Cecilia Mackworth/Isabelle Eberhardt

July, 2011: The Destiny Of Isabelle Eberhardt, by Cecilia Mackworth (1975) was, I'm pretty sure, given to me by my mother, but uncharacteristically for her, it has not been inscribed. Over the years, Mumma has given me quite a few books by feminist historians, or books about exceptionally bold and intrepid women from earlier times. I'm not sure whether this is because I have always shown a tendency towards boundary-bustin' feminism, or perhaps Mumma and her choice of birthday presents subtly urged me in that direction.

Isabelle Eberhardt is one of the most boundary-bustin' people I've ever read about. And it's unfair to keep her within the limits of feminism, because she was a boundary-buster by anyone's standards. "She was that which attracts me more than anything else," writes Colonel Lyautey after her death, "A rebel. What a joy to find someone who is truly himself, refusing all prejudice, all servitude, all banality, and who passes through life as freely as a bird through the air." In brief, she grew up in Geneva; her mother was an illegitimate German Jew who had kept her origins secret and married a Russian of noble birth (i.e. a big snob) in the Tsarist Army. After having several children with him, she ran off with their tutor, a handsome Armenian with all sorts of extreme philosophies. Isabelle Eberhardt, born 1877, was the youngest daughter from the second litter (to use my mother's terminology). Her childhood was bad enough to make her run, and keep running, until she was drowned, at twenty-seven, in a flash flood in Ain-Sefra, Algeria. By then, she had converted to Islam, dressed habitually as a man, had lost all her teeth and had malaria, was married to a handsome but rather spineless Arab soldier whom she had met one night in an oasis, and spent her days and nights riding around the Sahara, taking shelter (or not) in various Bedouin tents, army camps and tiny villages.

After reading her story (and it's very nicely told, too), the main impression left on me was that someone who lives so resolutely according to her nature, and by what seems right to her (rather than by what she is told is right), leads a very lonely life. Enemies spring up around Isabelle for practically no reason. She writes in her diary, on Christmas Day 1902, "The most difficult of all things - the only difficult thing, perhaps - is to enfranchise oneself and - even harder - to live in freedom. Anyone who is in the least free is the enemy of the mob, to be systematically persecuted, tracked down wherever he takes refuge. I am becoming more and more irritated against this life and the people who refuse to allow any exception to exist and who accept their own slavery and try to impose it on others."

Her ideas about freedom are further advanced than mine, and therefore exciting - nay, inspiring! - for me to read. Forget Jack Kerouac! He was a dilettante compared to Eberhardt.

One night, stretched out on the rush matting of some Moorish café far out in the Main or in the mountain country, she scribbled some notes in pencil:

'There are few intellectuals who care to claim their right to the life of a wanderer, to vagabondage.

'Yet vagabondage means escape from slavery and the life of the road means liberty.

'To take the decision, to cast off all the bonds with which modern life and the weakness of our own hearts have charged us, to arm ourselves with the symbolic staff and sack of the pilgrim and to depart...

'For anyone who understands the value and also the exquisite flavour of solitary freedom (for one is only really free when one is alone) the act of departure is the bravest and most beautiful of all.

'A selfish happiness perhaps. But it is happiness, for him who knows how to appreciate it.

'To be alone, to have no needs, to be unknown, a stranger and at home everywhere, and to march, solitary and great, to the conquest of the world...

'To possess a home, a family, property or some sort of public function, to have some definite means of existence, in fact, to be a cog in the social machine - these are the things that seem necessary and indispensable to the great majority of men, even to intellectuals and to those who believe themselves to be enfranchised.

'Yet all that is only a variety of the slavery into which we are dragged by the contact with our fellows, and, above all, by a contact that is regulated and continual...

'All property has its bounds and all power is subject to some law, but the tramp possesses the whole vast earth, whose only limits are the unreal horizon, and his empire is intangible since he governs and enjoys it in the spirit.'

At one point, Sliman gets a job in Tenes, a small town in Algeria. He and Isabelle have been so impoverished that the prospect of a regular income is appealing. But small-town life is excruciating for Isabelle (and the poverty continues, forcing Isabelle to beg friends for the odd ten francs, so that she can buy food).

Raymond Marival [a friend in Tenes], ...commemorated, after her death, one of these fits of despair which both he and Randau attributed to the insults and cruel mockeries of the town:

'Behind the house in which I lived at this period was a garden enclosed by a fence; a vine, a wild fig tree and a few flowering rose bushes were its only ornament. The noise of the town did not reach it and one could hear nothing but the confused murmur of the sea and of the great sea-gulls that circled in the air with piercing shrieks.

'Isabelle loved this retreat and used to come there almost every evening. She would sit on a bench, legs crossed and eyes vague, and silently smoke cigarettes of pale tobacco perfumed with musk. On the evening of which I speak, dusk had fallen and moths were fluttering around the lamp. Suddenly, in the shadow, I thought I heard a sob. Isabelle was crying, her elbows on her knees and her head in her hands.

"What is the matter," I asked. "What is the matter, Si Mahmoud?"

'She lifted her wet face reluctantly and fixed me with eyes full of distress, the eyes of a hunted animal. It lasted only for a second. As I approached, anxious at this breakdown, her face was masked again with the rather cold mask of careless serenity with which she usually faced her troubles.'

She makes me think of Rudyard Kipling's poem Untimely, except that Eberhardt's time hasn't come even yet. She writes to Barrucand, who published some of her articles and stories, and posthumously 'co-wrote' her work Dans l'ombre chaude de l'Islam, "We are all poor devils, and those who refuse to understand that are even poorer than ourselves."

I was moved to write a song about Isabelle. I started to play it to Nic; first he interjected, "Hmm, arty..." then he started to look appalled, "It's so depressing!"; then I started giggling, so stopped. I think it's a song to be played for myself when I'm by myself.

Isabelle Eberhardt only asked to live

To see what lay past the next sandy ridge.

Dressed as a man, she rode across the sand,

Following Islam and vagabondage.

Where the stars are bright and the night is clear,

And there's not a soul, far or near,

That's when you might hear the song of Isabelle, passing along...

"Oh, it's lovely out here!

Oh, how lovely it is to walk upon this ball of stone!

Am I the only one out here?"

Everywhere she went, she made enemies,

People feel discontent to see someone live so free.

We all want our share of what she found out there,

But few of us can bear that cold desert wind.

Where the stars are bright and the night is clear,

And there's not a soul, far or near,

That's when you might hear the song of Isabelle echoing on...

"Oh, it's lonely out here!

Oh, how lonely it is to walk upon this ball of stone!

Am I the only one who can see

We're all just vagabonds?"

Thea Astley

June, 2011: I bought  It's Raining In Mango (1987), by Thea Astley, from the Anglican Church Book Sale in Cowra for 50c (also the Readers' Digest Guide To Needlecraft, $1).  Back in 1996, when my novel The Showgirl And The Brumby was a finalist in the Vogels Award, one of the judges describe my novel as having "flashes of Thea Astley".  I thought it was about time I read one of her novels, to see what I was a bit like.

I'm afraid to say I'm glad S&B had only "flashes" of Thea Astley, rather than long stretches, and I hope that by novel number three (the one I'm working on tomorrow), I have completely extinguished any trace of her at all.  The worst thing is that I can see what the judge was talking about: colourful language, a strong Australian flavour, clunky plot, and the vague sense that the author is trying to say something serious.  Here's a bit of her colourful, clunky language that I found by opening at random:

Looks rippled between them. One of the girls - Flute! - spluttered with laughter that sounded rude.

Will's face became an interrogation mark. "Did I say something?"

"Grass," Bo explained kindly. "It's pot. Dope." He grinned rather stupidly. "Marijuana."

"Oh," said Will stiffly, "of course. I've heard the term."

Even in that short exchange, we can see how Astley has to poke and prod the story along, poke and prod the characters to play their parts, using a superfluity of adverbs, and exaggerating moods and expressions to make sure the reader doesn't miss what's going on. There were a few Aboriginal characters; as I'm not Aboriginal, and I'm of my generation (rather than Astley's), I'm genuinely uncomfortable with a non-Aboriginal novelist writing a few awkward passages from an Aboriginal character's point of view. If the passages had been good, I probably wouldn't have thought anything of it! Here's an excerpt from one part that made me cringe:

She bin chase that buggy two miles till one of the police he ride back on his horse an shout at her an when she wouldn take no notice she bin run run run an he gallop after her an hit her one two, cracka cracka, with his big whip right across the face so the pain get all muddle with the cryin and she run into the trees beside the track where he couldn follow.

The only part I really liked was reclusive Will's ill-fated love for the beautiful hippie boy, Buckle, about forty years his junior. Flashes of Death In Venice. It's an interesting description of a man who represses his gayness, eschews human relationships, sinks his energy into his huge garden, then, in his sixties, falls violently in love, and experiences for the first time all the humiliation and pain that comes with unrequited love. He finds it unbearable. His sister, Connie, understands what's going on:

[Connie says:] "Sixty years of passivity, Will. Well, it wasn't even that, was it? More like indifference."

"And that's the way I'd like it to go on. If it could. Right to then end. I don't like what's happening inside me. It's as if all my nerve centres have been wired up again and wrong. Hell, Con, I don't want to go on like this."

I'll be giving It's Raining In Mango to Glebe Vinnies, and I bet they mark it up by about six-hundred percent.

Susan McDonald

June, 2011: I posted Rob a copy of my novel, even though he claims (though also admits it's an exaggeration) that he has only read one book* in his thirty-eight years, and that was when he gave his right leg two knees by falling off a motorbike. He sent me a book in return written by someone who lives near (i.e. less than 500 kms away) him in western Queensland: Pinched Or Planted by Susan McDonald, 2010. It is a five-hundred-page book about a mob of cattle, belonging to a neighbour, that appeared in one of Susan and Graeme McDonald's paddocks, the result being that Graeme McDonald was charged with stealing them. As I pulled the book out of the post-pack, I thought, "This could well be the most boring book I've ever tried to read!"

However, it is not boring. It is meticulous, comprehensive and pedantic, but for a reason: the investigation run by the 'Stock Squad' or SARCIS was such a suspiciously inept botch-job, that the McDonalds soon figured out that it was necessary to document everything. Meanwhile, SARCIS officers are all in the habit of cutting-and-pasting from each other's diaries, forgetting to tape-record conversations, taking photos of the wrong things, getting the dates wrong, having huge blank spots in their memories etc. Although McDonald doesn't find out how the cattle got onto Albeni, she certainly shows up the hopeless and probably corrupt practices of the Stock Squad. It really is shameful and shocking! Errol (Blue Murder, Police State, Police Crop and Joh's Jury) should come out of retirement to make a telemovie about the SARCIS corruption. One thing I liked about it was that SARCIS treat McDonald as though she doesn't exist - at the committal hearing, they often forget to mention her when listing the people present during conversations or in gatherings, and only her husband is charged with the theft - and yet, it is her viewpoint that ends up being the most significant. A woman, armed only with notebook and pen, a tape-recorder and - a crucial difference - a brain, gets the better of a whole bunch of dubious men!

This is intelligent and carefully-written raw material. It has not been shaped or structured, and much of it is repetitive (and not repeated once or twice, but multiple times, as they go over and over the same events in the committal hearing). It's fun reading raw material that you can trust, because you can add your own shape to it. But every now and then, while the book sat on my breakfast table from February to June as I inched my way through it, someone would pick it up, then quickly put it down again. It's not for the faint-hearted!

There were very few grammatical mistakes or typos, but there was one very elegant one:

The sedimentary lifestyle was wearing a bit thin for Graeme.

So much more evocative than 'sedentary'! Sitting all day long in a chair does make you feel as though your blood is slowing and setting in clayey layers! I liked reading McDonald's observations about the differences between the town-life she leads during the committal hearing, and her usual back-country-life; she is no knee-jerk city-hater, and appreciates the best part of town life, namely, catching up with friends and family.

*Snouts In The Trough, if I remember rightly.

Ruth Park

June, 2011: Nic lent me Ruth Park's 1977 novel, Swords And Crowns And Rings, before I'd been disappointed by Harp In The South. Swords And Crowns And Rings was sitting there beside my bed after I'd finished Dana's sea-faring account, and I didn't have anything else to read, so I started it. It turned out to be one of the best novels I've read for ages! Park wrote Swords twenty-six years after Harp, so it's hardly surprising that, over the intervening years, she became a better novelist. If her only intention was to write a novel that would make the reader less prejudiced against dwarves, she succeeded; however, another consequence is that she wrote a great love story; another is that she has drawn a frightening, vivid picture of Australia during the Depression (I had no idea it was so bad!); and another is that she uses the novel to express some of her ideas about politics and economics.

It's the type of novel I admire the most: it is packed with ideas and substance (fulfilling the writer's needs), but it never neglects the story (fulfilling the reader's needs). It balances these two forces very evenly. I'd put Dickens a bit further across the scale towards the reader's needs, and Stead further across in the other direction towards the writer's needs...this novel might be squarely in the middle. Though I don't know how useful that reader's-writer's scale is.

Another balance that she gets just right is that between realism, or naturalism, and dramatisation. Having a dwarf for a hero immediately puts us in fairytale territory, as does the title. John Luke Hanna, our hero, loves the little princess-like Cushie, with blonde ringlets and a cold-hearted mother. There are the fierce, huge, brawling brothers with whom Jack Hanna gets his first job - one brother is missing an eye, one is fat, one is dark, one is puny and girlish. There's the journey that Jack and his stepfather undertake when they lose their shop in the Depression. The fairytale structure and motifs are unmistakable, and conscious - and yet, realism underpins everything. She has too much of a social conscience to be satisfied with fantasy. Park has found a story that, though colourful, really could have happened! - she simply allows the fairytale to show through. There's nothing forced about this story, even though it's so intricately constructed. It is masterful! The opposite to a novel like this might be one of the Carver school - those novels that pose as harsh, depressing, bleak realism, but actually are fairytales (if I'm being kind), or bullshit (my true opinion).

With my ongoing interest in alcohol (being all but a teetotaller), I picked up this handy little sentence, about eighteen-year-old Cushie, drinking her way through despair when she stays with her aunt and her aunt's girlfriend in order to have a secret abortion (alcoholism, lesbians, unwanted pregnancies, abortions - typical 'realist' material):

She was very crafty at taking the smallest amount from the bottle when she found it, and putting things back exactly as they had been, so that Claudie or Iris could never be sure whether the bottle had been touched. And it seemed that, with care, an intelligent person could manage to keep a thin veil of alcohol between herself and the sharp corners of life.

Here's a typical passage - colourful, poetic, and completely relevant. Jack comes back to his hometown to visit his mother, who is sick. Jack is shocked by the change he sees in her:

Jackie felt as though the air were full of dust, the familiar roof fallen in, the chimney dry and limey, crumbling. A wild, prophetic imagination conjured up for him weeds on the hearthstone, a doorless cupboard full of nettles, his mother's chair fallen in the corner, pocked with dry rot.

"The sky takes over in the end," remarked the Nun [Jack's stepfather].

Jack looked at him in terror. Then he realised that his stepfather had said something different altogether - something about Maida.

"She's expecting another baby," he said. His mother was pleased. Her toy-soldier cheeks became more empurpled.

Another wise sentence that you can apply to anything - even perhaps your love life - not just politics:

Jackie knew very little about [the new State Premier, Lang], and he had not yet been so conditioned by severe hardship that his mind was stimulated by the sound of any new name, any new proposition.

Jack and the Nun stowaway on a freight train, and jump off just as a notorious guard, Big Owen, is about to bash out their brains. This is one of those sentences that suggest a whole novel of its own:

Jack wondered how many of the hoboes found dead and mutilated beside the line had been thrown off by such as Big Owen, murderous hulks who'd had a whale of a time during the War and now found their métier in the Depression, bashing up tramps.

Many wise sentences. Here is another, formed by Cushie, who became pregnant to Jack - he didn't know, and was forced into marriage with another woman - had an abortion, a crisis, and is now starting to make a better life for herself:

She had accepted that no one could come into another's life without consequences. Jackie had taught her that. She would not want him to feel guilt for anything in her life.

The Nun battles with depression and bed bugs in a slum in Surry Hills:

With the boy gone, he felt as if he had dropped into a sea of pumice. Everything abraded feebly, yielded, fell away beneath him. His sense of hopeless dismay was so profound it was near panic. He wanted to get up, run like blazes out of this place, jump a train anywhere. The city noises clacked in his ears, his head. He couldn't think. Everything was wrong. There was not even any true darkness outside the window, only a church spire scummed over with green reflected from some illuminated sign. After a while, he saw a blister pearl appear from behind the spire. He lay there, scratching, looking at it dully for several minutes before he recognised it as the moon. His scratching became frantic, and he lit a match to see what was biting him. The whole wall was hung with tiny black berries. As he gaped, they broke their ranks and vanished.

A page later:

In the morning, both [Jackie] and Jerry were marked all over with swollen welts; their shirts were speckled with blood exuded by the glutted bugs. The musky smell of the insects was in the air.

Richard Henry Dana, Jr.

May, 2011: My father and I were talking about Moby Dick, and how weird and wonderful it is. I said, "It's not exactly a novel. There's some good story-telling at first, but as soon as Ishmael's on the ship, there's only one story-line - hunting down Moby - so it becomes more about describing and cataloguing. I mean, life on a ship is tedious and repetitive. Pretty hard to make a story out of it." Geoff said, "But not impossible - Two Years Before The Mast makes a story purely about life aboard a ship." I'd never heard of Richard Henry Dana, Jr., but according to Geoff, his account (published 1840) of the two years he spent on a buffalo-hide ship, was popular and much-praised for about a hundred years.

Dana is a clear-eyed, intelligent, unbigoted observer, the ideal guide for a reader through some colourful, by-gone material. It's always interesting to read about ways of life that used to be a common part of our society and now scarcely exist. I read about them, wondering, "For all the improvements we have made on this, might we have also lost something valuable? What have we replaced this with?"

I happened to be concurrently reading Patsy Adam-Smith's Folklore Of The Australian Railwaymen, and the hard work that people used to do is almost unbelievable. Dana writes about rounding the Horn in freezing conditions, none of them sleeping more than four hours at a stretch, their clothes never dry, their berths wet, their food meagre, not even a cup of coffee offered to them, their hands almost too cold to hold the ropes ('rope' being a land-lubber cover-all for the ten or twenty words that Dana uses), and losing their grip resulting in sure death. It is definitely an improvement that, in our society, no one labours in such terrible conditions for so little pay. And yet, pushing yourself to your furthest limits, and working not for an hourly rate, but out of a sense of duty and purpose, are two good things that are hard to find in our society today.

The problem about fair pay is: what is fair pay? Recently I had to think about how much I would charge for doing a day's portrait-painting-in-words for a corporate gig. My rate sharply increased from 50c per portrait (which is roughly what I get when we do it in the street) to approximately $300 per portrait. It's not that I got greedy (not just that I got greedy); rather, it's that my time is invaluable. It's impossible to pay me fairly for taking away my time.

And after reading What Good Are The Arts?, and Dissanayake's comments about the sense of well-being that comes from using your hands, I've extended that to the well-being that comes from using every part of your body - that's what our bodies are for! For example, my love of walking is simply to do with the good feeling that comes from using my legs. "My legs are my vehicle!" I walked from Cowra to Wattamondara a few weeks ago, along the disused railway track, partly to save Ken from having to pick me up, but also just because it felt good. I think we are haunted by a feeling of unfulfilled potential, leading the inactive life most of us lead.

So these were a couple of the thoughts that arose from reading Two Years Before The Mast. There is one passage that I'll partially transcribe, because I've never read anything like it:

For several days, the captain seemed very much out of humour[...]his displeasure was chiefly turned against a large, heavy-moulded fellow from the Middle states, who was called Sam. This man hesitated in his speech, and was rather slow in his motions, but was a pretty good sailor, and always seemed to do his best; but the captain took a dislike to him, thought he was surly, and lazy[...the captain] was down in the hold, where the crew were at work, when we heard his voice raised in violent dispute with somebody, whether it was with the mate, or one of the crew, I could not ell; then came blows and scuffling. I ran to the side and beckoned to John [the Swede], who came up, and we leaned down the hatchway; and though we could see no one, yet we knew that the captain had the advantage, for his voice was loud and clear-

"You see your condition! You see your condition! Will you ever give me any more of your jaw?" No answer; and then came wrestling and heaving, as though the man was trying to turn him. "You may as well keep still, for I have got you," said the captain. Then came the question, "Will you ever give me any more of your jaw?"

"I never gave you any, sir," said Sam; for it was his voice that we heard, though low and half-choked.

"That's not what I ask you. Will you ever be impudent to me again?"

"I never have been, sir," said Sam.

"Answer my question, or I'll make a spread eagle of you! I'll flog you, by G-d."

"I'm no negro slave," said Sam.

"Then I'll make you one," said the captain; and he came to the hatchway, and sprang on deck, threw off his coat, and rolling up his sleeves, called out to the mate - "Seize that man up, Mr. Amerzene! Seize him up! Make a spread eagle of him! I'll teach you all who is master aboard!"

The crew and the officers followed the captain up the hatchway, and after repeated orders the mate laid hold of Sam, who made no resistance, and carried him to the gangway.

"What are you going to flog that man for, sir?" said John, the Swede, to the captain.

Upon hearing this, the captain turned upon him, but knowing him to be quick and resolute, he ordered the steward to bring the irons, and calling upon Russell to help him, went up to John.

"Let me alone," said John. "I'm willing to be put in irons. You need not use any force"; and putting out his hands, the captain slipped the irons on, and sent him aft to the quarterdeck.

Sam is flogged. Dana says, "All these preparations made me feel sick and almost faint, angry and excited as I was. A man - a human being, made in God's likeness - fastened up and flogged like a beast!" After Sam has been flogged, the captain calls for John the Swede. The second mate stays still, the mate walked slowly, but the third mate, anxious to prove his zeal, grabs John, who throws him off. "The captain stood on the quarterdeck, bareheaded, his eyes falshing with rage, and his face as red as blood, swinging the rope, and calling out to his officers, "Drag him aft! - Lay hold of him! - I'll sweeten him!" &c. &c. John surrenders, "but as soon as the captain began to make him fast, the indignity was too much, and he began to resist."

When he was made fast, he turned to the captain, who stood turning up his sleeves and getting ready for the blow, and asked him what he was to be flogged for. "Have I ever refused my duty, sir? Have you ever known me to hang back, or to be insolent, or not to know my work?"

"No," said the captain, "it is not that that I flog you for; I flog you for your interference - for asking questions."

"Can't a man ask a question here without being flogged?"

"No," shouted the captain; "nobody shall open his mouth aboard this vessel, but myself"; and began laying the blows upon his back, swinging half round between each blow, to give it full effect. As he went on, his passion increased, and he danced about the deck, calling out as he swung the rope, "If you want to know what I flog you for, I'll tell you. Its because I like to do it! - because I like to do it! - It suits me! - That's what I do it for!"

The man writhed under the pain, until he could endure it no longer, when he called out, with an exclamation more common among foreigners than with us - "Oh, Jesus Christ! Oh, Jesus Christ!"

"Don't call on Jesus Christ," shouted the captain; 'he can't help you. Call on Captain Thompson. He's the man! He can help you! Jesus Christ can't help you now!"

At these words, which I shall never forget, my blood ran cold. I could look on no longer. Disgusted, sick, and horror-struck, I turned away and leaned over the rail, and looked down into the water.

Later, Dana says, "The flogging was seldom if ever alluded to by us, in the forecastle. If anyone was inclined to talk about it, the others, with a delicacy which I hardly expected to find among them, always stopped him, or turned the subject. But the behaviour of the two men who were flogged toward one another showed a delicacy and a sense of honour which would have been worthy of admiration in the highest walks of life." Dana informs the reader, and reminds us several times, that the fate of Captain Thompson was, on his next voyage, to die miserably of fever.

I transcribe this passage both because it's shocking (reading it almost made my blood turn cold), but also because it's an example, one of many, of Dana's observational powers - he repeats the dialogue verbatim, describes the actions, gives what background information is necessary, and also describes what he thinks, feels and does, and all of this allows the scene to play out in the reader's mind - it reads real. When I'm ninety-eight and getting a bit senile, I might easily start talking about that terrible Captain Thompson, and the awful thing I saw him do to John the Swede. Dana's intention is simply to describe what happens. As a novelist, especially at this point in my novel-writing (fourth draft, or is it the fifth?, and really, now I know: it's the second, and the last), this is what I try to do, too: describe what happens. All those early drafts are just figuring out what happens. I'm sorry to say that my first novel, The Showgirl And The Brumby, was still a rough draft when it was published, still a figuring-out draft (though I rewrote it four or five times, over seven years). I didn't twig onto the truth about novel-writing until last Easter. Better late than never!

One particularly beautiful couple of paragraphs is Dana describing what the ship looks like in full sail, pointing out that few people ever actually see this - you have to be on the open sea (of course, when near land, a ship is slowing down and sailing cautiously), in the right conditions, and you have to be on one ship, while another ship passes in full sail. Dana describes his ship, white sails, wind-filled, piled up into the sky, and while he is gazing raptly at the sight, he hasn't noticed that another sailor is at his side, gazing too, until this sailor says, "How quietly they do their work!"

Ruth Park

May, 2011: WIthin a month, three people (Stella, Vanessa Berry and Nic) all recommended Ruth Park. I loved Playing Beattie Bow when I was a child, but that was the only novel of hers that I had read. So I bought The Harp In The South (1951). I was disappointed. The first disappointment was the story-telling, which was unsubtle, unnatural and predictable. But story-telling is so hard to do well; it was more, "Oh, well, I'm not in the presence of a master," than a disincentive to keep reading. And at least there was a story being told! But the main disappointment was Park's attitude towards her subjects:

The New Year was important in Surry Hills. It was really the great feast of the year, uninhibited by religious thoughts, and with a pagan finality about it. Those people, simple and primitive, but with a great capacity for feeling the abstract strong and vital about them...

Reading a book is like being guided by the author through the world that they have chosen for you, and it is essential to like and trust your guide, partly because you're going to spend many hours with them, and also because you need to know that they're going to direct your attention to the interesting things. But Park's view of our Surry Hills characters is condescending - her empathy fails, and she only objectifies. Dialogue that attempts to replicate accents is always a bad sign for me - it differentiates the characters (them) from the author and the readers (us). The working-class Surry Hills residents all drop their aitches and say "Gawd", Lick Jimmy, the shopkeeper, struggles with his 'r's.

"You like flire!," asked Lick Jimmy of Dolour as she bought the potatoes. "They bling flire bligade and put him out," he prophesied gleefully, his satin ivory face breaking into ten-thousand hair-fine wrinkles.

I just don't find that interesting. So my trust in Park as a guide diminishes, as I fear she is getting caught up in superficial differences and missing fundamental truths.

But there were some good bits. Charlie is a nice character, and it is unusual to read a book written in the fifties that has an Aboriginal man as a love interest for our main character, Roie (my trust in Park starts to rise again). And it was interesting to read about what Roie's family says about their Aboriginal prospective son-in-law:

"You won't get rumbustious, now, Charlie boy, because there's no offence meant, and heaven knows I'm not the one to skite meself, having a hangman in the family, but could you be telling me where the dark blood in you comes out?"

He sat panting, fiercely swiping at mosquitoes, for they were sitting out on the veranda in the shadow of the hanging vine.

Charlie said: "It comes out all over me, I guess," and sat courteously waiting.

Hugh blurted: "I mean where it comes from?"

"Well, my grandfather was white, and my grandmother was white, so it must have been long before that. It's funny how it shows long after."

"It is that," agreed Hughie, baffled, pulling at his pipe and sliding the worn stem up and down a little nick in his teeth. After a while he tried again: "Perhaps I'm rushing things a bit, and no offence meant if I am, but what about the children?"

Roie and Charlie's honeymoon in Narrabeen has a few good bits in it - it feels as though Park is finally close enough to her characters that she can grant them almost the same depth of feeling that she herself has. But nothing worth dog-earring!

Nic defended Ruth Park, when I reported that I'd been disappointed, and his defence is apt: that in Ruth Park's time, the people about whom she was writing were considered foul beasts, so it was comparatively perceptive of her to see them as simple primitives. And Nic also pointed out that she was revolutionary to write with sympathy about such things as pre-marital sex, abortion and a happy marriage between an Aboriginal man and a white woman. So, I concede, I am being hard on her - I was reading it as a novel, not a historical object.

John Carey

April, 2011: Andy lent me What Good Are The Arts? (2005), by John Carey, because it had left him thinking that art is good for the artists who make it, and pretty much useless for everyone else. I really try to lead a useful (to others as well as myself) life; perhaps something from my high school Latin classes actually sank in (alas, the language didn't) - a common chastisement of Miss Weir's was, "Now, girls, start translating such and such, and make your miserable lives useful." John Carey spends the first two thirds of his book sticking his pin into any high falutin beliefs anyone has ever put into print about the worthiness of art. John Carey is English, and to an extent, he is fighting a war against classism - against using art to make yourself feel superior to others - and when I was first reading this book, I thought, "But this war isn't really relevant to Australian society." I'm not saying that Australia is classless, but I have a suspicion that class in England is much more of a big deal. It could be my Australia that is relatively classless, because I run a mile from people who give off a whiff of snobbery; I find it terribly embarrassing (for them).

Being an artist has never made me feel superior to anyone (the fact that I'm a third generation artist might partly explain why art just seems like a trade to me, rather than something that makes me different or special). I often wish I could say I did something else with my time - "bee-keeper" is my current alternative career fantasy. But, at the same time, art - not the producing of it, but rather taking it in - has done wonderful things for me. Most of all, what art does for me is to prove that other people also have things going on inside, and this makes me feel less lonely. Sometimes a song or a novel has pulled me through a rough time, as though it were a companion, a friend, articulating all the things that make life worth living. Art that's not literature-based, but visual or aural, has also made a difference to my life: when I find something beautiful, I feel glad to be alive, to be there to see or hear it. And I like being surprised, or charmed, or even shocked by something - these are galvanising responses, that draw the various floating strands of my consciousness to one particular spot, a little knot of "Oh!" This has nothing to do with art making me a better person, it is simply a tool or resource, one of many, that lots of people (including me) use to make life easier. Life is hard!

A few days later...I'm not going to spend paragraphs appraising this book; as Carey himself says, "Another thing we should do, I would suggest, is to switch the aim of research in the arts to finding out not what critics think about this or that artwork - which is necessarily only of limited and personal interest - but how art has affected and changed other people's lives." I wonder if Carey rejoices in the proliferation of blogs like these, all of us claiming the right to an opinion, putting ourselves on the same level with the 'proper' critics. He says, a bit later, "literature gives you ideas to think with. It stocks your mind." This book is packed with ideas. I liked a lot of them (sorry, Andy, I dog-eared a lot of pages), and the following are some favourites.

Ellen Dissanayake, in her book What Is Art For?, looks at animals, including humans, and wonders how art - skin-painting, weapon-decoration, dance etc. - contributed to natural selection:

Finding a single principle uniting these various art-practices is difficult. But the behavioural tendency that Dissanayake suggests lies behind them all is 'making special'. To make something special is to place it in a realm different to the everyday...the fact of taking pains convinced others as well as themselves that the activity - tool manufacture, say - was worth doing. So art's function was to render socially-important activities gratifying, physically and emotionally."

Dissanayake (via Carey) talks about popular art:

It emphasises belonging, and so seeks to restore the cohesion of the hunter-gatherer group. It is preoccupied with romantic-sexual love to a degree unprecedented, Dissanayake believes, in any previous human society, and this is a response to the loneliness of the modern condition.

Carey has quite a long passage on the benefits that prisoners gain from making art - it increases their self-esteem, makes them feel that they count, reduces frustration and sense of impotence, "gives voice to the anguish, pain and confusion that each inmate felt was their own private hell." I think this was the bit that prompted Andy to say that "art was good for the artists who made it", and many artists, I think, would find a lot to identify with when Carey is discussing the prisoners. Somehow art makes our dysfunctionality functional. Carey goes on to say that prisoners' interest in art tends to diminish rapidly after release, and claims that this is partly due to the fact that they find the art-world elitist and intimidating. I'd venture to add that a lot of people, ex-prisoners included, are soon discouraged from art-making by the fact that it generally costs rather than earns money. Most people think they should get money for doing work.

Another bit I liked, and on finding it again now, I realise it is more Dissanayake (via Carey):

Human needs and expectations evolved over millennia, she observes, in hunter-gatherer societies. That is where most of human history has been spent, and in these societies making things by hand was necessary. This is why manual contact with the natural world is satisfying to us. Pleasure in handling is hard-wired into our brains because our history predisposes us to be tool users and makers. But, Dissanayake regrets, "our marvellous, long-evolved, specialised hands, which can weave baskets, fashion arrows, or mould vessels, are now chiefly used for pressing buttons on appliances and computer keyboards."

A lovely argument for craft activities!

One thing Carey champions about literature is its "indistinctness" - the ambiguity of language, and the great gaping holes that words inevitably leave when describing something, a scene or an idea. These holes must be filled by the reader's own imagination, and this is, to Carey, an aspect of "literature's superiority". To Carey, reading is "empowering" - "the reader creates, and feels a creator's possessiveness." But I think the other forms of art are even more "indistinct" than literature - that's partly why I like writing. I have so many specific things I want to say. Other artists have inklings and feelings and atmospheres that they want to express or recreate (or whatever). Conceptual art is probably the most indistinct. Once, at some big art gallery (was it the Pompidou?), I read the two or three paragraphs that the artist had written about his or her installation - it was all about Lady Di, the car crash, the two sons left motherless etc. Then I duly walked into the room that the work was installed in, wandered around...I remember lots of autumn leaves stuffed in perspex boxes...and after a while, thinking about the boys and looking at the dead leaves, I felt quite moved. Then I walked out, and noticed that the artist's statement actually referred to another artwork. I felt silly. But perhaps I should think of it as a healthy act of imagination on my part. Another of my pipe-dreams is to make up a whole lot of artist-statements and surreptitiously substitute mine for the real ones next Biennale on Cockatoo Island.

Postscript: I keep thinking about What Good Are The Arts. Perhaps because I don't often read non-fiction about art, it has made a big impact on my little autodidactic store of thoughts-on-art. Another bit I didn't mention, but keep mentioning in conversation, was his defence of anything that we pejoratively call "escapism". He says (me paraphrasing, because I've returned the book to Andy) that when we use that word, we are implying that the one who enjoys escapism can't deal with reality, and seeks to escape from it, a bit like 'sticking your head in the sand'. But he says, maybe escapism is more about escaping to than from; about escaping to a world that has ideals that are hard to find in daily life. Maybe absorbing some 'escapist' subject matter can help a person to crystallise the way that he or she would ideally like to live - maybe it raises morale, gives hope, and enables a person to keep trudging on, reaching out, instead of apathetically giving up and just being a human boor. The other thing that I keep thinking about is how depressing our inactive lives are - we are creatures built for making things and moving! No wonder that sitting at desks poking buttons doesn't make us feel great. Dissanayake's idea about our specialised hands can be expanded to include our whole bodies, and especially our legs, which have lost a huge amount of their usefulness with the proliferation of the car. I was in the city at lunchtime the other day, and saw lots of office-worker joggers; it struck me as a rather desperate way to make life more active, and to keep neurosis at bay; the joggers reminded me of kelpies in parks, running back and forth fetching sticks (once you've seen kelpies expertly round up sheep, a kelpie whose life doesn't include this activity seems like a deprived kelpie).