tag:theconversation.com,2011:/ca/topics/tim-winton-10811/articlesTim WInton – 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/1954412022-12-12T19:02:54Z2022-12-12T19:02:54ZWhen Geraldine Brooks writes about Tim Winton, you can hear the axes grind<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499685/original/file-20221208-15-i96ihg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=43%2C17%2C5708%2C3811&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Markus Spiske/Unsplash</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The earthiness of Tim Winton’s homegrown language and storytelling has its share of critics, but also plenty of fans – enough to sustain 40 years or so of professional writing. His works are a feast of strange words and characters. There is a lot to admire, and a few butterfly wings to pick off if you like that kind of thing. </p>
<p>Winton wrote about axes in one of his early short stories: <a href="https://www.austlit.edu.au/austlit/page/C30213">My Father’s Axe</a>, from the 1985 collection <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/scission-9780140274011">Scission</a>. The axe is symbolic of the relationship between the young protagonist, who wields the axe, and his absent father:</p>
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<p>Short, winter afternoons I spent up the back splitting pine for kindling, long, fragrant spines with neat grain, and I opened up the heads of mill-ends and sawn blocks of sheoak my father brought home: Sometimes in the trance of movement and exertion I imagined the blocks of wood as teachers’ heads. It was pleasurable work when the wood was dry and the grain good and when I kept the old Kelly axe sharp. </p>
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<p>Frustration is mixed with sadness in a sublime emotional soup and captured in the ordinary – it’s classic Winton. </p>
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<p><em>Review: Geraldine Brooks on Tim Winton (Black Inc.)</em></p>
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<p>Geraldine Brooks has a formidable reputation as an author of historical fiction, and has a truckload of awards too. Her latest book <a href="https://www.blackincbooks.com.au/books/tim-winton">Geraldine Brooks on Tim Winton</a> is a cute little hardcover with a dustjacket, the perfect gift for your favourite bibliophile. What’s not to love?</p>
<p>Well, the sharp axe features more than I expected. Brooks has been grinding hers for a while, by the sound of things. She opens up a few heads in the petite chapters in this book, venting some long-held grudges against critics and unnamed academics.</p>
<p>An academic, university student or high school graduate who picks up Brooks’s essay might spot that it lacks some references. I don’t mean formal referencing, because it doesn’t try to be an academic text. But it doesn’t always direct a reader to its sources. When Brooks takes a hatchet to academic writing, for example, she slices a section from an unnamed essay on Winton’s novel <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/breath-9780143009580">Breath</a> and rips into its author, concluding “when I reach for meaning in paragraphs like this one, I find myself grasping thin air”.</p>
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<p>I want to cite Colleen McGloin’s essay <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/0021989411432586">Reviving Eva in Tim Winton’s Breath</a> in the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, because Brooks has not. The essay tackles the important issues of gender and race in Winton’s work. And the thing is, the paragraph from McGloin’s essay that Brooks quotes is not a terribly purple example of wordy academic jargon. Taking a fragment out of context is a strategy to allow Brooks to embark on a series of put-downs aimed at a shadowy mortarboard-wearing foe. </p>
<p>The book is looking for a punch-up with literary critics and academics. It’s clear from the start that Brooks has a problem with universities. Early on, she says Winton went to “tech because they had a creative writing course there and he wanted to learn to make literature, not theorise about it” (with no clue to where this gem about Tim Winton came from). </p>
<p>Winton in fact went to what is now Curtin University, in its previous incarnation as the Western Australian Institute of Technology – a college of advanced education. These institutions were a tier of education that existed between “tech” and university back in the 1970s and early 1980s, when gatekeepers kept new universities out of the echelons of sandstone institutions. The <a href="http://www.textjournal.com.au/april97/dibble.htm">creative writing course</a> to which Brooks refers is famous. It was the only one in the state at the time – and one of very few in the country. Winton was taught by published authors including Elizabeth Jolley. </p>
<p>Creative writing is part of the academic world (sorry Geraldine) and many academic creative writers manage to write literary criticism that is readable. The same goes for fictional work. Despite Brooks’ claim – based on a single textbook, James Wood’s <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/how-fiction-works-9781845950934">How Fiction Works</a> – that literary critics consider plot “the blowfly in the bisque”, there generally has to be a plot in a novel to get it published in Australia, because publishing is a commercial enterprise. </p>
<p>This argument is just another opportunity to plunge the axe-head into the academics who educate the country’s future writers and thinkers, and it makes no sense in light of the book’s subject – who was that again?</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/tim-wintons-answer-to-toxic-masculinity-god-94486">Tim Winton's answer to toxic masculinity: god?</a>
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<h2>Speaking of God</h2>
<p>I get that the author is a journalist and not an academic, but the axe-grinding is annoying because Brooks doesn’t say enough about Winton and his writing. Brooks intersperses her consideration of Winton’s work and life with personal narrative. A good chunk of the book is about her. </p>
<p>The chapter titled And Speaking of God, for example, meditates a bit on the absence of religion in Australian and US fiction, then dedicates a few pages to Winton’s work and its relationship to Christianity. This is a juicy topic, but Brooks hijacks the chapter to unpack her own religious upbringing, her atheism, and her subsequent conversion to Judaism, which was “driven by history rather than faith”. </p>
<p>She goes on to quote Winton explaining his position on religion in an (unidentfied) interview, where he said “if it’s not about love, if it’s not about mercy, if it’s not about kindness, if it’s not about liberation, then I’m just not that interested”. </p>
<p>Brooks quotes a speech at the 2015 Palm Sunday Walk for Justice for Refugees in Perth, in which Winton comes across as deep and compassionate. He cites the <a href="https://biblehub.com/matthew/7-9.htm">Gospel of Matthew</a> and reaffirms (against the odds, apparently) his Christian faith. Brooks then refers to the Jewish concept of <em>tikkun olam</em> – which refers to a person’s social responsibilities – as something that has meaning for her. She draws on Judaism for cultural capital at various points. </p>
<p>The contrast is profound – Winton has authenticity and Brooks seems disingenuous. She is selecting fruits from religious traditions to boost her credibility and link herself to something akin to that which Winton has deeply communicated. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/geraldine-brookss-horse-is-a-richly-detailed-examination-of-the-violence-of-americas-past-183112">Geraldine Brooks's Horse is a richly detailed examination of the violence of America's past</a>
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<h2>Technique and appreciation</h2>
<p>Don’t get me wrong, I want you to read this book. It made me like Winton more, because he was the underdog in this clash of Titans. I was waiting for him to be in the spotlight. </p>
<p>Brooks writes historical fiction and, in some ways, Winton does too. Although his work is often set in contemporary times, some of his characters hark back to the language and types of his grandparents, or the idyllic days of his childhood. His fiction is both historical and contemporary. It is realism, but there are elements of magical realism and speculative fiction. It is Australian, but not really my Australian, and perhaps not yours either. </p>
<p>There are glimpses of what Brooks sees in Winton’s work in the chapter Words, Just Words. Here she considers Winton’s narrators in relation to his own narrative voice. She reveals some insights into his technique, which she can see because she too is an author:</p>
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<p>Somehow, this boy of scant vocabulary [Jaxie Claxton in The Shepherd’s Hut] must carry a first-person narrative up some of the sheerest cliffs of the soul. To do it, Winton has to suppress his own rich troves of language, deny himself sentences of syntactical perfection, but inch his way up those treacherous walls anyway. It’s summitting Everest without an oxygen tank. And he makes it work.</p>
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<p>It is clear that Brooks appreciates Winton’s astonishing body of writing. She admires its impact and technique and breadth. It is an awe-inspiring career. Brooks’s work is also awe-inspiring. She has achieved amazing success in Australia and internationally. To be a writer in Australia is difficult. To be a successful writer is even more difficult, and I could say the same for being an academic in this field. And yet Brooks is compelled to observe that Winton had a “head start” on her because he began publishing when he was 21. Authorship is an art, not a competition. </p>
<p>Book reviews are sometimes the domain of journalists with sharp instruments they want to plunge into the hearts of authors, but I really wanted to like this work. I wanted to see the writer’s work anew. I wanted to devour it with enthusiasm, as I did Winton’s Breath and Brooks’s The Year of Wonders. But it alienated me very swiftly. Every time I thought it was back on track, it renewed the charge.</p>
<p>It would have been better without the axe. Brooks offers some shiny insights but, in the words of a great writer (from an unnamed source): “if it’s not about love, if it’s not about mercy, if it’s not about kindness, if it’s not about liberation, then I’m just not that interested”.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/195441/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Donna Mazza 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 her essay on the work of Tim Winton, Geraldine Brooks is looking for a punch-up with academics and critics.Donna Mazza, Associate professor, Edith Cowan UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1170012019-05-13T06:57:41Z2019-05-13T06:57:41ZIn Cloudstreet, nostalgia all too easily redeems Australia’s colonial past<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/274006/original/file-20190513-183089-ktkur4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Scott Sheridan and Natasha Herbert in Cloudstreet, a new production of the stage adaptation of Tim Winton's literary epic.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Pia Johnson</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>Review: Cloudstreet, Malthouse Theatre</em></p>
<p>Set in a rambling and ageing house haunted by a colonial past, <a href="https://malthousetheatre.com.au/whats-on/cloudstreet?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIgbbZoMiX4gIVAiUrCh2gzQ2SEAAYASAAEgLlPfD_BwE">Cloudstreet</a> is a theatrical adaption of Tim Winton’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/343881.Cloudstreet?from_search=true">1991 novel</a> of the same title. </p>
<p>Written by Nick Enright and Justin Monjo – and first performed in 1998, now directed by Matthew Lutton – the play is a faithful rendering of Winton’s modern literary epic. It follows the lives of two working-class families, the Lambs and the Pickles, as they attempt to eke out a living in the wake of the depression, while contending with a series of personal tragedies and triumphs. </p>
<p>The play roughly covers the period between the late 1940s to the 1960s, as the Pickles and Lamb children move into adulthood. Themes of death and rebirth abound. The house on Cloudstreet is restless – it heaves, sighs, and curses while Perth’s Swan River whispers the story of a submerged past. </p>
<p>Cloudstreet begins with a narrator figure (played by Noongar actor Ian Michael) who tells the house’s backstory. As in the novel, number one Cloudstreet was once a mission for young Indigenous girls, who were used as indentured servants by a land-owning woman and self-proclaimed paragon of Christian virtue. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/274005/original/file-20190513-183077-fwirh5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/274005/original/file-20190513-183077-fwirh5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/274005/original/file-20190513-183077-fwirh5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/274005/original/file-20190513-183077-fwirh5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/274005/original/file-20190513-183077-fwirh5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/274005/original/file-20190513-183077-fwirh5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/274005/original/file-20190513-183077-fwirh5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/274005/original/file-20190513-183077-fwirh5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Guy Simon and Ian Michael in Cloudstreet.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Pia Johnson</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The young Indigenous captives perished in the house along with its cruel mistress. One of the mission’s girls returns as an embodied presence on the stage, at times interrupting the dramatic time of the play to offer its main characters pieces of wisdom or provide exposition on plot. </p>
<p>The house and its surrounds are haunted by the past: the walls and foundation are soaked with the traumatised presences of its previous occupants. The outline of two figures whom we assume are the souls of the departed are literally etched in black charcoal onto the back wall. </p>
<h2>Cheery nostalgia</h2>
<p>Yet the play is unapologetically nostalgic and tips its hat to vaudeville, with larger than life delivery of dialogue, course humour, and a strong embrace of working-class Australian vernacular. Overtones of cheery nostalgia intersect with moments of magical-horror or surrealism – these arrive in the form of theatre’s equivalent to the horror genre’s jump scare. </p>
<p>Matthew Lutton’s directorial hand is palpable, delivering haunting atmospherics sustained and supported by a rich, often unsettling soundscape (J. David Franzke). The set-design (Zoë Atkinson), is reminiscent of a modernist style, with the set doubling as both the outdoors and the inside of the house. The walls of the house are not static – they grind as they protrude and retract, giving the impression the audience is moving in and out of a secret crypt.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/274007/original/file-20190513-183080-exz81u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/274007/original/file-20190513-183080-exz81u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/274007/original/file-20190513-183080-exz81u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/274007/original/file-20190513-183080-exz81u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/274007/original/file-20190513-183080-exz81u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/274007/original/file-20190513-183080-exz81u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/274007/original/file-20190513-183080-exz81u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/274007/original/file-20190513-183080-exz81u.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">The house on Cloudstreet is haunted by its past.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Pia Johnson</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Dramatic action unfolds over four acts, with the first depicting the near drowning of Fish Lamb (Benjamin Oakes), who is left permanently altered. Oakes inhabits the character of Fish Lamb with aplomb, drawing out the role’s subtleties and enthusiasm. </p>
<p>We also see the fraught relationship between teenager Rose Pickles (Brenna Harding) and her glamourous, listless and alcoholic mother Dolly (Natasha Herbert). Sam Pickles (Bert LaBonté), a kind but errant gambler, loses his livelihood after a trawling accident claims his hand. </p>
<p>In the second and third act, the Lambs and Pickles converge at the house on Cloudstreet, an eyesore bequeathed to Sam Pickles by a publican relative. They are polar opposites: Oriel Lamb’s (Alison Whyte) industriousness sees the Lambs opening up shop on their side of the house, a hive of entrepreneurial activity, while Dolly Pickles drinks, smokes and languishes on the other side. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/274002/original/file-20190513-183109-ovbk9h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/274002/original/file-20190513-183109-ovbk9h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/274002/original/file-20190513-183109-ovbk9h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/274002/original/file-20190513-183109-ovbk9h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/274002/original/file-20190513-183109-ovbk9h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/274002/original/file-20190513-183109-ovbk9h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/274002/original/file-20190513-183109-ovbk9h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/274002/original/file-20190513-183109-ovbk9h.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">Bert LaBonté as Sam Pickles and Natasha Herbert as Dolly Pickles in Cloudstreet. The Pickles and the Lambs are polar opposites.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Pia Johnson</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The actors deliver nuanced performances despite the demands placed upon vocal style and delivery when playing to the Merlyn Theatre’s large auditorium. Their performances are energetic, with members of the ensemble cast shifting convincingly across multiple small roles for the duration of the play. </p>
<p>In the third and fourth act, a serial killer stalks the town and its unwitting inhabitants, leaving a swathe of dead in his wake. The terror of the unknown gunman merges with the supernatural horror embedded in the history-soaked mortar of the house; while the perilous water of the Swan River beckons Fish Lamb to return to it.</p>
<p>Fish’s near drowning left him open to fits of revelry and panic; he hears the calls of the dead from Cloudstreet’s walls; and longs to return to his watery grave in which a subterranean landscape of sky and stars unfold.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/274010/original/file-20190513-183089-i76im5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/274010/original/file-20190513-183089-i76im5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/274010/original/file-20190513-183089-i76im5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/274010/original/file-20190513-183089-i76im5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/274010/original/file-20190513-183089-i76im5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/274010/original/file-20190513-183089-i76im5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/274010/original/file-20190513-183089-i76im5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/274010/original/file-20190513-183089-i76im5.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">Benjamin Oakes, Guy Simon and Ian Michael in Cloudstreet. The Swan River plays a key role in the story.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Pia Johnson</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The play’s stunning final image is elemental and cathartic, promising to wash away the colonial hauntings of the past, which leaves us to contemplate our own position in an Australian landscape beset by a continuing history of settler colonial violence. </p>
<p>However, relegating Indigenous presence to the margins of plot or to the ghostly realm is a major sticking point in Cloudstreet and has been critiqued before. This narrative device is advanced in both the novel and its theatrical adaptation. The Indigenous characters in the play remain spectral and/or peripheral – artificially grafted to the lives of the Lambs and Pickles as counterpoint. </p>
<p>While diverse casting in the new production attempts to mitigate this literary settler trope, it would require a deeper intervention in the writing itself to fully succeed. Pathos blends with humour to produce a visually arresting production, by turns raucous and tragic, but its nostalgia dovetails all too easily with a redemptive vision of Australia’s past.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>Cloudstreet is on at the Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne until June 16.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/117001/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sandra D'urso 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>A new production of Cloudstreet - the play adapted from Tim Winton’s literary epic - is visually arresting. But despite a diverse cast, Indigenous characters remain spectral and peripheral.Sandra D'urso, Researcher, The Australian Centre, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1117352019-03-03T19:04:42Z2019-03-03T19:04:42ZWhy are Australian authors obsessed with killing off kangaroos?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/261391/original/file-20190228-106350-pht809.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">George Stubbs, 'The Kongouro from New Holland' (1772), oil painting, detail of head. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Kongouro_from_New_Holland_by_George_Stubbs_(detail_of_head).jpg">Ashley Van Haeften/Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Kangaroos are the most visible of Australia’s unique animals, but despite their charm and national icon status, Australian writers perpetually kill them off.</p>
<p>A kangaroo appears struggling in a rabbit trap, doomed and dying in Charlotte Wood’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25876358-the-natural-way-of-things?from_search=true">The Natural Way of Things</a>, while Tim Winton has one killed on the road, dissected and fed to dogs in <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2176735.Breath?from_search=true">Breath</a>. These are just two of many Australian authors who have represented the kangaroo as a victim.</p>
<p>Kangaroos were a creature of wonder for early European explorers such as Dampier and Banks, but it didn’t take long for their public image to descend to that of a pest. Early settlers considered them competition, nibbling all the best pasture quicker than their sheep and cows, and they soon took up arms against the bounding menace.</p>
<p>The wild kangaroo population of Australia is still <a href="http://www.environment.gov.au/biodiversity/wildlife-trade/commercial/management-plans">commercially slaughtered</a> for dog food. In New South Wales, landholders and volunteers can be simply <a href="https://www.dpi.nsw.gov.au/hunting/volunteer-non-commercial-kangaroo-shooting">licensed</a> to kill them for reasons of damage control, and some parts of Western Australia have an <a href="https://www.ssaawa.org.au/faq/what-can-you-hunt-in-wa">open permit system</a> for non-commercial shooting. On any given day, there are usually several being mashed into the blue metal of highways, surrounded by crows and in various states of decomposition. </p>
<p>The expendable nature of the kangaroo may be a widely held view in Australia, but it’s a bitter irony that the creature which defines us to the rest of the world is perpetually under siege, in life and in literature.</p>
<h2>Fiction’s dead roos</h2>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/259666/original/file-20190219-121735-uwjqmg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/259666/original/file-20190219-121735-uwjqmg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/259666/original/file-20190219-121735-uwjqmg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=916&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/259666/original/file-20190219-121735-uwjqmg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=916&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/259666/original/file-20190219-121735-uwjqmg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=916&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/259666/original/file-20190219-121735-uwjqmg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1152&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/259666/original/file-20190219-121735-uwjqmg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1152&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/259666/original/file-20190219-121735-uwjqmg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1152&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Coming Rain by Stephen Daisley (2015).</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24897241-coming-rain?from_search=true">Goodreads</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In Stephen Daisley’s 2016 novel <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24897241-coming-rain?from_search=true">Coming Rain</a>, the author kills off a kangaroo with “a great thump” against the side of a truck, giving a gruesome description of the sweetening of the tail for stew. </p>
<p>The live joey almost has its head smashed against a tree but, owing to its “cuteness” it becomes a pet, wearing a straw hat. The stereotype of the cute joey is alive and well in children’s fiction too, but in adult fiction the kangaroo is dead.</p>
<p>In Tim Winton’s Breath, narrator Pikelet comes across surf guru, Sando, who has hit a kangaroo with his Kombi ute. Sando finishes it off with the jack handle from the car, pounded a couple of times into its head. His response to this act is very matter-of-fact: “This is what happens. And it isn’t lovely.” </p>
<p>Sando drags the “roadkill” into the tray of his ute and takes it home to butcher it. He is prepared for this, with a meat hook hanging from a tree, and he skins and guts the kangaroo. Pikelet observes this with some emotional discomfort, “shrinking from him a little” but accepts the flourbag of meat to take home to his parents who “wouldn’t eat roo meat in a million years”. He “hoiks” the meat into the bushes on the ride home. </p>
<p>Charlotte Wood considers the horror of roadkill in <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6974785-the-children?ac=1&from_search=true">The Children</a>, where Australian animals are killed by passing traffic and compared to contaminated “cushions”. Wood also kills a kangaroo (and a lot of rabbits) in The Natural Way of Things. Central character Yolanda snares a “large grey kangaroo” in a rabbit trap and finds it still alive:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Vainly, the kangaroo shifts and scuffles again. Then it lowers its head and lengthens its mighty neck, black eyes fixed on them, and lets out three long, hoarse snarls. Its snout fattens, nostrils flared. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Fearful of the sharp claws on its “delicate forefeet” they sit beside it, wondering how to set it free and instead bring it water and leave it to die slowly.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/259669/original/file-20190219-121744-1ra1aej.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/259669/original/file-20190219-121744-1ra1aej.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/259669/original/file-20190219-121744-1ra1aej.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=908&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/259669/original/file-20190219-121744-1ra1aej.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=908&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/259669/original/file-20190219-121744-1ra1aej.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=908&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/259669/original/file-20190219-121744-1ra1aej.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1141&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/259669/original/file-20190219-121744-1ra1aej.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1141&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/259669/original/file-20190219-121744-1ra1aej.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1141&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">To the Islands by Randolph Stow (1958).</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12906296-to-the-islands">Goodreads</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The image of the kangaroo is linked to death through earlier works from Australian authors too. The iconic 1940 poem, <a href="https://mypoeticside.com/poets/eve-langley-poems">Native-Born </a>by Eve Langley presents a detailed account of a dead kangaroo, while Randolph Stow’s 1958 novel <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5635849-to-the-islands?ac=1&from_search=true">To the Islands</a> features kangaroos and wallabies being shot and eaten.</p>
<p>Australian fiction is, so often, deeply entangled with nature. Anxiety around the bush, as described in D.H. Lawrence’s novel <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41722587-kangaroo">Kangaroo</a> back in the 1920s, is a feature of settler Australian fiction, tied together with violence, trauma and a sense of the uncanny. </p>
<p>Docile and violent all at once, the watchful gaze and twitching ears of kangaroos are, perhaps, reminders of that uneasiness the settlers felt. </p>
<p>The fact that Australian literature seems intent on killing off this national icon is deeply disturbing – but it is also deeply ingrained.</p>
<p>In contrast with kangaroos, thylacines are well and truly alive in Australian literature despite being extinct since 1936. They appear in over 250 works listed in the <a href="https://www.austlit.edu.au/">AustLit</a> database of Australian literature, including 18 novels since 1988.</p>
<p>Among these are Julia Leigh’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1398605.The_Hunter?from_search=true">The Hunter</a>, Sonya Hartnett’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/289515.Stripes_of_the_Sidestep_Wolf?from_search=true">Stripes of the Sidestep Wolf</a> and Louis Nowra’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17870105-into-that-forest?ac=1&from_search=true">Into That Forest</a>, as well as children’s fiction, drama, film, short fiction and poetry. These thylacines often meet with violent ends, but their aliveness in fiction is astounding compared to the kangaroo.</p>
<p>Contemporary Australia is sentimental about the thylacine as a strange creature lost because of “ignorance”. They are now a thing of wonder, destroyed by misguided colonial settlers who are long gone. But if they weren’t extinct, would we treat them any better? Would we protect them? Often that is the point writers are trying to make by invoking the extinct “tiger” in the first place.</p>
<p>Our relationship with kangaroos (and thylacines), both in fiction and in reality, is symptomatic of what Stow called our “bitter heritage”. So perhaps it is unsurprising, given the violence of colonisation, that it has had (and is still having) an impact on the way writers represent the Australian landscape and all who inhabit it.</p>
<p><em>This article is based on research published in a forthcoming article for <a href="https://www.wsupress.wayne.edu/journals/detail/antipodes-0">Antipodes</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/111735/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Donna Mazza 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>Kangaroos are a national icon, but Australian authors seem determined to kill them off.Donna Mazza, Senior Lecturer in Creative Arts, Edith Cowan UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1080832018-12-27T19:03:56Z2018-12-27T19:03:56ZTen great Australian beach reads set at the beach<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/251661/original/file-20181219-45419-1xarcf5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The beach is a common setting for Australian novels, which often capture its darker side.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">boxer_bob/flickr</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Australians flock to the beach over the summer holidays: Bondi alone had <a href="https://www.destinationnsw.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/bondi-visitor-profile-ye-march-2018.pdf?x15361">2.9 million visitors in 2017 – 2018</a>. But while tourism campaigns often portray the beach as an idyllic, isolated haven, many of our beach stories depict it as a darker, more crowded and complex place. </p>
<p>Here are ten Australian beach stories (in no particular order) worth reading this summer.</p>
<h2>Floundering by Romy Ash</h2>
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<p>Romy Ash’s debut novel <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13491444-floundering?from_search=true">Floundering</a>, shortlisted for the 2013 Miles Franklin award, is a captivating, sometimes chilling story of two young boys who are taken, without warning, by their mother to a beachside caravan park.</p>
<p>Left to their own devices, the boys must make the most of their time by the beach without anything but their school bags and uniforms. </p>
<p>The un-named regional beach in this novel is uncomfortable, “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/australia-culture-blog/2013/jun/14/miles-franklin-literary-award-2013">a location of risk and danger</a>” as author Robert Drewe once described it, and sometimes reveals the worst ways in which nature and humanity meet. It’s a refuge for people looking to escape from city life, a stark comparison to more urbanised beaches.</p>
<h2>Puberty Blues by Kathy Lette and Gabrielle Carey</h2>
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<p>When I tell people that I research the Australian beach, often their first response is to ask if I’ve watched Puberty Blues. Perhaps Australia’s most iconic beach text, the book (first published in 1979) is the story of two friends growing up in beachside suburbs of Sydney. It was adapted for film by Bruce Beresford in 1981.</p>
<p>Both the book and film, with their characteristic colloquialisms and Australian slang, capture a sense of Australian coastal identity while revealing uncomfortable truths about gender, sex, and drugs for the teenagers they depict.</p>
<p>Australian stories about the beach are often male-centred and written by men. <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/779126.Puberty_Blues?from_search=true">Puberty Blues</a> is an important contribution to beach literature because of Debbie and Sue, its female protagonists, and their perspectives on a blokey world.</p>
<h2>Time’s Long Ruin by Stephen Orr</h2>
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<p>In 1966, the three Beaumont children disappeared from Glenelg Beach near Adelaide. They were last seen in the company of a tall, blond man. Despite continued searching, <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-01-23/development-beaumont-children-case-best-lead-ever/9351666">even earlier this year</a>, they have never been found.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7879997-time-s-long-ruin?from_search=true">Time’s Long Ruin</a> (2010) is a fictionalised account of the disappearance of three children as told through the eyes of their young neighbour. Loosely based on the Beaumont story, Orr captures the dread of the aftermath for those left behind who knew and loved the children, the challenge of dealing with false leads and unreliable information, and the growing realisation that they will likely never be found.</p>
<p>The case of the Beaumont children had an enormous impact on Australian culture. My mother, who was a young girl when they disappeared, still recalls how her parents would worry about her momentarily being out of sight at the beach at this time.</p>
<h2>Breath by Tim Winton</h2>
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<p><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2176735.Breath?from_search=true">Breath</a>, published in 2008, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/jun/18/tim-winton-miles-franklin-award">earned Tim Winton his fourth Miles Franklin award</a> and was recently <a href="https://youtu.be/-DY7mxrRWpY">adapted into a film</a>, directed by and starring Simon Baker. </p>
<p>On the surface, this novel is about surfing. But it asks deep questions about masculinity, and boys’ attitudes towards sex, while capturing the feel of Australian coastal life in the 1970s.</p>
<p>Winton’s writings often engage with the ocean, the coast, and the beach – usually in West Australia, where he lives. His <a href="http://axonjournal.com.au/issue-15/coastal-memoir">memoirs have revealed his love for the coastal landscape</a>. As he writes in Land’s Edge (1993): “There is nowhere else I’d rather be, nothing else I’d rather be doing. I am at the beach looking west with the continent behind me as the sun tracks down to the sea. I have my bearings”.</p>
<h2>The Empty Beach by Peter Corris</h2>
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<p><a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-08-30/peter-corris-author-of-cliff-hardy-novels-dies/10183558">Peter Corris died in August</a>, after publishing 102 novels. <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7304462-the-empty-beach?from_search=true">The Empty Beach</a> (1983) was released early in his career and is the fourth novel featuring the private investigator Cliff Hardy - a homegrown, hard-boiled detective, firmly located in Sydney. It was <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/empty-beaches-in-search-of-australias-fictional-private-eyes/#!">adapted for film</a> in 1985.</p>
<p>In this book, Hardy is investigating the disappearance of John Singer, missing and presumed dead. He begins his probe in the rough, working class Bondi of the early 1980s. Corris captures Bondi Beach through the eyes of his protagonist, depicting it as a seedy extension of the city. </p>
<p>Hassled by junkies, threatened by mobsters; Hardy spends much of the novel embroiled in the corrupt underbelly of Sydney’s criminal kingpins, never far from the now infamous shoreline. </p>
<h2>The True Colour of the Sea, by Robert Drewe</h2>
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<p>Having lived in many coastal spots across the country, including Perth, Sydney, and Byron Bay, Robert Drewe’s stories regularly capture that very familiar, domestic sense of a beachside life.</p>
<p>Drewe’s The Bodysurfers (1987), a collection of short stories, became a bestseller.</p>
<p>His memoirs and short stories are all infused by the beach landscape, and this latest collection is no different. </p>
<p>As the narrator writes in Dr Pacific, the opening story in his new collection:
“One thing’s for sure – it’s my love of the ocean that keeps me going. You know what I call the ocean? Dr Pacific. All I need to keep me fit and healthy is my daily consultation with Dr Pacific.”</p>
<h2>Atomic City by Sally Breen</h2>
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<p>Sally Breen lives and works on the Gold Coast, and that strip of high density development on the beach works its way into much of her writing. </p>
<p>With its high rise skyline under a big sky, Surfers Paradise has been called a “<a href="https://www.couriermail.com.au/ipad/a-stately-pleasure-dome-in-paradise/news-story/6c706268e4891a401920b386ee8e8aec?sv=df1504d13cf9d26df36c048487c83557">pleasure dome</a>” by Frank Moorhouse. But <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18040711-atomic-city?from_search=true">Atomic City</a> (published in 2013), set largely in the lofty apartment buildings and businesses that abut, and look out on, the beach, captures perfectly the grift and graft of this place.</p>
<p>Jade arrives on the Gold Coast to make herself over and get rich. Together with shady croupier “The Dealer” this is a beach tale of cons, scams and identity theft.</p>
<h2>Not Meeting Mr Right by Anita Heiss</h2>
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<p>Prominent Australian Indigenous author Anita Heiss straddles both fiction and non-fiction, with her work often grounded in ideas around Indigenous identity. Her series of “chick lit” novels includes <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6662814-not-meeting-mr-right?from_search=true">Not Meeting Mr Right</a> (first published in 2007).</p>
<p>In the novel, Alice lives beachside in Coogee and regularly walks the coastal path between it and Bondi. A proudly single, Indigenous woman, Alice has a change of heart about marriage and decides to get serious about settling down - which means embarking on the rocky road towards finding love. In contrast to the challenges - including racism - she encounters along the way, the beach is a comfortably ordinary presence in this novel. However, Heiss also parodied the white Australian beach experience in an earlier book Sacred Cows (1996).</p>
<h2>After January by Nick Earls</h2>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/250162/original/file-20181212-76971-gpj476.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/250162/original/file-20181212-76971-gpj476.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/250162/original/file-20181212-76971-gpj476.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=920&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/250162/original/file-20181212-76971-gpj476.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=920&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/250162/original/file-20181212-76971-gpj476.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=920&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/250162/original/file-20181212-76971-gpj476.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1156&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/250162/original/file-20181212-76971-gpj476.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1156&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/250162/original/file-20181212-76971-gpj476.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1156&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>If you grew up in Brisbane when I did, there was a high chance you were reading a Nick Earls novel or <a href="https://archive.laboite.com.au/2000/after-january">seeing one adapted into a play</a>. <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/757110.After_January?from_search=true">After January</a> (first published in 1996) is one of Earls’ first works for young adult readers, and is set in the long break after finishing high school.</p>
<p>Alex is on holidays at Caloundra in his family’s beach house, a teenage boy uncomfortable in his skin but comfortable in the ocean. Although now more than 20 years old, this story still captures the uncertainty of burgeoning adulthood and the comfort the ocean can bring.</p>
<h2>Bluebottle by Belinda Castles</h2>
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<p>For many Australians, the beach can be wrapped up in childhood memory. These memories can blend and blur. In my mind, my summers spent at the beach with my grandparents were never-ending, from the moment school finished until the day before I was set to return. In reality, we spent some time there, often weekends, and certainly never the entire school holidays. </p>
<p>Belinda Castles’ <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39675739-bluebottle?from_search=true">Bluebottle </a> tells the story of the Bright family, and is filled with that uncomfortable tension that arises when we realise memory is fallible. Siblings Jack and Lou recount key moments from their childhood, starting with the disappearance of a local school girl and their father’s unpredictable purchase of a beachside property in Bilgola, Sydney. However, they learn that growing older can change perspectives on the past and, like the beach, it can be hard to tell what’s under the surface while the waves distort our view.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/108083/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Elizabeth Ellison 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>While tourism campaigns often portray the beach as an idyllic, isolated haven, many of our beach stories depict it as a darker, more complex place. Here are ten worth reading.Elizabeth Ellison, Lecturer in Creative Industries, CQUniversity AustraliaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/944862018-04-08T19:51:35Z2018-04-08T19:51:35ZTim Winton’s answer to toxic masculinity: god?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/213358/original/file-20180405-189821-1r2ogop.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Tim Winton sets his latest novel, The Shepherd's Hut, in the salt lakes of Western Australia. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock.com</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Tim Winton’s new novel, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36742671-the-shepherd-s-hut">The Shepherd’s Hut</a>, is a bit of a conundrum. True, it exhibits many of the well-known traits of Winton’s earlier works: representations of hurting men, bruised women; working-class identity; high lyricism and deeply vernacular dialogue intertwined; a sense of place as much more than simply landscape, but a living, breathing reality; a brooding on the experience of home, and a lack of belonging. </p>
<p>And like Winton’s earlier works, there is both tight narrative control and a contemplative probing: of sin, death, mercy, love, longing, responsibility and sacrifice. But in this novel these traits are exhibited in extreme forms, raising a number of extra challenges for readers.</p>
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<p>For example, what will Australian, let alone international, readers of Winton’s work make of the internal monologue of a small, skateboarding, fist-first young man of 17, introduced to us through his defiant internal monologue?</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Say I hit your number, called you up, you’d wonder what the fuck, every one of youse, and your mouth’d go dry. Maybe you’re just some stranger I pocket-dialled. Or one of them shitheads from school I could look for. Any of youse heard my voice now you’d think it was weather. Or a bird screaming. You’d be sweating sand. Like I’m the end of the world.</p>
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<p>In Winton’s classical movement between working-class vernacular and poetic prose, we meet a boy in extreme circumstances, a rebellious problem-child who lashes out against the world in direct proportion to the ways he has been maltreated by another man, his father. The whole world of Jaxie Clackton is one of loss and pain and anger, and he merely replicates what he has experienced from his father – “Captain Wankbag”, “that bucket of dog sick”, “the bastard” – becoming in turn this “hardarse the kids run clear of all over the shire”.</p>
<p>Winton has given us many iconic characters – mainly men and boys – who are wounded, lost, vulnerable: Mort Flack from <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/270794.That_Eye_the_Sky?ac=1&from_search=true">That Eye the Sky</a>, Fish and Quick Lamb in <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/343881.Cloudstreet?from_search=true">Cloudstreet</a>, Pikelet in <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2176735.Breath?ac=1&from_search=true">Breath</a>, Tom Keely and Kai in <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17788580-eyrie?ac=1&from_search=true">Eyrie</a>, Henry Warburton, Fred Scully, Sam Pickle, Luther Fox, Vic Lang and more. </p>
<p>What lies beneath Winton’s returning again and again to feckless, hurt, sometimes violent and abusive, self-loathing male characters? Some critics don’t like Winton’s focus on males at the expense of the female characters. It’s true, the men are central, but the women are there too, variously picking up the pieces, suffering, being strong: Georgie Jutland in <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35306.Dirt_Music?ac=1&from_search=true">Dirt Music</a>, Eva in Breath, Keely’s mum Doris and Gemma Black in Eyrie. But what to make of all these wounded boys and men?</p>
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<p>The Shepherd’s Hut is Winton writ large, in theological symbolism and in narrative drive. A continuing interest in theology has informed Winton’s work, though few of his characters would call it this. Winton himself might demur (he has said he has <a href="http://www.watoday.com.au/good-weekend/less-than-lovely-what-tim-winton-learnt-about-today-s-men-while-surfing-20180307-p4z38l.html">never given up his own faith</a>). But what else is it when an ex-priest – or possibly still ordained – living austerely and alone in an abandoned shepherd’s hut, helps nurture in Jaxie Clackton some sense of self-value, responsibility and even awe, in the middle of his self-loathing and feral physicality? </p>
<p>Winton’s theology is no tame thing. It’s made up of abjection, of blood and shit and wounds; and of a deeply awed sense of the created world and of human creatureliness. Just before the closing section of the narrative, the old priest insists on taking Jaxie out to the salt lake to watch the moon rise. Jaxie, as usual, is impatient, jumpy, cynical. But he is also open to – longing for – something larger than himself. </p>
<p>The old man, talking a lot as usual, tutors Jaxie on time and mortality:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>… Another month gone, a reminder every cycle that your moment is waning. No wonder it catches in a little fella’s chest when he sees it. Mebbe lunatics are men who’ve remembered they’re just men, not angels. <br></p>
<p>Jesus, I said. That’s what you come out to see the moon for, to remember you’re gunna die?<br></p>
<p>No, he said. To remember I am a creature, not a ghost. I am, for all my sins, the thing itself, not just the idea. Ah, look at that moon. Still rising, rising. Like the wafer. Forever out of reach. When I close my eyes it burns in my head. And Jaxie, how I wish that afterglow would light my way. To sleep. To peace.<br></p>
<p>So, I said after a bit. Who does a priest confess to?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>What Jaxie learns from the old priest, Fintan – a renegade Jaxie feels like hitting half the time, but with whom he learns to share meals and chores and theology – is not so much in the words, but in the fact that he is addressing Jaxie, trusting him, needing him. What Jaxie is and what he will do are of utmost importance to the old man. He can tell the boy, truthfully, that he is in awe of him.</p>
<p>The narrative arc of the novel is met, perfectly, by its theological freight. Fintan the derelict priest does not betray Jaxie to those hunting him, but protects and saves him. When the end comes and the old man is cruelly, violently interrogated, it is in terms of Jaxie’s whereabouts. Watching from the woods, in hiding, Jaxie hears:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Where was I?<br></p>
<p>Who was I?<br></p>
<p>What was I?<br></p>
<p>… And for a long time Fintan took it just like that. Giving them nothing. And it was horrible and incredible and it all piled up on me, squashing me in, forcing me down, until something cracked and all in one moment it was like everything landed. All the birds landed. The sunlight landed. The song landed. All the decent things in him landed. On me. On my head. And I knew where I was, and who I was, and what I was. Yes, what I am. And it was just like he said. What I laughed at him for. It was like the sun and moon going through me. I was charged …</p>
</blockquote>
<p>What the old man gives to Jaxie is not only his physical life, but the gift of self-recognition and self-esteem. In Winton’s earthed theology, in The Shepherd’s Hut, he presents us with a palpable ritual, the movement of Jaxie’s boyhood into manhood. There is a fathering that takes place, a making of home, a sacramentalizing of Jaxie’s self-worth. The boy begins to recognise himself as a creature in equal relationship with another human being, with responsibility toward that other, and to the created world of birds and sunlight and song and sun and moon. Not just the little thug who needed to hit out.</p>
<p>On his national book tour to promote The Shepherd’s Hut, Winton has spoken of an <a href="http://www.watoday.com.au/good-weekend/less-than-lovely-what-tim-winton-learnt-about-today-s-men-while-surfing-20180307-p4z38l.html">Australian culture of toxic masculinity</a>, the creating of boys and men with no sense of purpose or meaning, no self-worth, no rituals to honour the movement of boys into manhood. The novel is a symbolic staging of this movement, in extremis. </p>
<p>It is, arguably, a highly challenging read, stripping back middle-class niceties. It contains lots of “cunts” and “fucks”; it wallows in the palpable teenage lust of one lonely boy longing for his distant cousin and lover, Lee, the only one who “gets him”; it describes in close detail the smells and habits and physical realities of a sweaty boy and a whiskery old man.</p>
<p>Whether the novel’s representation of a toughened, bung-eyed, sausage-fingered working-class boy, and of his internal voice, will be considered “authentic” is yet to be tested in the court of readers. But for this reader, Winton writes deeply and convincingly into the psyche and the creaturely realities of one such boy, monstered and wounded, wallowing in hatred, who learns new possibilities, a way of being open to hope.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>Lyn McCredden is the author of <a href="http://purl.library.usyd.edu.au/sup/fictionoftimwinton">The Fiction of Tim Winton: Earthed and Sacred</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/94486/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Lyn McCredden receives funding from The Australian Research Council.</span></em></p>Tim Winton’s latest novel, The Shepherd’s Hut, pushes the author’s classic themes to the extreme.Lyn McCredden, Personal Chair, Literary Studies, Deakin UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/734402017-07-20T01:36:22Z2017-07-20T01:36:22ZRefuge in a harsh landscape – Australian novels and our changing relationship to the bush<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/167636/original/file-20170503-4135-gufh31.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Summer afternoon, Templestowe by Louis Buvelot, 1866. The bush was commonly seen by 19th-century writers as a place of despair.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Louis_Buvelot_-_Summer_afternoon,_Templestowe_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In 1790, Watkin Tench, the first officer with the First Fleet and a member of the fledgling British colony, stood on what we now know to be “The Heads” of Sydney, hungry and <a href="http://setis.library.usyd.edu.au/ozlit/pdf/p00044.pdf">pining for news of England</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Here on the summit of the hill, every morning from daylight until sun sunk, did we sweep the horizon in hope of seeing a sail. At every fleeting speck which arose from the bosom of the sea, the heart pounded and a telescope lifted to the eye…</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Tench’s palpable yearning for the mother country is an early account of British despair upon first settlement in Australia. One hundred years later, the sentiment remained. Many settlers were still unhappy with their surrounds, as evidenced in Edward Dyson’s musings in his 1898 short story <a href="http://www.telelib.com/authors/D/DysonEdward/prose/belowontop/belowontop24.html">The Conquering Bush</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The bush is sad, heavy, desparing; delightful for a month, perhaps, but terrible for a year.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In Barbara Baynton’s works, meanwhile, tales of harsh female experiences were set against even harsher Australian landscapes, devoid of respite or pleasure. In her 1896 short story <a href="http://resources.mhs.vic.edu.au/creating/downloads/ChosenVessel.pdf">The Chosen Vessel</a>, a young wife and mother left alone in her bush home is stalked, raped and murdered by a swagman:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>More than once she thought of taking her baby and going to her husband.
But in the past, when she had dared to speak of the dangers to which
her loneliness exposed her, he had taunted and sneered at her.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>For over 200 years, the white sentiment of desolation and anxiety about this “untamed” land has pervaded much of Australian literature. Children went missing, men went mad, and women suffered what writer Henry Lawson called the “maddening sameness” in <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4338844-the-drover-s-wife-and-other-stories">The Drover’s Wife and Others Stories</a>. “Oh, if only I could go away from the bush!” wails Lawson’s central character in <a href="http://www.telelib.com/authors/L/LawsonHenry/prose/overthesliprail/selectorsdaughter1.html">The Selector’s Daughter</a>. </p>
<h2>Desolate refuge</h2>
<p>The works of these early writers did much to reveal the challenging realities of the bush. Those eking out an existence in a land where soil and weather disagreed with European sensibilities and practices were met with hard work. And what a place to work! There was little room for bucolic tranquillity in a land of drought, flood and searing heat.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/164986/original/image-20170412-26736-bqloqc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/164986/original/image-20170412-26736-bqloqc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=915&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/164986/original/image-20170412-26736-bqloqc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=915&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/164986/original/image-20170412-26736-bqloqc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=915&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/164986/original/image-20170412-26736-bqloqc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1150&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/164986/original/image-20170412-26736-bqloqc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1150&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/164986/original/image-20170412-26736-bqloqc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1150&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">Tim Winton’s Dirt Music.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Picador</span></span>
</figcaption>
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<p>But, in the 21st century, there has been a change in how Australians read and write about the bush. Author and ecologist Tim Flannery, for one, <a href="http://www.aawp.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Hickey-2.pdf">urged</a> his fellow country men and women to “develop deep, sustaining roots in the land” in his address as Australian of the Year in 2002 – which is what many of our contemporary writers seek to do. Unlike their predecessors, they’re increasingly likely to write about the bush as a destination for escape, rather than a place from which to flee. </p>
<p>Author Tim Winton’s <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35306.Dirt_Music">Dirt Music</a> does exactly that, as told through the tribulations of protagonist Luther Fox. After being forced out of his small south-west Australian town White Point for the crime of theft, he does not flee to the city; instead he journeys to a more remote region: the Kimberley.</p>
<p>Lost, injured and starving, Fox does not curse the land for his fate. Rather, he accepts his minor place in the universe and begins to come to terms with his family history through listening to and appreciating the powerful land:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>He knows he lives and that the world lives in him. And for him and because of him. Because and despite and regardless of him. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Others, like Peter Temple in the <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1134743.The_Broken_Shore">The Broken Shore</a>, highlight the beauteous potential of working with the land, as opposed to fighting it.</p>
<p>When the novel’s protagonist, Joe Cashin, leaves the city to return to his home town on the cold, south-west coast of Victoria, he does so a shattered man. With only the battering winds, shrieking cold and his dogs as company, Joe attempts to rebuild the home of his ancestors. He does not curse the sea for the death of his father or bemoan the land or its conditions. Rather, he finds a way to live in it alongside the people he grew up with:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Cashin walked around the hill, into the wind from the sea. It was cold, late autumn, last glowing leaves clinging to the liquid ambers and maples his great-grandfather’s brother had planted, their surrender close. He loved this time, the morning stillness…</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Other authors such as Robert Drewe, Kate Grenville, Cate Kennedy, Murray Bail and Jenny Spence also create plots that entail leaving the city and finding refuge and peace in the Australian bush. This is a markedly different trajectory from that of Lawson’s The Drover’s Wife or even the doomed schoolgirls in Joan Lindsay’s <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/791345.Picnic_at_Hanging_Rock">Picnic at Hanging Rock</a>, who journey through the scrub and rock to never return. </p>
<h2>For the love of farmland</h2>
<p>This sentiment toward the land does not aim to romanticise one’s “return” to nature. Rather, it’s as much concerned with exploring the cultural practices intrinsic to Australian land.</p>
<p>This is most apparent in literary interpretations of farming, or “pastoral” literature (writing that idealises country life). <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/the-cambridge-companion-to-literature-and-the-environment/pastoral-anti-pastoral-and-post-pastoral/EA68A85A554C253E74DD70CBE9893EB5">UK scholar Terry Gifford</a> has coined a key term to consider here: “post-pastoral”, which is a “discourse that can both celebrate and take responsibility for nature without false consciousness”. </p>
<p>Gifford’s view is that post-pastoral is provisional and can be adapted to different regions. It does not idealise rural life. Nor does it exist only to highlight the harsh realities of life on the land. Rather, it seeks new ways of looking at the pastoral in all its forms.</p>
<p>In Australian writing, we appear to have an emerging “co-pastoral” discourse – a place where humans and the land co-exist. Humans do not, after all, always have to be the agents of disaster, and the land does not always have to be mundane and unforgiving.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/164984/original/image-20170412-26748-1bgoyki.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/164984/original/image-20170412-26748-1bgoyki.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=920&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/164984/original/image-20170412-26748-1bgoyki.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=920&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/164984/original/image-20170412-26748-1bgoyki.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=920&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/164984/original/image-20170412-26748-1bgoyki.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1156&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/164984/original/image-20170412-26748-1bgoyki.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1156&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/164984/original/image-20170412-26748-1bgoyki.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1156&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Christie Nieman’s 2014 novel As Stars Fall.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Pan Macmillan Australia</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This is the case for Winton’s follow-up play to Dirt Music, <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18162572-signs-of-life">Signs of Life</a>, where we learn that Luther Fox and his partner Georgie return from the Kimberley to live and work on the Fox family farm. At the end of the play, Georgie resolves to harvest olives on the land.</p>
<p>Christie Nieman’s 2014 novel, <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21920439-as-stars-fall">As Stars Fall</a>, follows the story of a family stricken with grief after the death of a mother in a bushfire. The children and their new friend, a daughter of farmers, begin to heal by uniting to save an endangered bush stone-curlew – an injured bird whose chicks also perished in the flames. The farming father is an avid birdwatcher who, in the end, suggests building a native refuge for the stone-curlew on his property.</p>
<p>“Farmers aren’t what a lot of people think they are,” writes the mother who dies in the fire.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>They care a lot about their land and the wild animals that live there. They really do want to know the best things to do, and how to help the natural environment in a way that doesn’t hurt their own livelihoods.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Here, Nieman attempts to cast new light on farm culture, as one deserved of respect rather than contempt. </p>
<p>Another key figure is Australian bush romance writer Rachael Treasure, whose work fits firmly in the co-pastoral lens. The bestselling author of five books and <a href="http://www.rachaeltreasure.com/">self-confessed</a> “bushland babe” supports sustainable farming and partly uses her work for advocacy. Treasure says she “consciously writes for a wide audience, because storytelling is the most powerful vehicle to convey your message”.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/165011/original/image-20170412-25888-4hn7r6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/165011/original/image-20170412-25888-4hn7r6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=917&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165011/original/image-20170412-25888-4hn7r6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=917&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165011/original/image-20170412-25888-4hn7r6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=917&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165011/original/image-20170412-25888-4hn7r6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1153&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165011/original/image-20170412-25888-4hn7r6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1153&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165011/original/image-20170412-25888-4hn7r6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1153&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Farmer’s Wife by Rachael Treasure.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">HarperCollins</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Her message is that regenerative agricultural practices, such as pasture cropping, are the only way forward – not only to feed the country, but to heal a damaged land. If this needs to be told with a healthy mix of humour, tragedy and passion under the gum trees, then so be it.</p>
<p>“For the first time in her life, she saw the land with clear vision,” Treasure writes of her main character, Bec Saunders, in <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17187499-the-farmer-s-wife">The Farmer’s Wife</a> – who against the wishes of her husband and father, begins to farm without fertiliser, pasture crop, and build ground cover. Bec hopes that her children will “never see a sod turned again in their lifetime” and vows to “celebrate the seasons, not fight them”.</p>
<p>In this sense, Treasure’s work in The Farmer’s Wife is not environmentalist “green” literature. Farms mean clearing, crops, machinery, pesticides and animals whose hooves destroy the fragile landscape and whose <a href="http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1839995,00.html">methane contributes to greenhouse gases</a>. </p>
<p>Co-pastoral literature does not dismiss the manufactured gardens, the introduced plants or the people who admit to wanting to work the land for profit. Nor does it forget the original Aboriginal landowners whose agricultural practices we now value. It does, however, seek to establish harmony between humans and the land.</p>
<p>Australian literature has long straddled this line between interpretations of bush life as harsh and incompatible, or of mutual benefit and interconnectedness.</p>
<p>But in fleeing to it, seeking refuge from it and working with it, our authors allow us, unlike the homesick Tench, to turn the telescope inward, toward the land and to ourselves.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/73440/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Margaret Hickey 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>White settlers and authors once saw the bush as an alien, despairing place. But writers from Tim Winton to Rachael Treasure now portray the land in complex and optimistic ways.Margaret Hickey, Lecturer in Academic Communication, La Trobe UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/713332017-01-29T19:01:27Z2017-01-29T19:01:27ZFrom Tim Winton to Gail Jones: why writing matters in WA<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/153566/original/image-20170120-5260-10iimdl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A termite mound in Cape Range National Park: WA's geography has helped shape its writers.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Susanna Dunkerley/AAP</span></span></figcaption></figure><blockquote>
<p>Being isolated spatially and culturally – us from the city, Perth from Australia and Australia from the world – arms one with an Atlas-strong sense of identity. Both actively and passively, originality seems to flourish in Perth’s artistic community.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>– Nick Allbrook, Griffith Review, 119.</p>
<p>The Western Australian writing and publishing sector is currently the subject of a review, a project of the state’s Department of Culture and the Arts, being conducted by independent consultants. It is a welcome development, particularly given the recent cutting of the WA Premier’s Book Awards from <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/literature-lovers-slam-changes-to-wa-premiers-book-awards-20150218-13i8zi.html">an annual to two-yearly format</a> and the removal of <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/booksandarts/writing-wa/7105726">multi-year funding support</a> to the sector’s peak body, writingWA.</p>
<p>The consulting firm, Positive Solutions, operates out of Queensland. Its involvement represents a laudable “arms-length” approach to the review. But speaking broadly, funding cuts nationally to the Australia Council and locally to writingWA suggest that arts organisations positioned at the same arms-length distance from government bodies are not being supported or recognised in the same way.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/153567/original/image-20170120-5221-6pffp5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/153567/original/image-20170120-5221-6pffp5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/153567/original/image-20170120-5221-6pffp5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=725&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/153567/original/image-20170120-5221-6pffp5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=725&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/153567/original/image-20170120-5221-6pffp5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=725&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/153567/original/image-20170120-5221-6pffp5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=911&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/153567/original/image-20170120-5221-6pffp5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=911&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/153567/original/image-20170120-5221-6pffp5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=911&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Tim Winton.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Hank Kordas</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>WA represents a unique environment for writing, and supports a dynamic writing and publishing sector. Writers like Randolph Stow (Miles Franklin winner), Sally Morgan (Prime Minister’s Award winner), Tim Winton (four-time Miles Franklin winner), Kim Scott (two-time Miles Franklin winner), Gail Jones (ALS Gold Medal winner) – naming only a few – all emerged from the WA scene.</p>
<p>Musician Nick Allbrook’s <a href="https://griffithreview.com/articles/creative-darwinism/">essay in the Griffith Review’s issue Looking West</a> articulates two key aspects of life in WA as culturally productive – rebellion against boredom and the compression of isolation. He notes the vibrancy of counter-culture to which Perth as a city gives rise. </p>
<p>Tim Winton, <a href="https://griffithreview.com/articles/contending-blank-page/">asked in the same volume</a> if he considers himself a Western Australian writer, answers:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I’m very conscious of the specifics of geography and the way it shapes us, whether we recognise this or not. And it used to take a certain doggedness to be a WA writer, defiance even, given the prevailing cultural headwind. Everything was harder. There was a weird logic to contend with, a kind of continental cringe that made A.A. Phillips’ cultural cringe look pretty tame.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>He continues to note “a historical grievance at work, about being forgotten or forsaken by the rest of the Federation. But also a hardiness and inventiveness that’s worth some credit.” Isolation, then, but also inventiveness…</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/153569/original/image-20170120-5234-cyajvz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/153569/original/image-20170120-5234-cyajvz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/153569/original/image-20170120-5234-cyajvz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=129&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/153569/original/image-20170120-5234-cyajvz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=129&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/153569/original/image-20170120-5234-cyajvz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=129&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/153569/original/image-20170120-5234-cyajvz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=162&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/153569/original/image-20170120-5234-cyajvz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=162&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/153569/original/image-20170120-5234-cyajvz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=162&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 Western Australian landscape from the book The Wild Frontier.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP Image/Panographs Publishing, Ken Duncan</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The geographic scale of the state, the isolation of its multiple cultural centres, the variety of its spaces, the complexity of its many peoples, all represent something unique. Much is made of facing a different sea, but the distance across land is just as significant. WA comprises a third of Australia’s landmass, and approximately 11% of the national population.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/153575/original/image-20170120-5227-s9qecf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/153575/original/image-20170120-5227-s9qecf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/153575/original/image-20170120-5227-s9qecf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=396&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/153575/original/image-20170120-5227-s9qecf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=396&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/153575/original/image-20170120-5227-s9qecf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=396&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/153575/original/image-20170120-5227-s9qecf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=498&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/153575/original/image-20170120-5227-s9qecf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=498&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/153575/original/image-20170120-5227-s9qecf.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">Emus walk single file past the thousands of limestone pillars in the Pinnacles Desert, 245 km north of Perth.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">EPA/Barbara Walton</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This isolation, the uniqueness of WA as a space, inherently shapes the nature of its writing and publishing sector. This isn’t necessarily negative. The sector is highly engaged and active. Writing has been taken up as a social force, protesting the Roe8 development and the destruction of Beeliar Wetlands, as <a href="https://theconversation.com/can-poetry-stop-a-highway-wielding-words-in-the-battle-over-roe-8-71005">Tony Hughes-d’Aeth has described</a>. </p>
<p>The local writing community is also close-knit, wonderfully welcoming and supportive. An example is the formation of WAWU – <a href="http://www.writingwa.org/about-writers-united/">Western Australian Writers United</a> – a collaboration of writing organisations sharing member benefits across their network and working to cultivate audiences. Isolation inspires collegiality, energy and enthusiasm to pull together. Isolation and inventiveness.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/153570/original/image-20170120-5227-pp7z8l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/153570/original/image-20170120-5227-pp7z8l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/153570/original/image-20170120-5227-pp7z8l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=795&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/153570/original/image-20170120-5227-pp7z8l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=795&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/153570/original/image-20170120-5227-pp7z8l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=795&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/153570/original/image-20170120-5227-pp7z8l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=999&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/153570/original/image-20170120-5227-pp7z8l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=999&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/153570/original/image-20170120-5227-pp7z8l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=999&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Kim Scott.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP Image/Burson Marstellar</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Writing thus has the power in WA to create community and contribute to society. This power is reflected in the existence of writingWA, a peak representative body supporting the interests of its member organisations, including publishing houses, festivals, writers’ centres and arts groups. It is not a service organisation but a facilitator, investing in projects that connect writers to each other and the local community. It supports individual writers through scholarships, and through promoting the development of the professional ecology in which those writers work.</p>
<p>Given the unique nature of the challenges faced by the sector – logistic concerns about the publication, shipping and distribution of books, the increased cost and effort required to maintain relationships across distance, the danger of being “out of (national) sight” and the need for representation and marketing to counteract this – the existence of a peak body is vital.</p>
<p>But it is easy to feel that literature has not been a priority in arts funding in the state. In the latest round of the WA government’s multi-year funding, only 6.2% of it went to literature. Only two literary organisations received funding, both worthy, but also both publishers. And in this process, three previously-funded organisations, including writingWA, lost multi-year funding.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/153572/original/image-20170120-5251-1oemrig.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/153572/original/image-20170120-5251-1oemrig.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/153572/original/image-20170120-5251-1oemrig.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=930&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/153572/original/image-20170120-5251-1oemrig.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=930&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/153572/original/image-20170120-5251-1oemrig.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=930&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/153572/original/image-20170120-5251-1oemrig.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1169&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/153572/original/image-20170120-5251-1oemrig.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1169&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/153572/original/image-20170120-5251-1oemrig.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1169&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Sixty Lights: winner of the ALS gold medal.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This reduction in funding came the year after the Department announced that the Premier’s Book Awards would be awarded only every two years. No suggestion has been made that this prize will be restored in the future, nor that writingWA will receive long-term support. Instead, Director-General Duncan Ord has<a href="http://www.booksandpublishing.com.au/articles/2016/01/14/38966/watershed-moment-for-wa-writing-sector-after-literary-groups-defunded/"> suggested that writingWA could potentially be positioned under the remit of the State Library</a>.</p>
<p>This would represent a conflict of interest in several of the organisation’s functions, reducing its agility to respond to the sector’s needs and ability to represent the sector to the Department. Through <a href="http://www.writingwa.org/writing-matters/">a new campaign, #writingmatters</a>, writingWA has put forward an impassioned case for independence on these grounds.</p>
<p>This conflict points to a wider discussion about the need for independent representation within the arts. It would be great to see, through the review, a commitment to the principle of arms-length and independent representation, and a map for funding, committing to meaningful investment based on the consultation undertaken. </p>
<p>The dynamism of literature as an art-form in WA, the vibrancy of the writing and publishing community, and the rich legacy of writing here, surely all demonstrate the merit of such investment and support.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/71333/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Catherine Noske is a board member for writingWA. </span></em></p>With its dramatic landscape, relative isolation and vibrant counter culture, Western Australia has a thriving writing scene. But government funding cuts are biting.Catherine Noske, Lecturer in Creative Writing, and Editor of Westerly Magazine, The University of Western AustraliaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/514812015-12-02T19:28:30Z2015-12-02T19:28:30ZExplainer: magical realism<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/104044/original/image-20151202-14473-4ffp1o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Magical realism has evolved into a heavily, and ironically, political literary form.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Berli Mike</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>A mother lives in Ohio in the aftermath of the Civil War with the child she murdered as a slave. A poor Nigerian boy, who is also an <em>abiku</em> or spirit child, fights supernaturally corrupt politicians to remain in the land of the living.</p>
<p>Welcome to magical realism: a type of storytelling in which the magical makes a surprising appearance in a realistic context. The contrast between the fantastical and real elements is used to heighten drama and challenge perceptions. </p>
<p>With roots in post-first-world-war paintings of empty European cities, magical realism has evolved into a heavily, and ironically, political literary form. </p>
<h2>The development of magical realism</h2>
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<span class="caption">Jorge Luis Borges by Grete Stern, 1951.</span>
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<p>The term “magical realism” was first used by the German art critic <a href="https://dictionaryofarthistorians.org/rohf.htm">Franz Roh</a> in 1925 to describe a new style of European painting. </p>
<p>These paintings, unlike <a href="http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/surr/hd_surr.htm">Surrealist</a> art works, were not interested in the fantastic. They portrayed vacant European cityscapes, creating a sense of mystery through stylised details and a sterile atmosphere.</p>
<p>Such paintings are now more commonly known by other terms such as Hyperrealism or Metaphysical Painting. </p>
<p>Magical realism, meanwhile, has become synonymous with literature. </p>
<p>The label was first used in Latin America to describe the worldly and metaphysical fantasy of writers such as the Argentine <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/500.Jorge_Luis_Borges">Jorge Luis Borges</a> and the European <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5223.Franz_Kafka">Franz Kafka</a>. </p>
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<span class="caption">Kafka in 1906.</span>
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<p>But the term came to be increasingly associated with a very different kind of writing – one tied to colonial histories and postcolonial politics.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/73725.Men_of_Maize">Men of Maize</a> by the Guatemalan Nobel Laureate Miguel Angel Asturias, and <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/669450.The_Kingdom_of_This_World">The Kingdom of This World</a> by the French-Cuban Alejo Carpentier, both published in 1949, are key novels in this nationalistic tradition. They represent the historical oppression of Indigenous and African people in Latin America by colonial forces, as well as portraying their mythological beliefs. </p>
<p>These texts use magic to proclaim an independent identity for Latin America, although later magical realist novels typically use magic in more ironic or satirical ways.</p>
<h2>Magical realism on the world stage</h2>
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<span class="caption">First edition of One Hundred Years of Solitude: Editorial Sudamericana, Buenos Aires, 1967.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
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<p>Writing in the journal Critical Inquiry in 1986, the critic Fredric Jameson described the term itself as having a “<a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343476?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">strange seductiveness</a>”. Certainly magical realist literature has proven appealing.</p>
<p>The 1967 publication of <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/320.One_Hundred_Years_of_Solitude">One Hundred Years of Solitude</a> – often referred to as the archetypal magic realist text – by the Colombian novelist and Nobel Laureate Gabriel García Márquez triggered a “boom” in Latin American literature. </p>
<p>By the 1980s, the book’s success had prompted a spate of magical realist novels internationally. </p>
<p>Salman Rushdie’s <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14836.Midnight_s_Children">Midnight’s Children</a> (1981) won the 1981 Booker Prize and went on to be adapted for stage and screen. <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9328.The_House_of_the_Spirits">The House of the Spirits</a> (1982), by the Chilean writer Isabel Allende, was a critically acclaimed bestseller and made into a film starring Meryl Streep. </p>
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<span class="caption">Beloved by Toni Morrison.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
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<p>Toni Morrison’s <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6149.Beloved">Beloved</a> (1987) – about the ex-slave living with her murdered child – won a Pulitzer Prize and was made into a film by Oprah Winfrey. </p>
<p>Such critical and commercial success continued into the 1990s. </p>
<p>Ben Okri’s <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/101094.The_Famished_Road">The Famished Road</a> (1991) – about the Nigerian <em>abiku</em> or spirit child – won the Booker Prize and inspired the lyrics to Radiohead’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCJblaUkkfc">Street Spirit (Fade Out)</a>. Arundhati Roy’s <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9777.The_God_of_Small_Things">The God of Small Things</a> (1997) won the Booker too, launching the Indian writer’s career as a public intellectual. </p>
<p>In Australia, Tim Winton’s <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/343881.Cloudstreet">Cloudstreet</a> (1991) won the Miles Franklin Award, was made into a television miniseries as well as a play, and is still regularly nominated as a favourite Australian novel in national polls. </p>
<p>As this list suggests, magical realist novels tend to come from the world’s geo-political margins. As such, they can be seen as offering readers a window into exotic worlds in which the marvellous might really exist. </p>
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<span class="caption">Isabel Allende in 2008.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
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<p>Indeed, the authors of magical realist texts have often claimed that the magic in their books is real. García Márquez, in his <a href="http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1982/marquez-lecture.html">Nobel Prize acceptance speech</a>, claimed that the challenge for Latin American writers was to make their “outsized” world believable.</p>
<p>It can come as a surprise to readers, then, that magical realist novels are fundamentally historical and political texts. It can also be surprising to discover that they are heavily ironic.</p>
<h2>Magical realism and irony</h2>
<p>Both classical and contemporary magical realist texts tend to be clearly ironic in their representation of the magical as real. </p>
<p>Famous examples include those already mentioned above: One Hundred Years of Solitude and Midnight’s Children. Contemporary instances include <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1757209.Benang">Benang</a> (1999), by the Aboriginal Australian Kim Scott, and <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/297673.The_Brief_Wondrous_Life_of_Oscar_Wao">The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao</a> (2007), by the Dominican-American Junot Díaz.</p>
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<span class="caption">First edition cover of the novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
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<p>These texts do not ask readers to believe that the fantastic is true. </p>
<p>Instead, they invite readers to reflect on the significance of the outrageous events in relation to the outrageous crimes of history.</p>
<p>For example, while the narrator of Midnight’s Children comically swears that his tale “is nothing less than the literal, by-the-hairs-of-my-mother’s head truth,” his fantastical journey mirrors and mocks India’s corrupt path into independence. </p>
<p>Similarly, when the Aboriginal narrator of Benang levitates, it is in the context of a novel that sarcastically documents Australian colonial policies about “uplifting” Aborigines.</p>
<p>The irony and political edginess of magical realist texts are not recognised enough. Yet they are surely part of the peculiar frisson of this form of literature, which has had an extraordinary rise and is still going strong.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/51481/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Maria Takolander 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>With roots in post first world war paintings of empty European cities, magical realism has evolved into a heavily, and ironically, political literary form.Maria Takolander, Associate Professor in Creative Writing and Literary Studies, Deakin UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/267952014-06-15T20:37:03Z2014-06-15T20:37:03ZWho will win the 2014 Miles Franklin Award?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/50238/original/sv7hyk7v-1401862389.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Read on for some pointers ... although all will be revealed next week.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Paul Bence</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>When Richard Flanagan’s <a href="http://www.randomhouse.com.au/books/richard-flanagan/the-narrow-road-to-the-deep-north-9781741666700.aspx">The Narrow Road to the Deep North</a> was published last year, one reviewer proclaimed he had just read the winner of the 2014 Miles Franklin Award. Flanagan’s novel has now got as far as the shortlist, the fourth of his six to do so. But on two previous occasions his novels were beaten by those of another of the authors on this year’s shortlist – Tim Winton.</p>
<p>In 2002 the judges preferred Winton’s <a href="http://www.picador.com/books/dirt-music">Dirt Music</a> to Flanagan’s Gould’s <a href="http://www.randomhouse.com.au/books/richard-flanagan/goulds-book-of-fish-9781742755090.aspx">Book of Fish</a>. In 2009 it happened again, when Winton’s <a href="http://www.penguin.com.au/products/9780143009580/breath">Breath</a> edged out Flanagan’s <a href="http://www.randomhouse.com.au/books/richard-flanagan/wanting-9781742755120.aspx">Wanting</a>. Both of Winton’s novels were set in Western Australia in contemporary or recent times. Flanagan’s were based on the dark history of his home state of Tasmania, drawing attention in particular to the mistreatment of Aborigines and convicts in the early days of colonisation.</p>
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Text Publishing</span></span>
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Newsouth books</span></span>
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Penguin Books Australia</span></span>
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Random House Australia</span></span>
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<p>The Narrow Road to the Deep North is also a historical novel, though the focus is now on more recent suffering and persecution, of Australian prisoners of war forced by the Japanese to work on the Thai-Burma railway during the second world war. Flanagan has also exchanged the magic realism and <a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-what-is-postmodernism-20791">postmodern</a> flourishes of Gould’s Book of Fish for a more conventionally realist narrative style, with a central character loosely based on <a href="http://www.awm.gov.au/people/164.asp">Edward “Weary” Dunlop</a>. </p>
<p>While Winton’s <a href="http://www.penguin.com.au/products/9781926428536/eyrie">Eyrie</a> (2013) is once again set in Western Australia, the habitat of its central male character is not now the natural world of the outback or ocean but a high rise apartment in Fremantle. The nostalgic evocation of an older and kinder Australia which made <a href="http://www.penguin.com.au/products/9780140273984/cloudstreet">Cloudstreet</a>, winner of the 1992 Miles Franklin, one of Australia’s best-loved books, is nowhere in sight. Tom Keely is a failed environmentalist, depressed by the rampant development all around him.</p>
<p>Of course, the contest this year is not just a two-man show. The other four shortlisted novels are by women, once again showing the <a href="https://theconversation.com/womens-writing-at-the-stellas-miles-franklin-and-kibble-awards-25872">current strength</a> of Australian women’s writing. Alexis Wright has already won the Miles Franklin with her remarkable <a href="http://readingaustralia.com.au/Books/Carpentaria.aspx">Carpenteria</a> (2006). <a href="https://www.newsouthbooks.com.au/books/the-swan-book/">The Swan Book</a> (2013) is even more remarkable in its mixture of genres, languages and cultures, setting European stories about swans alongside Aboriginal ones, biting satire against fantastic visions. </p>
<p>Although her novel is set 100 years in the future, Wright directs our attention to much that is wrong in contemporary Australia. As with Winton, one of her targets is the destruction of the environment. Like Keely in his apartment, Wright’s central character, the Aboriginal woman Oblivion Ethyl(ene), spends part of the novel looking down on a chaotic, ruined city. As her name suggests, Wright’s other main target is the continued neglect of most Aboriginal people, even while a few high-flyers make good. </p>
<p>The three other authors on the shortlist are appearing for the first time. Like Flanagan, Cory Taylor has set <a href="http://textpublishing.com.au/books-and-authors/book/my-beautiful-enemy/">My Beautiful Enemy</a> (2013) during the second world war. Like him, she has taken up an aspect of the war that has already been the subject of several novels and presented it in a different light. My Beautiful Enemy focuses on the Japanese interned in Australia during the war and in particular on the relationship between one prisoner and the guard who falls in love with him. </p>
<p>While Flanagan’s Japanese are not the brutal stereotypes of earlier representations, and his heroes sometimes less than heroic, Taylor has been much more radical in writing against the racism and homophobia of the period. </p>
<p>The remaining two novels also have something in common. Both involve stories of mysterious and threatening intruders, though in every other way they could not be more different. Fiona McFarlane’s <a href="http://www.randomhouse.com.au/books/evie-wyld/all-the-birds-singing-9781742757308.aspx">The Night Guest</a> (2013) has already been shortlisted for several other major awards and has recently won the NSW Premier’s Award for new writing. </p>
<p>McFarlane’s central character, elderly Ruth Field, wakes to hear a tiger in her lounge room. Later that day she has another unexpected visitor, a large woman called Frida, who claims to have been sent by the government to look after Ruth. As events are presented through Ruth’s eyes, readers are set the puzzle of trying to work out what is really happening.</p>
<p>Reading Evie Wyld’s All the Birds, Singing (2013) is even more of a puzzle. The novel’s settings alternate between a bleak farm somewhere in England and the Australian outback. But the episodes set in Australia are narrated in reverse order, so that only gradually can one begin to make sense of what has happened to Jake Whyte in the past. </p>
<p>While Wyld excels in creating mood and atmosphere, I found that too many puzzles remained. How did Jake get from Australia to England? Why did she leave home as a teenager? And we never do find out what has been killing her sheep.</p>
<p>So will Winton be the first author to win five Miles Franklins? Or will Flanagan finally be the victor? Will Wright win her second? Or McFarlane become one of the few first-book winners? All will be revealed on June 26. </p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/26795/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Elizabeth Webby 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>When Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North was published last year, one reviewer proclaimed he had just read the winner of the 2014 Miles Franklin Award. Flanagan’s novel has now got as…Elizabeth Webby, Emeritus Professor of Australian Literature, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.