tag:theconversation.com,2011:/ca/topics/helen-garner-13187/articlesHelen Garner – The Conversation2023-09-29T08:22:31Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2146372023-09-29T08:22:31Z2023-09-29T08:22:31ZBooks 3 has revealed thousands of pirated Australian books. In the age of AI, is copyright law still fit for purpose?<p>Thousands of Australian books <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-09-29/australian-authors-copyright-books3-generative-i-chatgpt/102914538">have been found</a> on a pirated dataset of ebooks, known as Books3, used to train generative AI. Richard Flanagan, Helen Garner, Tim Winton and Tim Flannery are among the leading local authors affected – along, of course, with writers from around the world. </p>
<p>A <a href="https://full-stack-search-prod.vercel.app/">search tool</a> published by <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/09/books3-database-generative-ai-training-copyright-infringement/675363/">the Atlantic</a> makes it possible for authors to find out whether their books are among the nearly 200,000 in the Books3 dataset.</p>
<p>Many of these writers have reacted angrily about their works being included in these datasets without their knowledge or consent. Flanagan <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/sep/28/australian-books-training-ai-books3-stolen-pirated">told the Guardian</a>, “I felt as if my soul had been strip mined and I was powerless to stop it”.</p>
<p>“Turning a blind eye to the legitimate rights of copyright owners threatens to diminish already-precarious creative careers,” said Olivia Lanchester, chief executive of the Australian Society of Authors, in <a href="https://www.asauthors.org.au/news/asa-response-to-use-of-australian-books-to-train-ai/">an official response</a> this week.</p>
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<h2>AI moving at speed</h2>
<p>Authors have turned to copyright law because it is the body of law that has traditionally protected authors and other creators from the appropriation of their works. </p>
<p>However, laws designed for the pre-AI era have little meaning in the post-OpenAI world.</p>
<p>Just last year, the issue of AI was only faintly on the cultural radar. But while AI technology is moving at high speed, the law moves slowly. </p>
<p>It took a very significant amount of time for copyright law to first appear. The first copyright law, the <a href="https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?entryid=3389">Statute of Anne</a>, emerged in 1710 after protracted lobbying by stationers (publishers).</p>
<p>In a more modern context, it took 20 years from the time Australian courts first recognised a system of Aboriginal law existed, with the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milirrpum_v_Nabalco_Pt">Milirrpum decision</a> in 1971 – meaning <em>terra nullius</em> was implausible – to the High Court handing down the <a href="https://theconversation.com/australian-politics-explainer-the-mabo-decision-and-native-title-74147">landmark Mabo decision</a> that erased <em>terra nullius</em>, in June 1992. In the interim, injustice reigned.</p>
<p>The question that now confronts us is whether we can wait for the law to catch up with the rapid advances of technology – or whether we must jumpstart the process. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/authors-are-resisting-ai-with-petitions-and-lawsuits-but-they-have-an-advantage-we-read-to-form-relationships-with-writers-208046">Authors are resisting AI with petitions and lawsuits. But they have an advantage: we read to form relationships with writers</a>
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<h2>A spate of copyright disputes</h2>
<p>There has been a spate of copyright disputes around AI datasets and copyright-protected works. </p>
<p>Earlier this month, the US Authors Guild <a href="https://authorsguild.org/news/ag-and-authors-file-class-action-suit-against-openai/">filed a class action</a>, with 17 authors including Jonathan Franzen and Jodi Picoult, against OpenAI for copyright infringement.</p>
<p>This followed <a href="https://theconversation.com/two-authors-are-suing-openai-for-training-chatgpt-with-their-books-could-they-win-209227">the first copyright lawsuit</a> against OpenAI in July. It was filed by authors Mona Awad and Paul Tremblay, for using their books to train its AI, ChatGPT, without their consent. </p>
<p>And in August, Benji Smith was <a href="https://theconversation.com/prosecraft-has-infuriated-authors-by-using-their-books-without-consent-but-what-does-copyright-law-say-211187">forced to take down</a> his website Prosecraft, which used an algorithm to trawl through more than 25,000 books (again, without authors’ consent) to produce analysis designed to give writing advice.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/two-authors-are-suing-openai-for-training-chatgpt-with-their-books-could-they-win-209227">Two authors are suing OpenAI for training ChatGPT with their books. Could they win?</a>
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<h2>Copyright is not the answer</h2>
<p>While it’s true that the uploading of works into a dataset is an act of copyright infringement, that only pertains to a one-off act of infringement. </p>
<p>No doubt, the liability would be large if thousands of works were involved and thousands of authors were to sue (as with the US Authors Guild class action), but the damages obtained by an individual author would be relatively small, making it not worth suing. The large commercial interests driving the development of the datasets and related AI tools are likely to withstand these lawsuits even if they are found liable.</p>
<p>Likewise, copyright law’s rules on <a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-what-is-fair-dealing-and-when-can-you-copy-without-permission-80745">fair dealing</a> in Australia and fair use in the United States would likely protect some uses. </p>
<p>Further, the outputs from AI that have been trained on these datasets are not likely to result in works that satisfy the substantial similarity threshold (which means that when the two works are compared side by side, they must be similar) for copyright infringement in most jurisdictions, including Australia.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/prosecraft-has-infuriated-authors-by-using-their-books-without-consent-but-what-does-copyright-law-say-211187">Prosecraft has infuriated authors by using their books without consent – but what does copyright law say?</a>
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<h2>‘A type of market failure’</h2>
<p>Copyright law has previously had to balance the interests of creators with those of technology developers. </p>
<p>This happened when the photocopier was invented, when video cassette recorders were developed, when blank tapes became widely available and when peer-to-peer copyright infringement took off during the digital era.</p>
<p>The difference then was that these technologies did not fundamentally threaten artistic and creative labour in the way AI does.</p>
<p>To appropriate a part of someone’s market is a radically different thing to producing a product that could entirely displace them in that market.</p>
<p>Yet this is the direction we’re heading in. And it requires a very significant rethink about the regulation of technology.</p>
<p>A type of market failure is occurring here, because authors are not being compensated even though their works, collectively, are the basis for new and commercially viable AI products. </p>
<p>When the sale of blank tapes began, <a href="http://classic.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/SydLawRw/1994/38.html">the government responded</a> with a levy on every blank tape sale, which sent money back to copyright owners. </p>
<p>Something like the blank tape levy might need to be considered for AI. This would mean every time somebody uses an OpenAI-type tool for which they pay a fee, some small portion of the fee would revert to copyright owners.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/214637/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Dilan Thampapillai does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Authors are furious about finding their works on pirated dataset Books3. Copyright is the usual avenue for redress, but while AI moves at speed, the law is slow – and not designed to combat AI issues.Dilan Thampapillai, Dean of Law, University of Wollongong, University of WollongongLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2061902023-06-22T20:07:05Z2023-06-22T20:07:05ZFriday essay: ‘the problem is that my success seems to get in his way’ – the fraught terrain of literary marriages<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/533324/original/file-20230622-17-5mqmny.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C1000%2C667&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Anna McGahan as Charmian Clift in the State Theatre Company's Hydra. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jeff Busby/State Theatre Company</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>“It’s true to say that writers are selfish people,” the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard once said. “But it’s not quite enough of an excuse.” </p>
<p>Howard was married to British author <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/1995/oct/23/fiction.kingsleyamis">Kingsley Amis</a>. Novelist <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-pre-eminent-novelist-critic-of-his-generation-martin-amiss-pyrotechnic-prose-captured-lifes-destructive-energies-206069">Martin Amis</a>, Kingsley’s son, credited his stepmother for encouraging his own writing career – not his father. But exhausted by the biggest child in the house – Kingsley – Howard often felt “too worn down by insecurity and fatigue to write”.
“He got up and wrote,” Howard recalled. “Then he ate lunch, had a walk or sleep, and then he wrote again.” </p>
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<p>Writes Carmela Ciuraru, in her book <a href="https://www.harpercollins.com.au/9780062356918/lives-of-the-wives/">Lives of the Wives: Five Literary Marriages</a>: “It was an idyllic existence – for him.” Howard, she notes, published three novels in the 18-year marriage; Amis published nearly 20.</p>
<p><a href="https://pushkinpress.com/our-authors/elsa-morante/">Elsa Morante</a>, the Italian author who inspired <a href="https://overland.org.au/2016/10/her-real-name-on-the-unmasking-of-elena-ferrante/">Elena Ferrante</a>, once wrote, “literary couples are a plague”. Married to novelist <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1990/09/27/obituaries/alberto-moravia-novelist-is-dead-at-82.html">Alberto Moravia</a>, her partnership (like that of Howard and Amis) is chronicled in Ciuraru’s book – along with <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-man-behind-matilda-what-roald-dahl-was-really-like-62810">Roald Dahl</a> and actor <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/jan/06/patricia-neal-interview-roald-dahl-1971">Patricia Neal</a>, sculptor and translator <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Una_Vincenzo,_Lady_Troubridge">Una Troubridge</a> and author <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radclyffe_Hall">Radclyffe Hall</a>, and author <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/10/books/10dundy.html">Elaine Dundy</a>, married to British theatre critic <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/arts/critic/feature/0,,567652,00.html">Kenneth Tynan</a>. </p>
<p>When both people in a relationship are writers, creative space is a faultline. So are matters such as who looks after the kids, inspiration turf wars, and yes, jealousy about success. As Ciaruru shows, it’s often the wives who ultimately choose writing over wedded bliss.</p>
<h2>Rooms – or tables – of their own</h2>
<p>The tension starts with writing space. Virginia Woolf famously observed that money and time is required for <a href="https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-a-room-of-ones-own-virginia-woolfs-feminist-call-to-arms-145398">a room of one’s own</a>. At Monk House, Woolf built a new writing lodge after she was irritated by her publisher husband Leonard and their dog. “The little noise upsets me; I can’t think what I was going to say.” </p>
<p>Most writing couples don’t have Monk House and its grounds to divide, especially in the early years. Instead they scrap over who gets the dining room table, or share it – as <a href="https://theconversation.com/a-woman-ahead-of-her-time-remembering-the-australian-writer-charmian-clift-50-years-on-117322">Charmian Clift</a> and <a href="https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/johnston-george-2277">George Johnston</a> did while writing <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2760144-the-sponge-divers?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=NCm9r8O0XL&rank=1">The Sponge Divers</a> together on the Greek island of Kalymnos in the early 1950s. They later upgraded to a shared home studio on the island of Hydra. </p>
<p>Clift’s biographer, <a href="http://nadiawheatley.com/the-life-and-myth-of-charmian-clift">Nadia Wheatley</a>, writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The image of Charmian and George writing together is a potent one: two people bashing away at two typewriters on the one table. Stacks of typescript – his spilling over into hers; hers ending up in the middle of his – the air wreathed in cigarette smoke […]</p>
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<p>Novelist <a href="https://kristinwilliamson.com.au/">Kristin Williamson</a> and her playwright husband David also started out table sharing, less harmoniously. In her biography of David, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21949734-david-williamson">Behind the Scenes</a>, she remembers that compared to David’s typing, she felt like a “slug on tranquilisers”. They since always ensured each has a room of their own in later houses. But as Kristin <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/under-the-covers-20040724-gdjen8.html">quips</a>, “David’s is larger. His rooms always have been.”</p>
<p>When Australian authors <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/mar/04/ruth-park-brings-sydneys-past-to-life-more-than-any-other-writer">Ruth Park</a> (originally a New Zealander) and <a href="https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/niland-darcy-francis-11242">D’Arcy Niland</a> lived in a rented inner-city room in Sydney’s Surry Hills, the suburb that inspired her novel, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1855153.The_Harp_in_the_South?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=mnZ7pblm10&rank=1">The Harp in the South</a> (1948), they wrote story ideas on each other’s palms in bed. Park recalls that when they finally moved into a flat that had more room, Niland:</p>
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<p>made a beeline for the dining room table, excitedly opened the typewriter, and spread out his dictionaries, papers, and reference books. “Look!” he cried. “I’ve a proper place to work at last”. </p>
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<p>Park tried to share the table. But “gradually his papers encroached, files ostentatiously fell to the floor; the carriage of my typewriter constantly hit things […]” She gave up. Park reflects in her second memoir, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2859274-fishing-in-the-styx">Fishing in the Styx</a>, that she should have fought harder for space to write, but “the ironing board was a minuscule price to pay for all the good things in his character and our relationship”. They eventually moved into a large but decaying house.</p>
<p>Kenneth Tynan, by contrast, made his wife plain uncomfortable when she turned from acting to writing after they married in 1951. Observes Ciuraru, </p>
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<p>Whereas he had his study as a refuge […] Elaine (Dundy) wrote each day “slowly but steadily” on the living room sofa with a typewriter propped up on her knees. Her back hurt.</p>
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<p>Space causes friction between established writers too. Murray Bail demanded total solitude while writing <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/319480.Eucalyptus?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=DQpHGaub4s&rank=1">Eucalyptus</a> (1998). Garner diarised her exile from their apartment that was his workspace in the third volume of her published diaries, <a href="https://www.textpublishing.com.au/books/how-to-end-a-story-diaries-1995-1998">How to End a Story</a>. </p>
<p>Garner felt forced to rent a bland office. Even on weekends, or with the flu, she felt unwelcome at home:</p>
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<p>With a friend who is married to a painter, I compared notes about our respective husbands and their demands […] Like me she is expected to run the house, do the shopping and cooking, and keep the home fires burning, all this without being permitted on the premises during work hours. I saw in her face my unhappiness. We did not know whether, or how, we could go tolerating their regimes.</p>
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<p>She fears she will “wither away with loneliness”. After the office lease ends, Garner moves out to a new apartment of her own, and separation.</p>
<p>Separate spaces, however, kept the Morante-Moravia union together. Morante, who died in 1985, published four Italian novels, including the acclaimed <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Liars">House of Liars</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27isola_di_Arturo">Arturo’s Island</a>, and volumes of essays, short stories and poetry. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532642/original/file-20230619-15-lh6e2j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532642/original/file-20230619-15-lh6e2j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532642/original/file-20230619-15-lh6e2j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=688&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532642/original/file-20230619-15-lh6e2j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=688&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532642/original/file-20230619-15-lh6e2j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=688&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532642/original/file-20230619-15-lh6e2j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=864&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532642/original/file-20230619-15-lh6e2j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=864&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532642/original/file-20230619-15-lh6e2j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=864&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Elsa Morante.</span>
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<p>Her husband said: “Writing was her life”; she called her characters “my people”. Morante preferred cats, who did not criticise her work or interrupt her. </p>
<p>Moravia was an Italian literary lion after his 1929 debut, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/sk/book/show/67145">The Time of Indifference</a>. She and Morante hid in a one-room hut in the mountains for nine months during World War II (which later inspired Moravia’s 1957 novel, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/67143.Two_Women">Two Women</a>.) </p>
<p>Ciaruru quotes Moravia as recalling this time together as “their greatest intimacy”. After the war, Moravia bought Morante a small apartment to use as a writing studio, largely funded by his bestselling novel, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12250543-the-woman-of-rome">The Woman of Rome</a> (1947).</p>
<p>“She says I am too noisy, too nervous, that she needs privacy,” he said. “I can write in a hotel lobby or with someone playing (the bass) in the chair near me.”</p>
<p>Morante admitted she was a “a little ashamed” about insisting on solitude. But, “if I had to write near Alberto I probably would not write at all. And I would be unhappy.” Moravia understood, and was happy and prolific amid his noise in their villa, publishing classics including <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/67146.The_Conformist">The Conformist</a> (1951), <a href="https://www.vulture.com/article/movie-review-bernardo-bertoluccis-the-conformist-returns.html">adapted into a film by Bernardo Bertolucci</a> in 1970.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-sex-swimming-and-smudgy-louvres-watching-monkey-grip-40-years-on-187625">Friday essay: sex, swimming and smudgy louvres – watching Monkey Grip 40 years on</a>
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<h2>Domestic tensions</h2>
<p>If kids come along, things get more fraught. Pregnant again in 1948, with her first child only seven months old, Clift was frustrated. She and Johnston had just won a Sydney Morning Herald novel prize for their collaboration, <a href="https://www.charmianclift.com.au/high-valley">High Valley</a>. Clift recalled: </p>
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<p>At this point I should have taken wings and started to fly but […] I was involved in having children […] I think those are terribly difficult years for any young woman and for a young woman who wants to write or paint or anything else, even more so. </p>
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<p>After they moved to Kalymnos in 1954, she gratefully paid a local woman to help. She did the same on Hydra, when their third child was born on the island. Later, back in Australia, Clift applied for a literary grant for “domestic help”. </p>
<p>Something has to give – and it’s the housework or childcare, not writing, if they can afford it.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532644/original/file-20230619-25-8r9ua9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532644/original/file-20230619-25-8r9ua9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532644/original/file-20230619-25-8r9ua9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=1001&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532644/original/file-20230619-25-8r9ua9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=1001&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532644/original/file-20230619-25-8r9ua9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=1001&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532644/original/file-20230619-25-8r9ua9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1258&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532644/original/file-20230619-25-8r9ua9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1258&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532644/original/file-20230619-25-8r9ua9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1258&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">D'Arcy Niland and Ruth Park.</span>
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</figure>
<p>Others muddle through. A single mother, Garner grabbed precious school hours at a library to write her debut novel, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/634141.Monkey_Grip">Monkey Grip</a>. </p>
<p>It is telling that Ruth Park wrote Harp in the South while visiting her parents in New Zealand, so had family help. Soon after its release, back in Sydney, her husband left for a research trip for his novel, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/625198.The_Shiralee?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=9CeitNq8gc&rank=1">The Shiralee</a>, and she was left with the three children and no mother to help – Park couldn’t afford childcare, despite her success.</p>
<p>She then devised the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Muddle-Headed_Wombat">Muddle-Headed Wombat</a> series while her now five children had chicken pox and D’Arcy was on another research trip. Park recalls, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I again pondered bitterly the question of which one of us it was who carried the Shiralee, which I now understood meant burden. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Domestic tensions are not restricted to childcare. Elaine Dundy’s daughter, Tracy, had a nanny but Elaine still declined invitations to attend opening nights with her critic husband. Instead, she would stay home to write her novels. In response, Tynan was “embarrassed and angered” that his wife put her writing before appearances to support his work. </p>
<p>Garner writes that she was upset Bail did not welcome her now-adult daughter and fiancee at their home, seeing their presence as another imposition on his writing life. Nor did she feel free to “be messing around at home”.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532633/original/file-20230619-23-57piop.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532633/original/file-20230619-23-57piop.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532633/original/file-20230619-23-57piop.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=729&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532633/original/file-20230619-23-57piop.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=729&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532633/original/file-20230619-23-57piop.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=729&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532633/original/file-20230619-23-57piop.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=916&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532633/original/file-20230619-23-57piop.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=916&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532633/original/file-20230619-23-57piop.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=916&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Elizabeth Jane Howard.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikipedia</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Prior to meeting Kingsley Amis, Howard, an established novelist, had left her first husband and daughter, Nicola, as she was “selfishly determined to be a writer”. Nicola called her mother “a very beautiful stranger” in her childhood. </p>
<p>Ironically, Amis’s own selfishness overwhelmed Howard’s. She managed his moods and meals. She was his secretary and chauffeur and regularly catered dinner parties for up to 12 people where Amis could hold court, as well being a stepmother to her two stepsons, who lived with them.</p>
<p>Her complaints were met with Amis’s decree, “I’m older, heavier and earn more money”.</p>
<p>Morante did not have children, though Ciuraru suggests this was not by choice. While she adored children, Ciararu wonders if the reality would have been challenging given “daily life made her lose patience and become difficult”.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/a-woman-ahead-of-her-time-remembering-the-australian-writer-charmian-clift-50-years-on-117322">'A woman ahead of her time': remembering the Australian writer Charmian Clift, 50 years on</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Literary ambition</h2>
<p>Fights over space and the kids set the scene for the most ferocious faultline: literary ambition. Ciaruru sums up the creative competition when describing Amis and Howard: “both were ambitious writers, only one could achieve success”. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532647/original/file-20230619-23-siyemc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532647/original/file-20230619-23-siyemc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532647/original/file-20230619-23-siyemc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=961&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532647/original/file-20230619-23-siyemc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=961&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532647/original/file-20230619-23-siyemc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=961&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532647/original/file-20230619-23-siyemc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1208&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532647/original/file-20230619-23-siyemc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1208&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532647/original/file-20230619-23-siyemc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1208&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Tynan’s toxic jealousy fully emerged after the successful release of Dundy’s debut novel, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1059856.The_Dud_Avocado">The Dud Avocado</a>, in 1958. “He confronted Elaine, warning if she ever dared to write another book, he would divorce her.” She began writing a new novel the next morning. They divorced four years later in 1964. </p>
<p>Some literary couples share success – to a point. Though possessive of the table, Niland encouraged Park to write Harp in the South. Wheatley notes of Clift-Johnston: “one of the common misconceptions about the relationship was that Charmian was perennially jealous of George’s output and success.” </p>
<p>Similarly, Wheatley recounts that Johnston “recognised [his wife] as a fellow writer, and indeed for many years he even publicly acknowledged that by literary standards she was a better writer than he was.”</p>
<p>According to Ciuraru, Moravia “spoke often and admiringly of Elsa’s genius, no matter the state of their marriage”, which he described as “a man and a woman in a very difficult, very personal relationship”. </p>
<p>But sharing in success has its limits. After the Sponge Divers collaboration, Clift carved creative space of her own:</p>
<p>“Actually of course, [The Sponge Divers] was a phoney [sic] collaboration because I was beyond the stage where I could collaborate any longer. I wanted to work in my own way. This was probably very egotistical, but most writers have this.”</p>
<p>As well as her Island memoirs and essays, Clift later published a novel, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4600900-honours-mimic">Honour’s Mimic</a>, under her own name.</p>
<p>Williamson, the author of <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6936173-tanglewood">Tanglewood</a> and other novels, quotes David’s reaction to her turning to creative writing from journalism: “Hey, this is my patch. But after I saw the work she was doing I was very impressed.” She qualifies, “I was writing novels rather than plays – imagine If I had dared to write a play!”</p>
<p>But Kristin declares that she first thought of the idea for David’s play, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9789009-siren">Siren</a>, borne out of his affair: she planned to write it as a novel. The couple fought over the idea, arguing it was both their “lived experience”. Kristin capitulated, but “felt somewhat bitter about it for a while”. David later publicly gave her credit, and their marriage survived the literary explosion.</p>
<h2>Vacating the field</h2>
<p>Not so Garner and Bail. Her fifth work of fiction <a href="https://www.textpublishing.com.au/books/cosmo-cosmolino">Cosmo Cosmolino</a>, was published the year she and Bail married (1992). But during the marriage she published her first book-length work of non-fiction, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2738022-the-first-stone">The First Stone</a>, and the anthology, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35576146">True Stories</a>. </p>
<p>As Bail wrote his novel, in her diary, Garner realises:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>All this jabber I carry on with lately, about how I’m heading for non-fiction, leaving fiction behind […] suddenly it strikes me that what I’m doing is vacating the field. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Garner adds:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>He is generous as he can possibly be about my book and its success, but if I had success like that with a novel there’d be serious trouble […] Maybe it is true then. A woman artist who wants to develop as far as she can needs to live alone […] The problem is that my success seems to get in his way. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The marriage ended in 1998, after <a href="https://www.textpublishing.com.au/books/eucalyptus">Eucalyptus</a> was published. Garner returned to fiction in 2008 with <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20895311.The_Spare_Room">The Spare Room.</a>.</p>
<p>After divorcing Tynan, Dundy wrote two novels, as well as biographies of <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/63328055-elvis-and-gladys">Elvis Presley’s mother</a> and <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/272578.Finch_Bloody_Finch">Peter Finch</a>. Howard’s literary output also rocketed after divorcing Amis in 1983. She was encouraged by her stepson, Martin Amis, to write <a href="https://www.panmacmillan.com/blogs/fiction/cazalet-chronicles-books-in-order">The Cazalet Chronicles</a>, a series of novels that drew on her family story,that were later adapted for television as The Cazalets.</p>
<p>With all these faultlines, it’s no wonder married authors keep their own names for continuous identity within and beyond a marriage. Morante “could not stand being called by her married name”, and could not fathom how other women “could tolerate this elision of their identity”.</p>
<p>Asked once in an interview if Moravia had influenced her work, Morante stiffened. “No,” she said. “He has an identity and I have an identity. <em>Basta</em>.” </p>
<p>She stopped the interview.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/206190/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kerrie Davies does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>‘Literary couples are a plague,’ wrote Elsa Morante, married to Alberto Moravia. They’re one of the couples in this lively exploration of what happens when two writers share loves and lives.Kerrie Davies, Lecturer, School of the Arts & Media, UNSW SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1914962022-09-29T20:05:07Z2022-09-29T20:05:07ZFriday essay: ‘with men I feel like a very sharp, glittering blade’ – when 5 liberated women spoke the truth<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487195/original/file-20220929-26-fi3pch.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=17%2C23%2C3910%2C1970&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Helen Garner on stage in Betty Can Jump at The Pram Factory in 1972.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo courtesy of the Betty Can Jump collective</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>There’s a climactic scene in Helen Garner’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58420880-how-to-end-a-story?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=2TyyJHICiB&rank=2">third and latest diary</a> where she describes tipping a box of her then husband’s cigars into a pot of soup, picking up a pair of scissors, slashing a straw hat that belongs to his lover and stuffing the pieces in his “ugly black suede shoes.” In her husband’s study she finds his latest manuscript: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I wrench the cap off his Mont Blanc fountain pen and stab the proof copy with the nib, gripping the pen in my fist like a dagger. I stab and stab, I press and screw and grind.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This scene of kitchen sink carnage comes after days of diary entries where Garner – the great observer of the smallest details – carries on blind (wilfully? self-protectively?) to what is staring her reader in the face: a novelist husband who is spinning fictional stories both to her and to his lover. It’s a cathartic moment for everyone. As if Garner had called her readers inside the bladder of a dark balloon, blown it up as taut as it could stretch, and then finally punctured the sides so fresh air can come screaming in. We can breathe again.</p>
<p>Something else struck me as I read this scene, which takes place in the mid-1990s: how Garner’s words echoed another scene about men and knives and stabbing she wrote and performed almost 25 years earlier, in 1972.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>With men I feel like a very sharp, glittering blade that’s only partly out of its sheath.<br></p>
<p>It glitters and glitters.<br></p>
<p>They don’t see it, but I don’t dare to show that blade, to come right out of the sheath, because I’m afraid of how fierce and joyful it will be to stab – and stab – and stab. So I don’t show it, I hold it, somehow I hold it back, but it’s there, glittering.<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>These lines are from a group-devised woman’s play, called Betty Can Jump, staged at Carlton’s experimental Pram Factory theatre in that year. A friend of Garner’s from university, Kerry Dwyer, was one of the founders of a theatre company based at the Pram Factory, the Australian Performing Group (APG). </p>
<p>Dwyer organised women from the APG, together with those from the Carlton Women’s Liberation Group, who were meeting in Garner’s share house, to build sets, make costumes and run the front of house while Garner and four other women – Claire Dobbin, Evelyn Krape, Yvonne Marini and Jude Kuring – workshopped scenes under Dwywer’s direction. </p>
<p>In closed workshops in the Pram’s back theatre, the cast explored how they felt as women, using consciousness-raising techniques from women’s liberation, and physical exercises and improvisations adapted from avant-garde theatre groups.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487016/original/file-20220928-20-p69mat.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487016/original/file-20220928-20-p69mat.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487016/original/file-20220928-20-p69mat.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487016/original/file-20220928-20-p69mat.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487016/original/file-20220928-20-p69mat.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487016/original/file-20220928-20-p69mat.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487016/original/file-20220928-20-p69mat.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487016/original/file-20220928-20-p69mat.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Pram Factory, circa 1970.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Lloyd Carrick</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As I read and reread many of Garner’s books recently, I started seeing knives and blades everywhere. Nora, the narrator of Garner’s 1977 novel Monkey Grip, describes how, after a perfunctory encounter with her careless lover Javo, she grabs a bowie knife and fantasises about “plunging it into the famous handsome picture of him in Cinema Papers”. </p>
<p>In another entry in Garner’s latest diary, Garner offers up to her father her most recent book. He criticises her author photo (it made her “look old”), then he takes a blade he is holding, turns the book on its cover, and demonstrates how to sharpen a knife against a stone.</p>
<p>I started to notice, too, other objects that keep reappearing in Garner’s work. She frequently introduces characters by describing their shoes, for example, like actors in a play walking on stage. </p>
<p>The diary scene where Garner stuffs her husband’s shoes with the remnants of a slashed hat brings these repeating objects together. The scene also vividly dramatises one of Garner’s other great concerns: the conflict between love and passion and individual freedom.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/486972/original/file-20220928-12-feronr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/486972/original/file-20220928-12-feronr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/486972/original/file-20220928-12-feronr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=469&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/486972/original/file-20220928-12-feronr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=469&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/486972/original/file-20220928-12-feronr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=469&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/486972/original/file-20220928-12-feronr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=589&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/486972/original/file-20220928-12-feronr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=589&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/486972/original/file-20220928-12-feronr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=589&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">‘It glitters and glitters.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo courtesy of the Betty Can Jump collective</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>‘Who will bring in a cup of tea?’</h2>
<p>In the Carlton world Garner inhabited in the 1970s – an inner-city Melbourne community of actors and artists and activists – jealousy and possessiveness was frowned upon while open free relationships were encouraged <a href="http://wayback.archive-it.org/10989/20180903014715/https://www.pramfactory.com/memoirsfolder/Hawkes-Ponch.html">writes Ponch Hawkes</a>, a photographer who documented the Pram Factory world.</p>
<p>In Monkey Grip, as Garner’s fictional surrogate Nora visits the Tower household that adjoined the Pram’s theatre and office space and the share households of her inner-city community, she constantly steels herself for the possibility of seeing her lover Javo emerge from another woman’s bedroom.</p>
<p>People, Hawkes writes of this time, “couldn’t say they were very hurt, or act hurt [when they] had to see you the next day, or the same day, in the hall.” They had to “wear it”.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487026/original/file-20220928-11-vke9gj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487026/original/file-20220928-11-vke9gj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487026/original/file-20220928-11-vke9gj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=895&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487026/original/file-20220928-11-vke9gj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=895&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487026/original/file-20220928-11-vke9gj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=895&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487026/original/file-20220928-11-vke9gj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1125&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487026/original/file-20220928-11-vke9gj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1125&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487026/original/file-20220928-11-vke9gj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1125&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>For many who were part of Australia’s social and cultural revolutions of the early 1970s – especially the denizens of the inner-city bohemia like Garner and her friends – the women’s movement and sexual liberation were so entwined they could not be understood separately.</p>
<p>In 1971 and 1972, Garner and Dwyer and the women rehearsing at the Pram Factory were developing a critique of the traditional, heterosexual, nuclear household. They were influenced by their reading of books such as Virginia Woolf’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18521.A_Room_of_One_s_Own?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=0EqHpxvnAu&rank=1">A Room of One’s Own</a>, The Female Eunuch, in which Germaine Greer argued the liberation of individual women had to begin with their sexual liberation (and satisfaction), and feminist journals and books from overseas – including the Boston Women’s Health Collective’s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Bodies,_Ourselves">Our Bodies, Ourselves</a>, a pamphlet urging women to understand their bodies, explore their sexual desires and control their reproductive lives.</p>
<p>Helen wrote another monologue for Betty Can Jump called “What is a woman?”.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>You want me to mother you, you want to worship me and make a goddess of me but I disgust you, you loathe me because of the dark wetness of my most secret place …<br></p>
<p>You expect me to find meaning in my household tasks, my hands in water and children’s shit, my back bent in your service, my mind flabby from constant distractions, but when I interrupt your recital of the day’s woes or try to speak of my daily frustration or pleasure I must hear my work dismissed as trivia, and my concern for my children called an obsession.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487022/original/file-20220928-13-vke9gj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487022/original/file-20220928-13-vke9gj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487022/original/file-20220928-13-vke9gj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=1477&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487022/original/file-20220928-13-vke9gj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=1477&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487022/original/file-20220928-13-vke9gj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=1477&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487022/original/file-20220928-13-vke9gj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1856&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487022/original/file-20220928-13-vke9gj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1856&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487022/original/file-20220928-13-vke9gj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1856&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Pram Factory poster (created by Micky Allan).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Image courtesy of the State Library of Victoria.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Twenty-five years after Garner performed this monologue, Garner’s diary entries from the 1990s describe her then husband dismissing her anxieties, making light of her worries, and calling her concerns trivial. </p>
<p>She leaves the house each morning to accommodate his demands for complete solitude while he works. She returns home in the evenings from her own writing labours, with food and hours left in her day to cook for the both of them. </p>
<p>He, a novelist, belittles her non-fiction writing as a lower-order craft. And he criticises her close relationship with her daughter and extended family.</p>
<p>Garner’s life during this period eerily echoes the one her good friend Micky Allan – a painter who created the sets and slides that formed the backdrop to Betty Can Jump – had lived quarter of a century earlier. </p>
<p>Allan attended her first consciousness-raising meeting in Melbourne the day she had split with her husband, a talented artist but someone whose ideas about men and women’s roles were formed in the 1950s.</p>
<p>When I visited her in 2018, Allan told me the story of their time sharing a flat, earlier in London, where she rose early and left in snowy weather to work as a relief teacher, leaving their home to her husband and his art.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I had a little cupboard off the kitchen which was my studio, and he took over our living room as his. When I came home in the afternoon, I couldn’t get in without him making a big fuss about having to move a giant painting blocking the door.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>He had asked her why she needed to paint: “If you’re painting too, who will bring in the cup of tea?”</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-the-female-eunuch-at-50-germaine-greers-fearless-feminist-masterpiece-147437">Friday essay: The Female Eunuch at 50, Germaine Greer's fearless, feminist masterpiece</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>A reaction to frustrations</h2>
<p>Betty Can Jump is named after a <a href="https://victoriancollections.net.au/items/5209c5d92162ef0ab432313a">1951 children’s</a> reader produced by the Victorian Education Department in which a boy called John plays with his truck and dog, and Betty plays with a toy pram and her cat. The play was a reaction to frustrations the women were feeling in their personal and professional lives. Helen was feeling left out and lonely while her husband Bill spent more and more time at the Pram Factory. Kerry, newly pregnant, was feeling increasingly sidelined in the the APG.</p>
<p>Kerry Dwyer recalls the day she stormed out of rehearsals for the APG’s first Pram Factory show, Marvellous Melbourne. It was meant to be a group-created show, but she was enraged at the way the men in the APG dominated the production. While the Marvellous Melbourne cast included equal numbers of women and men, scenes “arrived in the rehearsal room with five parts for men, none for women [or] seven parts for men, one for a woman”. Why are women in the theatre considered incapable of writing? she fumed. Or directing? Why is female culture not respected and nurtured?</p>
<p>The women spent five months devising Betty. One man attended the first planning meeting, bringing a couple of plays he’d written. The women asked him to join the large circle for general discussions, but instead he stormed around the edge shouting: “Damnitall! I don’t know how you are going to achieve anything at all if you won’t accept help and advice from us”.</p>
<p>The rehearsal room was then closed to men – until they realised they needed an actor to play the male roles. So Perth actor Vic Marsh was invited to take part. </p>
<p>In the opening scene, Marsh whips the women, who play convicts emerging from a ship’s hold. The cast re-enact riots in early female factories, and tell stories about suffragists <a href="https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/lawson-louisa-7121">Louisa Lawson</a> and <a href="https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/goldstein-vida-jane-6418">Vida Goldstein</a> and other women who had been largely ignored by an Anglo, male history. They also deliver intimate monologues written during rehearsal exercises, where each cast member has to complete the phrase “As a woman I feel like …” </p>
<p>Helen delivers her scene where feels like a sharp, glittering knife. </p>
<p>Evelyn feels like a cushion plumped up and sat in.</p>
<p>Yvonne feels like a mouth filled with laughing gas.</p>
<p>The lights go out and the cast talk about their bodies and blood and sex and rape. In another scene, the cast don jockstraps and fake penises and mock ocker men drinking at a pub. (Ockers featured in many plays written by APG men.)</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487014/original/file-20220928-24-4nlw3q.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487014/original/file-20220928-24-4nlw3q.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487014/original/file-20220928-24-4nlw3q.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=491&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487014/original/file-20220928-24-4nlw3q.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=491&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487014/original/file-20220928-24-4nlw3q.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=491&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487014/original/file-20220928-24-4nlw3q.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=617&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487014/original/file-20220928-24-4nlw3q.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=617&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487014/original/file-20220928-24-4nlw3q.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=617&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A scene from Betty Can Jump.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo courtesy of the Betty Can Jump collective</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This was the first play of the 1970s women’s liberation movement, part of an extraordinary period of social change. In just a few short years, a generation of women led a transformation of our social and cultural life. It’s easy to forget just how different the early 70s were: there were still separate columns in the paper advertising jobs for “women and girls” and “men and boys”. Many public bars still banned women. Not one of the 125 electorates across the country was represented in Canberra by a woman.</p>
<p>As I researched the play and these times, however, I thought about that other definition of revolution: a movement around a circle. I saw how feminism so often keeps rehearsing and staging the same battles. There is a scene in Betty, acted in the dark, where a character taunts a woman: “Got the rags on, have you?”. Fifty years on, I found myself talking to teachers recently about a group of primary school boys allegedly harassing girls with “jokes” about rape, and taunts about being “on their periods”.</p>
<p>These circlings are not unconnected, I thought, to the way in which we forget, or repress our history. Both individually and collectively.</p>
<p>For a long time, my image of the Pram Factory had centred on the male playwrights David Williamson and Jack Hibberd and actors Graeme Blundell and Bruce Spence. Don’s Party and boozing ocker men. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-great-australian-plays-williamson-hibberd-and-the-better-angels-of-our-countrys-nature-79332">The Great Australian Plays: Williamson, Hibberd and the better angels of our country's nature</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487189/original/file-20220928-20-auq96z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487189/original/file-20220928-20-auq96z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487189/original/file-20220928-20-auq96z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487189/original/file-20220928-20-auq96z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487189/original/file-20220928-20-auq96z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487189/original/file-20220928-20-auq96z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487189/original/file-20220928-20-auq96z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487189/original/file-20220928-20-auq96z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Kerry Dwyer in 1972 - just as Betty Can Jump’s season was ending and she was about to give birth.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo courtesy of Kerry Dwyer.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>I discovered the stories of women at the APG in the archives at the State Library of NSW, where Dwyer had deposited her production diaries – her own diary, with notes of rehearsals and descriptions of the cast, as well as Garner’s production diary, with stage directions and script notes in a neat pink slanted cursive script. </p>
<p>Dwyer’s archive also contained interviews she conducted with cast members and with Micky Allan and the play’s researcher, Laurel Frank.</p>
<p>Just as I hadn’t known about the history of women’s theatre at the Pram, Frank and another woman, Kay Hamilton, had turned to archives – at the State Library of Victoria, and the NSW Mitchell Library – to discover stories of colonial women’s settler history. The researched Female Factories, stories of auctions where convict women were sold off, they researched politicians and women’s rights activists such as Vida Goldstein and Caroline Chisholm. The play’s focus is on non-Indigenous women, something that might seem a glaring oversight to contemporary readers, but Kerry tells me: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>We were not so much blind to the lives of Indigenous women, it was more that we were catching up with ourselves.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>A huge success</h2>
<p>In 1972, after a shaky preview night of their women’s show – Garner, in an account of the play she wrote in 1972 for the journal Dissent, recalled thinking the APG men watching the show were “stony-faced” – Betty Can Jump turned out to be a huge success. </p>
<p>Women who saw the show laughed and cried, performances sold out, the four-week season was extended for two more weeks. While not all of the APG members praised the play – Hibberd called it “mawkish and sentimental” – the Pram Factory shows did slowly being to change.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487018/original/file-20220928-12-r3vhgv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487018/original/file-20220928-12-r3vhgv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487018/original/file-20220928-12-r3vhgv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=425&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487018/original/file-20220928-12-r3vhgv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=425&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487018/original/file-20220928-12-r3vhgv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=425&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487018/original/file-20220928-12-r3vhgv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=535&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487018/original/file-20220928-12-r3vhgv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=535&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487018/original/file-20220928-12-r3vhgv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=535&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The play was a huge success.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo courtesy of the Betty Can Jump collective</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The company began exploring women’s issues in plays and appointing women directors. Although the APG always styled itself as a radically democratic organisation, more emphasis began to be placed on what was often described by left political groups in the 1970s as “shitwork”, such as taking minutes and cleaning toilets and kitchens. </p>
<p>APG minutes show the group organised childcare for mothers performing in shows. In 1974, the Melbourne Women’s Theatre Group moved into the Pram, and they would stage dozens of women’s shows over the next four years. Theatre critic Suzanne Spunner wrote that in 1978 in Melbourne, “Everywhere you turned it seems there were plays by and about women wrote”, listing women’s shows at La Mama, Russell Street theatre, the Comedy Theatre and at the Pram Factory.</p>
<h2>Revolutions</h2>
<p>When I interviewed Garner about the time she made Betty Can Jump and these revolutionary years (Helen was active in the abortion rights movement, and women in the Betty collective ran through Moratorium marches doing street theatre dressed up as Viet Cong), she described the sensation of discovering women’s liberation as an epiphany. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I felt as if I’d been underwater for my whole life. And now for the first time, I’d stuck my head out of the water and taken a breath … looking around and thinking: ‘Now I get it. Now I get why my life is such a mess and why I’ve been so unhappy and wrecked everything’. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>She also thought it would be easy to change.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Once I got the sort of basic gist of feminism – or women’s liberation as it was called then – I thought, ‘Oh, now I understand everything, and everything’s going to change, because all we have to do is just say to men: “This is what’s the matter, and if we could just do this, and if you could just do that” …’ And I really thought that was going happen.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>She now reflects, in the context of MeToo: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Some things might change, but there’s stuff about men and sex and women that are just not amenable to social control, and never will be.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In Garner’s latest diary, as her third marriage disintegrates, she laments some lack in her that makes her a failure at marriage. But when she documents the failure of heterosexual marriage and monogamy in her diaries, they don’t read to me as proof of her own personal flaws, but rather as proof of a systemic flaw in the heterosexual, nuclear set-up. As a vindication of the 1970s ideal of the Pram communalism and the collective ideal (if not always the practice) of women’s liberation.</p>
<p>Garner was already known for her brilliant letters before she was cast in Betty Can Jump, <a href="http://wayback.archive-it.org/10989/20180903014625/https://www.pramfactory.com/memoirsfolder/Dwyer-Kerry.html">Dwyer has noted</a>, but the play was the first time she wrote for a public audience. Dobbin described the way she took on a role that was akin to a dramaturge, someone who could “take big ideas and reduce them to a human personal scale”. Garner wrote some of the play’s most affecting and effective scenes. The collective experience, and the visceral responses of audiences, was an important part of her development as a writer. </p>
<p>When Dwyer emailed me to apologise for her messy archives (they were, in fact, a goldmine of material that left me constantly amazed at her prescience in keeping them), I thought about how it can take more than a lifetime for us as women to shake off our proclivity for apology. </p>
<p>And I realised, when I recently began meeting on Sundays with a group of women from my neighbourhood – a visual artist, a filmmaker and children’s author, two musicians, a teacher, a journalist and a public communications expert – that we were reinventing the consciousness-raising circle.</p>
<p>Betty Can Jump was never performed again. Dwyer described it to me a “pastiche” that would be difficult to reproduce. “It was a very complex show. There were slides, there were puppets. We just flung everything at it […] It was a very, very dense show.” </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487013/original/file-20220928-24-p69mat.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487013/original/file-20220928-24-p69mat.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487013/original/file-20220928-24-p69mat.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=844&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487013/original/file-20220928-24-p69mat.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=844&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487013/original/file-20220928-24-p69mat.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=844&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487013/original/file-20220928-24-p69mat.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1061&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487013/original/file-20220928-24-p69mat.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1061&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487013/original/file-20220928-24-p69mat.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1061&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Although Dwyer tells me “not very much of [the script] was written down”, when I comb through the APG archives at the State Library of Victoria, I find a stapled document that appears to be a near-complete script for the play. </p>
<p>Still, unlike books, theatre is an ephemeral art form. Just as the story of women at the Pram Factory has been overshadowed by the story of men, the story of the collectively created plays and short films and bands that were part of the cultural renaissance of the women’s liberation movement, has not been well recorded. There is no star author to help sustain their afterlife in our historical memory.</p>
<p>But understanding our history, and our patterns – individually, collectively, historically – seems to me a pre-condition for escaping the revolutions that take us around in circles, and into the kind of revolutions that take us somewhere else.</p>
<p><em>This essay contains edited extracts from <a href="https://upswellpublishing.com/product/staging-a-revolution">Staging a Revolution: When Betty Rocked the Pram (Upswell Publishing)</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/191496/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kath Kenny received funding for this project from Create NSW and an Australian government postgraduate research scholarship.</span></em></p>In 1972, 5 women – Helen Garner, Claire Dobbin, Evelyn Krape, Yvonne Marini and Jude Kuring –spent 5 months workshopping a play. Frank, angry and explicit, it was a beacon of 1970s women’s liberation.Kath Kenny, Sessional academic, Department of Media, Communications, Creative Arts, Language, and Literature, Macquarie UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1876252022-08-11T20:04:32Z2022-08-11T20:04:32ZFriday essay: sex, swimming and smudgy louvres – watching Monkey Grip 40 years on<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/478246/original/file-20220809-16-p1hk56.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=17%2C19%2C673%2C442&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">An early poster for Monkey Grip, starring Noni Hazelhurst and Colin Friels.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">MIFF</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The woman’s name is Nora, and she’s getting out of the pool when she goes to look at the guy she’s seeing and sees something better: a sexy stranger, Javo, who radiates a type of bruisy depth. He hangs back near the famous sign, AQUA PROFONDA, while Nora and the guy she’s seeing, Martin, do their thing. He looks like he’ll be trouble, but not the bad kind of trouble; the kind it might be interesting to catch.</p>
<p>Nora learns from a mate that Javo likes heroin, though he seems to have kicked it; the mate is the girlfriend of Nora’s housemate, and in the anything-goes manner of the time, Javo is soon hanging out with Nora and Martin, enough that Javo can ask Martin how “together” they really are, and relay Martin’s evasive response straight to Nora – a canny move for such a cruisy guy.</p>
<p>Soon, she’s taking him to an art show that she has to cover for the small, busy alternative paper for which she writes reviews. Afterwards, she asks him if he’d like to stay the night. “That would be good,” he tells her, and it’s on.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/478176/original/file-20220809-19-ffr1dv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="a woman and man, smiling, stand in front of a weathered wall, the side of a house" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/478176/original/file-20220809-19-ffr1dv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/478176/original/file-20220809-19-ffr1dv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=284&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478176/original/file-20220809-19-ffr1dv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=284&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478176/original/file-20220809-19-ffr1dv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=284&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478176/original/file-20220809-19-ffr1dv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=357&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478176/original/file-20220809-19-ffr1dv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=357&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478176/original/file-20220809-19-ffr1dv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=357&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Noni Hazelhurst as Nora and Colin Friels as Javo in Ken Cameron’s 1982 film Monkey Grip.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">MIFF</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In the morning, Nora’s 11-year-old daughter, Gracie, finds out; Martin finds out. After Javo heads off, Nora relaxes in the kitchen and says, “I suppose I’ve done it again” – the wrong thing, the wrong man – but the story we’re talking about, of course, is Ken Cameron’s <a href="https://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/the-screen-guide/t/monkey-grip-1982/122/">Monkey Grip</a> (1982), and the casting of Noni Hazlehurst is one of its great coups. </p>
<p>Resignation, pleasure, self-satisfaction, concern: it’s all there in the delivery, and it all takes a back seat to a wonderful feeling that it doesn’t matter much at all. She supposes she’s done it again, and you may now grow aware of a disquieting question that is interesting to this movie the way a mouse is interesting to a cat.</p>
<p>Maybe understanding the implications of what you’re doing has little to no bearing on whether or not it’s actually done? And then the inverse – you can be wise enough to know what’s happening to you and have it happen anyway. This suspicion becomes unbearable as the film goes on. Nora’s carefree nature, which can be cruel but is rarely nasty, lifts the viewer and carries them over the movie’s darkest parts, but there’s always the sense that something irrevocable is happening, a little bit past the line of sight, a little way out of control.</p>
<h2>Making a novel into a movie</h2>
<p>The film is based on Helen Garner’s 1977 novel, and Garner and Cameron are listed as co-writers. On the indispensable website Ozmovies, where <a href="https://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/the-screen-guide/t/monkey-grip-1982/122/">the Monkey Grip entry</a> splices an interview with Cameron by Peter Malone and an account of Cameron’s DVD commentary into a narrative of how the screenplay was written, Cameron explains that he cut up and re-pasted the novel, typed it up “so that it resembled a movie”, then finessed the adaptation in constant conversation with Garner; he has a collection of letters in which she suggests solutions and scenes. </p>
<p>Garner says on the DVD commentary that she saw 14 or 15 drafts of the script, and then was there for the filming because Nora’s daughter, Gracie, is played by her own daughter, Alice, who is a sharp presence through the film, cheery and watchful, and possessed of slightly eerie wisdom.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/1DK_GmoxOfI?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Helen Garner co-wrote the film Monkey Grip, with director Ken Cameron.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Garner disliked the casting of Colin Friels as Javo, <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/national/bach-to-the-future-20080614-2qob.html">telling</a> The Age’s Peter Wilmoth in 2008, “I just can’t believe they cast Colin Friels as the junkie. [. . .] He was so healthy, a great big bouncing muscly surfing guy.” We all know people like Javo – if not the heroin, then the sulky mood – and it’s true that they’re not Colin Friels. </p>
<p>But I think of a point that a friend once made about a different kind of story, where two impossibly hot people have a meet-cute on a tram. That doesn’t happen in real life, someone at the time complained. But there are people in the world who look like that, my friend explained; when they hook up, it’s often with each other, and it has to happen <em>somewhere</em>. </p>
<p>If Friels’s Javo is not realistic to the story, then neither, perhaps, is Hazlehurst’s Nora, and you have to have someone like Friels to make the viewer believe that someone like Hazlehurst would give him the time of day. Monkey Grip is a movie, and it has to have some glitz. They have to hook up <em>somewhere</em>, and they hook up here.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/478247/original/file-20220809-20-m5kemu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="a woman riding a bike past the Edinburgh Gardens" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/478247/original/file-20220809-20-m5kemu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/478247/original/file-20220809-20-m5kemu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=396&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478247/original/file-20220809-20-m5kemu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=396&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478247/original/file-20220809-20-m5kemu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=396&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478247/original/file-20220809-20-m5kemu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=498&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478247/original/file-20220809-20-m5kemu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=498&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478247/original/file-20220809-20-m5kemu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=498&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Noni Hazelhurst’s Nora seemed to herald a new era of complex roles for women in 1982.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Umbrella Entertainment</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Sex was an issue for this film. At first, nobody liked it, neither the distributors, nor “most of” the Australian Film Commission, which, speculated producer <a href="https://www.nfsa.gov.au/latest/vale-patricia-lovell">Patricia Lovell</a>, saw it as pornographic. Stratton had interviewed Lovell for his 1990 book <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16041149-the-avocado-plantation">The Avocado Plantation</a>, about the turbulent economics of the 1980s in Australian film. The story of Monkey Grip’s production is harrowing. It almost found funding, but “fell over for lack of $150,000”. </p>
<p>Lovell moved on and produced <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082432/">Gallipoli</a> instead; by the time tax breaks made production more viable, other costs had gone up, so it was still a struggle to fund. When it finally got off the ground, some new funding problem meant that it looked like production might delay for two weeks – sending Lovell to hospital, where she spent 48 hours under sedation from nervous exhaustion. </p>
<p>When the film was done, Lovell heard that Gilles Jacob, director of the Cannes Film Festival, had been told “by someone in authority” that “the Australian government would not be pleased if Monkey Grip competed at Cannes” (though it did). Lovell screened the movie for three distributors in Melbourne, all of whom turned it down; one told her, “I loathed it.” Finally, Lovell distributed it herself, and after the first week’s takings offered proof of its heft, it was picked up officially by Roadshow.</p>
<p>Lots of films are incredibly sexy or incredibly sexual (dark, yearning, weird); Monkey Grip is both. It shows the parts of sex that are all about desperation, habit and distraction as much as those that are about intimacy, spontaneity or fun. </p>
<p>The first time Nora has sex with Javo is full-on, but first it’s so tentative that you think it might not happen; they get under the covers and at first you think they might just go to sleep. As soon as it’s happening, you realise that it was silly to think it might not. The eyes are closed, the clothes are off, the facial expressions work very hard; there’s some finger-sucking where the camera doesn’t cut away, and a kiss that’s more sexual than the finger-sucking.</p>
<p>Cameron told Stratton: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I had no problem with the actors during the filming of those scenes. I felt it was worth going all the way with them, and I was young enough not to have hang-ups. The atmosphere on the set was a bit funny: in the end, I had the entire crew, myself included, rehearse naked . . . we all believed in the novel and the film, so we felt those scenes had to be done that way.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It’s great, and sex reappears throughout the film as something that’s both absolutely normal – enmeshed in work, time, reading, eating sandwiches, meeting deadlines, having daughters, moving house, writing lyrics, being in bands – and something that’s like Javo: on a spectrum between consuming and impossible.</p>
<h2>On smack</h2>
<p>After Javo behaves oddly at a party, he says to Nora, “You just don’t get it, do you?” When he’d told her he was “stoned” earlier, he meant he was on smack. Nora smiles and kisses him. Javo overdoses. Nora visits him in hospital, where Javo is smoking. He looks at an old man across the room and says, “Jeez, old people give me the shits.”</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/478233/original/file-20220809-22-x5kab1.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="a sad-looking woman with shaggy hair looks to the right" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/478233/original/file-20220809-22-x5kab1.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/478233/original/file-20220809-22-x5kab1.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=997&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478233/original/file-20220809-22-x5kab1.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=997&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478233/original/file-20220809-22-x5kab1.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=997&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478233/original/file-20220809-22-x5kab1.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1252&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478233/original/file-20220809-22-x5kab1.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1252&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478233/original/file-20220809-22-x5kab1.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1252&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The film-tie in cover of Monkey Grip.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Abebooks</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Javo comes over to Nora’s share house and finds her in the shower and decides that she will be the one to give him outpatient care. Someone who knows how to inject penicillin comes over to show her how it’s done. Nora gives the injection; Javo is upset. They make jokes about the penicillin injection that are really jokes about junk; Gracie grabs the needle and says, “Don’t do it – you’ll get hooked!” All laugh. Everything in the house appears to settle down. Javo becomes part of the family, presiding over the children Nora lives with and the sharing of gifts.</p>
<p>And then one day Javo’s gone. First there is a false bottom, which presages those to come. He’s gone, and Nora finds him again, in a kind of drab bohemian lair, a large, dark, brick building with an arched window, where he gets to gesture at a traumatic origin. He has sex with Nora. He says – or sort of says; the line is fed by Nora – that his father is the reason women “never hit the mark”. </p>
<p>That night, Nora wakes up and Javo isn’t there. She finds him in another room, in the middle of shooting up, which he finishes doing despite her presence, half meeting her eyes. And then he’s really gone; he’s off to Singapore, with Martin (the guy Nora was seeing at the start – played by Tim Burns). Javo sends Nora a postcard. He wrote it on the plane, so there’s nothing about the trip itself. The world has swallowed him up.</p>
<p>The seasons change; Nora’s place of residence changes. She hears news in the winter that Javo is in Bangkok, in prison for stealing sunglasses (also with Martin). She sends him letters daily. “I miss him a real lot,” she tells a friend she’s hooking up with. “Like a piece of glass stuck in your foot,” the friend suggests.</p>
<p>And then, one sunny day, he’s back – in a garden full of hanging ferns and staghorns, Nora’s new, less-ramshackle share house. They go inside; she touches his face; they have sex slowly. “Now that he was back all the splinters of my life made sense again,” narrates Nora. </p>
<p>But straight away, there are new complications – pasta, women, alternative theatre. Nora takes Javo for coffee and gnocchi with her pension cheque, and Javo ruins it by going to talk to another woman under the obvious pretext that he wants to see what kind of cigarettes they’ve got behind the counter. The woman is Lillian (Candy Raymond), a co-star in a play he’s acting in, and he lurks on the other side of the restaurant chatting her up while the waiter brings the meals out to Nora.</p>
<p>“I mean, she’s too much,” Javo tells Nora; but Nora “feel[s] like she’s lining you up”. Later, the play is staged, in an awful and effective little scene, with Javo as the greasy bartender in a shiny vest, while Lillian is playing a “sight for sore eyes”, a “babe” in a silver slitted dress. </p>
<p>He has to throw up, he leaves the stage but doesn’t quite make it, getting as far as a prop piano bench. Nora runs down from the audience to tend to him, and he keeps speaking his lines while he’s sick.</p>
<h2>A third-act feeling</h2>
<p>Now there’s a third-act feeling; things begin to escalate. But part of what makes it so hard to watch – so like relationships you’ve seen people have, relationships you’ve been in – is that there aren’t any climaxes or moments where peace is restored, there’s just peaks that mean nothing, moments of understanding that distract from other problems, resolutions that will probably be broken. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/478232/original/file-20220809-22-hux0f8.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="a woman, mirrored, with a man, mirrored, and two hands gripping each other across the poster" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/478232/original/file-20220809-22-hux0f8.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/478232/original/file-20220809-22-hux0f8.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478232/original/file-20220809-22-hux0f8.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478232/original/file-20220809-22-hux0f8.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478232/original/file-20220809-22-hux0f8.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478232/original/file-20220809-22-hux0f8.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478232/original/file-20220809-22-hux0f8.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Ken Cameron found Helen Garner’s novel, Monkey Grip, hard to adapt for film.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">The Movie Database</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Garner told Wilmoth that Cameron found her novel hard to adapt for film because </p>
<blockquote>
<p>it hasn’t really got a filmic structure. It’s like a long-running TV series . . . it just starts and it goes on and on and eventually it stops.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The film mirrors the novel, which mirrors life, yes, but it also mirrors Javo, whose personal magnetism is all the more striking because the rest of him is staggering, exhausting. Cameron cast him after Doc Neeson, frontman of the Angels, dropped out and Cameron saw Friels at the Sydney Opera House playing Hamlet. For all his gravity he’s also disappointing and ordinary (“Jeez, old people give me the shits”); the story is never allowed to settle around him.</p>
<p>He creeps into Nora’s bed for comfort like a sick kid would. She holds him and kisses him. A needle is left out on the dining room table, in the middle of a household scene where the children are hitting Nora in the head with their dolls and asking her to make them cups of Milo. </p>
<p>“I want to stop,” says Javo, “but I can’t do it now. I can’t stop while the play’s on . . . I can’t perform when I’m coming down.” Nora understands. “When the play’s finished I’ll get off it and we’ll go away somewhere, go up north.” They’ll go to Sydney, see some friends, go to the beach, get a tan. He’ll go cold turkey. “I’m sick of the junk,” he says.</p>
<p>Cut to Javo playing harmonica in the passenger seat of a Mack truck being driven by a stranger, Nora and Gracie in the back. Soon, they’re at a diner just outside of Sydney, facing the kinds of problems faced by families on Australian road trips. They can’t order pies because the diner microwave’s turned off. Perhaps things are going to be all right.</p>
<h2>Filming Sydney as ‘a pretty good Melbourne’</h2>
<p>Although Cameron seems sheepish about the fact that Monkey Grip was filmed largely in Sydney – he explains in the DVD commentary that he was based in Sydney, as were Lovell, the DOP and the production designer, so by the time casting was done (in Sydney) and they’d secured funding, “we’d dug a big hole for ourselves in Sydney” – it’s a great joke of the movie that it does a pretty good Melbourne. </p>
<p>“I would have loved to have made it in Melbourne,” says Cameron, beyond the one week of exteriors he was able to film: “it’s the plaster that you see outside the window, it’s just all sorts of tiny things that you can’t reproduce”. </p>
<p>But when Nora rides her bike down a wide, leafy street, it feels like a suburb of Melbourne where you just haven’t been. Because the film is iconic to Melbourne (as is the novel), it’s satisfying that this seems to have no impact on viewers, as little as knowing that Rear Window <a href="http://movie-locations.com/movies/r/Rear-Window.php">was filmed in LA</a>. It undercuts the seriousness that forms around iconic things; it makes it easier to see the thing itself.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/eeRBctkbd7o?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Monkey Grip was filmed in Sydney, but here are some of the Melbourne exterior scenes, spliced together.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>When they get to Sydney – which scenes were also filmed in Sydney – the house they stay in is all pink light. The bed is “pre-warmed” by a dog. ‘What a good idea!’ says Javo when Gracie jumps in the bed, and they cuddle up together. It’s holiday time. With a clean shirt, Sydney light, and a comb run through his hair, Javo is transformed into a man on the upswing. Nora catches him trying to take money from her purse while she’s napping and says “Jeez, you’re good-looking.” He asks if 20 bucks is okay; he’s “just going to see some friends”.</p>
<p>While he’s out, Gracie consults the I Ching – big part of the novel, small part of the film – about the likelihood that the three of them will be going as planned to Manly tomorrow. The universe responds and says “don’t count on it, sister”. Nora asks Gracie what she thinks of Javo, who acknowledges that he’s a junkie, which of course has its problems, but, “You should be nicer to him, and leave him alone, that’s what I reckon.” When he finally comes home, Nora finds him in the kitchen, suspiciously going to town on a baguette. </p>
<p>“This was supposed to be a holiday,” says Nora. “What are you doing, what do you want?” He says, “I want some Vegemite,” and it’s all downhill from there. He converts a fight about doing smack and making empty promises into a discussion about whether or not he’s understood. If she understood him, would she like him? A good question at the wrong time.</p>
<p>Later on, in bed, he says, “I do this over and over. Whenever I get something good, I destroy it.” But just as he’s really exhausted your patience (you lose patience with both of them), the film finds something new in the couple, which is one of the pleasures of the looser, TV-like structure, where characters don’t have to change and grow; they can surprise you with qualities that disappear, then emerge anew, as if shuffled. </p>
<p>When it’s obvious that they’re done with each other, generosity becomes possible. They have a tender disagreement about which of them is going to leave the trip early and go home to Melbourne. It’s him. They kiss. As he rides away in the cab, he plays a little riff on his harmonica and gifts it to Gracie. Gracie and Nora catch the ferry to Manly. “You’ll get over it,” Gracie advises Nora. The ferry’s nice at night, she observes. While Javo has been happening to Nora, Gracie has been growing up. How often do you get to see this kind of thing on film, the child turning casually into the adult? </p>
<p>In The Avocado Plantation, Stratton points out that Hazlehurst as Nora in 1982 seemed like it would herald a coming age of complex roles for women actors, which the rest of the 1980s turned out to largely squander. He also mentions Wendy Hughes’s role as Vanessa in Carl Schultz’s excellent 1983 movie <a href="https://www.ozmovies.com.au/movie/careful-he-might-hear-you">Careful, He Might Hear You</a>, another adaptation of a well-loved Australian novel. </p>
<p>I got chills when Nora and Gracie went on the Manly Ferry; at the end of Careful, He Might Hear You, Vanessa, who’s a snob, decides for once in her life to cross the Harbour on the Ferry, gets into a collision, and drowns. Over in Melbourne, Hazlehurst’s Nora puts on her lipstick and decides it’s time to give her life a little TLC. Her metaphor is a tub that’s been draining towards Javo; now it’s time to put the plug back in.</p>
<p>She goes to a gig. (It looks like The Corner, but I’m sure it’s in Sydney.) One of the odd surprises of the film is that Chrissy Amphlett, Divinyls frontwoman, plays a muso in Nora’s circle named Angela; at the gig, she plays ‘Boys in Town’ from start to finish, but with actors playing the band (the rest of the Divinyls turned down roles in the film). </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/dRuNkBybku0?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Chrissy Amphlett plays Nora’s muso friend Angela in Monkey Grip.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Nora’s hair is slicked down and tied back; she’s wearing a sleek, feathered dress. She cuts loose, dances, laughs with friends; she reconnects with former housemate Clive (played with warmth by Michael Caton). Nora’s world remains spiky and young but it’s comfy without Javo. Soon, she’s writing in front of an open fire. She’s writing on a tram. She writes a short story addressing her feelings towards Lillian and doesn’t think there’s any particular reason to show it to her before publishing. Her life changes again. She moves house again. There’s the sticky business of telling her housemate, but these things are there to be dealt with.</p>
<p>“I just want it quite clear,” she tells the man she’s moving in with, “that we’re not moving into this house as a couple.” She reads books; she looks up words in the dictionary. Around her, children squabble. The framed picture of Virginia Woolf that Nora transports between residences assumes its place above the new workstation, perpetually stately and sentinel. Then, once again, there he is, in a striped shirt of thin fabric and a ragged, rather fashion-forward open seam. “You look great,” she says. “What happened?”</p>
<p>It’s Javo’s softer side. They go up to her bedroom. He sits in a sunny chair. “I’ve been having a really good time these days,” he says. “I’ve been knocking around a bit. Seen Lillian a couple of times.” Nora lies on the bed looking deeply unimpressed. Unprompted, Javo explains that he never loved Nora; he really needed her when he came back from Thailand, but he’s starting to feel better again. A tear slides down her cheek. “Come on, mate, we can outlast the lot of them,” he says. “We see so little of each other, we’re bound to,” she says, as if that’s the point.</p>
<p>In another room Nora’s housemate sits on the bed, playing guitar in his yellow socks and Volleys. He knows Javo is there but he’s being tactful about it. Later, they all go to a party. Life happens around them. A woman at the party observes that men do not like liberated women. People meet for quiet chats by a trellis adorned with green lights. And then the awful moment: someone’s crying in the dark over a can of Fosters and it turns out, incredibly, they’re crying about you.</p>
<p>It’s Lillian, and she’s now read Nora’s published story, the one she decided not to tell Lillian about. “Events don’t belong to people,” Nora explains. But everyone knows who the characters are, Lillian argues. “Twenty people in Carlton do not constitute everybody!” says Nora. </p>
<p>Lillian accuses Nora of just <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/oct/25/helen-garners-monkey-grip-makes-me-examine-who-i-am">publishing her diaries</a> – a critique that famously dogged Garner at the time, as if, she wrote in an essay in 2001 and was still telling Claudia Karvan in <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-11-28/books-that-made-us-puts-australian-literature-in-the-spotlight/100645224">an ABC special</a> 20 years later, writing diaries isn’t an interesting, challenging, valuable thing to do. But there’s no time for that discourse; Javo is inside, and look – he’s thrown up on himself again.</p>
<p>“Sorry, Nor!” he says. “Guess the dope’s fucked me liver.”</p>
<p>“Don’t be sorry, people have had to do this for me heaps of times,” she fibs, as she picks him up and hauls him away from the party. </p>
<p>Her housemate goes on tour. She rides her bike; she thinks. She drops a letter round to Lillian’s: “Can you see this gets to Javo?” She keeps riding her bike – one of the skills Hazlehurst had to learn for the film; the other, she told Women’s Weekly, was swimming – and soon she’s at her old share house, where lovely Clive still lives. She cries in his arms. She cries in the arms of a woman she hasn’t met. She leaves the house and cries again in front of the cast-iron fence. Was this scene filmed in Melbourne? Again, if not, it’s a pretty good fake.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/478174/original/file-20220809-26-mtzcdn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="swimmers in the Fitzroy Pool, with the words 'AQUA PROFUNDA' (deep water) on the wall behind them" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/478174/original/file-20220809-26-mtzcdn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/478174/original/file-20220809-26-mtzcdn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478174/original/file-20220809-26-mtzcdn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478174/original/file-20220809-26-mtzcdn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478174/original/file-20220809-26-mtzcdn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478174/original/file-20220809-26-mtzcdn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478174/original/file-20220809-26-mtzcdn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Fitzroy Pool, with its famous ‘AQUA PROFONDA’ sign, is an iconic Monkey Grip location: ‘a paradise’.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Ashton_29">Ash29/Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>And now we’re back at Fitzroy Pool, and it’s summer again. In the DVD commentary, Alice Garner points out that the scenes at the pool, which were filmed at <a href="https://www.ryde.nsw.gov.au/RALC">Ryde Aquatic Leisure Centre</a>, have done the trick for any Melburnian who’s seen the film, and even Cameron says he’s “quite proud” of the recreation. (When I watched it, I took it as self-sighted gospel that the bleachers at the Fitzroy Pool used to be blue on the verticals.) </p>
<p>Rachel Ang, whose 2018 comic <a href="https://www.glompress.com/swimsuit-by-rachel-ang">Swimsuit</a> was set at Fitzroy Pool, told me they set the comic there because “it’s really an amphitheatre, this stage for all kinds of emotional drama”. Ang, who is also an architect, was struck by the “formal power” of the space where the sun acts as a spotlight and shines on “everything”, the dramas and their social implications. </p>
<p>Victoria Hannan, whose 2020 novel <a href="https://www.hachette.com.au/victoria-hannan/kokomo">Kokomo</a> also has a critical scene set at the pool, told me that she did so as a “direct tribute” to Monkey Grip – the scene in the novel where Nora tells Clive, “No-one will understand but this is a paradise.”</p>
<p>I wanted to spend this time with the plot of Monkey Grip because I wanted to try to see, if I could, the thing itself. By the end of the movie, what’s obvious is that the thing itself extends beyond the characters and past the movie’s frame, into the rich shine of the sunshine, the blue soak of the pool. </p>
<p>There are fabulous clothes (Nora wears everything from a fuzzy tangerine sweater to a pair of pedal-pushers in animal print; even Martin, at one point, wears a denim jacket and rope-net shirt). It’s the yeahs, give-it-a-burls, fair-dinkums, I-think-it’s-beauts; a song done well at band practice is described as “very tasty”. It’s the slowness, the detail, the gossip, the repetition. Everyone’s always smoking in front of louvres that are always smudgy, and though the men may look unfathomable, they’re also always there.</p>
<p>At the pool, Nora gossips with another old housemate. Gracie gossips at the water’s edge with the old housemate’s kid. Javo is at the pool, under the AQUA PROFONDA sign. Nora approaches him in possibly the best outfit of the film, a red cap and lemon bomber over a one-piece bathing suit. It makes her happy that Javo’s doing well, but it’s bloody painful, too. It’s like watching a kid grow up and take off. She liked him needing her.</p>
<p>“Mate,” Javo says. “Our relationship’s permanent. Maybe we could go out tonight or something.” But she’s seeing a movie with Gracie. She remembers him the summer before, and it makes her reflect on their world, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>how we thrashed about, swapping and changing partners, like a complicated dance to which the steps hadn’t quite been learned, all of us somehow trying to move gracefully, in spite of our ignorance. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>A beautiful score rises, quite heavy with strings. Everything is blue. The credits rise. The movie ends.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>This essay is extracted from <a href="https://www.blackincbooks.com.au/books/melbourne-film">Melbourne on Film: Cinema That Defines Our City</a> (RRP:$34.99), which is published by Melbourne International Film Festival and Black Inc.</em></p>
<p><em>Monkey Grip will screen at MIFF on <a href="https://miff.com.au/program/film/monkey-grip">Sunday 14 August</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/187625/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ronnie Scott does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Ken Cameron’s film of Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip is dark, yearning, weird – and incredibly sexy – writes Ronnie Scott.Ronnie Scott, Senior Lecturer, Creative Writing, RMIT UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1790902022-03-30T19:08:53Z2022-03-30T19:08:53Z‘I will not hide’: Helen Garner’s radical gift is the shock of plain-speaking<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/454328/original/file-20220325-21-rp96pb.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Helen Garner</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Darren James</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Most readers of Helen Garner will be able to pinpoint a first personal encounter with her work: a book, or even a sentence, that cut through like sharp light; a local landmark suddenly immortalised on the page; an unsayable bodily experience transformed into the unabashedly said. </p>
<p>Reading Garner, it’s as though doors and windows have been flung open and there, over the cups and dishes and fruit bowls, is the stuff of life – frankly, tenderly, impeccably revealed. Garner’s clarity is such that it almost aches. </p>
<hr>
<p><em>Review: Writers on Writers – Sean O’Beirne on Helen Garner – Sean O'Beirne
(Black Inc. in association with the University of Melbourne and the State Library Victoria)</em></p>
<hr>
<p>My first encounter came in Christmas 1984, when an aunt gave me a slender novel called <a href="https://www.textpublishing.com.au/books/the-children-s-bach">The Children’s Bach</a>. Chosen probably on account of its brevity – I’d just turned 14 – this tensile little book was, for me, bewildering in its adult complexity, disorienting in its fragmentary narrative style, indecipherable if I applied the principles of storytelling I was accustomed to. It refused to fill me in, to explain itself, to tell me. It was an initiation of sorts: my first foray into the exciting work that goes with adult literary reading. </p>
<h2>Personal confession and concealment</h2>
<p>Sean O’Beirne is the same age as me and has followed the “phases” of Garner – my word, not his – much as I have. In his book-length essay on Garner, he doesn’t organise her works into phases, so much as entwine them into a single unfurling ribbon of the self: in different permutations, across time and intents and, of course, books. </p>
<p>Every phase, every work, gets attention. There is the “close to self I” of Nora in <a href="https://www.textpublishing.com.au/books/monkey-grip">Monkey Grip</a>; the “Not-I” of her early and mid-career fiction (The Children’s Bach, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1398613.Postcards_from_Surfers">Postcards from Surfers</a>, <a href="https://www.textpublishing.com.au/books/honour-other-people-s-children-text-classics">Honour and Other People’s Children</a>, <a href="https://www.textpublishing.com.au/books/cosmo-cosmolino">Cosmo Cosmolino</a>); and the “collective I” of her later non-fiction – which he explains as a sort of personal “I” nested within society. </p>
<p>In puzzling these selves in Garner, O’Beirne examines the impulse towards self in his own work. What results is an essay that examines personal confession and concealment in his own writing as scrupulously as it traces these in Garner’s.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/454572/original/file-20220328-25-fiob1w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/454572/original/file-20220328-25-fiob1w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=978&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/454572/original/file-20220328-25-fiob1w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=978&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/454572/original/file-20220328-25-fiob1w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=978&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/454572/original/file-20220328-25-fiob1w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1229&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/454572/original/file-20220328-25-fiob1w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1229&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/454572/original/file-20220328-25-fiob1w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1229&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption"></span>
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<p>O’Beirne’s is one of <a href="https://www.blackincbooks.com.au/imprint/writers-writers">a series</a> of book-length essays by writers on writers published by Black Inc., in association with the University of Melbourne and the State Library of Victoria. None of the subjects in the series needs introduction. </p>
<p><a href="https://theconversation.com/remembering-shirley-hazzard-art-is-the-only-afterlife-of-which-we-have-evidence-70519">Shirley Hazzard</a>, <a href="https://theconversation.com/david-maloufs-an-open-book-is-poetry-to-sit-with-105572">David Malouf</a>, Patrick White, Beverley Farmer: these are the literary cartographers of 20th-century Australia. Some of the essay writers occupy this same rarefied plane – <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-slap-whose-side-are-you-on-3969">Christos Tsiolkas</a>, <a href="https://theconversation.com/michelle-de-kretser-named-fifteenth-woman-to-win-the-miles-franklin-8747">Michelle De Kretser</a> – but other highly accomplished contributors (Josephine Rowe, Richard Cooke), like O’Beirne, will be new to many readers. There is clearly a generational impetus to the selections Black Inc. has made in commissioning this series – a desire to trace influences, connections and continuities across time and writers.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/a-new-literary-portrait-of-helen-garner-leaves-you-wanting-to-know-more-76975">A new literary portrait of Helen Garner leaves you wanting to know more</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Impersonal, efficient vulnerability</h2>
<p>O’Beirne, for his part, approaches Garner from what he calls a “place in the junior writing position”. He is the author, so far, of one well-received book: the 2020 short-story collection <a href="https://www.blackincbooks.com.au/books/couple-things-end">A Couple of Things Before the End</a> (also Black Inc.). A consistently intelligent humility runs throughout his essay, but O’Beirne is no less probing for his preparedness to defer to Garner’s art. He “carefully, respectfully” adjudicates Cosmo Cosmolino as a “bad book”, for instance, describing it as a sliding-doors moment in Garner’s career in which she might’ve fallen prey to a magical realism that is less cogent, less compelling than her signature crisp realism – yet he remains open to the novel’s innovations.</p>
<p>There is a persistent sense that O’Beirne is reaching for something in himself through Garner; something that may well be unreachable, but is worth reaching for all the same. Partly, this is Garner’s receptiveness to self and other, her preparedness to commandeer her vulnerability and plant it, with “brisk impersonal efficiency”, on the page. O’Beirne writes, at one point, that he wishes to “do the good work of less impersonation” in his own writing, to stop disguising himself in fictional personae, to cast off his reticence and put himself frankly there. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/454571/original/file-20220328-21-49yjmo.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/454571/original/file-20220328-21-49yjmo.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/454571/original/file-20220328-21-49yjmo.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/454571/original/file-20220328-21-49yjmo.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/454571/original/file-20220328-21-49yjmo.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/454571/original/file-20220328-21-49yjmo.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/454571/original/file-20220328-21-49yjmo.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Sean O'Beirne.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>His tendency to “hide” is partially explained in the spare details he gives of his traditional Australian boyhood in outer-suburban Melbourne where, in order to survive, an impersonation of “manhood” was crucial. You couldn’t be a soft-thinking, sports-averse, self-doubting “boy” who didn’t even know how to have an orgasm. You had to be pretend that you were part of a “bunch of blokes”, swiftly disguising any weakness if it threatened to spill over into the performance. O'Beirne’s habit of disguise is a habit of self-preservation, and Garner thrilled him by showing that being imprisoned in the ashamed not-quite-right self might be a blessing; that “it was contradictorily interesting and delicious and bad and lonely to be so steeped in, waterlogged with the problem of <em>me</em>”. </p>
<p>But, as he is first to admit, the “real man” behind the essayist does not fully materialise here. O’Beirne remains conceptual, not visceral – he wonders why he feels comfortable giving such bodily experiences as a first sexual encounter to a character, but retreats from owning it on the page as himself. He may, like Garner, be prepared to wriggle on the end of his own hook, but he retreats where Garner boldly goes forth. </p>
<p>In elucidating his ideas, O’Beirne employs an idiosyncratic prose style that determinedly avoids the administrative, structural, institutional literary – the world of “Them”, which, he says, Garner also eschews. Often this enables him to say things for which there are no existing words, or no sufficiently illuminating words. </p>
<p>Sometimes, though, in preserving his prose from the already-said, O’Beirne’s choices confound rather than illuminate. His tendency to noun phrases (“my not-as-socially-approved awareness”, “a starting amount of more open confession”, “a trying to be with someone else”) occasionally ruptured my sense of being a co-traveller on his thought journey. Similarly, his choice of the Australian vernacular (“bloke” and “I reckon”) made aesthetic or even ideological sense but nevertheless grated.</p>
<p>When they work, however, his hyphenated compounds, rammed together like a string of mismatched train carriages, led me on new journeys, or even jumped the rails entirely and deposited me in completely fresh territory. Sometimes I couldn’t go there with him, but I was elated when I could.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/remembering-janet-malcolm-her-intellectual-courage-shaped-journalism-biographies-and-helen-garner-163005">Remembering Janet Malcolm: her intellectual courage shaped journalism, biographies and Helen Garner</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
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<h2>Primal shock</h2>
<p>“I will not hide” is Garner’s gift, O’Beirne says. It remains a radical gift, even in the face of other recent acts of radical literary self-revelation – in the work, for instance, of Maggie Nelson and Sheila Heti, which O’Beirne cites. Yet, for any shock value in Heti’s <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/109/1098254/motherhood/9780099592846.html">Motherhood</a> or Nelson’s bone-crackingly good <a href="https://www.textpublishing.com.au/books/the-argonauts">The Argonauts</a>, the primal, bodily shock of Garner (a forgotten tampon, a slow fuck, a shit sucked back up into the body) has always been the shock of plain-speaking, not of sensation or transgression. </p>
<p>O’Beirne doesn’t seek transgression either: just honesty and bravery, the things he admires in his subject. He wants to be like Garner; he cannot be like Garner; the best he can do is be O’Beirne. Ultimately – for me and for him – that’s enough. In this essay, O’Beirne’s honesty may not be of Garner’s register, but it’s honesty all the same.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/179090/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Edwina Preston has received funding from The Australia Council for her latest and previous novels, as well as funding from Creative Victoria and the Felix Meyer scholarship</span></em></p>Helen Garner is the pioneer of fearless self-revelation in Australian literature. Writer Sean O'Beirne examines his own literary fear and fearlessness: should he ‘give’ more, as Garner does?Edwina Preston, PhD Candidate, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1630052021-06-21T04:25:01Z2021-06-21T04:25:01ZRemembering Janet Malcolm: her intellectual courage shaped journalism, biographies and Helen Garner<p>Journalism has rarely had a fiercer critic, nor a finer practitioner than the longtime writer for The New Yorker, Janet Malcolm, who died last week aged 86.</p>
<p>Some might quibble with the description of Malcolm as a journalist, but journalism is a far more supple practice than commonly believed. One list of the <a href="https://journalism.nyu.edu/about-us/news/the-top-100-works-of-journalism-of-the-century/">best American journalism of the 20th century</a>, for instance, had Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s Watergate reporting for The Washington Post ranked highly, but the top place went to John Hersey’s <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1946/08/31/hiroshima">Hiroshima</a>.</p>
<p>Published in 1946 in The New Yorker, Hersey’s 31,000-word article revealed in horrifying details the experiences of the victims of the first atomic bomb. It was also a pioneering, influential piece of what we would now call narrative non-fiction.</p>
<p>Malcolm began contributing to the magazine 17 years later, in 1963.</p>
<p>Over the next nearly six decades, she wrote many long reported pieces, profiles and essays that were published first in the magazine, then as books. Few journalists’ work has had as much influence on the way people thought about a range of topics – psychoanalysis, journalism, biography and the law.</p>
<p>She achieved this through a formidably sharp intelligence and sentences that were, as the magazine’s current editor, David Remnick, <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/books/double-take/janet-malcolm-in-the-new-yorker">wrote last week</a>, “clear as gin, spare as arrows, like no one else’s”.</p>
<p>A quiver of these sentences opens her <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1989/03/13/the-journalist-and-the-murderer-the-journalist-i">withering critique of journalism</a>, The Journalist and the Murderer, published in 1989: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself [sic] to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>When this was published, journalists exploded in outrage, not least because Malcolm had pierced the omertà observed by journalists concerning how they went about their work. There are all sorts of legitimate qualifications to be made about Malcolm’s insight, but more than three decades later it remains a key prod to any journalist, especially those working on longer projects, to reflect on the messy complexities inherent in the relationship between themselves and their sources.</p>
<h2>Helen Garner’s ‘shard of horror’</h2>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/407342/original/file-20210620-35190-k64zbm.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="The Journalist and the Murderer book cover" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/407342/original/file-20210620-35190-k64zbm.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/407342/original/file-20210620-35190-k64zbm.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=934&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/407342/original/file-20210620-35190-k64zbm.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=934&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/407342/original/file-20210620-35190-k64zbm.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=934&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/407342/original/file-20210620-35190-k64zbm.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1174&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/407342/original/file-20210620-35190-k64zbm.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1174&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/407342/original/file-20210620-35190-k64zbm.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1174&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>Malcolm’s influence extends to Australia, primarily through Helen Garner, who came to fame through her fiction but forged a second career as one of the nation’s foremost practitioners of narrative non-fiction, and a highly controversial one, too.</p>
<p>When Garner read The Journalist and the Murderer, she said it immediately struck a chord. “It sends a shard of horror right through you,” <a href="https://www.mup.com.au/books/meanjin-vol-71-no-2-electronic-book-text">she said</a> in an interview for Meanjin in 2012.</p>
<p>Later in the same interview with Sonya Voumard, she talked about her debt to Malcolm when writing <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/634139.The_First_Stone">The First Stone</a> (1995), her still much-debated account of a sexual harassment case at Melbourne University’s Ormond College in the early 1990s.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/helen-garners-this-house-of-grief-criminal-justice-viewed-from-the-coalface-29744">Helen Garner's This House of Grief: criminal justice viewed from the coalface</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>She recalled interviewing a retired judge who had once chaired the Ormond College council and was a “tough, smart old lawyer” who revealed little. As they talked and drank tea, Garner found herself gobbling up the homemade shortbread biscuits he had provided.</p>
<p>After she’d had three, he put the lid on the jar, saying “I didn’t do that to keep <em>you</em> out”, but he had.</p>
<p>Garner recalled:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It wouldn’t have occurred to me, unless I’d read Janet Malcolm, to put a Freudian interpretation on his closing the jar – I mean Freudian in the sense that people are always doing and saying things that enact their real purpose. He would have thought the incident was about biscuits. But unconsciously he was indicating to me that he was in charge of how much would be given and taken.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>A writer of unusual intellectual courage</h2>
<p>At that stage Garner had been reading Malcolm’s The Silent Woman (1993), her excoriating attack on biography in general and the industry surrounding the short life and tragic death of Sylvia Plath in particular.</p>
<p>In it, Malcolm likens biographers to professional burglars: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>The voyeurism and busybodyism that impel writers and readers of biography alike are obscured by an apparatus of scholarship designed to give the enterprise an appearance of banklike blandness and solidity.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Readers, as well as biographers, are skewered for colluding in the exciting, forbidden undertaking of “tiptoeing down the corridor together, to stand in front of the bedroom door and try to peep through the keyhole”.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/407343/original/file-20210620-35149-umlj8p.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="The Silent Woman book cover" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/407343/original/file-20210620-35149-umlj8p.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/407343/original/file-20210620-35149-umlj8p.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=927&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/407343/original/file-20210620-35149-umlj8p.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=927&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/407343/original/file-20210620-35149-umlj8p.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=927&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/407343/original/file-20210620-35149-umlj8p.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1164&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/407343/original/file-20210620-35149-umlj8p.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1164&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/407343/original/file-20210620-35149-umlj8p.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1164&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>Biographers were as outraged as journalists had been a few years earlier. Readers don’t appear to have objected. They — we — seem to think Malcolm must be talking about other readers, the voyeuristic ones. She couldn’t possibly be talking about us.</p>
<p>But she was, of course. One of the paradoxes of Malcolm’s work is she continued to practice the crafts that she forensically critiques — journalism and biography. For some, this might amount to hypocrisy. To me, it underscores her intellectual courage, taking seriously the power and influence inherent in the practice of these two forms, and refusing to shelter behind loyalty to her tribe.</p>
<p>Which brings me to my favourite rhetorical aria of Malcolm’s, also from The Silent Woman: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>The narratives of journalism (significantly called ‘stories’), like those of mythology and folklore, derive their power from their firm undeviating sympathies and antipathies. Cinderella must remain good and the stepsisters bad. ‘Second stepsister not so bad after all’ is not a good story.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Malcolm refused to write fairytales. Her stories may be as sharp as arrows; they also fly true.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/biography-in-the-age-of-celebrity-whats-left-to-reveal-29281">Biography in the age of celebrity: what's left to reveal?</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
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<img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/163005/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Matthew Ricketson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Journalism has rarely had a fiercer critic, nor a finer practitioner than the longtime writer for The New Yorker, Janet Malcolm, who died last week aged 86.Matthew Ricketson, Professor of Communication, Deakin UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1170862019-05-14T06:23:52Z2019-05-14T06:23:52ZHelen Garner’s musical metaphors come alive in a new production of The Children’s Bach<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/274251/original/file-20190514-60537-qy46g0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Natalie Christie Peluso in The Children's Bach. The opera is based on Helen Garner's novella of the same name.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Peter Hislop</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>Review: The Children’s Bach, Canberra: Fitters’ Workshop, Friday May 10</em></p>
<p>A new production of an Australian opera is an unusual event. The performance of Andrew Schultz and Glenn Perry’s 2008 opera, <a href="http://www.cimf.org.au/2019-calendar/concer-17">The Children’s Bach</a>, as part of the Canberra International Music Festival, was refreshing and welcome.</p>
<p>Perfectly suiting the central thematic strand of the Festival – the music of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Sebastian_Bach">Johann Sebastian Bach</a> – the opera is based on the <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/634140.The_Children_s_Bach?from_search=true">1984 novella</a> by acclaimed Australian writer, Helen Garner. The title is derived from a book of relatively simple Bach keyboard pieces for children. </p>
<p><a href="https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/1342464">Garner herself</a> described the musical structure underlying the novella as “contrapuntal … I wanted all the characters to have a voice”. It is a work investigating “the possibility of alternative means of communication, means other than the ‘symbolic’ or patriarchal order of language. Obviously music is one of these”.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/274242/original/file-20190514-60549-tett3u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/274242/original/file-20190514-60549-tett3u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/274242/original/file-20190514-60549-tett3u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/274242/original/file-20190514-60549-tett3u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/274242/original/file-20190514-60549-tett3u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/274242/original/file-20190514-60549-tett3u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1185&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/274242/original/file-20190514-60549-tett3u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1185&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/274242/original/file-20190514-60549-tett3u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1185&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Goodreads</span></span>
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<p>The setting is Melbourne in the 1980s, during which the interaction between old friends and new acquaintances precipitates a series of life-changing events. </p>
<p>At the centre is a middle-aged couple, Athena and Dexter, and their autistic son, Billy. Their seemingly uneventful existence is interrupted by a chance airport encounter between Dexter and an old friend from uni days, Elizabeth, who is meeting her 17-year-old daughter Vicky. Dexter and Athena are introduced to Elizabeth’s rock-singer partner, Philip and his young daughter Poppy. A brief affair between him and Athena follows. </p>
<p>As the new relationships unfold, and the old ones unravel, Australian middle-class values are challenged and old myths debunked. Male patriarchy is threatened – the women in the novel have agency, while the men are seen as ineffectual. </p>
<p>The book is saturated with music and its translation into operatic form almost seems obvious. In 2008, Schultz said of the centrality of music at the heart of the novella, “within its pages lie the conversation of tango, the sex of rock’n’roll and the deep emotion of opera.” </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/274253/original/file-20190514-60537-gztbo4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/274253/original/file-20190514-60537-gztbo4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/274253/original/file-20190514-60537-gztbo4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/274253/original/file-20190514-60537-gztbo4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/274253/original/file-20190514-60537-gztbo4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/274253/original/file-20190514-60537-gztbo4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/274253/original/file-20190514-60537-gztbo4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/274253/original/file-20190514-60537-gztbo4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Michael Cherepinskiy, Anna Fraser, Amy Moore in The Children’s Bach. The title of the opera and book comes from a book of Bach keyboard pieces for children.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Peter Hislop</span></span>
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<p>The opera, first performed at Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre in 2008, is very much an ensemble piece with each character being introduced as in a <a href="https://www.britannica.com/art/fugue">fugue</a>, a musical structure which repeats a central theme. The central thematic subject is Athena who is deeply dissatisfied with her life; much of this channelled into her frustrated attempt to learn the piano.</p>
<p>In this performance she was sung by Natalie Christie Peluso with warm, luminous tone and an engaging stage presence, capturing the warmth and vulnerability of the character. David Greco, as her husband Dexter, sang with crisp, full, and resonant tone and utmost clarity of diction, bringing out the character’s confusion and existential despair at “modern life”.</p>
<p>Elizabeth was sung by Anna Fraser, whose clear and warm soprano lent humanity to the character, while Andrew Goodwin’s exquisitely modulated tenor conveyed the intensity of Philip’s love for his daughter Poppy, sharply contrasted with his cavalier attitude to the other women in his life. Amy Moore, who played Vicky and several other characters, has an attractive full-toned, expressive soprano and strong stage presence.</p>
<p>Poppy, whose series of spoken explanations of the structure of Bach’s fugues provides a connecting thread through the opera – each intervention establishing a new stage in the narrative – was sympathetically embodied by Anna Khan, while Billy was Michael Cherepinskiy, who communicates through music. His playing of Bach was a deeply moving moment, as was his duet with Vicki of the “Skye Boat Song”.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/274257/original/file-20190514-60545-e54qa1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/274257/original/file-20190514-60545-e54qa1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/274257/original/file-20190514-60545-e54qa1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/274257/original/file-20190514-60545-e54qa1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/274257/original/file-20190514-60545-e54qa1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/274257/original/file-20190514-60545-e54qa1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/274257/original/file-20190514-60545-e54qa1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/274257/original/file-20190514-60545-e54qa1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">David Greco, Amy Moore and Jason Noble in The Children’s Bach.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Peter Hislop</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This is an opera essentially about music, and the role it plays in the lives of the characters. Roland Peelman – one of Australia’s most versatile musicians – conducted the small ensemble with flexibility and precision, neatly segueing through Schultz’s stylistic musical amalgam.</p>
<p>Peelman also staged this concert performance, always a challenging task given a lack of stage space. Schultz’s expressive and highly varied score was vividly brought to life in what is a challenging venue, not ideally suited to operatic performance. Peelman expertly brought out the myriad colours and rhythmic variation in this highly engaging music.</p>
<p>The incorporation of Bach’s music into a variety of musical idioms in Schultz’s opera echoes Garner’s use of music in the novel, as a meditation on the vicissitudes and challenges of contemporary urban existence. These characters are all are a complex mix of conflicting desires and emotions, reflecting the deep humanity of the novel.</p>
<p>The final poignant moments as Elizabeth and Vicki sing an extended duet describing how future events in the house will play out – a musical ending with strong undertones of Bach – will long linger in the memory: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>And Athena will play Bach on the piano. In the empty house her left hand will run the arpeggios and send them flying. Tossing handfuls of notes into the sparkling air.</p>
</blockquote><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/117086/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michael Halliwell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>It is rare to have a new production of an Australian opera - a vivid new performance of The Children’s Bach was refreshing to see.Michael Halliwell, Associate Professor of Vocal Studies and Opera, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/840692017-10-17T19:12:53Z2017-10-17T19:12:53ZShare houses and women’s liberation: a forgotten history<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/190254/original/file-20171015-3520-1tmoo8h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Share houses of the late 1960s and 1970s provided women with a new way of living, independent of families and husbands.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The 1970s was a decade of political agitation, when activism won women a range of legal and cultural freedoms, from no-fault divorce to work rights to escaping the “ladies’ lounge” in pubs. One little acknowledged aspect of feminist history at this time is the demographic and cultural shift that led to a new way of living: the share house. </p>
<p>For the first time, women could live independently of families or husbands, and find support networks outside the nuclear family model. In these experimental living arrangements, typically located in inner urban suburbs, women were free to become activists, creatives, hedonists and intellectuals. </p>
<p>Before this time, women had usually gone from the family home to homemaking with a male partner. Even if studying or working part-time, they generally lived temporarily with a relative, an older, trusted family friend, or a landlady.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/189945/original/file-20171012-31386-1laotmo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/189945/original/file-20171012-31386-1laotmo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/189945/original/file-20171012-31386-1laotmo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=435&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/189945/original/file-20171012-31386-1laotmo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=435&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/189945/original/file-20171012-31386-1laotmo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=435&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/189945/original/file-20171012-31386-1laotmo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=547&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/189945/original/file-20171012-31386-1laotmo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=547&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/189945/original/file-20171012-31386-1laotmo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=547&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Most ’70s share houses were in inner city suburbs.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Flickr</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In my interviews with women who lived in share houses in Melbourne and Sydney from the late 1960s to the late 1970s, most described these as places of freedom from the expectations of one’s upbringing – particularly gendered ones. </p>
<p>“It was as if parents didn’t exist,” said Amanda, an artist. “I could be whoever I want to be. I could do whatever I want, and my art could be what I wanted.”</p>
<p>Many of my interviewees spoke of disillusionment with their suburban upbringing. It represented conformity, a predictable life trajectory and narrow-mindedness, and was often viewed as a place of entrapment <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17573685-the-feminine-mystique">and confining gender relations</a>. </p>
<p>In a 1974 edition of the countercultural magazine The Living Daylights, for instance, “Trapped” of Wodonga begged readers for advice on escaping a marriage where she was “checkmated by the rules of this life into a state of living death”. She spent her days awaiting her husband’s return home, when he would use her as a “corpse to masturbate into”. </p>
<p>In a 1974 edition of the Melbourne University newspaper Farrago, a woman named Leanne observed that: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>to me, the way people live is political. What most people see as a ‘natural’ way to live, in a family … is in fact, a value judgement imposed by a dominant middle-class culture and ideology.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Talking to me, 40 years later, Leanne reflected that communal share houses were:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>very conscious efforts to take responsibility for children in a kibbutz-style way, sharing childcare, domestic labour, freeing up the women to live their own independent lives.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The inhabitants experimented with polyamory and spent many hours discussing “how not to be jealous” – with “zero success”, Leanne noted. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/189937/original/file-20171012-9795-1hjldk6.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/189937/original/file-20171012-9795-1hjldk6.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/189937/original/file-20171012-9795-1hjldk6.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/189937/original/file-20171012-9795-1hjldk6.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/189937/original/file-20171012-9795-1hjldk6.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/189937/original/file-20171012-9795-1hjldk6.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/189937/original/file-20171012-9795-1hjldk6.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/189937/original/file-20171012-9795-1hjldk6.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A poem written by one of the interviewees in the ’70s.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Deidre, who lived in shared houses in Carlton in the late 1960s and early 1970s, remembers discussing communal housing in women’s consciousness-raising groups as way of “creating a new way of living” where all inhabitants put equal work and love into the shared home. “The men were supposed to agree,” she said, “and a lot of them did.” </p>
<p>These communities were also crucial in fuelling a proliferation of women’s creativity, with the rise of women’s art and film-making collectives. Amanda remembers the very night she split up with her first husband. She had attended a women’s consciousness-raising group and realised that as long as she was married to him, his artistic ambitions would be the priority. (“If we were both working, who would bring in the cup of tea?”) In the share-house community of Carlton and Fitzroy, she found the space and support to focus on her own creativity.</p>
<p>Novelist Helen Garner famously captured this world in early works such as Monkey Grip and The Children’s Bach. The women in Garner’s stories resisted gendered identities like “mother” or “homemaker”, often sharing lovers and childcare in communal arrangements. As Garner’s protagonist Janet observes in Cosmo Cosmolino, she and her peers “despised our mothers for their sacrifice”. </p>
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<p>Still, while women found freedom in these communities, they sacrificed it too. Enormous emotional energy was spent discussing how to share their space, lives, domestic duties, resources and sometimes lovers. Leanne joked that her house was run “a bit like a military machine”, and remembers her envy at the seeming simple pleasures enjoyed by suburban families she would watch at the supermarket.</p>
<p>Another woman, Gina, recalled the pain and jealousy she felt when sharing a home with her husband and his lover – an arrangement that at the time felt ideologically important. “It was interesting,” she said, “because it was a philosophical decision, whereas the gut is completely prehistoric.”</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/190531/original/file-20171017-22319-l15p6n.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/190531/original/file-20171017-22319-l15p6n.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/190531/original/file-20171017-22319-l15p6n.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=563&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/190531/original/file-20171017-22319-l15p6n.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=563&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/190531/original/file-20171017-22319-l15p6n.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=563&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/190531/original/file-20171017-22319-l15p6n.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=708&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/190531/original/file-20171017-22319-l15p6n.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=708&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/190531/original/file-20171017-22319-l15p6n.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=708&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Birthday party in a share house, 1977.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Author provided</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>Many of my interviewees spoke fondly of the houses they lived in, and particularly the evenings, meals and music they shared. Some eventually shacked up with partners, as the wave of communal living experiments died down in the late 1970s.</p>
<p>Some, though, continued to live in alternative arrangements. One interviewee moved to Nimbin in the 1980s; one lives in a friendship arrangement with her ex-husband, who is in a gay relationship; one founded a publishing business and communal house in North Fitzroy, which lasted throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s.</p>
<p>Looking to this period of history is useful at a time when many speak of increasing social isolation, and when housing is less affordable than it has ever been. Today, the proportion of over-30s adults living in share houses has risen. But the communal nature of these share houses is somewhat diminished. </p>
<p>Deidre lamented to me that young people today don’t seem to enjoy the same sense of community that she did.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It wasn’t this individual thing, having your own food in the fridge and having it marked … it was like a family thing.</p>
</blockquote><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/84069/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Molly Mckew does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The share house may be taken for granted now, but before the late 1960s it was hard for women to live independently of families or husbands. For some, communal housing was life-changing.Molly Mckew, PhD candidate, School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/769752017-05-02T20:06:04Z2017-05-02T20:06:04ZA new literary portrait of Helen Garner leaves you wanting to know more<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/167436/original/file-20170502-17287-19pilnf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Helen Garner: her work frequently polarises readers.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.nicholaspurcellstudio.com/">Nicholas Purcell Studio</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>How remarkable that, after some 40 years of books and essays, stories, articles and movies, there have been so few major publications on the life and works of Helen Garner. The National Library of Australia catalogue lists discussion notes; a study (in Mandarin) by Zhu Xiaoying; and Kerryn Goldsworthy’s excellent <a href="https://www.bookdepository.com/Helen-Garner-Kerryn-Goldsworthy/9780195532814">1996 monograph</a>. Bernadette Brennan’s <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33809188-a-writing-life">A Writing Life</a> goes a considerable way to filling out this slender collection. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/167429/original/file-20170502-17319-7udixs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/167429/original/file-20170502-17319-7udixs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167429/original/file-20170502-17319-7udixs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167429/original/file-20170502-17319-7udixs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167429/original/file-20170502-17319-7udixs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1154&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167429/original/file-20170502-17319-7udixs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1154&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167429/original/file-20170502-17319-7udixs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1154&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Text Publishing</span></span>
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<p>Brennan offers a detailed account of Garner’s writing life, tracing the influences and obstacles; psychological and emotional affordances and constraints; her research and craft; and the critical and popular reception of her books. This is a valuable contribution about a major contemporary Australian writer who has delighted, infuriated, confused, charmed and frustrated readers, and whose experimental practice has galvanised ways of writing and thinking about writing.</p>
<p>I arrived in Australia late in 1990 and, enrolling in a local university to study Australian culture, found myself in the unfamiliar waters of Australian fiction. The views offered by the lecturers and tutors on Australian writing, and its contexts, meanings and values, were fairly uniform until we reached <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/634141.Monkey_Grip?ac=1&from_search=true">Monkey Grip</a> (1977). Then emotions were heightened, and attitudes hardened along gender lines.</p>
<p>The (male) professors generally derided the novel as “self-pitying”, as “women’s writing about trivialities”; the (women) tutors discussed the freshness of the perspectives of a time, place and pattern of life familiar to many young Australians.</p>
<p>Like the tutors, I fell in love with the book, identified strongly with it, and fiercely defended it. So, a little over a decade later when I was teaching creative writing, I set <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/634139.The_First_Stone?from_search=true">The First Stone</a> (1995) for a class on contemporary genres. As with Monkey Grip, the readers were divided, but this time along generational lines. The older students — both men and women —generally found it incisive, courageous and honest. The younger students generally found it self-obsessed, and oblivious to structural and systemic inequities.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/167445/original/file-20170502-26311-oum9dk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/167445/original/file-20170502-26311-oum9dk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/167445/original/file-20170502-26311-oum9dk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167445/original/file-20170502-26311-oum9dk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167445/original/file-20170502-26311-oum9dk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167445/original/file-20170502-26311-oum9dk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167445/original/file-20170502-26311-oum9dk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167445/original/file-20170502-26311-oum9dk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Bernadette Brennan.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Murray Harris</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>I recount these two anecdotes because they seem to me emblematic of Garner’s long writing career: one that slips and slides between genres and forms; one that frequently polarises readers. It is difficult to be ho-hum about Garner’s writing; though at times I have been repulsed by the narrative voice or perspective, I keep returning to her, buying each new book, expecting to be moved either to disappointment or delight.</p>
<p>Brennan is clearly also an eager follower, but unlike me she has closely investigated the contexts of Garner’s practice and tracks her career in this elegantly written account. Based on sound scholarship, the book nonetheless avoids the arcanity of critical literary analysis. The tone remains warm and admiring, and the narrative is highly accessible. </p>
<p>This is no easy task: biography is a difficult form, and there are many cases of <a href="https://theconversation.com/when-writing-biography-should-any-part-of-a-life-be-off-limits-54221">offended subjects causing trouble for their biographer</a>. Brennan, I suspect, need have little fear of this: Garner provided access to her private papers, and also shared “two years of conversations” with her biographer. What a privilege; not least because it must have helped Brennan to make sense of the “I” that weaves through Garner’s publications.</p>
<p>Of course the “I” is always a problem: though all social beings necessarily <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/detail/44212">“prepare a face to meet the faces that they meet”</a>, a writer of prose probably prepares more faces than average, because they construct and inhabit both narrators and characters in their works. It can therefore be difficult to determine where the author’s living being ends, and the narrator’s or character’s paper being begins. </p>
<p>For Brennan, the “I” is fictional, but this is a little difficult to accept given how consistent that “I” is in Garner’s fiction and nonfiction; and Garner’s own commentary suggests that it is she herself, filtered through her diary entries and other notes, who is represented.</p>
<p>This, for me, constitutes an absence in an otherwise excellent book: why not take on more directly the issue of a writer who insists on telling her readers what she is thinking? After all, writers need not be explicit: like the old saw goes, “show, don’t tell”. We have language and literary techniques to convey our perspectives and obsessions, and to ensure readers hear our voice, and see things — to quote another difficult and extraordinary writer, Joan Didion — <a href="http://www.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/uploadedFiles/schools/whitmanhs/academics/english/Why%20I%20Write%20Didion.pdf">from our point of view</a>.</p>
<p>Garner’s decision to place herself at the centre of the story can also become a distraction from the story itself, and can leave the writer sounding didactic. Novelist Marian Halligan writes about The First Stone, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>The book is not a piece of journalism, it’s a novel whose main character is Garner, acting out the role of journalist. </p>
</blockquote>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/167430/original/file-20170502-17322-1go4mig.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/167430/original/file-20170502-17322-1go4mig.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/167430/original/file-20170502-17322-1go4mig.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=919&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167430/original/file-20170502-17322-1go4mig.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=919&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167430/original/file-20170502-17322-1go4mig.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=919&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167430/original/file-20170502-17322-1go4mig.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1155&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167430/original/file-20170502-17322-1go4mig.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1155&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167430/original/file-20170502-17322-1go4mig.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1155&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Good reads</span></span>
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<p>Does it matter if a work is fiction cast as journalism? <a href="http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-September-1998/halligan2.html">For Halligan, yes</a>, because Garner “is a superb writer and story teller, so the book has a lot of power”. “A lot of power” matters in questions of literary representation, particularly if a work is marketed as nonfiction, which presents as having the authority of actuality. If such a work is more truly fiction, or essay, and if it is also superbly written, it can persuade readers that the author’s personal sociopolitical views are a kind of “truth”, which can leave them feeling either convinced or betrayed.</p>
<p>A second aspect of Garner’s extraordinary career that I would have liked to see developed is the nature of her relationships with others, and her ethical writing practices.</p>
<p>Brennan does not hesitate to describe the sometimes startling cruelty with which Garner treats those close to her: her irritation and impatience with her dying friend in <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3014272-the-spare-room">The Spare Room</a>; her remarkably ungenerous characterisation of the women students in The First Stone; her appropriation of the lives of others, such as using her friend Axel Clark’s surgery for brain tumours to generate the story Recording Angel, which was included in Cosmo Cosmolino.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/167431/original/file-20170502-17319-voxc3k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/167431/original/file-20170502-17319-voxc3k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/167431/original/file-20170502-17319-voxc3k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=928&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167431/original/file-20170502-17319-voxc3k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=928&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167431/original/file-20170502-17319-voxc3k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=928&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167431/original/file-20170502-17319-voxc3k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1166&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167431/original/file-20170502-17319-voxc3k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1166&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167431/original/file-20170502-17319-voxc3k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1166&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Text Publishing</span></span>
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<p>Yes, we all know Faulkner’s perspective that “<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/07/-the-ode-on-a-grecian-urn-is-worth-any-number-of-old-ladies/259392/">the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies”</a>, but is it? And if it is, what are the ethical principles at stake in consuming old ladies for the sake of another Ode?</p>
<p>I can’t help trying to fill in these gaps in the portrait, particularly because Brennan also describes (and many people in the writing community have experienced) Garner’s generosity and compassion. No doubt to some extent, the hard-edged Garner is so visible first, because she puts herself in the work, and next because she seems not to have the sort of filter many of us operate – the one that keeps our more troubling or savage thoughts private.</p>
<p>Garner lays herself bare in what is often a deeply troubling way, and it fascinates me that a writer should expose themselves thus to a reader’s potentially cold and unforgiving eye. </p>
<p>I wish Brennan had found herself able to dig a little more deeply into these tricky and even unsavoury aspects of her subject, and offer a more nuanced portrait of this difficult, fascinating writer. </p>
<p>But all writing is a matter of making choices, and it is hardly fair to criticise a writer for not having fully satisfied my own desires: particularly when this is an absorbing, informative and engaging read.</p>
<p><em>Bernadette Brennan’s A Writing Life: Helen Garner and Her Work is published by Text Publishing.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/76975/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jen Webb receives funding from the Australian Research Council.</span></em></p>Over 40 years, author Helen Garner has delighted, infuriated, confused and charmed readers. A new account of her writing life is informative but avoids delving into the trickier aspects of her work.Jen Webb, Director of the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research, University of CanberraLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/635952016-10-10T18:59:45Z2016-10-10T18:59:45ZJoe Cinque’s Consolation: violence, delusion and the question of guilt<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/141027/original/image-20161010-2645-1lw0geh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Maggie Naouri as Anu Singh, behind Jerome Meyer as Joe Cinque. Singh famously killed Cinque in 1997 by injecting him with a fatal dose of heroin. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Supplied</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>If you want your cinema neatly wrapped with a bow on top by the time you walk out of the theatre, then Sotiris Dounoukos’s <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4771160/">Joe Cinque’s Consolation</a> (2016) is not for you. The events that this film portrays will keep working on you, testing your thinking on truth and fantasy, probing where you sit ethically in relation to mental illness, manslaughter, and its complicit witnessing.</p>
<p>Based on Helen Garner’s acclaimed 2004 non-fiction book <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/613475.Joe_Cinque_s_Consolation_A_True_Story_of_Death_Grief_and_the_Law">Joe Cinque’s Consolation: A True Story of Death, Grief and the Law</a>, this drama is an engaging response to real events. </p>
<p>Dounoukos and Matt Rubinstein’s script focuses on the behavior of Singh, Cinque and their “friends”. They pick apart the events leading to Joe Cinque’s death in Canberra in October 1997, when Australian National University 1990s law student Anu Singh (played by Maggie Naouri), killed her engineer 26 year old boyfriend, Joe Cinque (Jerome Meyer). He was given an overdose of the date-rape drug Rohypnol, followed by two lethal doses of heroin.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/141024/original/image-20161010-2647-qm1iyb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/141024/original/image-20161010-2647-qm1iyb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/141024/original/image-20161010-2647-qm1iyb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/141024/original/image-20161010-2647-qm1iyb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/141024/original/image-20161010-2647-qm1iyb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/141024/original/image-20161010-2647-qm1iyb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/141024/original/image-20161010-2647-qm1iyb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/141024/original/image-20161010-2647-qm1iyb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Maggie Naouri and Jerome Meyer in Joe Cinque’s Consolation (2016).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Consolation Productions</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Singh was assisted by her best friend Madhavi Rao (Sacha Joseph) during the various machinations, denials and false starts that led to Cinque’s death, which are examined in the film. In the trials that followed, Rao was acquitted. Singh was found guilty of manslaughter on the basis of diminished responsibility because of her mental state.</p>
<p>Singh’s decision to kill Cinque was plainly the product of her delusional beliefs and <a href="http://netk.net.au/Australia/Singh1.asp">disordered thinking</a>. She was sentenced to 10 years and served four, completing her law degree while incarcerated.</p>
<p>The perceived injustice of this outcome has been working on Joe Cinque’s parents (played in the film by Gia Carides and Tony Nikolakopoulos) since that October day in 1997. It also fuelled Helen Garner, who attended the trials, and whose book was motivated to give Joe Cinque, the story’s victim, a voice and a witnessing. This is his consolation.</p>
<p>Both book and film have Cinque’s parent’s approval, while Singh’s response to the book is less clear. Singh understands herself not to be the same person to the one involved in these events. She <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/latenightlive/joe-cinque-is-dead/3426180">has changed</a>, according to the <a href="http://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/news-life/what-i-did-was-a-horrible-thing-anu-singh-seeks-atonement-for-killing-joe-cinque/news-story/0da02270935eccc2c690d64b8b6f9fd6">few interviews</a> she has given since 2004. </p>
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<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Helen Garner, Joe Cinque’s Consolation, A True Story of Death, Grief and the Law (2004).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Pan Macmillan Australia</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Garner’s book explored the death, the trial and its consequences. Dounoukos restricts himself to re-performing the events that lead to Cinque’s death. He focuses in particular on Singh’s often erratic, delusional behaviour both socially and in relation to her own body. As viewers, we are the jury now – asked to re-try and weigh up the range of culpabilities of those present.</p>
<p>Singh’s friend Rao organised two dinner parties at Singh’s behest, telling at least some attendees at the first that a terrible crime would be committed. After the first dinner, Anu gave Cinque Rohypnol in his coffee, but did not go through with her plan to kill him and then herself.</p>
<p>After the second party, held days later, Singh administered the Rohypnol and heroin that would kill Cinque. </p>
<p>Interestingly, many of those involved with the two eventful dinners played the train of events as if they were watching a film and did nothing. The two dinners were send-off parties, and several people were told of Anu’s intentions. </p>
<p>All discounted the danger to Cinque’s welfare of this fabricated suicide pact. Many knew but all dismissed such plans as less than real.</p>
<p>Are such dissociative behaviours now becoming a residue effect of our media saturated worlds? Today our mobile accessibility to screens in multiple places at once enables us to enter and leave worlds at will, to cross between public and private space, between real and fantasy. Such digital mobility may have been incidental in 1997 but such seamless digital slippages between facts and fictions now frame and temper any audience’s ability to place and unpack the gaps between the real and the imagined. Dounoukos and Rubenstein’s script takes full advantage of this situation.</p>
<p>The film begins with the unnerving evasive emergency call made by Singh for an ambulance to attend Cinque’s drug overdose, while he lies dying in their Anhill Street Duplex in Downer, a Canberra suburb. This sound-bite is repeated at film’s end (a bookended structure reminiscent of Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1957 feature <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0050458/">Il Grido</a>), and a call by then loaded with all the emotional baggage that the film has gathered along its way.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/141023/original/image-20161010-2619-evwsfx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/141023/original/image-20161010-2619-evwsfx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/141023/original/image-20161010-2619-evwsfx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/141023/original/image-20161010-2619-evwsfx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/141023/original/image-20161010-2619-evwsfx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/141023/original/image-20161010-2619-evwsfx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/141023/original/image-20161010-2619-evwsfx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/141023/original/image-20161010-2619-evwsfx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Sacha Joseph and Maggie Naouri in Joe Cinque’s Consolation (2016).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Consolation Productions</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In the end, this is an engaging drama, not a documentary with an ethical allegiance to fact. This is a mature and intelligent film, mining ambiguities through the behaviour of its characters. </p>
<p>It is riveting Australian cinema with a heightened sense of tension and implicit violence throughout, yet without any car chases or punch-ups. This is the kind of relentless hidden violence that is all the more effective because of its invisibility. </p>
<p>That it is violence perpetrated by women adds another compelling wrinkle to the tale. How it is covered over, played out through hesitations, innocent coercions, what is not said and what is not acknowledged and how all this is expressed are the pearls delivered in this fictionalised re-telling. This maps trauma’s landscape.</p>
<p>And the death is a traumatic event, not only for those involved at its centre and margins but culturally, bringing culpability for killing and mental illness and its legal definitions together in a perfect storm.</p>
<p>Traumatic events, by definition do not make sense and often come back in flashback form, looking for a framework or context that enables biography, story and history to form. </p>
<p>On a cultural level, Dounoukos’s latest iteration cannot be the last word. This drama on the social manners of denial invites us to think productively about bigger questions while we are being entertained.</p>
<p>I will leave the last enigmatic word on the relation between horrendous behaviour and story to the philosopher Slavoj Žižek. He is not interested in the words we concoct to explain our actions. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>we construct narratives ourselves basically to cover up, to justify, to render us blind for the horrors that we are doing in reality. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is an insight that the film brings to life.</p>
<p><br></p>
<hr>
<p><em>Joe Cinque’s Consolation will be released in Australia on October 13.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/63595/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Dirk de Bruyn does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>In 1997, Joe Cinque was killed by his girlfriend Anu Singh. A new film about his death is riveting Australian cinema, with a heightened sense of tension and implicit violence throughout.Dirk de Bruyn, Associate Professor of Screen, Deakin UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/332552014-10-28T19:07:30Z2014-10-28T19:07:30ZGarner’s This House of Grief ducks some hard questions<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/62945/original/cttpqdbk-1414459903.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The Robert Farquharson case raised questions about male violence that go unanswered.
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP Image/Julian Smith</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Helen Garner isn’t usually thought of as a crime writer, but some of her best-known prose has been on law-breaking. She won the prestigious Walkley Award for her 1993 Time Magazine <a href="http://books.google.com.au/books/about/True_Stories.html?id=POkH-P5ZDVEC">article</a> on the murder of toddler Daniel Valerio. Then there were her bestsellers <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1913364.The_First_Stone">The First Stone</a> (1995) and <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/613475.Joe_Cinque_s_Consolation_A_True_Story_of_Death_Grief_and_the_Law">Joe Cinque’s Consolation </a>(2004).</p>
<p>Those last two books are particularly striking in their intertwining of crime and sexual politics. </p>
<p>Both featured male key protagonists who were – at least in Garner’s eyes – victimised by vengeful young women. The First Stone was widely <a href="http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-November-1997/giles.html">criticised</a> for trivialising the issue of sexual harassment. The man at the centre of that text was a university college master who was accused of sexually harassing five female students, two of whom reported his behaviour to the police. Garner attributed their allegations to a feminist-fuelled misandry.</p>
<p>Thus, it was with some interest that I – an Australian literature scholar who has previously <a href="http://www.limina.arts.uwa.edu.au/volumes/18/thompson">written</a> on Garner’s work – began reading Garner’s recently-published <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22814793-this-house-of-grief">This House of Grief</a> (2014). </p>
<p>Once again, the author becomes engrossed in a criminal trial, and this time it’s the trial of Robert Farquharson. In September 2005, while driving down the Princes Highway in rural Victoria, Farquharson’s car veered off the road and into a dam. </p>
<p>Farquharson swam to safety, but his three sons, also travelling in the vehicle, drowned. In the ensuing investigation, it was revealed Farquharson had allegedly threatened to kill the children to punish his ex-wife, Cindy, for ending their marriage. Farquharson denied making this threat. </p>
<p>He attributed the crash, and his children’s subsequent deaths, to “<a href="http://www.medlink.com/medlinkcontent.asp">cough syncope</a>” (“a very brief loss of consciousness that follows an episode of intense coughing”, as Garner puts it). In October 2010, Farquharson was sentenced to life imprisonment with a non-parole period of 33 years.</p>
<p>So, I asked myself as I snapped up my copy of This House of Grief at the local Readings outlet, has anything changed since 2004 – or, for that matter, 1995? Is Garner going to spin yet another noir-ish narrative in which a flawed but basically decent bloke is oppressed by a heartless vixen? Or will something altogether different happen in these pages?</p>
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<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A Victoria police photo of the car Robert Farquharson was driving, after it was removed from a dam off the Princes Highway.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP Image/Victoria Police</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>And the news is good – to some extent. There are no <em>femme fatales</em> to throw stones at here, nor is there any attempt to paint Farquharson as a good guy who cracked under the weight of a world that is apparently unkind to the male of species. Garner at least seems to achieve the kind of balanced, thorough and objective reportage that she promised (but never delivered) all those years ago with The First Stone. </p>
<p>The court case – with its legalese, endless parade of “experts” and heightened emotions – is described in painstaking detail. And there’s the overwhelming air of sadness. As Garner so eloquently puts it: “The children’s fate is our legitimate concern. They are ours to mourn”. One is instantly reminded of her piece on Daniel Valerio.</p>
<p>But crime doesn’t take place in a vacuum, and the Farquharson case is no exception. This should be obvious, but it isn’t – to Garner. Let me be specific: This House of Grief largely fails to address the broader issues of gender inequality and male violence. </p>
<p>There has been significant media coverage given to the issue of male violence since the 2012 death of <a href="https://theconversation.com/rip-jill-meagher-but-lets-not-forget-the-other-female-victims-of-violence-9977">Jill Meagher</a>. Meagher was raped and murdered. Not all male violence takes the form of brutalising women. In an <a href="http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/revengeful-fathers-kill-children-to-punish-mum-20140422-372ee.html">article</a> published earlier this year in The Age, Deborah Kirkwood (a researcher at the Domestic Violence Resource Centre Victoria) is quoted as saying that:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>fathers who killed their children ‘feel entitled to take their lives because they’re his possessions … It’s about making the mother suffer. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Kirkwood’s research has focused on <a href="http://www.news.com.au/national/ramazan-acar-jailed-for-life-over-murder-of-daughter-yazmina/story-e6frfkvr-1226085746990">Ramazan Acar</a> and <a href="http://www.news.com.au/national/child-killer-arthur-freeman-bashed-in-brawl-at-barwon-prison/story-e6frfkvr-1226093501023">Arthur Freeman</a>. Both men were convicted of killing their children in acts of revenge against their former partners.</p>
<p>My point is not that Farquharson really did intend to kill his children. The only person in the world who can ever know these intentions is Farquharson himself. My point is rather that those children’s deaths cannot be entirely separated from crimes such as those cited above, nor from the broader field of sexual politics. </p>
<p>When we read that Farquharson allegedly threatened to “pay [Cindy] back big-time”, how can one not discuss questions of male power and entitlement? What of the fact that the children died on Father’s Day, of all days? In This House of Grief, even that anodyne term “gender” barely rates a mention.</p>
<p>Ultimately, crime writing is political. Crime writers help frame the ways in which particular crimes are discussed, understood, remembered. This is particularly the case when the author is as high-profile as Helen Garner. </p>
<p>In This House of Grief, Garner’s eye for detail is unsurpassable. The melancholy she evokes is haunting. But Garner’s failure to pursue the hard questions about male violence that are raised by the Farquharson case is a mystery – and a disappointment.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/33255/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jay Daniel Thompson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Helen Garner isn’t usually thought of as a crime writer, but some of her best-known prose has been on law-breaking. She won the prestigious Walkley Award for her 1993 Time Magazine article on the murder…Jay Daniel Thompson, Research and Publications Officer, Judith Lumley Centre, La Trobe UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.