Farewell Deirdre Hill (O'Donnell)

I knew her only for the past few years. She was one of my predecessors at the Australian Society of Authors where she worked to help achieve one of our greatest victories, Public Lending Right, and she remained very interested in its affairs right up until her last days. For the past year or more, her frailty was very apparent.
We ceased having meetings of the Trustees of the ASA Benevolent Fund (of which she was Chair until forced to stand down down due to her physical deterioration) at the ASA because it was too difficult for her to climb the stairs.
I knew her particularly through the Benevolent Fund and her attendance at ASA events.
I was aware she was the wife of Gus O'Donnell, who was the copyright visionary who set up the Australian Copyright Council and Copyright Agency Ltd.
I'm sorry she's gone.
Pax vobiscum, Deirdre (1925-2010).

Lisa Heidke: What Kate did Next

As I've stated elsewhere on this blog, Lisa Heidke is a friend of mine. Because of that I read her books. I'm glad I do, because otherwise I would miss almost entirely the genre she inhabits.
It's marketed as chick-lit. The pink cover with gold hearts gives that away, but really What Kate did Next (Allen & Unwin, ISBN 978-1-74175-933-4) is simple escapist popular fiction, and that's meant as a compliment.
Rather than expanding the generic boundaries of the Mills and Boon and Harlequin formulaic books, this is the sort of book we had on the bedside tables of our house when I was growing up. It's the sort of book we took on holidays to the beach. It's the urban Australian equivalent of Georgette Heyer, Agatha Christie, Taylor Caldwell and even Mary Renault.
Of course it recounts a journey. In this case, the journey concerns Kate Cavendish, who should be happy in her well-off middle-class North Shore lifestyle (yes, I'm talking about a very Sydney book).
She has two children, a thirteen year old troublesome daughter Lexi and an eight year old son Angus. Her husband Matthew is a successful businessman who expects her to cook dinner for visiting American clients at a moment's notice. The scene where Kate offends four Mormons with her alcohol fuelled meal is very amusing, and self-deprecating about the smug superiority of North Shore codes of behaviour.
Kate was a successful photographer before she took on motherhood. Now, she has a chance to work again at Delicious Bites magazine. Her friend Fern, perhaps a little conveniently but again in that casual North Shore way, is "a guru in the magazine world" and thus able to offer Kate a suddenly vacant assistant position.
So Kate starts work and, while she is fantasising about the thighs of Arnaud, Angus' soccer coach, who also works at the magazine publishing company, finds herself out late at night, and drunk, with Graeme Grafton, the handsome chief photographer.
At the same time, her mother is proposing to remarry her father, who left the family twenty years before, while her sister Robyn blobs around eight and half months pregnant. Robyn's husband, Dan, ran away once the pregnancy was confirmed and is now in Spain asking for a divorce so he can marry the chick he's met there. Meanwhile, Lexi has cut her hair off and is wagging school.
It sounds silly and it could be, but Heidke hangs these disparate pieces together to create a funny and pleasant read. That may not seem much, but so few books offer that these days. I find I close more at page 10 than I finish.
Yes, we have infidelity, but neither Kate nor Matthew does the dirty deed (though Kate comes perilously close). The side-story of the remarrying parents is engaging and offers a counter balance to the general craziness. And in the end Kate finds she can be a photographer, a mother and a loved and loving wife.
Is it for everybody?
I don't think so, but it is for sufficient readers that Allen & Unwin chose to publish this second of Heidke's books. It's not merely because it is set on the North Shore, where the dads drive BMWs, the mums drive Mercedes and the soccer coaches are French and handsome. My own book set on the North Shore, Music from another Country, has been praised for its honest depiction of masculinity, but, even though it is enjoying modest sales, no publisher (including Fat Frog, who published it) was ready to throw significant marketing dollars at it.
Not so for What Kate did Next. The book is everywhere, including front of the shop here in Dymocks Armidale. Heidke's book is indicative of subtle changes in the publishing industry. She is part of the feminisation of publishing -- it is women who are buying more books, who are reading more fiction. Stories for blokes are relatively high risk -- publishers are better off targetting their non-fiction lists at them.
So this is the new "middle list". And with a book like What Kate did Next, Allen & Unwin have made a good middle-brow, middle-class choice.
That may seem as if I'm damning the book with faint praise, but I'm not. This is the sort of book that is like comfort food. It's nourishing, familiar and tasty and you know what you are getting.
You can't go wrong with that.

Footnote: In the list of acknowledgements, Heidke thanks Shelley Kenigsberg as a member of her writers' group. Shelley has been an office-bearer in the Society of Editors (NSW) and or several years in the eighties I worked with her and Lisa Heidke at the same publishing company. It's pleasing to see we're still all muddli9ng around with the industry.

Fear Factor: Terror Incognito launched

Fear Factor, edited by Meenakshi Bharat and Sharon Rundle, and featuring a wide range of stories looking at the impact of terror on the world (including one by yours truly), was launched at The Hughenden Hotel in Woollahra yesterday by Melina Marchetta. The book is a unique collaboration between India and Australia.
While I wasn't able to make the launch, I look forward to seeing the book do well in sales.
You can buy copies here .

ASA Barbara Jefferis Award 2010: The China Garden

Professor Robert Dixon (right) of the University of Sydney and myself at the ASA Barbara Jefferis Award, 14 March 2010.

The Barbara Jefferis Award 2010 was awarded on 14 March. The winner was The China Garden by Kristina Olsson, published by University of Queensland Press.

"Without feeling the need to resolve every absence or mystery, Olsson gently suggests that it is always possible to make new things out of the past, however fractured or painful.” ~ from the judges' reading report.

The Australian Long Story edited by Mandy Sayer

Mandy Sayer, a Sydney writer, has edited a new collection, The Australian Long Story (ISBN 978-1-926428-00-0), for Penguin imprint, Hamish Hamilton. The concept is good; a package of longer fiction works by familiar and some not so familiar authors. As always with anthologies, the editor's choice is open to debate.
Sayer sets out her reasons for the need for such an anthology and her choice of works in her introduction, and there she offers some grounding points for those who might use a collection such as this for study of both literature and writing practice. She first speaks of her inspiration for a collection of longer fiction, being The Granta Book of the American Long Story and recent collections by Tim Winton and David Malouf. The success of Nam Le's The Boat (also published by Penguin) must also have been on her and her publisher's minds. The works of all three of these Australian writers are included in the collection, and they are certainly among the better stories here.
Sayers gives a potted history of the short story in Australia and some of its practitioners and sets out to define what she means by "the long story". I'm not convinced by her arguments, but at least she explains her reasons for making a distinction between works because of their number of words. I couldn't accept that she refused any Christina Stead as the long stories "were all set overseas". That smacked a little too much of the idiosyncrasies of the terms of Miles Franklin Award. As it is, the Peter Carey piece she includes is set in an unidentified location that could easily be New York, Cape Town or Sydney, so why could we not have Christina?
And while I'm being niggardly, I'm tired too of Kings Cross writers sneering at Patrick White. To say he "commits the cardinal sin of patronising his characters" when you include your own husband's work in your anthology pushes the boundaries a bit too far for me. Finally, I find it baffling for an anthologist to claim that she would have included a piece by Frank Hardy but "it was too different in terms of tone, style and setting (the 1930s) to keep company with what would become the final selection" -- does this mean she seeks homogeneity?
These quibbles aside, the collection offers not only solid stories from Malouf ("The valley of lagoons", an evocative, restrained, fully realised story from childhood), Winton ("Boner McFarlin's Moll", vivid in the description of small-town life, though not entirely convincing in its conclusion) and Le ("Halflead Bay", where family bonds and obligations are covert levers for a deceptively simple narrative), it also provides an opportunity for the genius of Elizabeth Jolley to shine again. Her "Grasshoppers" is to my mind the strongest work in this book. While it seems to be conventional, closer examination reveals some magic realism at work. It's a delight.
Interestingly, none of these are urban stories. All are set in small towns or rural areas, "Grasshoppers" also crossing over to India.
Two other works are also non-urban. Gillian Mears' story is set in Grafton. Unfortunately, over the years I have found myself unable to engage with Mears' work since it brings a sense of suffocation on me. I know this is my fault, not hers, and I think it is largely due to my gender. Female readers may well have a very different perspective on "The childhood gland". The work by Sayers' husband, Louis Nowra, "Ten anecdotes about Lord Howe Island", is exactly that. As a piece of writing, I suspect it sat better in its original showcase publication for the Sydney Olympic Games. I enjoyed reading it, but I wondered whether there were other "longer stories" that might have had stronger claims to be in an anthology such as this one.
Set in Adelaide, Peter Goldsworthy's "Jesus wants me for a sunbeam" is a strong story about choice. If I were using this book in a writing course, I'd ask students to read this work first. The fact that a father chooses to accompany a dying child in death, leaving his wife and son alive, raises a spectrum of ethical and life issues. Death (or almost death) and reactions to it are central in a number of the other works in this collection. I would ask that students read the Jolley work next, then the Le work, then the Mears work (despite my personal reaction, I can see what the work is doing), then the Malouf work, with Carey's work, "The chance", which deals with loss and transformation, as the final piece. Carey's work is urban "speculative fiction" set in a world where people can take part in a lottery and change their bodies for other ones. It is a perfect counterpart to "Jesus wants me for a sunbeam".
The other story included in the collection is Helen Garner's "Honour". It has an urban setting yet, partly because of political references, it seems oddly dated. It is still a strong story, but the tone, style and setting vary significantly from the rest of the works selected. Should it not be here? I think it should, but so should Stead and White and Hardy.
This collection has its faults, but its strength are sufficient to outweigh them. I'm pleased Sayers took the time to assemble this collection.

ABR's Favourite Australian Novel

I voted for The Vivisector by Patrick White in the Australian Book Review survey of favourite Australian novels. It made it into the Top 20 at place 14.
The book is also in the running for the 1970 Lost Man Booker Prize. That year, the rules were changed and 1970 books were not considered. The prize is now being reconsidered. Would Paddy have cared? (Probably -- he was a dark horse.)
If you are frightened of reading Paddy and who isn't, The Vivisector is a good place to start. It's a very Sydney novel. I'm thinking of the humidity and dampness there at the moment and the book's atmosphere is already with me. I like to think it is close to being a self-portrait -- the cruelness of the artist cutting through emotional sinews in pursuit of his obsessions.

Copyright cases: Comment

The recent decisions in the iiNet and "Dowununder" cases are quite straightforward, steady-as-she-goes affirmations of the solidity of the legal decision-making processes in the Australian copyright system. On the one hand, the courts have cleared an internet service provider (ISP), that is, iiNet, of providing a means for people to carry out illegal activities. This decision will be challeneged, of course, and the issue will go to the High Court. Why? For the content providers, there's too much money at stake.
With "Downunder", the primacy of 'material form' is again demonstrated. But the offending part of the song is only a very small part.
The real issue, as in all copyright disputes, is how much is it worth. That will be the interesting part of this case.