Six Degrees of Separation - From Picnic at Hanging Rock to The Hate Race

The edition in my TBR pile

This month's 6 Degrees of Separation begins with Picnic at Hanging Rock, which celebrates 50 years of publication this year. I suspect it has been continuously in print since it was 'launched' by Sir Robert Menzies in Melbourne in October 1967. It's been years since I read it but it's on my reading calendar this year (I know, the reading calendar is struggling because I'm tempted by other books).

Annabel Smith and Emma Chapman began the 6 Degrees of Separation meme in 2014 and now it is managed (is that the right word?) by Kate at Books are my favourite and best. The idea is that Kate nominates a book and, on the first Saturday of the month, participants reveal chains of six books that all connect in some way. 

Back to Picnic at Hanging Rock - as Whispering Gums says, there are just so many ways you could go. Lost girls, girls named Miranda, rural Victoria, Australian Gothic. I'm choosing to follow the author, Joan Lindsay. Joan was married to Daryl who, as well as running the National Gallery of Victoria for many years, was the brother of Norman.

Norman Lindsay leads me to The Magic Pudding. I managed to avoid The Magic Pudding when I was a child but I did read it to my boy when he was little. It turned out to do a good job of putting us both to sleep. But who can understand Australian politics without understanding the frequent references to 'magic puddings'?

Magic leads me to Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by JK Rowling. Well, where else could I go since Harry has just turned 20. I nearly missed the whole Harry Potter thing - being 30 when the first book appeared. But Harry has been a big part of my shared reading and viewing life with my boy so I won't hear any words against him.

I've enjoyed reading JK Rowling post-Harry, especially her Cormoran Strike series which she publishes under the pseudonym of Robert Galbraith. So my next choice is the first Strike novel, The Cuckoo's Calling. If you enjoy Rebus - and love London - I recommend it.

So I could run with pseudonyms (curiously, Joan Lindsay published her first novel under a pseudonym) or London but I'm going to continue with the crime theme, this time set in Paris. This week (at 4am in the morning) I finished reading Cara Black's new novel in her Aimee Leduc series, Murder in Saint-Germain. Black's heroine is a private investigator, with a penchant for second-hand designer clothes, a dog named Miles Davis, and a pink Vespa. Each mystery is set in a different part of Paris. They are also very political.

Politics - and crime too - leads me to another recent read: Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railway. The story of Cora's journey from slavery to freedom is a confronting read. There were times when I really wanted to look away but Cora's journey across America is compelling and Whitehead's imaginative telling helped me to understand why race continues to be so contentious in the United States.

The Hate Race by Maxine Beneba Clarke is the last book on the list today. It's about growing up black, but non-Indigenous, in Australia in the 1980s. It's about the way racism is embedded in our communities, in our schools, the way we don't often see it or the damage that it does. If you haven't read it, do. It made me think deeply about the ways in which my own behaviour is racist - as Oscar Hammerstein wrote, 'you have to be carefully taught'.

From an elite Australian girls school to the western suburbs of Sydney, from an elite Australian artistic family to the cotton fields of the American south, we've been on quite a journey, with a little magic thrown in for good measure.

Next month: Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.

Six Degrees of Separation - Where will Shopgirl lead me?

Last month, a tweet from Whispering Gums introduced me to the 6 Degrees of Separation meme.

Annabel Smith and Emma Chapman began the 6 Degrees of Separation meme in 2014 and now it is managed (is that the right word?) by Kate at Books are my favourite and best. The idea is that Kate nominates a book and, on the first Saturday of the month, participants reveal chains of six books that all connect in some way. 

This month's book is Shopgirl by Steve Martin. Damn, haven't read it. Thank goodness for Google! Steve Martin's heroine is an artist making a living selling gloves at Neimann Marcus in Beverley Hills. Already I'm stumped. I'm working with a book by a comic, set in California, featuring a heroine who is both artist and shop assistant. 

My first stop is Shopaholic Abroad by Sophie Kinsella. This is the only book in the 'Shopaholic' series I've read. It's a frothy confection of romance and fashion and dazzling New York. At the risk of spoiling the end, the book's heroine Rebecca finds her calling working in Saks Fifth Avenue. So my first link is based on the occupations of the heroines.

Now I'm in New York I feel like I'm on slightly firmer ground and the city is my next link. It seems impossible to go past Anita Heiss' Manhattan Dreaming. Her heroine Lauren, a curator at the National Aboriginal Gallery in Canberra, receives a fellowship at the Smithsonian. It's been years since I read it and loved it. Heiss is a genre-hopper. She has done some outstanding work, not least being The Macquarie PEN Anthology of Aboriginal Literature. Her most recent book is Our Race to Reconciliation, for younger readers. I always learn from her work so it's on my to-be-read list.  

Another Indigenous writer I admire is Kim Scott, which brings me to his third novel That Deadman Dance (2o10). This book won so many awards, including the Miles Franklin in 2011. Set on the south coast of Western Australia, it tells a story of the early encounters between black and white.

There are many strands to That Deadman Dance: epic coastal journeys, whaling sequences that will make you gasp in wonder, injustice, understanding and loss. But it is the characters - flawed, credible human beings, embodying their history but never mere ciphers - who stay with you: Menak, the tribal elder, both wise and cantankerous; Jak Tar, the escaped sailor, who takes (and is given) Binyan as his resourceful wife; Bobby Wabalanginy, the dancer, the go-between, who has to grow old to know fear; Chaine, the entrepreneur, who gives and then takes and whose cosseted daughter Christine reads The Last of the Mohicans and wonders at the shining manhood of her childhood companion, Bobby; and Cross, who "encourages ideas of entitlement" in his Noongar friends: his bones are exhumed and ceremonially reinterred on higher ground while Wunyeran's are dishonoured and scattered.

SMH review by Morag Fraser, 13/1/2011 

I almost didn't finish it. I remember putting it aside over Christmas and wondering if I'd return to it. When I did, early in 2011, I galloped to the end - and what an ending it was! Have you ever felt a book punch you in the guts? That's how I felt at the end of That Deadman Dance and six years later I'm still recalling that feeling. 

Now I'm in Western Australia, I'm going to link to Dorothy Hewett. Perhaps best known as a poet and playwright, Hewett wrote three novels: Bobbin' Up, The Toucher and Neap Tide. I read the last two when they were first published but that was some 20 years ago. Maybe I should have gone with Rudyard Kipling's Kim? Although I haven't read that.

Dorothy Hewett used to live in the Blue Mountains and that provides a link to Delia Falconer's The Service of Clouds, which was set in Katoomba in the period 1907-1926. (I'm a bit horrified to discover it was also published nearly 20 years ago!) I remember this as a very lyrical first novel about photography and clouds and love and the effects of World War 1. The experience of reading it remains imprinted in my memory. Perhaps its because I spent a year living in Katoomba when I was 6, a year that is also imprinted on my memory. The Service of Clouds, though, is also a novel about that moment in the early 20th century when life changed irrevocably for small communities such as those in the Blue Mountains and it talks about the war without ever taking you to the front.

So my last link is to another novel which reveals the impact of World War 1 without ever taking you to the frontline. It is, of course, To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. Another book about a woman wanting to be an artist, about the effects of war, about a coastal journey. I've read it many times since being 'forced' to read it a uni. It improves with each reading - as Margaret Atwood discovered. 

Well, that was harder than it looked. I'm looking forward to seeing where Picnic at Hanging Rock leads me in July. I might begin thinking about my chain tomorrow.

The Shoes of the Fisherman - Morris West

2017 Reading Calendar - March

When Morris West died at his desk, mid-sentence, on 9 October 1999, he had sold an estimated 60-70 million copies of his novels. His death was reported in London and New York, as well as across Australia. The 7.30 Report paid tribute, sharing excerpts of an interview with Geraldine Doogue in which he talked about life, love, death and the Catholic Church.

The Church seems to have been something of an obsession. He almost, almost took vows as a Christian Brother. Instead, he went on to create what Kerry O'Brien described as 'the so-called Vatican novel', publishing novels that explored morality, belief, religious power.

The Shoes of the Fisherman is one of these. Published in 1963, on the day Pope John X111 died, it is the story of the election of the first Russian Pope.

'The Pope was dead. The Camerlengo had announced it. The Master of Ceremonies, the notaries, the doctors had consigned him under signature into eternity.'

I read this book years ago. Intrigued by the pomp and mystery (for a non-Catholic) of the Catholic Church. Curious about this Australian writer who was read all over the world and doted on by my mother. As we packed up Mum's house to move her into full-time care, her copy of The Shoes of the Fisherman ended up in a box in my living room.

Returning to it was a struggle. My mind couldn't make sense of all cardinals. I lost track of the plot lines - there's the new Pope, at least two retiring cardinals, a priest returning from the spiritual wilderness, a journalist wrestling with an all-consuming love, a woman adrift in Rome. Sometimes I lost my way in the complexity of the sentences. I began to worry I was spending too much time on Twitter, that I was losing my ability to read anything more complex than 140 characters.

Struggle, though, is what I have come to think the novel is about. The struggle to find our way in the world, to live the life that we have chosen or which has been chosen for us. Kiril, the newly appointed Pope, wrestles with his role as the leader of the Church. George Faber, the journalist who has made his career reporting on the Church in Rome, has reached his own crossroads: how much of his soul is he willing to sell to secure marriage to the young Chiara, the deserted wife of a Catholic politician?

The Shoes of the Fisherman is also extraordinarily contemporary, even if sometimes its language feels outdated. Like so many of the book's characters, the world is at a crossroads too. A disaster is pending, unless Russia and America can find a way to work together. Environmental disasters loom. The Catholic Church is losing its eminence in many parts of the world. Kiril wrestles with how to change the Church while honouring its origins.

Morris West left Australia in the late 1950s, not returning until 1980. It is hard to find a sense of Australia in this novel. It is an international book, embracing the wider world without more than a backward glance to the country West had left. The references are brief. There is 'Hanna the Irishman from Australia', joining the other cardinals in the Conclave that will anoint Kiril. And 'A plague in the Philippines can infect Australia within a day'. But that's about it. Yet it's not as though West was completely disinterested in his home country. He returned to live in Sydney, chairing the Council of the National Library of Australia and the National Book Council. He was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia in the Australia Day Honours of 1985 and upgraded to Officer of the Order in the Queen's Birthday Honours of 1997.

Today, Morris West's 101st birthday, he is little read and you will probably only find copies of his 30 books tucked on the dusty shelves of secondhand bookshops. Perhaps it's time for those books to be dusted off and read again.

Want more?

• Listen to Morris West via the National Library of Australia. There are two interviews available online - one recorded by Hazel de Berg in 1960; the other recorded by Diana Ritch in 1992.
• Read the New York Times obituary.
• You might also track down the biography, Morris West: Literary Maverick by Maryanne Confoy, published by John Wiley in 2005.

Paris Dreaming - Anita Heiss

2017 Reading Calendar - February

Anita Heiss' novel about a young woman's journey of self-discovery is part of my own 'Paris dreaming'. Published in 2011, I read it before I was able to spend 8 weeks in Paris in 2012, before the Charlie Hebdo attacks in 2015. Rereading it now, I'm reminded that it was one of my first 'guide books' to the city. It also has an innocence and an awareness of the traumas to come.

Ostensibly contemporary women's fiction, or 'choc lit' as Heiss herself has described it, Paris Dreaming is, like all of Heiss' work that I've read, politically aware. On the surface, this is a novel about discovering your self and your true love in one of the most romantic cities in the world. Libby Cutmore is over men and focusing on her career. She may not be interested enough in fashion or food to keep her friends happy, but she is ambitious and determined to make a contribution to the promotion of Indigenous art on an international scale. I think she has a lot in common with Carrie Bradshaw - no matter how much she protests she doesn't need a man, you know she just hasn't met her 'Big' yet. And you know by the end of the novel that she will.

That, though, is just what's happening on the surface. Rereading Paris Dreaming, I was reminded of four things:

• how much I learned about Paris and, especially, the Musee de Quai Branly and Australia's involvement in it;
• the political environment - in Australia but also in France. Libby's friendship with the young Roma seamstress, Sorina, provides an early insight into the impact of the recent mass influx of refugees in Europe. The novel also references the riots on Paris' council estates in 2005-06, as well as the Cronulla riots that occurred at the same time;
• what it's like to read about your own city (Canberra) in fiction. Heiss isn't always complimentary - how many cities compare well to Paris? - but there is something special about reading about your own place; and
• how much I learned about Indigenous Australia, it's art, culture, and politics.

This, I suspect, is really the point of Heiss' writing and it's something she has spoken about. At the 2014 Australian and New Zealand Festival of Literature and Arts, she is reported by Philippa Moore as saying:

“I wanted to connect with Australian women to talk about Aboriginal art, culture, politics, social justice and issues that I am passionate about, and issues that I think all Australians should be engaging with ... But I had to think about ways to engage women who may never have had a cuppa or yarn with an Aboriginal woman before, who may have seen us marching about Black Deaths in Custody or the NT intervention but never understood why. Or worse still, had never thought about us at all.”

This is something I think Heiss does extremely well in her fiction. Whether it's the 'choc lit' Paris Dreaming and it's forerunner, Manhattan Dreaming, or her more recent novels, Tiddas and Barbed Wire and Cherry Blossoms, Heiss helps me to better understand the lives and the issues faced by Indigenous Australians in a way that is very accessible.

You can read Paris Dreaming for the city and the romance and it will reward you. But if you read it just a little more closely, you will finish the book with an enhanced understanding of what it means to be an Indigenous Australian.

Want more?

• Anita Heiss' website has lots of interesting reads and links
• Whispering Gums' review of Paris Dreaming
• 'From chick lit to choc lit' - Philippa Moore's article on Anita Heiss at the 2014 Australian and New Zealand Festival of Literature and Arts

The Boy Behind the Curtain - Tim Winton

2017 Reading Calendar - January

Late in the day we step out into the withering heat. Most of the sting has gone from the sun but the air is still so hot it's like trying to inhale a fluffy towel fresh from the tumble dryer.

From 'High Tide', The Boy Behind the Curtain

Twenty-two years ago, I stopped reading Tim Winton. There was something about the ending of The Riders that so infuriated me, I swore I would never read him again. Of course, now I can't tell you exactly what it was that made me so mad. And my (gradually dissipating) fury didn't stop me reading his non-fiction when it appeared in newspapers and The Monthly. But it did stop me reading his novels and the highly praised Island Home.

Last October, I decided it was time for a change of heart and it was Winton himself who won me over. At an event at the National Library to promote his non-fiction collection, The Boy Behind the Curtain, he enthralled me with his storytelling and his fearlessness. You can listen to the event online. I bought the book and it sat in my to-be-read pile until now.

When I chose it for the Reading Calendar, I assumed it would be a great read for summer, full of Winton's renowned love for the ocean. And it is. 'High Tide' and 'The Wait and the Flow' take you to the beach and into the sea. But the book reveals more than just the experience of being in and on the water. Many of the essays explore Winton's love of the 'litoral', For Winton, the spaces on the edge - of the sea, of the desert, of civilisation, of society - are the spaces that engage his imagination and they are often the subject of his non-fiction.

The essays in the book are presented chronologically, so we begin with the boy Winton quite literally hiding behind the 'terylene curtain', taking aim with his father's shotgun at people passing by, We watch him grow up, going to university, parenting and grandparenting. He writes about hospitals, class, the environment, Ireland, 2001: A Space Odyssey, art and refugees, about sharks and whales and Ningaloo Reef. Occasionally, he writes about writing, of being taught by Elizabeth Jolley, of the urgent need to 'light out' once a book is finished.

Winton's knowledge of Australian flora and fauna amazes and shames me. In 'Repatriation', I travel alongside him to Lake Moore but am almost left behind by his knowledge of marsupials. Bilbies I know, but boobies, woylies, 'the elusive wambenger, the chuditch ... and several species of dunnarts' have me running to Wikipedia. He calls me back as

A mob of Major Mitchell's cockatoos spills, untidy as a closing-time crowd, from a desert cypress.

I know I will never see cockatoos in any other way again.

Winton surprises me most, though, when he writes about religion, the way it shaped his childhood and continues to inform his life. I'm struck by how little I read about religious belief and I wonder if this reflects my reading choices or whether we hesitate to reveal our spiritual selves in this secular world.

'Twice on Sundays' reveals Winton's childhood as part of the Church of Christ. My grandfather, who died 10 years before I was born, was a Church of Christ minister. By the time I was attending Sunday School, though, the Church of Christ had faded and my mother chose the Methodist Church as the next best thing. I grew up knowing a little about  my grandfather's faith, that full-immersion baptism marked the Church of Christ as different. But if pressed, I wouldn't describe it as 'a counterculture', as Winton does. I still find it hard to reconcile the family picture of my grandfather with the 'militantly religious' upbringing Winton experienced. And yet ... perhaps I can.

The Boy Behind the Curtain is best read slowly, savouring the language, pondering the ideas. Inevitably, as many of the essays have been published previously, there is a sense of familiarity, occasionally of repetition as an incident is revisited in part or from a different angle. And occasionally, Winton sermonises, perhaps not surprising given his upbringing but often disconcerting, breaking the rhythm of his storytelling.

If you have never read any Winton, The Boy Behind the Curtain is a great place to begin. And if, like me, you are seeking reconciliation, it is joyful, heartrending,and often thought-provoking.

The Boy Behind the Curtain by Tim Winton, published by Penguin Random House Australia, 2016

Hal Porter: A writer I haven't read

The Tilted Cross by Hal Porter
Faber & Faber, London, 1961

Recently, I was given a copy of Hal Porter's Tasmanian novel, The Tilted Cross. Published in London in 1961 by Faber and Faber, the novel is set in Van Diemen's Land and is loosely based on the life of Thomas Griffiths Waineright, an artist, author and journalist, possibly a serial killer and 'multiple poisoner'. Surprisingly, given this colourful story, he was transported for forgery.

It wasn't Waineright who intrigued me, however (the Australian Dictionary of Biography provides a balanced overview of his life if you'd like to know more). It was the novel's author - Hal Porter.

Porter's memoir, The Watcher on the Cast-Iron Balcony, was published in 1963. One of the first Australian memoirs, it is widely regarded as a classic and today it's the book for which he is best remembered. Now out of print and not a novel, it still managed to find its way onto Booktopia's 2010 list of 'The 50 Must Read Australian Novels'.

As an adult, Porter lived a peripatetic life. The ADB entry reveals he moved from Bairnsdale to Melbourne, Adelaide, Hobart, Sydney, taking up short-lived teaching positions, tutoring, producing plays, running a hotel. In 1949 he joined the Army Education Unit and was posted to Japan twice. London beckoned in the early 1960s but he returned to Australia, spending the remainder of his life alternating between Melbourne and rural Victoria. Homosexual, his biographer Mary Lord revealed in 1993 he was also a paedophile. Was all this movement driven by the need to keep ahead of the law, of unhappy parents and school principals?

The one constant in his life seems to have been his writing. In an oral history interview recorded for the National Library of Australia in March 1964, Porter describes himself as a 'born writer', although one afflicted with a terrible disease.

Porter published Short Stories in 1942 and, according to the blurb on The Tilted Cross, 'won all the major short-story competitions in Australia'. A meeting with Angus and Robertson's editor Beatrice Davis in Sydney lead to the publication of poetry, novels and a trilogy of memoirs. Apparently a bit of a snob, he must have been over the moon to have been published in London by Faber and Faber, joining the likes of TS Eliot, Beckett, Harold Pinter and Ted Hughes.

The Tilted Cross received mixed reviews. In The Canberra Times review published on 9 December 1961, 'FX' wrote:

He spins his words like a thick spider's web and in the depths of the web he set an evil collection of characters - the impotent knight, his adulterous wife, the nymphomaniacal spastic, sadists, drunkards, homosexuals ... The book was written under a Commonwealth Literary Fund Scholarship. In spite of Mr Porter's previous achievements and record, I feel the money might have been better spent.

The full review is available via Trove.

Porter recognised that his writing wasn't liked by everyone, that some reviewers thought he was verbose, baroque and overblown. The opening paragraph of The Tilted Cross provides an example of why they might have thought that:

Van Dieman's Land, an ugly trinket suspended at the world's discredited rump, was freezing. From horizon to horizon stretched a tarpaulin of congealed vapour so tense that it had now and then split, and had rattled down a vicious litter of sleet like minced glass, that year, that winter, that day.

In his oral history interview, Porter claimed his large vocabulary was due to a childhood addiction to books and dictionaries.

Porter died in September 1984. A brief obituary in The Age noted that he once said that 'posterity would see him as a passable novelist, a fair playwright but a pretty good short story writer'. He was 73.

This post was written as part of the 2016 Sydney Story Factory Pen to Paper Challenge. I'm inspired by the work of Sydney Story Factory. I'd like to help them grow so that, one day, Martian Embassies will be all over this country. So during September I'm putting pen to paper - and hopefully rebooting my blog. If you enjoyed this post, please give whatever you can. Let's help the Sydney Story Factory grow.

A New Chapter

A new chapter. A fresh start. Turning over a new leaf. A makeover. Beginning ... again.

A week ago, while browsing Twitter, I discovered Maggie Alderson's revitalised blog. 'Why don't I update my blog more often?' Maggie wrote back in January. Well, she's returned to blogging with a passion, inspired by Stephen King of all people. And her passion has inspired me in turn. Like Maggie, I am feeling energised - all because she has given me a new vision for 52 Sundays. I am going to follow in her footsteps and blog about books.

For the last few years, I have kept a reading diary. On paper (how 20th century). In my little black book, I write about the books I have read, the books I have given up on. I keep stats too - how many books read, how many by Australian writers, fiction vs non-fiction. For my personal edification only.

Reading is what I do. I read for work. I read for my own mental health. I read to my son to (hopefully) inspire his own love of reading. When I am faced with a crisis, I turn to books for answers, for escape, for rescue. So now, thanks to Maggie, I'm going to share some of that reading with you. I am so excited by the prospect, I can't wait to begin.

But first, some disclaimers.

Like Maggie, I do not review books. 52 Sundays is going to be a celebration of books and reading, of my reading in particular. If I didn't enjoy a book, I'm not going to write about it. Nor will I accept books for review (much as I might desire free books to supplement my book buying habit). Critical reviews play a very important, even if hotly debated, role in our literary culture. There are some great publications that publish reviews by accomplished reviewers. As my blog roll grows, you'll find links to some of them. But you won't find critical reviews here. What you will find (I hope) will be my personal responses to some great writing.

52 Sundays will not include everything I read but I hope it will provide an honest picture of what I read. I read widely. Literary fiction, non-fiction, drama, general fiction (including chick lit and not-so-gruesome crime), kid's books, magazines and the odd journal, newspapers and occasionally poetry. There's a place for all of these here.

I will not always write about reading. Sometimes, I will write about bookish things - prizes, writers, publishing, the bookish media. I might even choose to write about something completely non-bookish. But reading will be at the heart of 52 Sundays - at least until the next makeover.

And finally, the views I express here are entirely my own. They do not reflect those of my employer.

Now stand by for the first chapter of the new 52 Sundays.