I still remember when I won my first literary competition. It was 1998 and I was a second-year creative writing student. My tutor that year had urged us to start sending our work out, had counselled us that we would likely fail more than we would succeed but if we really wanted to be writers we must persist. I remember him holding up a sheaf of papers, a catalogue of his rejections, and feeling heartened. I don’t recall how many competitions I entered before I won my first, but I don’t think it was many. What I do recall is the thrill of that win. The validation I felt. Somebody thought my words mattered. To confirm this there was an award ceremony, a trophy, a modest cheque, publication in an anthology, and an article in the local paper. It was all rather dizzying. I didn’t realise at the time that most competitions offer little reward. A certificate to be filed away and a few hundred dollars to be banked, but rarely publication. Which is why this anthology is such a gem.

Now in its fourth year, the 2011 edition of Award Winning Australian Writing (AWAW) has collected 46 winning entries, both stories and poems, giving them a life beyond the competitions. Each story is accompanied by an author bio and an informative blurb about the competition itself. This makes it a useful tool for writers engaged in the enterprise of entering literary competitions. In particular, it is ideal for creative writing students.

Back in 1998, as I began dipping my toe into the mystifying world of publishing, I hadn’t the faintest clue what competition judges were looking for. What, precisely, did a winning story look like? I blindly sent my work out into the great unknown with a kind of scatter gun approach and hoped for the best. A book like AWAW would have been a great help in working out how to be more strategic. As Delia Falconer notes in the Foreword, strategy is not just about increasing the chances of success but also about ‘conserving energy’ and protecting yourself from ‘constant rejection’. Incidentally it was Falconer who awarded an early story of mine in the Banjo Paterson Writing Awards and wrote lovely and insightful things about it in her judge’s report. I treasured this feedback from an author I admired, and this is one of the benefits of entering these competitions.

So, AWAW is a valuable resource indeed, but what of its contents this year? Despite being a collection of award-winning works the quality of the writing is uneven. This reflects the range of competitions included – from those with minimal prize money and a local focus to more lucrative prestigious national awards that attract international entries. The authors included are also at varying stages of their careers.

The clear standout is Sarah Holland-Batt’s ‘Istanbul’, winner of the Adelaide Review/University of Adelaide Creative Writing Program Short Fiction Competition (unwieldy names seem to be obligatory for literary competitions). Holland-Batt displays a poetic attention to the rhythm of language and an ear for dialogue. Her observations of the minutiae of life and evocation of place are skilfully handled. With elegant prose she captures the endless languor of summer holidays and the agonies of youth. I read this story twice and enjoyed it just as much the second time.

Another standout is Adam Tucker’s ‘How Would They Get Rid of Him?’ (Australian Literature Review Best Rural/Small Town Short Story). It is the story of a boy (known only as The Boy) whose father has killed his dog, ‘put its head on the chopping block’. When an older local boy runs away The Boy befriends him and toys with the idea of joining him. Tucker’s story is beautifully written. His distinctive and effective style of employing short, sharp sentences reminded me, in some ways, of a script. Indeed, while reading, it struck me that this story would make an excellent short film. So I was interested to discover that Tucker studied film at RMIT. Here’s a little taster:

The Boy closes his eyes. Listens to The Father fade away. Raises his eyes to his mother. Sees the imploring face. Clumps his own way across the kitchen floor. Opposite direction to The Father. Leaves The Mother with her hand stoppering her mouth.

Other favourites include Theresa Layton’s ‘The Afghan Hook’ (Perilous Adventures Short Story Competition) about a woman who decides to leave her husband on their fiftieth anniversary, then wavers. The small cruelties of this relationship have eroded it over time: ‘Her case against him has built, slowly, in sedimentary layers’. This well-crafted narrative is a gem. And then there’s Leah Swann’s moving story, ‘Street Sweeper’ (Page Seventeen Short Story Competition). As in Tucker’s story, a beloved dog is killed, this time by a car. The event, witnessed by the dog’s owner, 14-year-old Mathew, is pivotal in this coming of age tale and Swann handles it with deftness. She also pulls off the difficult to master second person narrative mode with assurance.

Other notable stories are Karen Heenan’s ‘Beyond the Bay’ (Hal Porter Short Story Competition), Jacqueline Winn’s ‘The Dangers of Swimming’ (Banjo Paterson Writing Awards), and Kate Rotherham’s ‘A Favourite Sky’ (Rolf Boldrewood Literary Awards).

Poetry has also been included in AWAW for the first time and it is a welcome addition. Kevin Gilliam’s ‘the unwritten blue’ is a poignant poem that displays a fine observation for detail. It won the Reason-Brisbane Poetry Prize, one of the most lucrative poetry prizes in the country, sponsored by writer Joy Brisbane whose aim is to nurture both new and established poets. Irene Wilkie’s ‘Living Sculpture’ (Grenfell Henry Lawson Festival of the Arts Literary Competition) is both evocative and vivid, and I enjoyed Gemma White’s wry take on personal ads in ‘Wanted: Poet’ (Picaro Poetry Prize). Finally, one can’t go past KA Nelson’s powerful political poem ‘Chorus of Crows’, winner of Australia’s most prestigious prize for new and emerging poets, our very own Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize.

Overall this is a collection with much to offer and a must read for those interested in entering Australia’s array of literary competitions.

When Hitler came to power I was in the bath. The wireless in the living room was turned up loud, but all that drifted down to me were waves of happy cheering, like a football match …

Overland’s Boris Kelly corresponded with Anna Funder.

BK: Both of your books deal with the politics and, to some extent, the logistics of covert surveillance. What is it about spying that fascinates you?

AF: To secretly gain information about people and use it against them is a form of power, often illicit. It is done everywhere – by political parties, by secret services, by news organisations, by internet giants, by corporations trying to sell us something. I think it is a kind of voyeurism and theft combined and I think we need to be wary. Of course that is also what writers do, so the ethical entanglements of it are personal, not theoretical, to me.

BK: The central characters in All That I Am are German émigrés forced out of the country after the burning of the Reichstag and Hitler’s ascent to power. Although they are Jewish, their persecution by the National Socialists is primarily a consequence of their political activities, not their religion or ethnicity. What was it about this particular moment in history and the lives of these characters, most of whom are based on real people, that drew your attention?

AF: I like the dramatic tension of telling a story about prescience and courage. These people were the bell-ringers in a world that would not listen. The action takes place between 1933 and 1935, which is a long time before the war, and the better-known stories from that time. In the beginning – though, of course, the Nazis were by nature anti-Semitic – their first priority was to eliminate or expel the educated, the outspoken, and the cultural elite. Hence, the expulsions as soon as they came to power. Later came the extraordinary and little-known extra-territorial assassination squads that were sent out. But I never saw myself as drawn to a period. I was drawn to write about the characters themselves. I am interested in courage and its flipside, terror. I am interested in how we can be braver than is good for us, or, on the other side, we can let ourselves and everyone else around us down.

AF: I don’t think this is a historical novel – it does not set out to represent an era for its own sake. It is, however, one that makes the past firmly present. The situations the characters find themselves in – speaking out against unjust and outrageous governmental power – are utterly contemporary. I could have written the same book about characters in China, or Libya, or Burma or Russia and set it in the present. The idea that things can be known as facts, and yet not fully apprehended in the hearts and minds of people or the body politic, is something that fascinates me because it speaks to the fact that humans are only in the second instance rational beings – we apprehend things by emotion first, and hence the force of the novel form in our culture.

As for specifics, well there are many resonances. For instance Clara’s brother is on a ship of Jews fleeing Hitler that is off the coast of Florida, but it is turned away by both the US and Canadian and Cuban administrations, and sent back to Europe. That is the kind of thing happening off the Australian coast now.

More importantly, I think that the relationships between the characters in the novel are ones I see all around – mistaken loves that are nevertheless permanent and passionate; true loves that don’t turn into practical, everyday lives lived together; the difference between what we want and what we need and how, try as we might, we just can’t see it.

BK: There are moments in the novel that contain highly significant but very subtle plot and character details which, on a first reading, are likely to be missed. On a second reading their weight is more apparent. How important are such fine details to the craft and technique of the writer?

AF: I think they are hugely important. Underneath the suspense story there are several others. The book is in one way about what we don’t see – what an individual can miss; what a society can miss – the rise of Hitler, the boats off the coast … The details need to be there for the story, but also for the reader to experience the missing, and then the satisfaction of, finally, ‘seeing’.

BK: To take that point further: The novel is narrated in part by Ruth Becker, a ninety-four year-old woman living in Bondi Junction in 2001. Ruth reflects on years spent in Germany and then London with her cousin Dora, her own journalist husband Hans Wesemann and the celebrated, revolutionary playwright, Ernst Toller. At one point Ruth says:

It is an observation that reflects on both her personal life, especially her marriage, but also to wider social and political circumstances. How do you regard this tension between the personal and political? Was this a challenge in writing the novel?

AF: I loved writing about what we see and what we don’t. I’m interested in blindness of all kinds – the necessary ones in marriage, in life – and the devastating ones, in politics and in the limits of public compassion. For instance, I think some marriages, perhaps many, survive by selective blindness to foibles that would otherwise drive us crazy. And yet this too can lead to serious consequences. On the political plane, the blindness of appeasement, in the case of the British government – and of course the Menzies government in Australia, too, though that wasn’t my subject in All That I Am – while understandable in some ways was also devastating, in the first instance for some of my characters, and then later for everyone. I don’t draw any glib equivalence between individual human souls and the shifting movements of public consciousness but I think one thing a novel can and should do is explore both.

BK: Dora is the pivotal character in the book. Your characterisation is drawn from accounts of the life of Dora Fabian, a pacifist, leftist political exile active in London, who was hunted by the Nazis. She is the most politically driven character in the novel. If she had lived on, do you think Dora would have returned to East or West Germany after the war?

AF: I think she would have gone to West Germany. She’d left the Socialist Workers Party a long time before. Or, she might have gone to the US, like Hannah Arendt did. Her ex-husband Walter went back West Germany.

BK: Do you write by hand at any point in the process of drafting?

AF: I have a notebook that I write things in – scraps, observations, ideas, pre-sleep insights. I never draft longhand, though sometimes the notes in the notebook are sentences, or paragraphs that come out of nowhere, and that I need to get down. When I look at the long-ago Stasiland notebooks – and there are ten of them – I can see the beginnings of paragraphs that were then fixed and honed for the book. Some come pristine though. For Stasiland I had the final paragraph of the book – ‘children on swings and roundabouts I never noticed were there’ – long before it was written. For All That I Am I had the last scene with Bev, and the last line where she ‘starts to clean’ also for a long, long time before I was done. These things are strange. It is as if I have an ending to write to, a point of hiatus or upswing or unfinished business that I nevertheless know is the final note of the book.

BK: Are you a meticulous note taker during the research phase?

AF: I don’t know that meticulous is the right word. It implies too much straight diligence. I do take lots of notes that I carry around with me. But they are bowerbird notes – bits of bright things that strike my mind.

BK: I’m interested to know if you might at some point write something closer to home, something with an explicitly Australian theme. Would you mind telling me what you are currently working on?

AF: I’m working on a novel. It’s sent in contemporary times and it’s not very political. Or not at the moment, at any rate.

BK: Given the acceleration of social and political volatility in the world today and the reactivation of the Left, do you think there is a place for the overtly political novel?

AF: I think there is always room for good novels. If they deal with political issues, so much the better. But to be good, they have to be about what it is that makes us human, and not, in the first instance, about prescriptions for living.

BK: Why the title, All That I Am?

AF: When Toller first sees Dora she’s holding an audience entranced with a speech. She extends her hand and he sees she is someone who holds their own life in their palm, to do with as she wishes. My characters are people who, like many activists, have to assess the value of their lives when powerful, possibly fatal forces are arrayed against them. Is it worth it to them to give up their lives? And on the other hand, for instance for Hans, he falls short of his ideas of himself. We all do this. When we do, we comfort ourselves with the idea that ‘we’re only human’. I wanted in the title to encompass the extraordinariness, the hugeness, the miracle of a single human being, and at the same time the smallness of a single soul.

So why bother? Because The Courier’s New Bicycle is a hybrid creature – a genre amalgam, but who would know from the bookshop shelf arrangement by genre, as if being in one category denies the possibility of the others?

My book rep tells me my real problem is that my surname begins with ‘W’. Chastened, I scuff my boot against her bag hung on the café chair. If only I’d had the perspicacity of Jim Grant, who, with a clear and canny eye to his future as an author, carefully gathered together the correct letters and syllables to make his nom de plume, and turned himself into Lee Child.

About labelling, I remember the first short story competition I sent a story to. Its requirements were that the writing be ‘speculative’. I thought, well, my stuff’s that. At the time, I didn’t realise how the term was part of a highly structured system of categorisation: one that a writer and their writing could become permanently ententacled in, despite the term itself being a superfluity, all fiction surely speculative. Anyway, this first story won that competition, then one called an Aurealis, and my trajectory as a writer of speculative fiction was set.

My first novel, The Daughters of Moab, was published in 2008 by HarperVoyager, and so it came out with a science fiction label. I preferred to call it poetic apocalyptic, a descriptor I’d come up with in an effort to flag to readers something of the style and substance of its interior, which was a conglomerate of SF, mythology and the supernatural, all with a literary bent, its bedrock being the land – a post-apocalyptic Terra Australis – and its preoccupations being with humanity’s capacity for destruction and equal instinct to survive.

Fiction that crosses genre lines runs the risk of not being judged on its own terms, but according to the label it comes with, preconceptions firmly attached. The Daughters of Moab, viewed through the lens of science fiction, was critiqued accordingly – and more often than not it vexed expectations, the prose deemed too obfuscatory for the genre. And while I maintained that a broader readership might get something out of a dose of the poetic mixed with the apocalyptic, apparently the story’s SF label made it too lowbrow for literary inspection.

I remember how my first-time novelist’s ego plunged like a bungy jumper into a bucket when (I shan’t say a close family member) saw the book cover’s shout line, Assassin. Protector. Blood Sister… and said, ‘If you write something like that, you have to expect a lot of people won’t want to read it’. Sadly, my close family member wasn’t wrong – labelling and shelf allocation all but killing a broader interest; and alas, the novel fell through the genre cracks.

By now you’re thinking I’m dark on labels. In fact I like labels, and sorting things. Some (family members) would say it’s my anally retentive Virgo nature coming to the fore, but I think labelling was invented to help everybody, not just me, organise a confusing world.

One of my favourite activities as a kid was to put all the animals from my big bag of plastic creatures into groups. Sometimes it was according to kind – farm animal, wild animal, mythological animal, etc; other times it was by biggest to littlest or best to worst; and other times it was according to the new alliances and friendships each had made with the others while I was off eating my breakfast. Eventually abandoning my bag of animals, I went on to list making and room tidying, my clothes drawers organised by colour and my files alphabetically. This, I said to myself, was so I could find things. Little did I know that this entirely sensible rationale would return later in life to bite me in the bum.

Back to the genre amalgam that is The Courier’s New Bicycle. I’m happy to report Australian Bookseller+Publisher has described it as ‘a disturbingly credible and darkly noir post-cyberpunk tale’. This quote-worthy phrase opens up the field of interest: the ‘noir’ a nod to crime fiction, the ‘cyberpunk’ to SF, and the ‘credible’ to current societal aptness. Hopefully, it will spur a variety of readers into wanting to know more about a bike courier and accidental sleuth who has a mystery to solve in the alleyways of a dystopian Melbourne just around the socio-political corner from now, despite the book’s despatch solely to the SF shelves steering it too towards the genre cracks. Which brings me to Venn diagrams.

Unlike fractions (those sharp-edged and unyielding divisions that caused me no end of pain), the circles that I learnt about in primary school geometry class, their intersections alluringly shaded, hinted at a world with grey areas, ambiguities. These days I wonder if my fascination for Venn diagrams was because I knew from quite young that I was attracted to girls as well as boys, desire floating in an as yet unnamed place, and those grey areas speaking to me of the possibilities that might live inside me and at the interstices of things. This might explain, in part, the gravitational pull cross-genre writing has always had on me, and maybe now’s the time to mention that Salisbury Forth, the primary protagonist in The Courier’s New Bicycle, is happily gender androgynous.

I don’t remember when I stopped believing in the binary labelling system currently used to decide sex and divide gender, and began to see both as continuums with any number of identity positions along them; but a non-intersecting binary now seems as blunt and flawed an instrument of categorising as the labelling system used, say, to keep literary and genre content apart.

An either/or world is a brittle, lifeless creature. The pleasure that sorting animals gave me as a kid was also the pleasure of re-sorting; that is, the freedom to change perspective and make endless rearrangements in the order of things. In my fiction I go to the grey areas and in-between places because they hold the most promise. And for those willing to read a novel that slips between the genre cracks, there’s always the possibility of finding wonderland.

Read more from Kim Westwood at her website.

I thoroughly enjoyed Sophie Cunningham’s Melbourne, and not just because of its gorgeous production values. I finished it just before alighting at Southern Cross station, ready to catch the connecting train to Footscray. As I was politely weaving my way on to the escalator with my suitably conservative morning commuter fellows, wearing the obligatory smart woollen coat against the cold and clutching the proofs of an edition of Overland (heading to that office), I felt like I had fallen into the book I had just read. Its warm, wry tone stayed with me as I went on to take in the sights and smells of Droop street with a freshly appreciative eye.

Sophie has kindly agreed to have a chat with me about the book and what she’s up to at the Melbourne Writers Festival:

Melbourne is a very personal account of the city. What was your brief?

The brief was extremely open. Phillipa McGuiness, the publisher, envisioned the books as being travel books about your home town. And she only wanted 50,000-or-so words (it ended up being about 60,000). Then it was up to me as to how I’d approach the material. I had to let her know what my approach was – a year in the life of, seasonal – to make sure we were all in agreement. Then I was on my own.

Memoir is a powerful thing, I would imagine in particular, ‘surprise memoir’ … does writing autobiographically change the way you feel about the story of your life?

I’m not sure what you mean by ‘surprise memoir’. Do you mean you weren’t expecting it? Obviously my approach is memoir, but it doesn’t feel overly personal.

By surprise memoir, I meant that it wasn’t like you sat down and thought, ‘I’m going to write a memoir’ but the brief came and then the idea of memoir as a way to meet the assignment. But I guess I was happily surprised that Melbourne is also a bit of an insight into you as a person. I think you managed the autobiographical approach beautifully, keeping the focus on the city.

Except for a couple of references to my parent’s ill health I don’t really touch on matters close to me in the intimate sense of that word. But geographically close, and culturally, certainly. What I did with my memories of Melbourne and the town it used to be, was to set them alongside the place I live in now; then try to figure out how we got from one place to the other. I also researched key memories – such as the Westgate Bridge disaster – to more fully understand their implication. That is, I tried to isolate the experiences I had of Melbourne that would have been broadly shared, and would resonate for readers. I used memoir to orientate and organise.

In terms of how that made me feel about the story of my life – well yes it did change that a bit. It reminded me that my story is connected to many other people’s. Once you share details about yourself and your life, you come to see how many other people have similar experiences and you also get to hear their stories. For example, one reader told me that Melbourne used to use the mud at Merri Creek for cricket pitches because it was so sticky – this guy played a lot of cricket. I love that story. I wish I’d known that when I wrote the book.

Is there anything else you left out that you wish you’d had room to leave in?

Yes, I would have liked to have had a bit more about Melbourne’s political life – both historical and contemporary, both conservative and radical. And I’m interested in Melbourne’s history in terms of class – the way some key families, like the Baillieu’s, have lived here for many generations. The way there is still such focus on the school you went to.

There has been a lot of comment about how middle-class I am and the ways in which this comes through in the book. While this is true, I went to a new high school in an area known for its old private schools, so that always left me feeling that I was outside that particular world (I’m talking more culturally than economically here).

I don’t touch at all on the city’s gay and lesbian history. I write about Melbourne’s sprawl but don’t talk about the development of the suburbs after World War II. As well, there are any number of factoids and historical gems that I would have loved to include. The library at the Athenaeum doesn’t get a look in. I only briefly mention Curtain House. Oh, the list is endless.

Where are you now with your writing practice?

I still have a novel on the back burner that I am wanting to bring to the front burner. And I’m researching another non-fiction book. I am attempting to live as a writer full-time which is both a luxury (in terms of time) and a curse (in terms of money).

What are you up to at the 2011 Melbourne Writers Festival?

I’m running several walking tours around the CBD throughout the festival.

I’m launching Overland on the first Saturday afternoon. I’m on a panel about cities during the day on the first Sunday, then giving a keynote that night, on feminism, at BMW Edge. The following week we’re throwing a bit of a party to celebrate the Stellas, the prize for Australian women’s writing that I’m involved with. It’s a busy time.

Melbourne is available at all good book stores.

For details about Sophie and the MWF. And come along (the more the merrier) as she launches Overland edition 204.

For much of John Howard’s reign as Prime Minister debate on Australian history took a polarised view: the Black Armband History versus the White Revisionist’s History. The culmination of which was John Howard’s refusal to apologise to the Stolen Generation. With Kevin Rudd’s 2008 apology, and the bi-partisan support for it, it seemed that that debate had ended, that a compromise had been achieved. But has it? In his book The Protectors: a journey through whitefella past, Stephen Gray addresses this question by asking what are we apologising about?

Starting with the apology and working backwards, Gray looks at the lives of some of the protectorates and patrol officers in the NT, the people involved in implementing the policy. Through showing their lives he asks readers to imagine what the apology would mean to them? What it means to be acting out in best intentions? An approach he himself takes: ‘the reason why the “Aboriginal problem” has always been so utterly intractable in Australian political life is that it is truly foundational. It goes back to our beginnings – the original smear, or sin, of colonisation, from which everything else flows … It was from that original moment which established political relations as they have been ever since – White Australians with the power, Aboriginal people without.’

And so, after preliminary discussions, we begin with Harriet Douglas arriving in 1870 as a sixteen-year-old girl with her Dad, Captain Douglas, the new governor of the town of Darwin. We learn of the early years of Darwin, with its oppressive heat and drinking, with its Chinese and Aboriginal labour. We learn of Harriet’s defence later in life of the methods used by those opening the frontier. We learn of the language that was used – euphemisms for killing, massacre, rape and so on. The twisted poetry, like that of Constable William Wilshire: ‘Martini Henry carbines…talking English in the silent majesty of those great eternal rocks.’

Readers witness Baldwin Spencer as he arrives in Darwin in 1912 as the second Chief Protectorate of the Northern Territory. His role meant that he controlled the ‘movement of the natives and their employment by settlers’. It was a role in which Spencer did more to protect those in urban areas then those living in the bush, those still living traditionally. Spencer, influenced by Social Darwinism, came to form the opinion that full-blooded Aboriginal people would eventually die out. As Gray points out, there’s no proof that Spencer did anything to actively pursue that genocidal logic; but he held those beliefs.

It’s a belief carried through to Doctor Cecil Cook, one-time Chief Protector of the NT, and often referred to as the most hated man in the Territory. At the 1937 conference of chief protectors, he expounded on the notion of ‘breeding out the colour’. Yet, at the same time, introduced the policy of exemption which meant Aboriginal people could be free to live like the white man. He also created the Aboriginal Benefit Funds, a form of workers compensation – while holding thoroughly abhorrent racists views. As one Darwin Stolen Generation remarked, he was an enigma. To Gray, Cook comes across as a man whose good intentions had evil consequences.

Which brings us to the crux of the book: the notion of good intentions, a somewhat lame excuse but the grounds in which many people – from the Missionaries to the Chief Protectorates and Patrol Officer of the 1940s, 50s and 60s – use when reflecting back on those days. As Gray shows in interviews with people like Patrol Officer Colin Macleod, in the legal testimonies in the two Stolen Generation cases, there is a truth to what they believe that cannot be ignored. Even in Hasluck assimilation, the idea began as a policy whereby people weren’t treated on race but rather on welfare situation (a policy approach that is still apparent today). It was a policy that was based around some notion of equality, but was as clumsy, messy and as far removed as the day-to-day realities of its implementation were.

And herein lies a problem. As Gray admits, in understanding the motivation of perpetrators (i.e. the protectors and patrol officers) you risk forgiving them and therefore undermining the impact of their policy. It’s a risk that Gray deems worthwhile – and he is right. In order to truly understand where we are heading as a nation in relation to Aboriginal issues we need to stop merely blaming one side or the other; rather, we need a more nuanced approach. An approach in which we see and recognise the truth of those who witnessed and experienced that period.

It doesn’t mean that we do not criticise the policy. There is much criticism in Gray’s book of the policies of that past and he states numerous times his feeling on the worth and value of the apology. But he argues that we learn from them and take it on board. Gray concludes, in the second last chapter of the book: ‘the truth is, I believe, that on the question of our treatment of Aboriginal people we are still largely silent. We did, for a while, make space in our public discourse for the voices of Aboriginal people, who have told us at length what was done to them and what they have had to suffer in its wake. We heard them a little, but then we could not bear to hear any more- the whole thing was too shameful and unpleasant- and so we have turned away. We might be more opening to hearing these stories if we were more willing to open our own cupboards and acknowledge our own stories, and all that they imply.’

Perhaps this is the new history path we need to head down

Occasionally a book so exceptional comes along that you want to greedily devour it in one sitting. Like a new lover you want to spend every moment together and become resentful when forced to part. You eat with it, curl up in bed with it, and pick it up the moment you wake. This rarely happens to me, but it did with Bereft.

Bereft is Chris Womersley’s second novel, and his first, The Low Road, won the Ned Kelly Award for Best First Fiction in 2008. If Bereft doesn’t pick up some prestigious awards I’ll be very surprised.

The novel opens with the murder of twelve-year-old Sarah Walker in the ‘fly-speck town of Flint’. Her brother, Quinn, is found at the scene with a bloody knife in his hand, and flees. Ten years later, after fighting in the Great War, Quinn returns to the town. The war has just ended, but the Spanish influenza epidemic is now sweeping across Australia taking more lives. Quinn’s mother is one of those quarantined in her home, teetering on the edge of death. Despite knowing that the town’s inhabitants regard him as a murderer, and that his father and uncle would relish the chance to hang him, he is desperate to make peace with his mother and assure her that the crime was not his. He hides in the bush surrounding the town where he meets the strange and mystical Sadie Fox, a young orphan with whom he develops an uneasy and complex friendship.

Sadie is the same age as Sarah and one gets the sense that fate is offering Quinn the chance to replay the past and carve out a different ending. At times the lines become blurred, and both Quinn and reader are led to wonder whether this strange girl is in fact the ghost of his dead sister. Has Quinn somehow imagined her into existence through the sheer force of longing? Set during a period of history when superstitions are rife and the practice of contacting the dead through séances has gained popularity, it seems anything is possible.

Quinn is plagued both by the death of his sister and his time in the war. He is clearly experiencing post-traumatic stress syndrome and his hearing has been damaged by shell blasts. He suffers from hallucinations, and the after-effects of the gas regularly render him immobile with violent coughing fits. The landscape, which Womersley vividly describes, reflects Quinn’s turmoil. Like him it is scarred, damaged, bereft.

There is nothing particularly original about the novel’s structure and the way the story gradually builds to a conclusion that is designed to satisfy the reader, and yet every sentence is a delight to read. Womersley’s prose is crisp, taut and beautifully constructed. He doesn’t waste a word, expertly propelling us along with the power of his storytelling. From the very first sentence he had me captivated.

Bereft can be read as a Gothic novel, a crime novel, a ghost story, a thriller. Whatever, this is a book of searing, heart-wrenching brilliance that should appeal to a wide range of readers. Simply put, Bereft is one of the best books I’ve read this year.

Labelling something to be ‘in crisis’ can be a fraught activity; when the motivation is to create a rethinking of the issue at hand, it often leads to bandaid solutions to quickly fix the crisis. In this collection of essays, Altman and Hinkson have chosen this approach – divided into four parts: the problem of recognition, the problem of violence, counting culture, imagining futures – to bring many of the discussions that have been taking place among Australian anthropologists to a wider audience. It’s a job well done.

The problem of recognition begins with Elizabeth A. Povinelli discussing how culture has transformed under late liberalism/neoliberalism from arguments of difference to arguments of care. The Intervention is one form of this argument, where to critique the announced policy was ‘to not care about the children’. She argues that this shift to care fits alongside new attempts to create the good day in Indigenous communities: a day which will never happen because ‘late liberalism never allows the present to occur. The good day never comes. It s only a near event, or a tardy event – never in the moment; a manner of being always in lag time and distended; delayed and deferred.’

Jeremy Beckett’s essay outlines the history of Australian anthropology starting with the early, state-based research, moving onto Stanner and then towards the modern day. It arcs a movement from government-based work to work independent of government and now, a little worringly, a return to the government sector. It’s an essay that provides background to the Gillian Cowlishaw exploration of ‘the role of the helping anthropologists’. She writes of the role in which anthropologists can help communities: ‘instead of trying to explain Aboriginal people to the state, we need to understand the social engineering the state is involved in, and our own part it.’

‘The problem of recognition’ ends with an essay by Andrew Lattas and Barry Morris exploring the connections with Peter Sutton’s The Politics of Suffering. Having not read the book, it’s hard to engage in the textual critiques of the book although it does make some interesting points regarding the shift in focus from the collective to a more individualistic approach, as exemplified by neoliberalism.

The problem of violence begins with an essay by Marcia Langton on the shock of the new. Langton makes an interesting argument about anthropology’s failure to account for the changes over the last 30 years or so in Aboriginal communities. This failure, she contends, is that it doesn’t fit into the role of the anthropologist of documenting traditional culture and assisting in native claims. It’s a contentious point on several levels, when you consider some of the work that comes out of ANU and CAPER, but one with a certain validity.

The book then goes onto an essay by Francis Merlan on the problems surrounding child abuse figures. Using the Little Children are Sacred report, the impetus for the Intervention, Merlan argues for the need for more community engagement in dealing with the issue of child abuse in communities.

This is followed by an essay by Diane Austin-Broos on how anthropology quarantines violence from the wider society. This, she says, is down to a failure to account for some existing violence, and a focus on holism and consultancy, the latter being the native title. This is not to underplay the fact that violence exists, or that there is not a personal component to it, just that anthropology has overlooked some components that need more focus.

Counting culture starts off with Tim Rowse taking a look at the statistical conditions of social exclusion. Through maps and statistical analysis he argues for a rethinking of the parameters and markers in which comparisons are made. Instead of Indigenous people being compared broadly across the whole to non-Indigenous people, Rowse argues for a region-by-region comparison.

From this, we move on to essays by Emma Kowal and Tess Lea on Outstation Health and Training. Using Samson and Deliah as well as personal stories and experiences as examples, Kowal looks at the white anti-racist emphasis on outstation health as a new form of Orientalism: seeing the Other through the sphere of fears and desires. Lea’s essay looks at the difficulty of education, and the complicated nature of non-educationalist perspectives, noting the difficulties of change occurring in this field.

The final essay in this section works with the front and back roads between Yuendumu and Wari Wari (Yulemula) as a metaphor, painting a picture of a policy that has not worked. Yasmine Musharbash recounts witnessing the GBM and other Government workers in Yuendumu not even bothering to leave their compounds to engage with the community. She writes:

For the NT Emergency Response to be anything less than a disaster, it would have needed to be conceptualised, planned and co-designed as a road travelled together- something the Howard government never envisioned and the Rudd Government grandly missed.

Imagining futures is, I guess, the solution. Melinda Hinkson looks at they way in which the Walpiri community of Yuendumu portrays itself through mainstream media. She does this by closely examining the special on Remote voices in Australia. She analyses the ways in which the Warlpiri self present, and consider the ease in which they shift from the first person to the collective, and how this emphasises their complex nature to community, country and language.

The following essay, by Nicholas Peterson, addresses the charge of silence laid on anthropologists post Intervention. Peterson sees this as an illustration of the complex nature of commenting on policy that have such impact on the personal lives of individuals. He contends that this part of the policy makes it difficult to be objective. He backs this claim by referring to Raymond Williams’s comments on culture as being difficult to define as a case in point.

The final essay is by Jon Altman on his Economic Hybridity model, and focuses on some of the ranger work in Indigenous Protected Areas. For those not aware, Altman hybridity theory argues for a reevaluation of how remote communities are economically assessed. Forgoing the dichotomy of viable/unviable, Altman argues for a new approach which looks at work on a social and cultural means, which ranger work exemplifies. It helps the state in its tracking of animals and custom work it performs; it helps the commercial sector in protecting livelihood; culturally, it means that people are being paid to look after country and meet kinship relations.

Altman sees this as a new approach that breaks from the state project, the aim of which:

is to homogenise communities and discourage small dispersed settlements and mobile population that are hard and expensive to govern. Such small dispersed communities do provide opportunity for alternative lifeworlds and livelihoods. But the state looks to eliminate non-state spaces and to meet the labour and resource needs of mature capitalism, especially in labour power poor and mining-dependent situations as in Australia.

Altman goes onto say: ‘The challenge we all face as anthropologists is getting beyond the dominance of discourse that focuses only on capitalist economy and statistics so we can reintegrate people and different cultural systems into our analyses and interpretations.’

So, after reading, is the call of crisis going to bring forward any agreed upon solutions? It’s hard to say. What this selection shows is that Australian anthropology is emerging into a more public debate, something that can only make anthropology more relevant, something Cowlishaw demands. It’s a debate certainly worth following.

Although I did not plan my recent trip as a literary pilgrimage, that’s pretty much what it turned out to be. Driving from Scotland to the south of England, there are ghosts of writers everywhere, but it was one of my favourites, Jane Austen, who seemed to pop up at every corner. I first came across her in Bath at the Jane Austen Museum, housed in Gay Street a few doors down from where Jane lived for a few years. From there it was a short walk to the Royal Crescent that overlooks the city. I walked along the curved frontage of the terraced houses, swept along, ‘all eager delight’, like Northanger Abbey’s Catherine on the way to the ball.

I was distracted from Jane Austen for a day or two when I arrived on the south coast and found myself on Cheshil Beach. But at nearby Lyme Regis I picked up her trail again. It was in the harbour (The Cobb) in this Regency seaside resort that Louisa Musgrove had a nearly fatal fall in Austen’s last novel Persuasion. I had already been to Belton House in Lincolnshire, one of the stately homes used in the 1995 BBC production of Pride and Prejudice, and seen the ornate desk where Darcy (Colin Firth) penned the letter to Elizabeth Bennet. But now I was about to see a very different desk, a tiny three-legged one belonging to Jane Austen.

By this time I was in the nearby county of Hampshire. I had arrived on Open Day at Chawton House, the home of Jane Austen’s brother Edward, which now houses a library of manuscripts by early English women writers. When Austen’s family fell on hard times, it was Edward, who had been adopted by rich childless relatives, who found a place for them to live on the Chawton estate he had inherited. Jane, together with her mother and her sister Cassandra, moved into a cottage on the estate, and it was here Jane spent a happy few years writing her best work before she became ill and moved to Winchester, where she died.

It made sense to visit Chawton House while it was open to the public, and exciting to follow in Jane’s footsteps along the road to her brother’s house, walk up the driveway that would have been so familiar to her, up the sloping lawn and the flight of steps into the mansion. But it was Jane’s cottage that I really wanted to see.

I went back there two days later when the crowds had gone, and immersed myself in the daily rituals of her life. There was the well next to the bakehouse, where the women baked bread and washed their clothes (and the pig!); the humble donkey carriage they used for trips to Alton; the cheerful kitchen with its cooking range; the sunny bedroom where you can see Jane’s lacework and the patchwork coverlet she made with Cassandra and her mother; and the dining room, with the tiny pedestal desk under the window, just big enough to fit a book, a pen and inkwell. She would write here after breakfast and dinner. Before breakfast was the time for daily piano practice. Cassandra took on most of the household duties to give Jane time to write – good on you, sis! In glass cases are Jane’s cup and ball – she was a proficient player – and the books on manners she presented as gifts to her nieces. I could feel the happiness and order that radiated from every corner and no doubt contributed to her prolific output during her eight years here. It was in this cottage that she finally achieved success with Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park and Emma.

I left the house with a lingering look at that tiny desk, resolving to maintain that simplicity in my writing life, resume my piano practice, take up baking bread again and going for long walks. Not much has changed in my life since I got back to Melbourne. My desk, which I am thinking of replacing with a bigger one, is chaotic with papers and I don’t know what, the piano is gathering dust and my walks around the suburbs are short and irregular. But I have bought a cake tin and made a Madeira cake. Next comes the bread. No pig to wash or patchwork to sew, so there’s plenty of time to write.

Ralph de Boissière lived for a hundred years and wrote five novels but this autobiography may be the story that de Boissière was always meant to tell. Born in Trinidad in 1907 he migrated to Melbourne in 1948 and lived the rest of his life there working in a variety of mundane day jobs while writing and rewriting his novels. De Boissière did not achieve success as a novelist in either the West Indies or Australia although his two major novels, Crown Jewel and Rum and Coca Cola, were published widely in Eastern Europe. He wanted to describe a society and its people in his novels and he was impressed by the example of Tolstoy and Turgenev but as de Boissière filters his experiences to create his autobiography he does a better job of describing people functioning within their societies in all their unpleasantness, glory and contradiction than most novels ever manage.

Ralph de Boissière lived for a hundred years and wrote five novels but this autobiography may be the story that de Boissière was always meant to tell. Born in Trinidad in 1907 he migrated to Melbourne in 1948 and lived the rest of his life there working in a variety of mundane day jobs while writing and rewriting his novels. De Boissière did not achieve success as a novelist in either the West Indies or Australia although his two major novels, Crown Jewel and Rum and Coca Cola, were published widely in Eastern Europe. He wanted to describe a society and its people in his novels and he was impressed by the example of Tolstoy and Turgenev but as de Boissière filters his experiences to create his autobiography he does a better job of describing people functioning within their societies in all their unpleasantness, glory and contradiction than most novels ever manage.

The tightness and poverty of Trinidadian society suffocates us as we read about his education and childhood. As a young man De Boissière set out into the world with only a high school education and a passionate commitment to his art. Opportunities were limited but he was fortunate throughout his life to meet and build connections with likeminded people such as The Beacon Group in Trinidad and the Realist Writers who founded the Australasian Book Society in order to get their books published.

Race and class shaped him because they dominated his society and eventually, like many West Indians who were ‘passing’ but not quite white enough for the local system of stratification, Ralph de Boissière emigrated to start afresh. He was cared for but not loved by his stepmother so when he tries to explain the difference between the excitement and drive of the Australian Communist Party and the inertia that he had left behind, his description of Trinidad’s domineering ‘step-mother England’ is striking. However Australia was no paradise, especially not for his wife Ivy whose support he acknowledges. It is hard for the reader not to feel that this very capable woman was miserably homesick for nearly forty years and her first experience of Australia cannot have helped. De Boissière’s story of the White Australia policy at work on his wife and two daughters upon their arrival in Melbourne is not surprising but it is nevertheless shocking and shameful.

“My family is still on board the Marine Phoenix. Why haven’t they been allowed to disembark? What is all this aboutCanberra?”

He began to take me to task. I must have known that there were certain restrictions on entry, I had deliberately breached them, I had put the shipping line in a very difficult position (163)

We left the ship with the sick, unhappy feeling that we were tolerated migrants. It would be long before she could put this humiliating episode behind her (164)

Straightforward story telling and honest descriptions grab the reader’s imagination and pull us into the amazing episodes of his life such as the American ‘invasion’ of Trinidad during the Second World War, studying motor mechanics in Chicago, travelling by sea to a new life in Melbourne or visiting China and Russia as an honoured, Australian Communist guest.

De Boissière felt a migrant’s distance from his fellow Australians. They could not pronounce his funny name or understand the way that he spoke. He was a quiet, cultured, bookish man who did not share their passion for football or their parochial desire to travel around the country in a caravan. He quietly passes judgement on his colleague at the Gas Company who hates the Japanese because of the war yet buys one of their cars because the bargain is too good to miss. At the same time he received enormous help, support and comradeship from many Australians such as the Lundmark family, the novelists John Morrison and Alan Marshall and the Gunsbergers, refugees from Hungary. He bought a boomerang from Lin Onus’ father, Bill. By the end of his life de Boissière had also found a new love and companion in Annie Greet. On balance, he was a fortunate man.

The book was edited and introduced by the prominent Caribbean critic Kenneth Ramchand who provides important background information for those who are not familiar with Caribbean studies. It is illustrated with photographs, letters, a family tree and useful biographical notes but a timeline would have been a helpful addition.

The book is not on sale in Australia yet other than a few copies available from anniegreet[at]westnet.com.au. It may be ordered from the publisher directly: lexicon[at]tstt.net.tt

Flannery’s new book Here On Earth reads like a cross between Bill Bryson and Jared Diamond, which is reassuring given it has the title of a Leelee Sobieski film. It also sort of makes sense; both of these authors have read and commented on the book, and Diamond is referenced throughout. Flannery has clearly read their work and is borrowing from their styles, which I enjoyed.

The book talks a lot about the Gaia Hypothesis and essentially argues for it throughout. For those unaware, the Gaia hypothesis states that the world as a whole tends to act as a singular organism and has many feedbacks and other mechanisms to maintain a given state. I personally am not a fan. I believe the world does a lot of things we don’t understand and certainly has all sorts of negative and positive feedback models going on, but I find both the name of the hypothesis and many of the people claiming to adhere to it irritating. It’s all a bit hippy-pie-in-the-sky from where I’m sitting, and I was surprised to find Flannery advocating it.

That said, he makes a lot of good arguments for the ability of the planet to maintain itself, and then moves on. He refers to the Gaian hypothesis in opposition to a Medean mindset; if I caught the gist of it, one is about working for a common good while the other is about fighting for individual goals. His argument is that one will lead to the saving of the planet – because we’ve succeeded in doing it before – while the other will lead to slowly deteriorating lives or dying in the event of climate change. It’s uplifting reading, particularly the statistics on the expected death tolls from climate change.

Being Flannery, the book ranges far and wide. He considers the development of Darwinian and Wallacian views of evolution and their social impacts, and asks what would have happened socially had the survival of the fittest view not prevailed. He also looks at many of the unknown and unexpected impacts of the lives we live at the moment, with a particularly fun section on PCBs and hormone disruptors, and non-prescription medications. Suffice to say that if Australia had vultures, I’d need a new muscle relaxant.

It’s an enjoyable book but I got to the end wondering what it was meant to achieve. Certainly, arguments for compromise and cooperation are always valuable, but I don’t feel it particularly shifted my worldview or offered any prescriptions for action. Still – it’ll make a great Christmas present for my Dad.

In Westgarth Books first emerging writers’ event, Steven Amsterdam, Chris Womersley, Matt Hooper and Maryrose Cuskelly will join Sydney Smith to discuss ‘Beginnings’.

Steven, Chris, Maryrose and Matt will read from their novels and you will be able to ask questions as well as talk about your own experiences in beginning a novel. Authors will also be available for book signings.

So come along and meet some of Australia’s most exciting new authors and network with other emerging writers while enjoying cheese and wine and the charm and character of Westgarth Book.

When: Friday 15 October at 6:30pm
Where: 77 High Street, Northcote
Cost: Free, but bookings essential
RSVP: Email info@westgarthbooks.com.au or call 9482 7117 by Wednesday 13 October

Wine by the glass will be available for purchase, with cheese and biscuits on the house.

Bios

Steven Amsterdam was born in New York and educated at the University of Chicago and University of Melbourne. His writing has appeared in Five Chapters, Heat, Overland, Meanjin, The Sleepers Almanac and Torpedo. His first book, Things We Didn’t See Coming, was named The Age 2009 Book of the Year, has been nominated for the Guardian First Book Award and will be on the VCE list in 2011.

Maryrose Cuskelly is the author of Original Skin: Exploring the remarkable human hide recently published by Scribe. She has had essays and articles published in a range of magazines, journals and newspapers. In 2006 she co-wrote, with Nic Frances, the winning proposal for the Iremonger Award for writing on public issues and the ensuing book The End of Charity, published by Allen & Unwin in 2008. She is currently writing her first novel, with the working title, Quench.

Matt Hooper is a writer and a painter, currently finishing a masters degree in creative writing at RMIT. His novel manuscript, My Father’s Notebook, was short-listed in the 2008 Overland novel prize.

Sydney Smith is the founder and co-ordinator of the Victorian Mentoring Service for Writers and was a manuscript assessor for ten years.

Chris Womersley is a Melbourne-based author. He won the 2007 Josephine Ulrick Prize for Literature with his short story ‘The Possibility of Water’ and the 2008 Ned Kelly Award for Best First Fiction for his first novel The Low Road (Scribe). His second novel Bereft (Scribe) is available now.

The title is still shouting at us in caps, although at least they’ve removed the extra emphasis on the ‘must’ which I found particularly grating last year considering the lacklustre contents. This year they’ve made the rather curious decision to ditch the commissioning editor. One presumes the Get Reading! committee made the selection, which includes the obvious choices of recent award-winning authors Tsiolkias, Silvey and Miller. Of the 10 writers included in the anthology, four have novels on the 50 Books list. I was surprised then that Cate Kennedy – master of the short story whose first novel, The World Beneath, has made the list – does not have a story included in the anthology. Nor current darling Nam Le, whose prize-winning short fiction collection, The Boat, is also on the list. Nevertheless there were only 10 spots to fill and omissions could be endlessly debated. Plus the committee were clearly trying to represent a range of genres and styles.

The anthology opens with Christos Tsiolkas’ ‘Sticks, Stones’, the story of a mother’s conflicted feelings for her teenage son. For my money it’s the strongest of the lot. Interestingly though, the explicit sex and swearing which is so much a part of Tsiolkas’ trademark style has been somewhat muted here. I couldn’t help wondering if the committee asked him to take it down a notch or two.

Craig Silvey’s story, ‘The Amber Amulet’, continues one of the themes of his novel Jasper Jones, centering on a twelve-year-old masked avenger in pursuit of peace. Although I think Jasper Jones a remarkable novel, I found myself skimming over much of the tedious and lengthy banter about superheroes between his characters Charlie and Jeffrey. But this delightful story had me smiling to myself.

Alex Miller’s mesmerising story, ‘Manuka’, takes us into the harsh and eerie Australian bush. The slower, almost meditative pace of Miller’s story stood out amongst the others. It focuses on two men, working the land in brutal conditions, suffering through the slow grind of it, and the tragedy that ultimately befalls them. His descriptions of the menacing landscape are sharply observed, as we have come to expect from Miller, and his prose almost musical at times. An absorbing, haunting story.

Other stories included are by Maggie Alderson, Georgia Blain, Mark Dupain, Nick Earls, Judy Nunn, Malla Nunn, and Rachael Treasure. Unlike last year’s offering I did enjoy reading most of this anthology, so it’s certainly an improvement. But the measure of a great story is whether it lingers in the mind long after the book has been put down. For me, only Miller and Tsolkias achieved this.

Next year I’d love to see the Get Reading! committee take more risks. After all, the book is free. Since they don’t need to convince readers to buy it, they can afford to go out on a limb. To include works that challenge our perceptions, take us deeper. And instead of only including the big names, why not take the opportunity to introduce readers to some of our newer, exciting writers. Kalinda Ashton comes to mind, whose debut novel, The Danger Game, was exceptional. Or fellow Sleepers author Steven Amsterdam, whose collection of stories, Things We Didn’t See Coming, was recently longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. Or Chris Womersley, whose first novel won the Ned Kelly Award for Best First Fiction, and whose second book, Bereft, has just been released (and is sitting tantalisingly on my bedside table demanding to be read). All these authors also write short stories with that lingering quality. I could go on, of course, but I’ll spare you a long list of names. Suffice to say that in trying to make safe choices that appeal to a broad cross-section of readers they have ended up with a vanilla ice-cream kind of book. Enjoyable but a little bland.

So next year, dear Get Reading! committee, be bold and do something to really warrant those caps.

By the time I got it together to choose a book from Overland’s list to review, I was saying: Send me over whatever you’ve got. Novels, I’ll read novels. When two arrived and I read the first two pages of each, I reluctantly chose the tome, a doorstopper as Phillip Adams would say, a 680-page weapon – if you can lift it and get enough swing to wallop someone over the head with it. But there you have it, by the time I’d hit page 100, my thumb fanning across the rest of them, I found myself lamenting there were so few. And right to the end, Equator was one of the truly unexpected joys of reading for me this year.

What’s even more perplexing is that Equator is classified as magical realism, a genre I’ve never greatly admired. The idea of an omnipresent narrator being a treasure box is – despite the set-up for this needing tightening (the only time in the text, in my opinion) – a lovely one. One which, as a device, works to drag a rambling story together beautifully. It also allows Wayne Ashton to have a lot of fun with language. And that fun is contagious. It’s great to hear words he’s not only employed but constructed used in such a playful manner.

Equator is not just a work of frivolity however. The big themes – the global economic meltdown, the state of the oceans, the role art plays in our world – are woven into the story, as is one of the most potent descriptions of a mother’s torment over a mentally ill son I’ve read to date. What is most powerful though, in this wide-stretching tale, is the ability to relay pearls of wisdom to the reader without a hint of twee or lecturing:

What we boxes understand, what binary bagpipes cannot understand, coz I dunno why, coz I guess they’re addicted to ceremonies, is Kieran was giving the colonel that outright simple thing, the simplest of all things, and it don’t require a national holiday in Tangiers for it to happen. He was giving the colonel the honour of memory. But hold it: he had little or fuck-all control of it. Just comes and goes and vacant thoughts and idle hummings of internal silence, wafted pieces of olden crumbs getting a ride on a wind nobody knows anything about, and warm breeze under the shade of The Tree of Wishes suddenly comes up, and then goes. Scant intention and scant taste and scant scent and no control.

By the time I’d finished this book I felt that I’d been across the globe and, even more impressively, that Australia was part of the world rather than, as I sometimes feel still, a forgotten younger brother who’s got some annoyingly positive attributes going for them.

Her first novel, What is left over, after, benefits from having the kind of title that made me want to read it without knowing anything about it. It sounds like the title of a Romantic-era poem, something from one of Coleridge’s contemporaries swiped for a contemporary take. I love it. The book is also pretty good.

The story follows the life of Gaelle, a young woman who’s just had her first baby – an event that should be surrounded by joy and congratulations, but is instead encircled by an impenetrable air of secrecy. Her confusion becomes the reader’s as time passes and Gaelle speaks with love of a baby who never appears. When Gaelle runs away from her own party, she meets a young girl who provokes her into beginning to give up her secrets.

Lester’s writing style reminds me of Sonya Hartnett’s, which probably reflects the fact that the book is aimed at a similar age group. It’s a simply told story, which can be either a strength or weakness for many novels; she avoids the danger of simplicity by using the sparse events and characters to crystallise the concern centred on Gaelle. An array of secondary characters flesh out Gaelle’s life without ever following back stories; select information about a chosen few supports the singular nature of Gaelle’s own life.

My one complaint is that I do wish it could have been longer, or that it sought to investigate her relationship with her husband a bit more. While it’s evident Gaelle’s husband is devoted to her, the total lack of perspective as to his experiences – or for that matter, what either one gets from their marriage – leaves me a little curious. However, as this is typical of the Young Adult market – the simplifying of certain relationships or aspects to focus on the critical thread of the novel – I surrender my objection.

I’m also just a bit irked by the tagline of the novel, something about denying her promiscuity. It seemed to me to totally miss the point and instead focus on a singular coping mechanism. As this is another common complaint I have of novels and movies – taglines chosen to titillate and intrigue rather than be at all representative – I’ll cede the point.

‘May I smoke?’ asks an older man ahead of me. He looks like a writer, to me – dishevelled and blinking in the sunlight. ‘I think you should,’ replies his polite companion. Not what I would’ve said.

At last, the doors are open and the queue begins to move. ‘Sorry to have kept you waiting, but it’s our first day,’ says a MWF volunteer. As this is the twenty-fourth Melbourne Writers Festival, I find this a remarkable explanation but what the heck, here we go, the well-oiled machine rolls on.

I refrain from baa-ing as I flock up the stairs to my destination: Writing Women with Carmel Bird (Child of the Twilight) and Sallie Muirden (A Woman of Seville) in cinema one.

But, what is this? Maybe I am as stupid as a sheep? Everybody else in the queue is filing into cinema two … a lone volunteer stands by the closed door of cinema one. I scuttle up and she ushers me in. I’m late.

As I sneak to the nearest seat, I feel rude and foolish – could I have bypassed the smoker, the chatty older man ingratiating himself with the women behind me to thereby effortlessly jump the queue – and just waltzed in?

No matter, here I am and just in time to hear the rather stunning chair, Christine Gordon, tell us, the audience, not to share our own life stories at question time. It’s not the time for sharing that part, she tells us. It’s time for the celebration of the author.

Righty-ho, let’s celebrate.

Sallie Muirden is first up. She reads her speech and rarely looks up. I find myself thinking about this role of writer-as-commodity and the entertainment value of the MWF. Should writers have to take presentation workshops? Can they be shy and still speak in an amateur way to paying audiences? Muirden reads from her book and only when she begins to describe the feeling of the silk dress billowing down over her protagonist’s body does she really become animated. Perhaps she has forgotten we are there.

Despite my criticism, Muirden tells me interesting and thought-provoking things, such as the idea that one can consciously seek sustenance from the writing of other women and that there is a ‘firm kinship between history and our long-ago childhoods’.

The cinema screen is used to show us a Spanish painting that was inspiration for her latest novel and a view of Seville’s rooftops that inspired the novel’s mysterious ‘ladder man’. Images that make Muirden’s book, and Spain, enticing. (A petty distraction is that pesky cursor-arrow and the appearance of the toolbar at the top of the screen – which proves that if they can’t control that at ACMI, they can’t control it anywhere).

I am relieved to hear Muirden say that the ‘seeds planted in the unconscious take seven years to become a novel’ and that ‘novels grow like trees – the roots won’t let go.’ I am also rather taken by the idea: ‘Every novel is a fluke … a roll of the dice brought about by the power of positive thinking.’ And utterly delighted by this brief quote from A Woman of Seville:

… can such buffoonish excess be allowed?

Carmel Bird bounces to the microphone to share with us her technology – a tiny Black Virgin Mary, smaller than a Freddo-frog. Carmel is a confident, engaging speaker. She begins with the legitimate complaint that there will never be a MWF session called Writing Men, where the ‘serious considerations and deliberations of men’ are discussed. Men, naturally, ‘write about the “real world”, so there’s nothing to discuss.’ Later, Gordon remarks that Virginia Woolf had the same complaint almost one hundred years ago.

‘If I have a feminist project that winds its way through my novel,’ says Bird, ‘it’s the Black Virgin Mary statues repressed by the church, favouring a whiter, prettier Mary.’ Her reading is robust and makes us laugh. Bird is the editor of The Stolen Generations – Their Stories and says there’s ‘nothing funny in that book’, but that in fiction, she consciously brings humour into her stories.

Bird says one of the hardest questions to answer is ‘Why did you do such-and-such?’ The answer is not so easy because ‘the story seemed to do the things of its own volition – plot, voice, characters, etc., are all one at the beginning and only discerned after – my fiction weaves its own webs’.

Carmel Bird is a great fan of Sallie Muirden’s novels and says the two writers are both ‘fond of Spain, France and the contested place of women and children in narrative’. After Bird’s reading, the three discuss fantasy and reality. Muirden says fantasy only works when ‘there’s the potential for it to be real’. Gordon asks about the role of art and religion in both authors’ work. It’s Bird, I think, that says, ‘Art is used to promulgate Catholic doctrine and also to challenge it.’

At question time, there’s a bit of an awkward silence. Then one of the three men asks a question on the topic of feminism. ‘Has it all gone too far?’ he wants to know. ‘It’s all very well …’ he says, ‘but isn’t it about relationships?’ Presumably, between men and women. Bird says that ‘relationships can also be between women’ and the conversation moves on.

Gordon quotes Virginia Woolf – ‘As a woman, I have no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.’

To which Bird responds with a hearty, ‘Go, Virginia!’

Gordon asks, ‘As an author, do you have the right to go anywhere?’

‘Yes,’ replies Carmel Bird. ‘Fly.’