrie Tennant's play competition. It would be unfair in a survey of women writers not to mention Miss Tennant's name, for, while she conducted her little theatre, she did a good deal to encourage Australian playwrights. Doris Egerton Jones and Dorothy Tobin have done creditable work in longer plays.

Our women writers have no mean sense of humour when they like, though it cannot be termed a strong feature of their work. Winifred Birkett, a younger writer, who has published a couple of books, has developed this side pleasingly; and so, too, has Mary E. Lloyd, whose humorous work was praised by that discerning critic, the late A. G. Stephens. "Three Goats on a Bender" Miss Birkett named her humorous story; Miss Lloyd, "Susan's Little Sins."

All of our women writers are well read, none very keen about sport, though golf and tennis and sometimes dancing play a part in their leisure moments. All are earnest, sincere workers.

I have left Mary Gilmore, whose hobby might well be "the finding of new writers," to the last. She holds a unique place both in our hearts and our literature. For years through helping others, young and old, she delayed publication of her reminiscences, "Old Days Old Ways," an important contribution to our literature now delighting everyone. Her poetry will mean more to posterity than her prose, I think. She has published several volumes, the subjects ranging over a wide field, from charming little lyrics to lovely lullabies.

There are many others, who might well have been noticed, but all of these mentioned have published books either abroad or at home, and not one but will repay the reader's perusal.

Our women aim at truth in writing just as the men do; and this is characteristically Australian. We do not need to read Russian literature to inspire us to realism. Our country, born of suffering and hardship, has shaped our character, and out of it is coming a literature entirely different from any other. Women are doing their share in the building up of this national literature just as they did their share towards the making and shaping of the nation itself.

First published in The Sydney Morning Herald, 4 April 1935

[Thanks to the National Library of Australia's newspaper digitisation project for this piece.]

Caleb's Crossing Geraldine Brooks HarperCollins 2011

In 1665, a young man from Martha′s Vineyard became the first Native American to graduate from Harvard College. From the few facts that survive of his extraordinary life, Geraldine Brooks creates a luminous tale of love and faith, magic and adventure.

When Bethia Mayfield, a spirited twelve-year-old living in the rigid confines of an English Puritan settlement - and the daughter of a Calvinist minister - meets Caleb, the young son of a Wampanoag chieftain, the two forge a secret friendship that draws each into the alien world of the other.

As Bethia′s father feels called to convert the Wampanoag to his own strict faith, he awakens the wrath of the medicine men. Caleb becomes a prize in a contest between old ways and new, eventually taking his place at Harvard, studying Latin and Greek alongside the sons of the colonial elite.

Fighting for a voice in a society that requires her silence, Bethia becomes entangled in Caleb′s struggle to navigate the intellectual and cultural shoals that divide their two cultures.

Once again, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Geraldine Brooks brings to vivid life a shard of little-known history, and through Bethia and Caleb explores the intimate spaces of the human heart.

Reviews

Jane Smiley in "The New York Times": "Geraldine Brooks's new novel, Caleb's Crossing, her fourth in a decade, is a short and seemingly modest historical work -- no kings, no famous events -- told by an equally modest narrator who does not go on to become acquainted with, say, the infant Benjamin Franklin...In Caleb's Crossing, Brooks returns to the time period and some of the issues she explored in Year of Wonders, a novel that takes place in a 17th-century English town ravaged by the plague, told in the first person by a young servant girl. The setting of this new novel is, however, not an earthly hell but a version of paradise, fertile and beautiful...Caleb's Crossing could not be more enlightening and involving. Beautifully written from beginning to end, it reconfirms Geraldine Brooks's reputation as one of our most supple and insightful ­novelists."

Kirsten Tranter in "The Monthly": "Caleb's Crossing extends Geraldine Brooks's interest in the early history of the United States, first explored in her Pulitzer Prize-winning March, which is set during the Civil War. Here, she writes about the seventeenth-century Puritan settlements in colonial Cambridge and on the island of Martha's Vineyard, where she now lives...Brooks's chief desire seems to be to inform - to set before the reader a carefully researched historical picture. In these terms, Caleb's Crossing succeeds."

Sarah Johnson on the "Reading the Past" blog: "As always, Brooks treads the dividing line between literary and popular fiction with confidence. Her work is strongly plotted, full of twists and surprises: life-changing disappointments, sudden opportunities, unexpected crossroads. The language is as fresh and crisp as the salt-tinged air, and her characters are, for the most part, ripened to their fullest potential. The one exception is Caleb himself. We get to know his personality and mettle, but he is kept at a distance. There are times - fortunately rare - when he reads more as symbol than flesh and blood. "

Mark Rubbo of "Readings" bookshops: "Geraldine Brooks's great skill is taking small historical moments and writing them large, using them to create a bigger picture. In 1665, a young man became the first Native American to graduate from Harvard College. Very little is known about this man and so Brooks has created a life and world for him: Caleb...Brooks tackles big issues in this book and gives them a universality that is not confined to the period it covers. Among them are the issues of women's rights, conflict between cultures, affirmative action and the nature of god and religion. Big stuff, but Brooks does it through the telling of a fascinating and rich story."

Alan Cheuse in "The Chicago Tribune": "A gift for creating a certain kind of novel can sometimes become as much a liability as a joy when that gift makes for great success in the writer's career. Fortunately for readers Pulitzer-Prize winning novelist Geraldine Brooks seems to love writing historical fiction as much as her fans love to read it. She follows her splendidly engaging novel People of the Book with a new novel, this one set on Martha's Vineyard in the late Seventeenth-Century...I admired this novel a great deal, especially the way that Brooks turned her extensive research, of which she speaks in a five page Afterward, into an easefully conducted narrative."

Interviews

Stephen Romei in "The Australian"

John Purcell on the "Booktopia Blog"

Ramona Kaval on ABC Radio National's "The Book Show".

Other

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