Overland literary journal

QE review: The Happy Life

Quarterly Essay 41
The Happy Life: The Search for Contentment in the Modern World
David Malouf
Black Inc.

Clichés rendered by the deft literary hand of David Malouf must inevitably be far more eloquent than those bashed out by the average typing monkey, but it doesn’t mean they have changed in substance. In the first Quarterly Essay for 2011, David Malouf looks at happiness – The Happy Life to be precise – and the clichés are right there in the first paragraph:

There can be no one, however miserable the conditions of their daily existence, who has not at some time felt the joy of being alive in the moment; in the love of another, or the closeness of friends or fellow workers; in a baby’s smile, the satisfaction of a job well done or the first green in a winter furrow; or more simply still, bird-song or the touch of sunlight.

... read more

Written by Stephanie Convery on 7-04-2011, 3 user comments

Speaking of ‘them’…

As 2010 was wrapping itself up in Christmas paper and curled ribbon, my sister-girls Cadie and Kimberlee came to stay with me for a few days. They live in Queensland and it had been months since I’d seen them, so we decided to go out for a couple of drinks. The cute little bar down the road was closed but the local pubs were making the most of seasonal alcoholism, so we walked a couple of extra blocks to the hotel by the railway station.

I knew this particular establishment it for its trashy music and not-so-subtle clientele, and I warned the girls before we went that it wasn’t the classiest of places. Sure enough, we hadn’t even been there for ten minutes before some blokes sauntered up and asked if they could sit with us.

Too polite (or perhaps not drunk enough) to tell them to get lost, we assented. The conversation that followed was that kind of awkward, reluctant exchange that is always made more ridiculous by the fact that you have to speak louder than usual to be heard over Rihanna and Eminem - and to compensate for the fact that the people you’re talking to are actually quite drunk. There were three of them and they were in their late twenties. It was their office Christmas party and they were at the pub with a larger group of people, most of whom were milling around some tables about 10ft away, heads together, throwing us occasional glances. It wasn’t long before a couple more blokes wandered over, one of them receiving more of a welcome than the other as the guy directly across from me threw his arm around his friend and slapped him on the chest. ... read more

Written by Stephanie Convery on 25-02-2011, 9 user comments

Push this button

It is one thing to describe this reality, another to explain it
without falling into simplisitic slogans.
A few sat goggle-eyed,
before the traffic that was leaping forward on the right
along for the ride
but with little to no idea what was about to happen.
‘Apple pie exists to create sweet memories, not regurgitate old ones!’
The military thought this was great stuff—
‘Stay a little to the side!’
They’d heard about our proposed sedition:
a form of collective memory
intent on taking the fight a big step further.

I pull my professional face into order.

A speech.
A postcard to the next Left,
a matter of some delicacy.
The nakedly commercial and haphazard nature of the literary enterprise
is clear.
Where will this take us?
Access to such a rich store of information
that is continuously changing and evolving through ongoing debate
lowered the barriers to participation,
opportunity too, in the tsunami of material
the seeds for non-abstracted, compassionate, grass-roots politics.
Where will this take us?
Politics has a tendency of being refracted.
As a country we are profoundly deluded—
whose views does it represent?
They locked us out, remember?
We expect more than this from our government.
The old monkey suit doesn’t fit like it used to
&
we need to go beyond thinking
that the struggle for liberation follows a linear
path.
Cultural creativity comes in all shapes and sizes.
The real work of transformation
is being born in our households, in sharehouses, in neighbourhood projects. ... read more

Written by Stephanie Convery on 29-11-2010, 2 user comments

What I think about when I think about writing

1.
‘A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.’

2.
Looking inwards is inevitable, natural, expected, required for a writer – writing being an essentially meditative activity. But prolonged navel-gazing is a selfish waste of time if it doesn’t translate into actions that make the world a better place. However, that says more about what I value and the standards I set for myself than it does about how I expect the rest of the world to behave.

Sometimes I feel like art is standing on the in-between: realism / idealism. Reality / imagination. Tradition / experimentation. Art can make the world a better place simply by being beautiful, but I’d like at least some of that beauty to be accompanied by meaning.

3.
I am in my third year of a PhD in Creative Writing by research at Monash University. I’m not in an academic institution because I thought having a PhD would make me better qualified to write fiction; I’m in one because I knew when I decided I wanted to write that new writers, young writers, ‘emerging’ writers, make very little money from their work. I am on an Australian Postgraduate Award, a living allowance paid in fortnightly instalments. I am effectively getting a salary from the Federal Government to write my first novel, even if in the end nobody wants to turn it into a commercial product – copy it, mass-produce it, sell it, profit financially from it. Even if nobody wants to read it.

I’d like both of those things to happen because I feel like I have important things to say, but there’s no guarantee of anything post-doctorate except the opportunity to wear a stupid hat and a gown for 15 seconds on a stage. But the institution, the scholarship and the degree itself are tools at my disposal. I can eat and pay rent, and I do my best to make what’s available work for me as I attempt to juggle the practicalities of living in this society while trying to critique it, change it, make it better – however clumsily.

That’s not to say that it isn’t a fight. I am frustrated by what I see as the dampening and anaesthetising of crackling-new ideas, energy and enthusiasm for change by bureaucracy and over-administration driven by concerns of money and power. I am angry that people’s lives are dismissed so easily in favour of trivialities.

4.
Last night I dreamt of an apocalyptic tempest, rust-red storm clouds snaking down from the sky, sending feelers across the earth towards a bellowing ocean. We were stuck in a cage, halfway up a tower at the mouth of a river, surrounded by a raging torrent. The only way out, you said, was to jump in.

5.
I had students for a while. I told them that their fiction ought to change the reader in some way. A shift in mood. An altered perspective. A better understanding. A different understanding. Growth. I told them that fiction should be transformative, because that’s what I believe.

I told them I wanted them to put feelers out into the world and let them snag the rough spots and the corners and the cracks and the sharp edges, because I think if you’re serious about fiction you have to be serious about living, and if you’re serious about living then you pay attention to the world and what’s going on in it. That means paying attention to politics – politics as your own understanding of the world manifests itself in morals and agendas, but also politics as the systems of negotiation and argument that result in changes to the social fabric.

But that doesn’t mean politics are the point of fiction. The point is, surely, to make life richer – emotionally, intellectually, spiritually and physically – for as many people as possible. Isn’t it?

Written by Stephanie Convery on 12-11-2010, 9 user comments

Fiction review – The Anthology of Colonial Australian Romance Fiction

The Anthology of Colonial Australian Romance Fiction
Edited by Ken Gelder and Rachel Weaver
MUP

I read this book while embodying the bush cliche – lurching between cattle stations and floodplains, rainforest and thick scrub, dipping into the stories by the light of campfires and fading torch batteries. Given these unexpectedly apt settings I suppose I could have found myself in good company with a book of colonial romance fiction. But the truth is, I’m not sure how much of it I actually enjoyed. ... read more

Written by Stephanie Convery on 28-09-2010, 5 user comments

MWF – Writing Indigenous Australia

I’m writing a PhD on Indigenous Australia and have been travelling the Top End researching for six months or so. The Melbourne Writers Festival began the very day after I arrived home. Given the topic of my PhD, attending the Writing Indigenous Australia seminar seemed like an appropriate thing to do.

The panel was made up of one Indigenous and three non-Indigenous writers. Hannah Rachel Bell opened with a brief talk about Storymen – ‘an excavation of converging world views exposed through personal memoir, letters, paintings and conversations’ – which meditates on her relationship with Ngarinyin lawman Bungal Mowaljarlai, the fiction and philosophies of Tim Winton, and the relationships between land, story, and male rites of passage. ... read more

Written by Stephanie Convery on 9-09-2010, No comments

Fuel for your fire

Sunday: the Liberal Party ‘launched’ their election campaign and everybody watched on in complete apathy because their election campaign has been going since November 2007 and we’re sick of it already. I’m willing to bet the Labor Party’s campaign launch (scheduled for 16 August) will be just as much of a faff-filled non-event. I want to be excited – I really do – but the truth is, this whole election disgusts me. You – Australian politicians – you disgust me. I’m not enthusiastic about you. I’m not inspired. I can’t even find the energy to laugh at you. I’m just angry – ALL THE TIME.

I’m angry because the best you can offer me is another three years of conservative mediocrity and stagnation. Stagnation is not progress, it’s a fucking insult. I’m offended because you think I’m not worth the risk. I’m disgusted because you talk to me like I’m a child and it’s not okay – it’s never been okay – but you hardly make sense now anyway. This language that used to belong to us both gets bent up and mangled in your mouth: forward means backwards, liberal means conservative, atheism means indoctrination, freedom means war, love means immorality, art means conformity, sustainable means racist. I can’t say what I mean anymore without running up against your roadblocks, so I’m forced to find words that you haven’t yet stolen – snowdrop, velutinous, mellifluous, fumarole – just to remember where the ground is. Just to remember what it means to have meaning. ... read more

Written by Stephanie Convery on 10-08-2010, 9 user comments

Cattle country

At Kalala Station, 8km from Daly Waters, three hours south of Katherine in the Northern Territory, we are out of bed at 5:30 am and in the yards before dawn. I have seen the sunrise more often in the few weeks since I came to Kalala than I have in the last three years. Sitting in the early morning dust on the cattle run fence, I ask Sam, a 21-year-old ringer, ‘Have you always wanted to work with cattle?’

He shrugs. ‘It’s all I’ve ever known.’

I watch the cattle kick up dust as they’re moved into the pound and I think about how different this feels from home. The cities are saturated with the product of rural Australia, but they are hardly watching cows get drafted for market, dipped for travel below quarantine lines, dehorned, castrated, spayed, branded, immunised, milked, taught to follow a fenceline, being treated by a vet, fed molasses when they’re sick, or charging at a ringer who gets in their way. There are also cars to fix, tyres to change, trailers to wash down, fences to mend, bores to cover, employees to feed, buyers to source, bank managers to impress. There are helicopters, light planes, motorbikes, vegetable gardens, and supply sheds. There are stock camps, hay camps, weaner camps, horses, abandoned calves, pigs, dogs. And I think about the animals themselves and everything they provide for Western society: not just meat but also milk, cheese, clothing, luggage, shoes, jewellery... ... read more

Written by Stephanie Convery on 21-06-2010, 22 user comments

Canine country

My friend Cadie, a Garawa woman, and I are on a six-month road trip. We’ve been staying in Woorabinda for the last week with Cadie’s friend Ida, a nurse. Woorabinda (‘kangaroo sit down’) is an Aboriginal community of approximately 1000 people. Situated between Blackwater and Rolleston, about two hours’ drive from Rockhampton, Woorabinda came into being in the 1920s when the Queensland Government ordered the Aboriginal people living at Taroom to move, ostensibly because they were planning to build a dam. The dam was never built. These people – who weren’t just locals, but came from all over North Queensland and the Gulf country – were required to walk to their new home. The road between the two points on the map these days covers about 200km.

For years, the only house that existed was that of the superintendent. The Aboriginal people lived in humpies. In the town, there was strict segregation between black and white. The Aboriginal children were put in dormitories off limits to the rest of their families. Aboriginal people who walked down the main street of the town without permission were put in jail – 20 days on bread and water. If they left the town without permission, they were arrested and put in jail. Corroboree was permitted but speaking in language wasn’t, effectively making the former permission redundant. If Aboriginal people spoke in language, they were put in jail. Often that meant being sent to Palm Island. Strict curfews were employed. Bells rang for wake up time, go to work time, get off the street time, go to sleep time. Regular parades were held in which all residents were required to line up and salute the flag. Punishment for missing parade was also 20 days in jail. If an Aboriginal person attempted to run away and was captured, they were required to pay for their own capture. That is, if they had a bank account. ... read more

Written by Stephanie Convery on 22-04-2010, 6 user comments

Lip service

Members of the Liberal Party have been creating a minor storm about the matter of Indigenous recognition. In statements made to the Adelaide Advertiser yesterday, Opposition Leader Tony Abbott implied that formal recognition of traditional owners at the beginning of significant events is superficial and unnecessary. ‘I guess this is the kind of genuflection to political correctness that [Labor ministers] feel they have to make’ he said. ‘Sometimes it’s appropriate to do those things, but certainly I think in many contexts it seems like out-of-place tokenism.’ Liberal backbencher Wilson Tuckey weighed in a few hours later, claiming such recognition was a ‘farce’, while Senator Eric Abetz called it ‘outdated’ and a ‘fad’. ... read more

Written by Stephanie Convery on 16-03-2010, 13 user comments