 Celebrating Australian WritingbyGillian Polack
Australians are very civilised. We take a little holiday towards the end of January. Most of my friends call this holiday by its official name, Australia Day. Some point to it as a day that celebrates white colonisation of the land. Both are true. What’s also true is that a long weekend just before the hottest month of the year, the weekend before school goes back after the summer holidays, is a very good thing to have. It’s a great time to read; it’s too hot to do anything else. My gift to you today (it’s not the holiday, but it's close enough) is to introduce you to a great Australian love story and the books that hover around it. I want to make Romeo and Juliet references, because one half of the love story was from New Zealand and the other, rather Australian. New Zealand and Australia have had a friendly rivalry for a long while. New Zealand was nearly part of Australia, in fact. But that’s the closest to the Montagues and Capulets this love story gets—our rivalry is more the rivalry of siblings than of enemies. We make jokes at each other’s expense and we have each other’s backs.. D'Arcy Niland was the Australian half of the equation. He was born in 1919, in New South Wales, and was from a big Catholic family. He was a writer. Of course he was a writer. I’ve forgotten how it happened, but I remember Gillian-the-young-woman being totally impressed when she read Ruth Park’s (the other half of the equation, also a writer) description of falling in love with him by letter and giving up everything to come to Sydney and marry him. That’s how I half-remember it, from reading their shared autobiography The Drums Go Bang! and her solo autobiography The Fence Around the Cuckoo many years ago. This isn’t the way the official obituaries tell it. The official obituaries say that she moved to Australia to take up a newspaper job in 1942. Ruth Park is the New Zealand half of the not-quite-Capulet/Montagues, of course. It was no easier to be a writer in 1942 than now. Park described walking miles to get to a publisher rather than spending money on a stamp, for they had no money for stamps. The couple was happy, however. What's more, they were both extraordinary writers. Each of them has left Australia with an enduring legacy that helps us explain who we are. D'Arcy Niland’s The Shiralee is a story of a man and his child. It’s my favourite of his books, by a long shot. It makes me cry, every time. It was first published in 1955.. We’ve lost the Australian tradition of swaggies, men who wander from place to place, looking for a bit of food, a bit of work. Some of them carried tools and did skilled work. Some made trinkets from whatever they could find. Some were castigated as ‘sundowners’—swaggies who turned up to a place so late in the day that the owners felt obligated to give them food and a place to sleep, and then left before they could do anything in return for their keep. As our country changed, swaggies disappeared. They’re rare these days. However unusual it is to see them, they are still an important cultural memory. Most people think of swaggies and remember the words to Waltzing Matilda. For me, whenever I think of swaggies, I think of The Shiralee. There are two main characters in The Shiralee. Macauley is the swaggie and Buster is the four year old who travels with him. Buster is the millstone he must carry, his shiralee. The novel opens with bleak honesty:: There was a man who had a cross and his name was Macauley. He put Australia at his feet, he said, in the only way he knew how. His boots spun the dust from its roads and his body waded its streams. The black lines on the map, and the red, he knew them well. He built his fires in a thousand places and slept on the banks of rivers. The grass grew over his tracks, but he knew where they were when he came again. He had two swags, one of them with legs and a cabbage-tree hat, and that one was the main difference between him and others who take to the road, following the sun for their bread and butter. Some have dogs. Some have horses. Some have women. And they all have mates and companions, or for this reason and that, all of some use. But with Macauley it was this way: he had a child and the only reason he had it was because he was stuck with it. (borrowed from the book via Perry Middlemiss, whose website is a good place to visit if you're curious about Australian literature.) The novel moves as Macauley does and changes and Macauley does and, as I said, I can’t read it without crying. I hated it as a teen, because Macauley seemed cold and cruel and I wanted Buster to have a fair go. As an adult, the novel is tougher and stranger and more complex and very, very beautiful. I remember Niland for one iconic book. I remember Park for several. When I’m asked about stories for four year olds, I suggest The Muddle-Headed Wombat (he's such an endearing character!), for ten year olds who like ghosts and a bit of danger Playing Beattie Bow and for adults The Harp in the South. All are equally good. Each is brilliant in entirely different ways. The Harp in the South was published in 1948 to instant acclaim. It was set during the Depression and, like The Shiralee, focuses on poor people. Sydney unvarnished, but written with metaphor and vigorous colour and pulsing life. It’s not poverty as a celebration, but poverty as an unavoidable aspect of daily life. The novel isn’t about poverty, however, it’s about people. When I lived in Sydney for a few years, I kept looking for the vanished world Park brought to life for me in The Harp in the South. Each time I visit even now, I keep a corner of my eye alert in case that Australia still exists. Also about people is one of the first books I ever read. The Muddle-Headed Wombat was me when I was little. The character I most identified with of any character in literature until I was seven years old. Whenever I ran out of pocket money I would say to myself “I’m the Wombat—I have no pocket money.” One of the first books I bought myself with my pocket money was a copy of The Muddle-Headed Wombat, because all our family books were shared and I needed my very own copy. The Wombat was first published in 1962 and life without him is impossible for me to imagine. English friends had Paddington the Bear, but I had my Wombat. The best book of all—the book that's written with technical perfection and a yearning and where the climax is always an emotional surprise, even fifty readings later—is Playing Beattie Bow. It’s a timeslip novel, set in Sydney’s Rocks. It’s a young adult novel written before young adult novels were big. It’s haunted and unsafe and very lovely. My copy is battered and beloved. Patricia Wrightson’s The Nargun and the Stars and Felicity Pulman’s Ghost Boy are the only novels I’ve found that come close to it in feel and magic. I don’t want to explain the plot. Just go and read it and see for yourself. Whenever I visit The Rocks and look across at the bridge, I think of the past and present, dangerously linked. I can hear children and their songs. This novel is one of those that helped turn me into someone with a driving passion to understand people in the past and how they linger inside our streets and our houses and our alleyways. Australia is a country that had produced many outstanding books for young adults, and it always amuses me that the best of them all is by a New Zealander. Ruth Park came to Australia just as her writing was maturing: her Australian novels are her best. She was going to write brilliantly, however, wherever she was. She would have written evocative and moving novels about Auckland, if she hadn’t written to D’Arcy Niland and fallen in love and chanced her future on him being the man that his letters showed him to be. We don’t just owe D’Arcy Niland for The Shiralee, we owe him for The Muddle-Headed Wombat, and The Harp in the South and its sequel and especially we owe him for Playing Beattie Bow. The romance between those two writers changed Australian literature. I always wished I could meet Ruth Park, but she died a few weeks ago. I never wanted to meet Niland: his writing scared me, even as I loved reading it. Between them, however, they have given us extraordinary books and a beautiful love story. Both are worth celebrating. Books mentioned in this column:
Gillian Polack is based in Canberra, Australia. She is mainly a writer, editor and educator. Her most recent print publications are a novel (Life through Cellophane, Eneit Press, 2009), an anthology (Masques, CSfG Publishing, 2009, co-edited with Scott Hopkins), two short stories and a slew of articles. Her newest anthology is Baggage, published by Eneit Press (2010).One of her short stories won a Victorian Ministry of the Arts award a long time ago, and three have (more recently) been listed as recommended reading in international lists of world's best fantasy and science fiction short stories. She received a Macquarie Bank Fellowship and a Blue Mountains Fellowship to work on novels at Varuna, an Australian writers' residence in the Blue Mountains. Gillian has a doctorate in Medieval history from the University of Sydney. She researches food history and also the Middle Ages, pulls the writing of others to pieces, is fascinated by almost everything, cooks and etc. Currently she explains 'etc' as including Arthuriana, emotional cruelty to ants, and learning how not to be ill. She is the proud owner of some very pretty fans, a disarticulated skull named Perceval, and 6,000 books. Contact Gillian.
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