You don’t have to be a father, or a son, to enjoy Laurie Steed’s witty, self-deprecating memoir of love, family and contemporary masculinity. I was especially taken by the parts of the narrative that speak of the creative process—made particularly challenging, in Laurie’s case, by the competing demands of fatherhood and the need to earn a living. Having said that, I think Love, Dad would be an exceptionally welcome gift for fathers and sons alike—infinitely more stimulating than socks and barbecue tongs.
A must-read for all new parents, Love, Dad explores what it means to be a father in the twenty-first century.
The father of two young boys, Laurie reflects on how his own experiences have defined the kind of man he is and the kind of parent he would like to become. His stories—triumphant, funny and sad—draw on Laurie’s own childhood experiences and important relationships with family and mates, alongside the challenges of trauma and mental health shared by many men. This memoir openly shares how Laurie strives to overcome challenges—from breaking generational cycles to maintaining joy in work and parenthood—and how others fresh to parenting can learn from this authentic story of a new dad and his family.
Coming soon (October) from Fremantle Press, Salt River Road is the most recent winner of the City of Fremantle Hungerford Award, again showing the value of this longstanding unpublished manuscript award in introducing fine new writers and exciting new books. Molly Schmidt consulted with Elders of the Menang and Goreng people in developing a story—both authentic and ambitious—that reaches far beyond its premise of a family whose grief is tearing them apart, bringing in a wider view of careless, systemic racism in a rural town in 1970s Australia. Once again I’m struck by the way a work set in the past can have so much to say about the present.
Introducing an exciting new voice in Australian fiction: Molly Schmidt, winner of the 2022 City of Fremantle Hungerford Award. Salt River Road is a compelling coming-of-age novel about grief and healing set in a small town in the 1970s.
In the aftermath of their mother’s death, the Tetley siblings’ lives are falling apart. Left to fend for themselves as their family farm goes to ruins, Rose sets out to escape the grief and mess of home. When she meets Noongar Elders Patsy and Herbert, she finds herself drawn into a home where she has the chance to discover the strength of community, and to heal a wound her family has carried for a generation.
A.J. Betts One Song Pan Macmillan $19.99 YA fiction
Good YA fiction written for young adults may equally be enjoyed by those a bit (or a lot) older—and A.J. Betts always writes good YA fiction. It’s easy to be drawn into the story of Eva’s obsessive quest to win Triple J Unearthed High, and the perils of having to rely on a band of teenage musos yet to gel as a band. The action takes place over a single weekend, in a single setting, and you can feel the tension, smell the aromas of sweat, angst and pepperoni. An engaging, well-paced read about friendship, desire, creativity and resilience.
Aspiring singer-songwriter Eva has one last chance to enter Triple J Unearthed High and break into the music industry.
But after three failed attempts, she needs some help.
Cue the band: perfectionist Eva, charismatic Cooper, easy-going Ant and moody Ruby. Plus fly-on-the-wall Mim, who’s filming them for her school Media project.
Five people who have nothing in common but music. One emotionally and creatively charged weekend.
Can they record the most important song of their lives?
I was blown away by Angela O’Keeffe’s Night Blue when I read it last year, and not at all surprised when it went on to be shortlisted for the 2022 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction.
Angela and I met at Varuna last July, where I was working on my current novel and, in the next room, she was finishing the manuscript of her second novel.
And that manuscript has just been published. I loved The Sitter as much as I did Night Blue and was thrilled when Angela agreed to take part in this interview series.
Angela O’Keeffe grew up with nine siblings on a farm in the Lockyer Valley, Queensland. She completed a Master of Arts in Writing at UTS, and her first novel, Night Blue, was shortlisted for the UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing, as well as the Prime Minister’s Award. She was the recipient of the 2023 Varuna Eleanor Dark Fellowship, and the 2023 UQP Quentin Bryce Award for The Sitter.
Paris, 2020. A writer is confined to her hotel room during the early days of the pandemic, struggling to finish a novel about Hortense Cezanne, wife and sometime muse of the famous painter. Dead for more than a century, Hortense has been reawakened by this creative endeavour, and now shadows the writer through the locked-down city. But Hortense, always subject to the gaze of others, is increasingly intrigued by the woman before her. Who is she and what event hides in her past?
Heartbreaking and perfectly formed, The Sitter explores the tension between artist and subject, and between the stories told about us and the stories we choose to tell.
Art as story
AC: Angela, this is your second novel and the second involving art. Where does this fascination for art come from? Are you an artist yourself? An art historian?
AO: I am neither! But I am asked this a lot. The attraction had to do with the artworks, of course, but also, and perhaps more so, at least initially, it came from the stories that surrounded them. So it was narrative that drew me in. Blue Poles was hated by so many Australians. Why? Hortense Cezanne looks so unhappy in the portraits, and she was disliked by Cezanne’s family and friends. How did she feel about that? But the stories never felt to me to be separated from the artworks. As I wrote, the artworks were an insistent presence.
‘Travelling and speaking through time’
AC: In the present of the narrative, there are only two characters, both of them compelling even though one of them is dead. A writer—at first unnamed—is in a hotel room in Paris, where she is writing a novel about Hortense Cezanne (1850–1922), the wife of French artist Paul Cezanne (1839–1906). Hortense is the other character—ghost, spirit, presence, shadow, figment of the writer’s writerly consciousness? She seems, during the course of the novel, to inhabit some of these nuances, or an indescribable other. I have two questions concerning Hortense. First, could you please talk about the creation of this unique character—what it was that drew you to this woman from history, and your decision to have her enter a contemporary story.
AO: I knew I wanted to write about Hortense when I saw some of the portraits in Paris in 2017. As already mentioned, it was the story surrounding her that drew me in. She was from a working-class family. Cezanne hid her and their son away from his family for many years out of fear of losing his stipend (on which all three survived) from his banker father. Their friends found her shallow. She sat for 29 portraits, and he was a painstakingly slow painter. In the portraits she looks dejected. I knew I wanted to write from her point of view, to explore how she might have seen all this. Bringing her into the present was an attempt to trace, or make visible, the invisibility of art travelling and speaking through time, how art latches onto the present and becomes something it wasn’t before. So I put Hortense and a contemporary writer in a room together in Paris. Could I conjure a situation in which their individual stories might somehow collide? And what might come of such a collision, what new thing might be born? These are the kinds of questions I was asking as I worked. I couldn’t articulate them then as I can now. But on some level I was aware of them through feelings of curiosity and fascination.
‘She would not defend herself’
AC: And my second question about Hortense: I imagine there were many writerly challenges in bringing Hortense to the page so convincingly. I am thinking, for example, of the issue of corporeality and how she manifests her presence in the contemporary character’s world; and also the question of desire—the needs and wants of the departed. Could you please talk about the challenges you faced and how you handled them?
AO: I have this memory of Hortense being really present from the start, that she was such a strong force that she landed quite easily on the page and I didn’t have to think about it. However, that can’t be true, because I also know that I wrote a full draft of the manuscript that I then discarded. Hortense was somehow wrong, or false in it, and I couldn’t use any of it. Then the pandemic came, and it shifted the book’s orientation, and suddenly Hortense came alive. She was just so present, and all I had to do was sort of feel my way along with her. I realised that she was not going to refute the terrible things that had been said about her. She would not defend herself. Instead, she would inhabit those things, and I would see what came of it. I remember feeling huge excitement at this.
Honouring blanks in the canvas
AC: I love the way Hortense, in life always the observed (the model for 29 paintings by Cezanne), becomes the observer in death. Was it your intention to give agency to this woman who appears to have had so little?
AO: Yes, that was one of my intentions, for sure. But I realised quite quickly that I couldn’t—and didn’t want to—make her whole. There are blanks in the canvases and blanks in her history, and I came to see that it was more interesting—for me, for the book—to honour those blanks, to see what an ‘unwhole’ character might do in this situation. The writer, too, is ‘unwhole’ in the story about her own past.
Hidden things
AC: You have devised a graceful way of telling the stories of the two women. The point of view is essentially Hortense’s—as both observer of the writer’s present and the teller of her own memories—but the writer’s point of view is also given voice when, in Part II, a new narrative is introduced, in the form of a letter from the writer to her daughter. Given that the two women are brought together by the writer’s narrative intention to write Hortense’s story, I wondered whether you were ever tempted to include also that developing narrative (aside from the one brief passage in Part I).
AO: Yes, I considered that. In the first attempt I mentioned earlier, there were some of those passages from the book. But there was something off about it. I can’t say what, really. It just didn’t work. And so when I came to write it again, that book is talked about rather than shown. It’s one more thing that is hidden in a novel about hidden things.
Holding two women in a room
AC: The narrative in the present is set in a significant time, March 2020: one year on from the Notre Dame fire in Paris, just after the catastrophic bushfire season in Australia, and the first month of a global pandemic that changed the lives of us all. All of these events are woven into the novel, and Covid plays a major part, in ways I can’t raise because they involve spoilers. But may I ask at what stage of the writing you were in March 2020? That is, did you set the novel then because of what happened and the opportunities it presented, or did you have to rethink a novel already in progress?
AO: As mentioned, I was at the stage where I was starting from scratch again. I had the two characters in a hotel room in Paris. I wanted them to be there for a while, but I couldn’t find a good reason. Was it jet lag? Probably not. And then the pandemic came and not only did I have the reason but the characters, both of them, came alive in new ways. It was such a wonderful thing to discover in that uncertain and terrible time.
Life mirroring art
AC: Did you write some or all of the novel in Paris?
AO: I couldn’t get to Paris because of the closed border. I had been there a couple of times, and I decided that that would be enough. It added to the sense of urgency, in a way. It was a sort of mirroring of the writer’s difficulty in returning home.
I’ve been a great admirer of Robyn Cadwallader’s writing ever since her bestselling first novel, The Anchoress, was published in 2015. The Anchoress tells the story of a seventeen-year-old girl who chooses to renounce the world and become enclosed as a holy woman of prayer (my review here). Robyn’s second novel, Book of Colours, paints a vibrant, compelling portrait of medieval life and the lives behind the illuminated manuscript pages of that time (Robyn talks about Book of Colourshere). Both novels were award winners and gained a huge following in Australia and beyond.
Robyn is a novelist and poet who lives in the country on Ngunnawal land outside Canberra. Prior to working as a researcher, academic and writer, she describes an eclectic early career: ’as a teenager, in retail, selling jewellery, women’s underwear and records (when they were popular the first time round); as a petrol station driveway attendant; and, during uni break, in the Kiwi factory, filling and packaging shoe polish, bleach and fragrant toilet blocks’. Sounds to me like a solid background for studying human life!
Robyn’s new novel, The Fire and the Rose, has been described as ’a heartbreakingly timeless tale, richly imagined and wondrously alive’ (Nigel Featherstone) and ’a beautifully written, thought-provoking exploration of prejudice towards minorities‘ (Canberra Times). I was thrilled to have the opportunity to ask her about it…
England, 1276: Forced to leave her home village, Eleanor moves to Lincoln to work as a housemaid. She’s prickly, independent and stubborn, her prospects blighted by a port-wine birthmark across her face. Unusually for a woman, she has fine skills with ink and quill, and harbours a secret ambition to work as a scribe, a profession closed to women.
Eleanor discovers that Lincoln is a dangerous place, divided by religious prejudice, the Jews frequently the focus of violence and forced to wear a yellow badge. Eleanor falls in love with Asher, a Jewish spicer, who shares her love of books and words, but their relationship is forbidden by law. When Eleanor is pulled into the dark depths of the church’s machinations against Jews and the king issues an edict expelling all Jews from England, Eleanor and Asher are faced with an impossible choice.
Vivid, rich, deep and sensual, The Fire and the Rose is a tender and moving novel about how language, words and books have the power to change and shape lives. Most powerfully, it is also a novel about what it is to be made ‘other’, to be exiled from home and family. But it is also a call to recognise how much we need the other, the one we do not understand, making it a strikingly resonant and powerfully hopeful novel for our times.
That moment…
AC: Robyn, where did The Fire and the Rose come from? What was the moment when you felt: This is a story I have to explore in fiction?
RC: While I was doing research for Book of Colours I came across a reference to the Jews being expelled from England in 1290. I read the sentence again; I was horrified. I’d never heard of this expulsion, so I read a little more. How could a group of people who were part of the fabric of a country be so summarily expelled? That question stayed with me, even when I dismissed the idea of writing a novel about it because it seemed too hard. Each of the three novels I’ve written has begun with an insistent question.
An intimate sense of the past
AC: You are well known for your re-creation of vivid, authentic worlds from a distant past—far more distant than I have ever attempted with my historical fiction. Has your background as a medieval scholar given you that strong sense of time and place, or do you use research methods that would be familiar to any writer of historical fiction?
RC: Both, I think. I consider research as a way of educating myself about a time and place, not simply gathering information to add into the story.
As an academic I studied medieval literature, and that necessarily involved understanding the history of the period. But the literature also gives a more intimate sense of the people: what they believed, what made them laugh, what gave their lives meaning, how they spoke about love or pain or desire. I think I soaked that in and became more familiar with people in the Middle Ages as a result.
When I begin a novel in a particular setting or period, I need to do more focused research. I read everything I can about the historical context, of course, but I’m also very interested in the material culture: physical location and topography, housing, food, etc. But I try to go a bit deeper still and ask myself the implications of whatever I learn. This might involve aspects that we take for granted; for example, I read and think about how people engaged with the senses; how they understood art, or beauty; how they understood their place in the world.
A novel of her own
AC: While your three novels do not form a series, there are crossovers from The Anchoress to Book of Colours and also to The Fire and the Rose. I think the protagonist of The Fire and the Rose, Eleanor, plays a role in all three, although she is only referred to in Book of Colours. What is it about this character that has had such a pull on your imagination?
RC: Oh, Eleanor was such a curious, clever and determined little girl that she refused to let her story end at The Anchoress; I think she wanted a whole novel of her own!
When I wrote The Anchoress I had no conscious sense of extending Eleanor’s story. In that story the anchoress wants to teach her to write, but because neither of them has access to parchment and ink, she shapes letters in Eleanor’s palm.
Even after the novel was finished, I thought about the implications for Eleanor of such a profound experience, discovering a whole world of words in such a sensual way, through the skin. I wondered how she would manage in a small village where so few people could read or write. Would the village become too limiting for her? Would she become restless? Would those around her resent her skills? Those questions were the seeds of her story in The Fire and the Rose.
Making sense of their world
AC: There are aspects of the human subject that are commonly considered universal, but people from the past did not necessarily think as we do today, and I imagine the further back in time we go, the more different those world-views would be. Is it a challenge to negotiate such differences when you create a character from the thirteenth century, or do they present an opportunity?
RC: I think the remarkable thing about investigating people from the past is just how similar they are to us, and at the same time, just how different they are. When I write, I try to hold those two ideas together.
Through the process of writing these three novels, I’ve slowly discovered that limitations or differences are a challenge, but often a good one that pushes me to take a story further. Of course, it means more research in order to understand the beliefs and thinking of the time. My primary interest in writing stories set in the Middle Ages is trying to understand how the people then made sense of the world they found themselves in, and I think that’s true of anything I write in a contemporary setting as well.
We do people from the past a great disservice if we simplify their thoughts and motivations and experiences. For example, when I began writing The Anchoress, the challenge was to write meaningfully about a woman who chooses to be enclosed in a stone cell for life, there to pray and read and ‘suffer with Christ’—something I would never do. As I grew to understand Sarah more closely, I recognised that my initial assumption that she was a very committed and holy woman was much too simplistic. Our motivations are never so simple. Once I began to consider Sarah as a full person, I could begin to explore the fears, desires and dreams that led her to choose enclosure.
Writing the other
AC: The brutal treatment of Jews by the English drives The Fire and the Rose, and in your Author’s Note you describe your position as a Gentile writer writing of this painful history as coming to the work ‘with a bowed head’ (after Colum McCann). More than once you have Jewish characters telling Eleanor, a Gentile, that her own experiences of marginalisation do not give her the right to think she understands theirs. Does this impossible gap between empathy and understanding reflect, in some way, the challenge for a novelist trying to write of the other?
RC: This is a very interesting and somewhat tricky area.
Even though Eleanor is, at times, rebuffed by Jewish people, I’m not suggesting that there is an impossible gap between empathy and understanding. I think Eleanor grows into a profound understanding of the situation of the Jews and their struggle, but I was exploring some of the implications of extreme prejudice.
In the novel, the Jews have been attacked again and again, forced to retreat, relying only on one another for support and comfort. The times that Eleanor is rebuffed are most often moments of grief and stress for the Jews, and their rejection of her attempts to understand their suffering is a product of their marginalisation and the attacks. When they are treated as ‘other’, the divisions are enforced, and in the emotion of the moment, Eleanor is on the other side. However, the relationship between Eleanor and Asher demonstrates how love—the commitment to another through hardship and struggle and delight—can overcome such divisions. The deep bond between Eleanor, Hannah and Marchota is another example.
I recognised that the profound impact of prejudice on Jews and their culture could have implications for my writing, and I spent some time debating and investigating whether I should write this novel, or not. I was warned by a First Nations Australian woman that I shouldn’t attempt to write about a group of people if I didn’t have ‘skin in the game’ because if I made mistakes in my portrayal, it is they, not me, who would suffer as a result. However, a Jewish woman commented in response that if I didn’t tell the story, others would never know it. I knew there was a risk of offending others, but I made several strong commitments: to research as deeply as possible, to seek help and opinions from Jews (I had three sensitivity readers, and another three Jewish readers), and to write only from the point of view of a Gentile character; I would not assume to write from the Jewish point of view.
I think that a writer always seeks to get inside the experience of another person, so in theory, it should be possible to write about others who have a very different experience and outlook from the writer. However, I don’t think that means a writer should just assume that they can write anything. There are areas of sensitivity and marginalisation that need to be carefully considered, but I am heartened by the Jewish woman’s encouragement to write the story so that others would learn of it.
An eternal witness in stone
AC: The walls of the city of Lincoln are given a voice in the novel. These poetic sections, headed ‘The Walls Speak’, provide a chorus of Lincoln’s history, the physical embodiment of its memory, and a brief, eloquent commentary on the timelessness of persecution. It occurred to me that the personification of the inanimate in this novel and also in Book of Colours (the gargoyle) might spring from the same intense experience I have felt during site research—feeling the past in brick and stone. Could you please talk about this aspect of the novel?
RC: Yes, you’re right. I have always loved stone, with its long, long formation in the depths of the earth, its endurance, and the huge range of ways we transform it: into protection, memorial, worship, beauty, foundation and so on. It’s everywhere in Old Lincoln: castle, cathedral, street paving, houses, walls. I knew that the stone would need to speak in some way. I imagined the city walls that completely surrounded the city in the Middle Ages would have stood guard, silent witnesses to all of life in Lincoln, from the joys and celebrations to the suffering, struggle and death. That would include the persecution of the Jews. It’s also ageless, and I found it easy to imagine it as an eternal witness. Even the Bible, in both Old and New Testaments, describes the stones or the walls crying out when people remain silent.
Finding a title
AC: I always find book titles interesting—I think because I’ve had the experience of being wholly certain of what a title should be, as well as the opposite. And when it comes to publication, settling on a title can sometimes be a battleground! Was The Fire and the Rose the first and only title of this novel?
RC: Oh, I’m no good at finding a title at all. I had several. The first one was ‘Not less than everything’, taken from T.S. Eliot’s line in ‘Little Gidding’: ‘A condition of complete simplicity / Costing not less than everything’, because I felt that Eleanor and Asher’s love would, in some ways, cost them everything. However, my agent and my publisher both said it was too vague to communicate well—though it’s interesting that there are quite a few novels now with titles that are phrases. We didn’t battle, because I trust their experience, but I struggled to find another title. My agent suggested The Fire and the Rose, and I discovered that it did suit the story.
Perhaps I’ll call on you for the title of my next novel, whatever it is! [Best not, I think!]
A life goes on
AC: Might we anticipate meeting Eleanor on the page again?
RC: Never say never, but I suspect not. She is someone I would love to meet; wherever her life goes, she will be fascinating and never dull.
The work of three writers most influenced me in the years when I was studying literature and writing, all the while daring to hope I might one day be able to write, myself. Those three writers were Gail Jones, Joan London and my guest today, Simone Lazaroo. You can imagine, then, how delighted I am to have the opportunity to interview Simone here.
Simone migrated to Western Australia from Singapore as a young child. She is an honorary research fellow at Murdoch University, where she taught creative writing for many years, and is part of a Spanish-funded research group.
Since winning the T.A.G. Hungerford Award in 1993, Simone has published six novels, as well as numerous short stories and essays, and has won the WA Premier’s Book Award for Fiction three times. She has also been shortlisted for the prestigious Kiriyama Prize and the Nita B. Kibble Award.
If you are not acquainted with Simone’s work, please do hunt down the brilliant novels that form her backlist: The World Waitingto Be Made, The Australian Fiancé (optioned for film), The Travel Writer, Sustenance and Lost River: Four Albums.
But before you do that, there’s the sixth, her new release, Between Water and the Night Sky…
Elspeth is full of inexpressible longings: to leave behind life in Perth and her beginnings in a small wheatbelt town, and a secret she scarcely comprehends.
Francis wants to fit in—to make a life for himself after migrating from Singapore that is not determined by the colour of his skin or the judgement of others.
Told by their only child, Eva, this is a novel about falling in love, and falling apart—the beautiful, sad story of a shared history that never ends.
Memorialising courage
AC: Simone, Between Water and the Night Sky has been described as auto-fiction, a hybrid genre blending elements of fiction and autobiography. There are many ways a novelist can weave real events and characters, and themselves, into a work of fiction; Donald Stuart, for example, whose novel Shuggie Bain is often classified as auto-fiction, said that it was not autobiographical but inspired by his own experiences. Could you please talk about your choice to write this novel in the way you have, and some of the challenges it posed?
SL: Between Water and the Night Sky began as a couple of short stories that drew on incidents from my parents’ lives, but fictionalised aspects of these (including some elements of plot, setting, characterisation, imagery). But a few years after my mother died, I felt compelled to incorporate extracts from these short stories into a longer story that memorialised aspects of my mother in particular, including her relationship with my father. I focused particularly on my mother’s courage and creativity in the face of considerable struggles she’d experienced. I’d always felt that the way she lived her life showed a kind of heroism often unacknowledged by society. Doubtless many of us know individuals who have shown unacknowledged courage in dealing with the after-effects in their daily lives of traumas they’ve endured, although we sometimes don’t know the precise nature of those traumas.
I also tried in this book to convey many of the social and historical circumstances of my parents’ lives, to give a sense of the era and some of the social and geographical settings in which they lived. For example, partly due to aspects of the White Australia Policy still operating then, marriage between Anglo-Australians and Asians was unusual in the late 1950s, when my parents married, as was migration of Asians into Australia. However, partly because I simply didn’t know certain details of my parents’ lives before and after their marriage, imagination was all I had to fill in the gaps. Also, as the writing of the story progressed, it took on a life of its own. I used various fictional techniques (some of which I’ve alluded to above) to make the story more engaging, and because of issues of privacy.
At the intersection of cultures
AC: Throughout your body of work, you have explored characters at the intersection of cultures. Could you discuss how this plays out in Between Water and the Night Sky?
SL: The marriage of Elspeth and Francis might be considered an embodiment of the intersection of cultures—in this case, Francis’s Singaporean Eurasian culture and Elspeth’s Anglo-Australian culture. And of course, they each experience the upheavals, difficulties and joys of migrating and living in cultures and nations they are unfamiliar with. These kinds of experience can make unusual demands on the individuals involved, and on their relationship with each other. Some of the effects of such experiences upon a bicultural (or perhaps it would be more apt to say multicultural) marriage and family are reflected in this book.
Ways of seeing
AC:A photo’s just a memento of how a person looks at a particular moment…but a person’s life floats across countless moments. Elspeth, p. 164
I love the use of photography as an elemental motif in the narrative. The younger Francis is a keen hobbyist photographer, an interest gifted to daughter Eva, who studies photography at university. It recurs again and again as a metaphor for light and shadow, positive and negative, truth and illusion. I wondered, too, about the relationship between photographs and words in telling the story of a life—whether each complements the other, compensating for the other’s limitations. Was photography always a fundamental part of the story of Francis, Elspeth and Eva?
SL: Yes—photography is in a sense emblematic of how Francis and Eva develop their ways of ‘seeing’ other individuals, particularly during Francis’s courtship of Elspeth and later as Eva sees Elspeth aging. Many of us are familiar with the ways in which family photographs help trigger narratives and understandings about family members.
An enduring kind of love
AC: The relationship between Elspeth and Francis is both incredibly strong and heartbreakingly fragile, and ultimately does not survive—or at least not in the way we expect of a love story. But (and I’m trying not to wander into spoiler territory here) long after finishing the novel I was left thinking about the nature of love, and what endures between people. Did you conceive this work as a love story?
SL: Not while I was in the early stages of writing it. But as the writing progressed, I reflected on some aspects of Elspeth’s and Francis’s relationship with each other in the light of some of the wisdom I believe my parents acquired about their relationship as they aged, and saw that a nonetheless enduring kind of love had developed between my parents, despite the breakup of their marriage. Although my parents didn’t have the conversation that Elspeth and Francis have just before he dies, I wanted to convey something of the growing respect they had for one another as they aged.
Indirect trauma
AC: The great trauma of Elspeth’s infancy, painfully, shockingly, revealed to her late in life, in some ways drives the narrative. Again, I don’t want to give too much of that away. But I have always been interested in the idea that trauma can be passed from one generation to those that follow, and I sense that in this novel. Could you talk about that aspect of the work?
SL: I’m certainly not an expert in these matters. But I’d suggest that while the offspring of a person who has suffered trauma may experience it much less ‘directly’ than that parent, they nonetheless are affected by their parent’s long-term psychological responses to the trauma, which can continue to play out in their daily life decades after the traumatic event—in ways such as depression, anxiety, perhaps difficulty with some kinds of social engagement—even if the parent hasn’t told them about the traumatic event. And it’s possible that offspring who know more directly about their parent’s trauma may feel a heightened sense of responsibility towards their parent, sometimes resulting in the offspring taking on a carer’s role towards the parent at a young age; this can in turn lead to depression and anxiety in the offspring, particularly if they feel powerless to ‘cure’ or make their parent feel ‘better’.
Narrative immediacy
AC: I’ve noticed that while you don’t use it exclusively, you often seem drawn to writing in the first person. What does first-person narration bring to a novel such as this?
SL: As one of my hopes for this novel was that it might help people who’ve suffered similar kinds of trauma feel less alone, I used first person to try and build a sense of more ‘direct’ communication between the writer and reader.
More broadly speaking, I sometimes use first person in my fiction to give a sense of immediacy and direct revelation of the narrator’s thoughts, feelings and experiences—although attentive readers and writers know this isn’t impossible to achieve with third person point of view, too.
When you have to let a title go
AC:Between Water and the Night Sky is a beautiful, evocative title. Was it an ‘always-was’ title or one that took time to emerge?
SL: It took a long time to emerge—partly because I discovered around the middle of last year, while I was working and travelling in Europe, that the title I’d originally chosen for the manuscript-in-progress (almost three years ago) was very similar to the title of someone else’s novel published about two years ago. So en route to various work destinations in Europe, and just as the cover design was being finalised, I had a frantic email correspondence with the exceedingly helpful and patient Georgia Richter of Fremantle Press, in an effort to find another suitable title. Both titles included water, which is central to the novel’s preoccupations with the Indian Ocean and with states of merging, flux, separation and release, in the relationship between Elspeth and Francis, and in her life generally.
Portland Jones is a beautiful writer—a favourite of mine on the strength of her brilliant debut novel, Seeing the Elephant, which was shortlisted for the City of Fremantle Hungerford Award. I came late to reading this, but I have been singing its praises ever since, and if you haven’t yet read it I urge you to (as Molly Meldrum used to say) do yourself a favour and seek out a copy.
Needless to say, I was excited to hear that Portland’s second novel was scheduled for 2022, and anxious to read it. I was not disappointed. Only Birds Above is sublime, and I think you’ll get a sense of that from reading her responses to my questions below.
Portland Jones is a writer, lecturer and horse trainer who lives and works in the Swan Valley, near Perth. She has a PhD in Literature, and in addition to her two novels she has co-authored a non-fiction book, Horses Hate Surprise Parties. She is currently working on a third novel and another work of non-fiction.
Arthur the blacksmith goes to war with the 10th Light Horse, to care for the horses of his fellow soldiers. When he returns, Arthur’s wife, Helen, and their children bear witness to a man forever damaged by what he has seen and suffered.
As a second war looms, Arthur insists on his son Tom going to work in Sumatra. Tom is taken prisoner by the Japanese, but is sustained by memories of life on the farm at home and a growing understanding of his father.
This big-hearted, beautiful novel captures the deep and mysterious connection between humans and horses—whose very presence lends a sweet, steady counterweight to human frailty, and whose nobility aligns with human courage.
The unfathomable
AC:Portland, I’m intrigued that your two novels, although very different, both tell stories of war—the Vietnam War in Seeing the Elephant (2016) and now World Wars I and II in Only Birds Above. What draws you, as a novelist, to these critical historical periods of the twentieth century?
PJ: I think there are two main reasons. The first is because history, or more specifically the history of conflict, has always felt very real to me. When I was growing up my Dutch grandmother would hold us in her lap and tell stories about fighting in the resistance during the war. She used to tell us about hiding my grandfather in their house between the floor of the second storey and the ceiling of the first. They would roll back the rug, prise up the floorboards and then, once he’d squeezed himself into that tight little space, she would nail the boards back down and replace the rug. She told me how German soldiers had come to the house and yelled at her, ‘Where’s your husband?’ And she had pretended she didn’t know, although he was hiding just above their heads.
And some stories become indelible because of their context. I admired my grandmother a great deal and it wasn’t until she had been gone for several years and I started a PhD on learned helplessness in war veterans that I realised that both she and my grandfather had suffered from PTSD. My grandparents belonged to a generation that didn’t speak about trauma. PTSD was only recognised as a disorder in 1980, so people like my grandparents just lived with their responses because they didn’t have the language back then to talk about them. That realisation reframed a lot of my childhood memories of my grandparents. I saw how their lives and the lives of their children had been irredeemably altered by their experiences and I suppose that made me want to understand more.
I was born at the height of the Vietnam War (or the American War, as the Vietnamese say). During my childhood I felt like it was a dark secret grown-ups wouldn’t talk about with children and I’ve always been suspicious of those sorts of secrets. Then the Welcome Home March was held in 1987 (the year I left school) and it all felt a bit underhanded. No-one that I asked could give me a coherent answer about the treatment of our Vietnam veterans, so I started to read as widely as I could. Back then, there wasn’t nearly as much material about the Australian soldier’s experience in Vietnam, it was mostly about the American experience. As an example of that, one of the most popular Australian songs about the war (Cold Chisel’s ‘Khe Sanh’) is about a battle that Australian ground troops didn’t even fight in. They could have written the same song about Long Tan without even changing the rhyme, but perhaps in the late 70s no-one knew anything about Long Tan because it was a specifically Australian battle.
I decided to do a PhD so I could untangle in my own mind this enormously complex, multi-dimensional part of Australian history. When I first started researching, we were on a family holiday to Exmouth and we stopped at the Overlander Roadhouse. I saw a man sitting in a car eating a burger and on his back window a sticker that said AATTV (Australian Army Training Team Vietnam). I knocked on his window and we had a chat about his service and a few weeks later, over a cup of tea, he told me about himself and the terrible price he’d paid for the years he spent in the army. History can be uncomfortably close when you hear it first hand—that was another story made indelible by its context.
The second reason that I write about war is because it frightens me. I have three children, two of them boys, and I can never forget that we’ve had conscription during my lifetime. Once you’re a parent, history happens to sons and daughters. So I write about war as a way to try and understand that.
Custodians of the horse
AC:Arthur is a blacksmith who has grown up and worked with horses all his life, and he carries an intimate knowledge of and love for them into war as an infantryman in the 10th Light Horse. The scenes where Arthur is interacting with his horse are among the most beautiful and moving of the novel, and they clearly come from your own experience and knowledge as a horse trainer. Could you please tell us about this aspect of the novel, and the research you conducted into Australia’s war horses?
PJ: During WWI the horses were usually tethered in a row on long picket lines. At the end of the war, when it was decided that the horses would not be coming home, they shaved their manes and tails, pulled off their shoes and a veterinary officer walked down the line and shot them where they stood. The horses were so habituated to gunfire at that point that they didn’t even try to run away.
I tell that story to my university class and every time I pretend to be objective, though it’s an image that will always haunt me. Not just because of the loss of the horses but also because of what it must have done to the men that had fought alongside them. Nearly 136,000 horses left Australia between 1914 and 1918 and only one returned.
To me, horses are the most beautiful of all our domestic animals. The joy of watching them gallop and play never wears off, even after all these years. When you’re a horse trainer, their lives are tightly woven into yours. There’s this moment, every evening, just before I go inside for the night. The afternoon light is coming sideways through the trees and horses are quietly eating. I know then that I’m just one small link of a chain that stretches back for over five thousand years, all of us custodians of the horse. I’m grateful every single day that I can do what I do. It’s a job but it’s also a privilege. In writing Only Birds Above I really wanted to convey that sense and, in my own small way, to honour the thousands of horses that died during the war.
I really enjoy novel research and I like to think of myself as a method researcher—I want to live and breathe my subject. Luckily there are lots of people who are interested in the history of the Light Horse and I’ve been able to speak to many who are passionate about preserving that history. And people are so kind. When you tell them that you’re interested in their passion, they are incredibly generous with their time. I have been lucky enough to have been shown original equipment, ridden in a replica of a universal pattern saddle (the saddle that was used during WWI) and had many, many long conversations about the tiniest details of gear and equipment with people who have dedicated years of their lives to learning as much as they can about the Light Horses. A friend even gave me an old universal pattern saddle which had been hanging in the rafters of a shed for decades—it’s now been restored and is sitting in my living room. To me these things connect us to our past.
In the presence of death
AC:
Joining up was the right thing to do and like everyone says—it’s a chance to see the world.
When Arthur meets Helen, he is already in training at the Blackboy Hill Camp and there is an aching poignancy in his words to her. Is their hasty marriage, emblematic of many of that time, an act of naivety? Desperation? Hope?
PJ: I think the threat of death strips everything bare. All the layers of artifice that we paste between ourselves and the world get ripped away. I have a very dear friend fighting a serious illness and I’m often struck by how the threat of this loss has altered the way we communicate. It’s as though your skin has been rubbed raw—some moments have an almost painful vividness and clarity. It’s sad but it’s also beautiful.
You’re never more alive than when you’re in the presence of death. That’s why risk is so important, it makes you cherish your life. After my father died I sat down to try and write about it and the first thing I wrote was: ‘Why is everything so beautiful since you’ve gone?’ For weeks I’d have to stop and stare at the way the light fell through the leaves or the way the sunset coloured the dust. The sight of a mother lifting her baby from a car seat or a flock of parrots in a marri tree would take my breath.
When I was writing the novel I felt sure that Arthur and Helen’s marriage would have been informed by that same sense. There would have been an urgency to it, a need to hold onto what is real and important in the presence of so much uncertainty. In an era without videos, social media and all those other windows into other people’s experiences, falling in love must have been like exploring new territories. Amazing and yet also terrifying. Our ability to love is the most miraculous and beautiful aspect of life, isn’t it? [A million times yes!]
On the homefront
AC:For all that the novel takes us into theatres of war and the world of men and horses, it also brings us stories of the homefront, of women and children left alone during the war, and then inexplicably alone again when the men who return are morose, insular and unable to communicate with those who love them. Without giving away spoilers, could you talk about the longer term effects of the war on Helen, a new bride when Arthur leaves, and their daughter Ruth?
PJ: One of the things I encountered when I was researching my first novel is the prevalence of families with three generations of soldiers. Many of the Vietnam veterans who I met had grandfathers who served in WWI and fathers who had served in WWII. I am really interested in how this would change the dynamic of the entire family. What happens to intergenerational trauma when it is compounded?
I think it’s the role of historical fiction to fill in the gaps between what is written and the people who lived it. The experiences of women in war are rarely privileged by non-fiction historical narrative, though that is definitely changing. History doesn’t always tell us what ordinary people thought or felt and sometimes the numbers are too big to comprehend. Or maybe your mind won’t let you comprehend them because it’s too much. But having an insight into one person’s experience makes it easier to relate to. Listening to veterans speak about the experiences of their wives and families is often very moving because it takes great courage to love someone whose life has been impacted by war.
‘Almost as if it didn’t happen’
AC:Son Tom, working in Indonesia at the outbreak of World War II, becomes a prisoner of the Japanese and one of the slave workforce building the Pekanbaru Death Railway across Sumatra, which was completed on the day Japan surrendered and subsequently abandoned. Your own great-grandfather was among the thousands who died during its construction, and I noticed he appears briefly in the novel. Was it important to you to explore this terrible tragedy of World War II?
PJ: The novel started out as a story about my great grandfather. He was one of those aspects of the family history that no-one really knew much about other than that he’d died in Indonesia during the war. So a while ago I wrote to the Dutch archives just to see if I could find out anything and within 24 hours I had a copy of his death certificate and a photo of his grave. That was really the start of an absolutely fascinating journey.
My daughter’s Japanese teacher was able to translate the death certificate for me and I learned that Dirk had died very near to Pekanbaru, the start of the infamous Pekanbaru Death Railway built across Sumatra by both POWs and press-ganged Javanese labourers known as Romushas. When I was researching the railway online I came across a website put together by a New Zealander working in Sumatra who was fascinated by the railway. He mapped the length of the line with a drone and a GPS using the little information that he could find. In fact most of his information came from a single text written by a Dutch researcher.
I sent him an email and we started chatting and pretty soon he invited me to come stay with him in Pekanbaru (an experience that went way better than it might have done, in hindsight). The Pekanbaru Death Railway is not very well known. Around the town you can still see rail embankments winding through palm oil plantations and train tracks repurposed as farm fencing. It’s almost as though it didn’t happen, and I think that’s very sad. Standing in the place where my great-grandfather died, listening to the traffic and the call to prayer, was definitely an experience I’ll never forget.
I’m interested in representations of truth in fiction. I wrote my great-grandfather into Only Birds Above knowing only what I’d found out through the archives and the couple of stories and photos from my grandmother. Originally I wanted to include photos in the novel—I have photos of Dirk and I have taken photos of various things in the novel that I thought it would be interesting to include. But in the editing process we decided that the novel was better without them. But it’s that blurring of the line between truth and fiction that really interests me.
Piecing a story together
AC: Only Birds Aboveis structurally complex, moving between time-frames, generations, characters and places. This has the effect of creating a compelling narrative, with different threads to be drawn together so that the reader can see the whole. But I’m wondering how you managed the process of writing the story—whether you wrote entire strands and wove them together, or worked piece by piece, assembling them into that whole.
PJ: I wrote the first 50,000 words with great confidence but absolutely no plan. I wrote without any sense of continuity or cohesion and in totally random order. And then one day I sat down at my computer and realised with horror that what I had was not a novel but a seething mass of disparate fragments.
I had to call on the assistance of the always amazing Richard Rossiter to try and pull them into some kind of order. It was a bit overwhelming for a while; I thought it would never make any sense at all. But sense emerged in the end.
After that I vowed I would never write a novel with a complex structure again and that I would write in an organised and disciplined way. But maybe my brain is too chaotic for that kind of order because the novel I’m working on now is at least as complex and I’m no more organised. I guess that’s future-Portland’s problem.
Only birds…
AC:I love the novel’s title. Did it come early in the development, or, as so often happens, was it something you and your publisher agonised over?
PJ: I consider myself extremely lucky to have worked with Georgia Richter as editor on this novel. I learned so much during the process; it was both fascinating and humbling. I’m sure Georgia had many hair-tearing-out moments when we were editing but luckily the title wasn’t one of them. It came to me very early in the writing process as it seemed to be a good way of describing a loss of faith. If there’s only birds above you, there’s nothing else, is there?
Only Birds Above is published by Fremantle Press You can follow Portland via her website
What an exquisite gem of a book with which to begin a new year!
Rashida Murphy’s collection The Bonesetter’s Fee and other stories was runner-up in the 2021 Carmel Bird Digital Literary Award and has been published by Spineless Wonders as part of the award prize.
The twenty stories that make up the collection—a few short enough to be considered flash fiction—are clever, quiet, surprising. Some are wickedly humorous (e.g. ‘Strands of Jupiter’), others heartbreaking (e.g. ‘When the sky breaks’). Many tell stories of truths and lies about identity—what is lost, found, forged, inherited, what is clung to, thrown away.
While there is no continuous narrative running through the collection, as I thought about the work long after turning the last page I held in my mind the image of a endearingly quiet, intelligent young girl, watching the folly around her, learning the value of words and of silence, knowing ‘a girl’s worth is not in the symmetry of her bones’. Rashida Murphy has done her justice.
Julia Lawrinson Meland Shell Fremantle Press $16.99
Okay, I know I’m not exactly the target audience for Julia Lawrinson’s tween/YA novel Mel and Shell, but I’m a longtime fan of Julia’s voice and find it hard to go past anything she writes. And this is a novel that I suspect is going to find many, many readers who read for the sheer pleasure of nostalgia, although it’s likely to be leavened with the acerbic aftertaste of hindsight. If you grew up in the days of ABBA and Countdown, if you ate Chico Rolls and played Space Invaders, if you remember the distinctly whitebread version of history favoured in Western Australia’s sesquicentenary celebrations of 1979, I think you’ll enjoy Mel and Shell as much as I did, while appreciating its subtle critique of that time.
It’s 1979. Swedish pop group ABBA rules the airwaves, roller skating is cool, and Mel and Shell are best friends. There’s nothing they like more than making up dances to ABBA songs, and there’s nothing they like less than Scary Sharon and Stinky Simon. But things are changing, fast. Confiding in her pen pal from 1829, Shell discovers she has a lot to learn about loyalty, honesty and roller skating.
I’m intrigued by the premise of Sara Foster’s new title, The Hush, and I think there will be a few copies under my Christmas tree this year. Sara is well-known as a bestselling author of psychological thrillers, and this time she ventures into a dystopian near-future world that sounds frighteningly familiar with our present. I’ve been hearing a lot about The Hush and am looking forward to reading it.
Lainey’s friend Ellis is missing. And she’s not the only one.
In the six months since the first case of a terrifying new epidemic—when a healthy baby wouldn’t take a breath at birth—the country has been thrown into turmoil. The government has passed sweeping new laws to monitor all citizens. And several young pregnant women have vanished without trace.
As a midwife, Lainey’s mum Emma is determined to be there for those who need her. But when seventeen-year-old Lainey finds herself in trouble, this dangerous new world becomes very real. The one person who might help is Emma’s estranged mother, but reaching out to her will put them all in jeopardy…
The Hush is a new breed of near-future thriller, an unflinching look at a society close to tipping point and a story for our times, highlighting the power of female friendship through a dynamic group of women determined to triumph against the odds.
Fremantle Press’s crime list seems to have taken on a different shade of murder recently, with the release of three debut titles by women writers. All three will be finding a place under my Christmas tree this year.
Sally Scott has a wicked sense of humour, so I feel confident in predicting readers of Fromage are in for a pacy crime story with more than a few laughs along the way. Listen to her talk about killing people with food, as well as the more serious matter of writing while undergoing cancer treatment, in this ABC Radio interview.
Journalist Alex Grant is enjoying the last days of her summer holiday in Croatia when she is accosted by an old school friend, Marie Puharich, and her odious brother, Brian, both there to attend the funeral of their fearsome grandfather’s two loyal retainers. The only upside of the whole sorry business is meeting Marco, the family’s resident Adonis. An incorrigible foodie, Alex is unable to resist Brian’s invitation to visit the family creamery in Australia’s south-west to snoop around for stories and eat her body weight in brie. But trouble has a way of finding Alex, not least because her curiosity is the size of a giant goudawheel. What begins as a country jaunt in search of a juicy story will end in death, disaster and the destruction of multiple pairs of shoes.
I saw Karen Herbert interviewed at this year’s York Festival, and The River Mouth sounds like a brilliant thriller with a lot to say about the social world. It’s been described by Readings as ‘a stunning debut that will keep you guessing till the last chapter’. There’s an interview here in which Karen talks about her inspiration for writing.
Fifteen-year-old Darren Davies is found facedown in the Weymouth River with a gunshot wound to his chest. The killer is never found. Ten years later, his mother receives a visit from the local police. Sandra’s best friend has been found dead on a remote Pilbara road. And Barbara’s DNA matches the DNA found under Darren’s fingernails. When the investigation into her son’s murder is reopened, Sandra begins to question what she knew about her best friend. As she digs, she discovers that there are many secrets in her small town, and that her murdered son had secrets too.
It always adds another layer of interest when authors write what they know. Lisa Ellery is a lawyer who runs her own law practice, and has now turned to writing crime. There’s a great interview with her here.
Andrew Deacon is young, fit and single, a junior prosecutor at the WA DPP with a bright future and a sense of entitlement to match. That future starts to look darker when he spends the night with an attractive stranger, Lily Constantine, and she is found murdered in her apartment the following day. Andrew believes he knows who killed Lily but there is not a shred of evidence to prove it.
This is a pacy, darkly comic whodunnit with a twist—Andrew knows who did it but the clock is ticking and he has to prove it before he gets himself taken out.
I love regional festivals, and they hold a special place in my heart: the very first festival I took part in as a writer was one (sadly now defunct) in Albany, where I discussed my debut novel, The Sinkings. The historic murder that is at the centre of Little Jock’s story in The Sinkings took place at a lonely campsite near Albany, and one of the thrills of my writing life was when several Albany residents introduced themselves to me at the festival as descendants of the real people who feature in the novel.
The York Festival—a diverse, family-friendly multi-arts festival held in the historic town of York—has been running for many years. But this year its program includes a one-day writers festival, curated by the wonderful William Yeoman and featuring some fabulous Western Australian writers—many of them introducing new books.
The writers festival, to be held on Saturday 2 October, is divided into several sets:
The Fiction Set:Skyglow by Leslie Thiele, Wherever You Go by Monique Mulligan and Locust Summer by David Allan-Petale, with a discussion on Truth in Fiction
The Crime Set:The River Mouth by Karen Herbert and Death Leaves the Station by Alexander Thorpe, and a panel on Criminal Speculations
The Non-Fiction Set: Isolation by Stephen Scourfield and Many Maps by Bill and Jenny Bunbury, with what sounds like a fascinating conversation entitled Westralia Triumphant?
The Children’s Set:Beneath the Trees by Cristy Burne, The Wrecker’s Curse by Norman Jorgensen and Where Do Stars Go? by Katie Stewart, and a panel on Writing for Children
The Poetry Set: John Kinsella, Caitlin Maling, Fr Robert Nixon and Rose van Son, and a discussion on Wordmusic
There’s also a Long Table Breakfast, featuring Stephen Scourfield and Will Yeoman, with proceeds going to the local River Conservation Society.
Details and bookings here (check the ‘Writers’ box).
I’m thrilled to be taking part in the festival, chairing sessions with Monique Mulligan (10.30am), Cristy Burne (11.30am) and Rose van Son (4.30pm). In this episode of the festival’s Pod Fiction podcast, Will Yeoman and I talk about these sessions and the festival in general.
York, situated on Ballardong Nyoongar land, is 98 kilometres east of Perth—a short drive for Perth residents. It is the oldest inland town in the state (established 1835), and really worth visiting, with its heritage buildings and vibrant arts scene.
David Allan-Petale Locust Summer Fremantle Press $26.99
This beautifully written debut novel from writer/journalist David Allan-Petale is set in a fictional town in Western Australia’s Wheatbelt. Although strongly evocative of rural life and the relentless work involved in farming the land, the novel’s strength, for me, lies in the delicacy of its handling of family relationships and the way those bonds are tested by internal and external pressures. Locust Summer was shortlisted for the Australian/Vogel Literary Award.
On the cusp of summer, 1986, Rowan Brockman’s mother asks if he can come home to Septimus in the Western Australian Wheatbelt to help with the harvest. Rowan’s brother Albert, the natural heir to the farm, has died, and Rowan’s dad’s health is failing. Although he longs to, there is no way that Rowan can refuse his mother’s request as she prepares the farm for sale.
This is the story of the final harvest—the story of a young man in a place he doesn’t want to be, being given one last chance to make peace before the past, and those he has loved, disappear.
Perth writer Meg McKinlay has produced some of my favourite children’s picture books and fiction for young people—A Single Stone (Prime Minister’s Literary Award, Queensland Literary Award), Catch a Falling Star (SCBWI Crystal Kite Award, WA Premier’s Book Award), Ten Tiny Things, Once Upon a Small Rhinoceros and many others. And I’ve lost count of how many copies of The Truth about Penguins I’ve bought! This is her latest, a chapter book for young readers.
Bella’s house likes to travel, setting sail across the ocean while everyone sleeps. Bella’s parents don’t mind as long as the house is home by daylight. One night, Bella has a wonderful idea for her grandfather’s birthday. She wants to find a figurine he made of her grandmother, which was lost overboard in an accident. Bella and the house go in search of it, but things don’t quite go according to plan…
Author of KATHLEEN O’CONNOR OF PARIS (narrative non-fiction), ELEMENTAL and THE SINKINGS (novels) and INHERITED (short story collection). looking up/looking down is an occasional blog about writing, reading and watching the world...
looking up/looking down 