Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Belgium-France-Italy

2011 may be the year that 3D came into its own with auteurs from Spielberg and Scorsese to Wenders and Herzog making admirable contributions to the medium. However, this year belongs to a modestly analogue film about an eleven-year-old boy abandoned by his father and taken in by a young woman. The filmmaking of The Kid With a Bike is unshowy yet wildly kinetic, driven by the camera’s need to follow a boy whose desperation sends him running with the velocity of a wild animal. With this astonishing film, the Dardennes remind us that cinema’s true greatness lies not in technological advancements but in ideas and stories.

2. Bridesmaids

Paul Feig, USA

In Time, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Horrible Bosses, Tower Heist – This was the year that Hollywood went class conscious (with certainly mixed results). Bridesmaids was the best film to emerge from this phenomenon, its crass comedy cleverly disguising a solidly constructed story of class difference threatening to break the friendship of a failed small businesswoman and her friend who is marrying into high society. It may be the only film you see in which a scene of women defecating all over a bridal store also carries deep thematic weight.

3. Melancholia

Lars von Trier, Denmark

Two flawed sisters. The first is kind and thoughtful of others but caught up in the game of keeping up appearances. The second doesn’t buy into the bourgeois values of her sister but also can’t stop her contempt of the world from hurting others. And the world is coming to an end. Despite its title, Melancholia is, in a roundabout way, an optimistic film. Its central thesis is that during a crisis, love must pass through pessimism in order to be valuable. Melancholia is funny, frustrating, visually arresting and it may also be von Trier’s most straightforwardly sincere film to date.

4. Mysteries of Lisbon

Raúl Ruiz, Portugal

We can’t deny it – a large proportion of what’s interesting about cinema these days is not happening in a darkened theatre but on the televisions in our living rooms. Mysteries of Lisbon was the televisual highlight of the year, a sprawling six-part miniseries based on the novel by Camilo Castelo Branco. The great Chilean director Raúl Ruiz (who sadly passed away this year at age seventy) described this project as evoking the labyrinthine qualities of a soap opera. Indeed, one can’t imagine anything but such a television-specific genre as an appropriate medium for such a monumental work that begins as a simple costume drama about an orphan’s search for his parents but spins off into a multitude of interlocking stories about secret identities, hidden histories and romantic tragedy.

5. Mildred Pierce

Todd Haynes, USA

This year saw a few films subverting the idealisation of parenthood. The narrative trickery of Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin caught many people’s attention but Todd Haynes’ impressive HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce was the pick of the bunch; an adaptation of the James M. Cain novel with Kate Winslet playing a mother striving to win the love and respect of her status-conscious daughter. Haynes doesn’t deploy any pomo techniques here. (You can imagine that Haynes might have been tempted to make this film in the style of a Douglas Sirk film à la Far From Heaven.) Instead he lets the actors play out an excellent story that charts the complex exchanges of power between a mother and daughter.

6. Oki’s Movie / The Day He Arrives

Hong Sang-soo, South Korea

Despite the international film distribution logic that tells us in the West that South Korea only makes genre films, the country’s best director may be Hong Sang-soo who specialises in Rohmerian comedy-dramas where the stakes are usually only ever as high as those of your last weekend. Film festivals are usually the only chance for Australians to catch his work and this year we got two. Hong Sang-soo films are generally structured around narrative repetitions with subtle yet crucial differences. Some have accused him of making the same film over and over again, but if he can maintain this level of quality, I wouldn’t want him to change a thing.

7. Meek’s Cutoff

Kelly Reichardt, USA

In her previous film Wendy and Lucy, Kelly Reichardt directed a hard-faced Michelle Williams looking for her dog in a small American town. In this film, Kelly Reichardt directs a hard-faced Michelle Williams looking for water in a vast American desert. Meek’s Cutoff is a materialist Western; more concerned with the economy of daily survival than fancily edited shootouts. Reichardt sets her gaze unflinchingly on the motivations of a group of American settlers who depend on a captured Native American for survival. It is telling that when Williams’ character becomes the only character to show kindness to the Native American, it is not a triumph of good charity but of self-interest.

8. Olivier, Olivier

Agnieszka Holland, France

Some of the most important film events are not screenings of current films. Rather, it is at the small film societies and cinematheques that the most fascinating films are seen. In Melbourne, we are lucky enough to have the Melbourne Cinematheque, which screened some excellent director retrospectives this year, including one for filmmaker Agnieszka Holland who made a handful of masterpieces in Poland and France before her more recent work for television on series such as Treme and The Wire. Olivier, Olivier – a lyrical work about a family that loses a child only to see him emerge years later as a teenager – was made almost two decades ago, yet remains more provocative, more insightful, more essential than the vast majority of what gets released in cinemas today.

9. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Turkey/Bosnia/Herzegovina

A group of men search through the night for a dead body after two men have confessed to murder. It sounds like a police procedural but it’s not. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia never follows the straight line of a story. Instead, reality throws up events and the writers allow them to happen. Enigmatic images, funny encounters, mysterious anecdotes, strange dreams – with such a casket of riches, to demand a straightforward linear story of this film would be truly petty.

10. Boxing Gym

Frederick Wiseman, USA

Legendary documentarian Frederick Wiseman turned 81 this year but he shows no sign of losing energy. He still uses the same basic formula he began using in 1967 with his famous mental institution documentary Titicut Follies: no interviews, no explanatory titles, just the slow and patient accumulation of details until an argument is formed of the images. While Wiseman has often focused on the barbarity of social institutions from high schools to research facilities, the institution of this film – a small, local boxing gym – offers an almost utopian vision of egalitarianism, discipline and community.

One such discovery was How to Cause a Scandal: Adventures in Bad Behaviour by Laura Kipnis (Scribe). This book could have been a supremely trashy exercise in schadenfreude were it not for Kipnis’s witty razor-sharp analysis of the unconscious forces that drive those who scandalise and those who feed on these public fiascos. Taking her cue from Freud, Laura Kipnis tackles four case studies – the spurned female astronaut bent on revenge, the judge who created alter-egos to stalk a former lover, the false friend who snitched on Monica Lewinsky and the fibbing memoirist. As she follows the convolutions of these lurid plots, she lays bare the basic psychic ingredients of scandal: the impulse to self-sabotage, the capacity for self-delusion, the revenge imperative, the flimsiness of rationality and the collective hunger for a scapegoat. Her psychoanalytical approach, fascination with human foibles and feel for narrative make Kipnis akin to Janet Malcolm on overdrive.

This is the highest praise I can give, being a long time admirer of Janet Malcolm’s writing. While I haven’t yet read her latest book Iphigenia in Forest Hills, I recently tracked down her 1992 selected writings The Purloined Clinic (Vintage), comprised of pieces written for The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. Malcolm is probably best known for her scathing critique of the morally dubious relationship between journalists and their subjects in The Journalist and the Murderer. All of her work is informed by an abiding interest in psychoanalysis and Malcolm invariably puts her subjects on the couch – although never in an obvious or crass fashion. These intellectually demanding essays, reviews and articles, however, bring to mind the pathologist’s slab more than the couch. There’s something of the forbidden thrill of watching a brilliantly executed post-mortem during which a subject’s or book’s diseased viscera are dissected for our edification. Malcolm makes her incisions with such clinical elegance and precision – exposing subcutaneous contradictions, blind spots and bad conscience – that even when she draws blood, it looks like a string of beads.

This combination of sharp-eyed, cool analysis and fine writing also distinguishes Cordelia Fine’s Delusions of Gender: The Real Science Behind Sex Differences (Icon). Claims of hardwired differences in the brain which account for the gender status quo have been around for centuries. But as Fine shows, the mind is not vacuum-sealed in the brain. It is shaped by culture and society. To talk about a ‘female mind’ and a ‘male mind’ is another form of the ‘biology is destiny’ argument dressed up in new clothes. While there are sex differences in the brain, the complexity of our grey matter means that these differences are not simply blueprints for gender. Sadly, this doesn’t stop the so-called experts all too eager to use neurosexism to reinforce cultural beliefs. From the performance of male and female students in maths and science, to the apparently stereotypical behaviour of young children, Delusions of Gender challenges us to consider how unconscious cultural assumptions about gender shape our behaviour, abilities and desires.

When you’ve been in the dark for a long time about a persistent health problem, finding a book that sheds light on your particular ailment is an occasion for celebration. I wouldn’t, however, be recommending Tim Park’s Teach Us to Sit Still: A Sceptic’s Search for Health and Healing (Vintage) unless it weren’t also an extremely well-written, bracingly honest and often funny account of the author’s journey from chronic pain to a kind of enlightenment. Just as good writing can redeem the cliché, so too does this book redeem the clichéd, self-help narrative about the quest for physical and spiritual health. Parks, the British author of many prize-winning novels and non-fiction, was in his forties when persistent abdominal pain began to dominate his life. The more he learned about his condition, the more it required him to profoundly rethink his identity as a writer –‘All writing is a sin against speechlessness’ Beckett once said – and his understanding of the relationship between body and mind. There’s none of the mawkish earnestness that often besets this genre. In fact, no one is spared Park’s irreverence. He shadow-boxes with J. M. Coetzee and Christopher Hitchens, wrestles with the ghost of his father who was an evangelical Anglican minister, and even pokes fun at the Vipassana guru on a meditation retreat.

Talking of irreverence, I don’t know of anyone who understands its subversive power better than the British graffiti artist, Banksy. I bought Banksy’s Wall and Piece (Century) for my son as a Christmas present but it was as much for me as for him. If there’s one thing I miss in contemporary, image-dominated street art, it’s the verbal playfulness of an earlier phase of graffiti. Banksy’s hybrid work often combines the two elements to brilliant effect. One example is a stencil of a rat – an animal he has made his own – holding a roller and can of paint with ‘Because I’m worthless’ scrawled above. The caption to the photograph reads: ‘They are hated, hunted and persecuted. They live in quiet desperation amongst the filth. And yet they are capable of bringing entire civilizations to their knees.’ His most poignant and politically telling work was done on the wall between the occupied territories and Israel – a girl lifted into the air by a bunch of balloons, two boys beneath a cut-out image of a tropical paradise and a child painting a ladder that reaches over the wall. I particularly like the way Banksy gives graffiti its due without taking himself too seriously. ‘A wall,’ he writes in this feast of sly images and trenchant observations, ‘has always been the best place to publish your work.’

In a recent entry on my own blog entitled ‘Some Thoughts’ I made a few points about my sometimes awkward relationship with contemporary Australian poetry. I will refrain from quoting myself here but I will preface the following list by admitting that if permitted I would spend all my time reading books by my favourite poets and authors, almost all of whom are international and dead.

However, I will also admit that on occasion it proves a blessing to be forced to delve into contemporary Australian poetry and the following is a list of ten things that failed to make me wish I was born in another time and place:

10. ‘Poetry or Pornography’ by Koraly Dimitriadis. This blog post on Overland back in June has inspired 107 comments and counting. Frankly, I don’t like the poems quoted in the article and I disagree with three quarters of Dimitriadis’ argument. But even if it is only because like schoolboys sniggering at swearwords whispered behind the bleachers people are titillated (pun intended) by any talk of sex (ooh-er) – at least they are simultaneously thinking about what makes poetry. The saying is ‘sex sells’ not ‘good sex sells’, and anything that might pique the interest of a potential broader poetry readership is alright with me. After all, even the most discerning reader of poetry had to start somewhere.

9. ‘Two Years On’ by Elizabeth Allen. This poem was published in the spring 2011 edition of Overland. I don’t know whether it was the intention of the poet to include references to a bunch of other contemporary poems – but every other line in this poem seems to be a tribute to other poets. I smiled and thought of Jaya Savige’s ‘Posture’ in the lines ‘… To write a poem / about yoga: feeling vulnerable, inflexible, / briefly graceful …’ and of my own poem ‘It’s Raining Chem’ when she writes:

while the neighbour’s
opera floods through the wall and
the children across the road have a
screaming contest. It would never be
published & wouldn’t be recognised in
either edition of The Best Australian Poetry.

8. ‘The List Grows’ by Emilie Collyer. This poem was published on Verity La (ed. Alec Patric) in November. I love that a female poet can use an erection simile in the first stanza of a poem, fall into a rhythmic stream of consciousness about John Lennon and Yoko Ono, and then bring it back to the hard-on metaphor to tie it all together neatly at the end, while remaining halfway subtle the whole way through.

7. Ali Alizadah’s review of The Simplified World by Petra White published on the HEAT Poetry Online website in February. This website was off to a very slow start in 2010 and appears to be grappling with the infinite possibilities and demands of the digitalisation of literary journals, having to date featured a mere nine reviews. This particular review, however, inspired some lively debate about what constitutes ‘conservatism’ in poetry (among other things).

6. ‘Don’t be Stupid’ by Ouyang Yu. This poem was published by Cordite (ed. David Prater) in May. The delightfully awkward speaker in the poem stumbles over his own indiscriminate racial prejudices and admonishes himself for doing so in the same breath, then confronts his social anxieties about being misunderstood and left behind with a taxi driver. If you happen to speak Korean, a Hangul translation of the poem by Kim Gayhiun appears beneath the English.

5. ‘The Freedom Fighter’ by Misbah. This prose poem appears in the December issue of Cordite (ed. Jill Jones). To simultaneously deliver a gripping narrative and evoke such vivid imagery all in fewer than 350 words is to be a poet. The poem opens with an intriguing exposition of the poem’s protagonist who ends up capturing my heart as well as the heart of the speaker:

In case you die and they don’t know whose side you are on, you have an identity card that states your distinguishing features, like the mole on your neck. At night you and your friends smoke hashish and then jump in the soft snow.

4. ‘Some Random Notes About Contemporary Poetry’ or ‘Some things I hate’ – Gig Ryan’s speech at the 2010 Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize presentation as part of the Emerging Writers Festival. As well as appreciating her summary that ‘all art reflects and contains that which has gone before’ – a point which I drew from in my own review of Roger Sedarat’s Ghazal Games – I found this whole speech entertaining and honest. I admire Ryan for not holding back in her criticisms of contemporary Australian poetry (or perhaps she did hold back?) and I hope to someday have the guts and the authority to be just as bold about telling everyone what I hate about contemporary Australian poetry.

3. ‘Self-Portrait’ by Helen Cerne. This concrete poem in the shape of a woman was published in Offset no. 11 (eds. Samuel Ryan and Alexandra Schleibs). While I hope it isn’t strictly a self portrait, it inspired me to try writing my own concrete poem. I decided to stick with free verse but anytime I read something that makes me want to write, I am infinitely grateful for the lesson.

2. ‘Seven Last Words of the Emperor Hadrian’ by David Malouf. This suite of 7 short poems appears in Out of the Box (eds. Michael Farrell and Jill Jones) published by Puncher & Wattmann Poetry in 2009. I first discovered Malouf’s poem when reviewing this collection for the Overland blog (I was a little late to the party).

1. ‘The Suspect’ by Ali Alizadeh. This poem appears in Alizadeh’s latest collection of poems entitled Ashes in the Air, published in 2011 by University of Queensland Press. I first mentioned this poem in my review of UQP’s The Best Australian Poetry 2009 on the Overland blog. In that review I said that this poem ‘takes the top of my head off’ (as Emily Dickinson recommends good poetry should do), and it continues to do so.

The Cook is a gobsmacker of a book.

Written by the much-lauded Australian writer Wayne Macauley, The Cook’s themes of capitalism-gone-mad, excessive consumption, untrammelled growth and rampant exploitation of humans, animals and natural resources is timely.

Macauley explores a number of issues recently highlighted by the Occupy Movement, animal welfare groups and the GFC through his main protagonist Zac, one of a number of young offenders sent to Cook School to learn a trade and become decent, upstanding and productive citizens.

The story, told from Zac’s point of view, pays no heed to commas or quotation marks so that sentences tumble and flow. It is an inspired choice that takes us along for a hypnotising ride and immerses us fully in Zac’s macabre world, which, we learn along the way, is our world too.

Zac, unlike most of the ne’er-do-wells who end up at Cook School, is not only determined to make a new start, he has his heart set on becoming one of the world’s great chefs. A lad to be applauded, he embodies the qualities we most admire: hard work, ambition and a belief in the individual. Zac, who is happy to work long hours for a pittance, is the equivalent of every free marketeer’s wet dream. And like most in the western world and beyond, he’s swallowed the ideology of laissez-faire capitalism hook, line and sinker:

Cook School was my university and I was learning things I never learned while I was pissing my future up against the wall. What else are rich and successful people except those who’ve learnt how to manipulate what’s around them a guy dealing win the money market architects designing fancy buildings TV guys making TV shows selling dreams to losers writers and their happy endings. That’s what civilisation is I reckon manipulating nature.

Zac takes on Head Chef’s (Head Chef didn’t have to wear a cravat for me to channel Matt Preston) dictum that power is achieved through service. Maybe that’s what the contestants on MasterChef and its huge audiences believe too, persuaded by a popular culture that depicts working your arse off in the kitchen as somehow glamorous.

But unlike MasterChef, which spares the salivating audience the suffering of the animal, the recipes in The Cook start with the slaughter of the beast. Macauley seems to have had a lot of fun contrasting the brutality of the kill with what ends up on the plate:

… I put them on the bench and got a cleaver and with a sharp whack I cracked open the skulls and wrenched them apart with my fingers. The brains inside were still warm and slippery. I put them on the bench … We plated up I garnished mine with warm baby onions caramelised in balsamic and some sprigs of fresh Italian parsley.

A vegetarian troubled by the ethics of eating meat, I’m probably not the right person to judge the mouth-watering appeal or otherwise of Zac’s recipes. But appetite’s a funny thing. Head Chef again:

To public taste. To whim. To folly. To whatever looks and smells new. We bow to the fickle and frivolous we are servants of all that is decadent excessive unnecessary.

Still, I’d be surprised if carnivores didn’t struggle with the mess of blood and guts that precedes the plating up of body parts even when they’ve been simmered and dressed up with nasturtiums.

The glorification of food and the adulation of celebrity chefs also act as barometers of social decay. As Shelley Gare points out in her must-read The triumph of the airheads and the retreat from common sense, all that it takes for a kind of amoral airheadism to thrive is for people to be distracted by money or power or both.

When halfway through the novel, Zac is whisked from Cook School to serve as cook to a wealthy family, I was grateful to be transported from the killing fields to gentility no matter how superficial or dysfunctional:

My husband she said is a very rich man we are a very rich family we can have whatever we want when we want it but you know I’m going to tell you a secret all I really want is for us to sit down together once a day five days a week as a family and talk.

The end when it comes shouldn’t have been a surprise – like a good crime novel all the clues were there – but be warned: don’t read the last chapter just before you turn out the light. The sickening dénouement is not one of the happy endings Zac decries in an earlier passage. It is, however, an antidote to fiction that too often massages misplaced beliefs in our selves, our society and our humanity.

It is impossible to read The Cook and not examine your own conscience: the status we seek by virtue of the food we serve and eat, the bars we seek out, the indulgences we permit and excuse because we are, for some reason or another, deserving. No matter how we critique late-capitalism, we are all seduced by its temptations and we are all complicit in its endurance and its legacy.

The Cook is not without its faults. The wealthy but dislocated family was a little too clichéd, Zac’s transformation from bad boy to brilliant chef in just a few months stretched credibility, and Zac’s shift to the family had it come earlier – slaughter and its metaphors were wearing a bit thin – would have better served the themes of the narrative. But these are minor quibbles. For my money, The Cook does a better and more nuanced job of showing the excesses of late-capitalism, its gluttony, its ambition and its class relations, than The Slap. And it has a sense of humour, albeit a dark one.

The Cook is one of the most disturbing novels I’ve read in a long time. I hope it ends up, as did Macauley’s debut novel Blueprints for a Barbed-Wire Canoe, on the VCE reading list.

Do you know the screensaver that comes standard with windows called Mystify? It looks like a kaleidoscope of string art, with lines from one shape flowing in and out of the preceding and following patterns; it can be quite mesmerising to watch. I got the same sense reading AS Patric’s The Rattler & other stories, each story is standalone brilliant, but together they flow and mystify the reader.

There is a clear direction to Patric’s work; within a single paragraph you could find yourself part of the story, intricately woven into the narrative then suddenly a distant observer as the words cast a wide panoramic shot. I would say that AS Patric goes beyond author into auteur: he directs the shots and has complete control over the artistic vision.

‘Movement & Noise’ opens the collection. The opening scene is a classic Australian street, in the time before electronic games abducted children from under their facebooking parents’ noses. Kids are playing in the streets when the daughter of the milk bar owner is the fatality of a hit and run. But the victim is not the focus of the scene. Our attention is taken to the emergency vehicles flashing lights and the silence. Cut then to an interior scene: the protagonist, Sebastian, returns home on his bike, mother has gone away to get better and return, father has his home routines. Without going in to a full retelling of the story, what I find interesting is that in a story that features a death, Patric skips the obvious over description of the accident scene and draws an eerie tone out of the description of the home life of the young witness.

‘B O M B S’ is the second story of the collection. Patric takes an interesting approach, it doesn’t spoil the story to reveal that a bomb goes off sending a plane hurtling into the side of a mountain because the story doesn’t follow a chronological flow; rather the paragraphs are fragments, pieces of lives scattered amongst rubble and remains. A boy smuggles a lizard in a wooden pencil case onto the plane; a female passenger, sick of attention, hides behind a ‘curtain of hair’; a woman regrets her marriage; dreams and memories flash across the pages in seemingly random order. We hear the thoughts of each passenger before they realise they are about to meet their end. Again, Patric deftly avoids the obvious. This premise, in the hands of a lesser writer, could easily have fallen into a swamp of sentimental clichés, but Patric keeps us in the air for the duration of the flight.

Patric draws on his poetic skills in ‘Back when Jean-Michel Basquiat was My Best Friend’. Not the kind of poetry that would startle a metrophobe or mainstream reader, it’s a beautiful flow of metaphors that graffiti early 80s New York imagery into the reader’s mind. ‘When I wore a New York soul like a Bowery whore wears stolen mink’, ‘a city with a broken heart need not cost the life of a paint-spattered visionary. That New York should not forget seduction so soon after it is drowned in kisses.’ The narrator takes us into the backstreets and dark bars of Basquiat’s hometown for an intimate journey with a tortured artist.

What I love about Patric’s work is the balance he achieves. There is artistic expression, the way he explores techniques that can be jarring, such as the paragraph shuffle in ‘B O M B S’ or the psychedelic flow of ‘Back when Jean-Michel Basquiat was My Best Friend’, but this experimentation or jarringness (new word I just made up) does not come at the expense of readability; strangely, it enhances the reading. This is a testament to Patric’s skill as a writer that you can get buffeted through a story and come out massaged and refreshed.

The title story ‘The Rattler’ is pure and unapologetically Melbourne. It screams ‘Melbourne’ from start to end. I’m from Sydney and there is supposedly a rivalry (☺), but I felt at home in Melbourne while reading the inner workings of retired tram driver, wannabe writer Atticus O’Neill. Life happens to Atticus; he is not an overly active participant, but he does have a nice, massive, leather and chrome office chair for his underused study. Again Patric takes us deep into the mind of an ordinary life and shows us how surreal ordinary can be. And I love the hat tip to ‘B O M B S’ at the start of the section titled ‘A Green Light’, after Atticus’ wife, tired of seeing him sitting in his study all day, gets him a job as a taxi driver. Atticus drives out to the airport with ‘a small child … the first thing the boy had shown Atticus was a baby lizard he kept in a large wooden pencil case.’ ‘The Rattler’ was shortlisted for the Melbourne Lord Mayor’s Awards in 2009 and went on to receive a High Commendation.

Alec Patric has served his apprenticeship. Each story in this collection has proven itself in the best literary journals in Australia: Wet Ink, Quadrant, Going Down Swinging, Etchings and others. Together they highlight a mammoth talent, and, without hyperbole, AS Patric’s name should be used often when referring to great Australian contemporary writers.

The Rattler & other stories is available from good bookstores and directly from the publisher, Spineless Wonders.

Kim Westwood’s passion for the repressed, both animal and human, provides her second novel, The Courier’s New Bicycle, with its raison d’étre and much of its energy. She champions the ‘other’ – those groups who have historically been voiceless or politically powerless. Her characters, both human and animal (especially a very cute, fluorescent purple cat, Nitro) each stand as testament to the value of the ‘different’ – and in the world ruled by the fundamentalist Nation First party (no great leap to see a blend of One Nation and Australia First in that name), that means just about everybody who’s not heterosexual and religious.

In a world where infertility is the norm, Sal operates as a courier for the enigmatic Gail, dispensing ethically derived but illegal hormone therapies to the many women desperate to have a child. But someone is undermining the Cute ‘n’ Cuddly brand with hormones drained cruelly from animal farms and Sal must find out who it is before her employer is put out of business. Sal is also an activist for a group called Animal Protection Vigilantes and, in the most powerful scene in the novel, frees a string of horses from one such hormone farm. Here, Westwood shines, describing the suffering of animals reduced to hormone production factories with such visceral power some readers might need to take a break.

Kim Westwood’s novel is a slick and assured read. Westwood’s own term for her prose – poetic apocalyptic – is apt. The narrative dashes from place to place through prose dotted with deft descriptions and passages of genuine beauty. In a novel part mystery, part romance, but ultimately a search for family, for belonging and acceptance, Westwood’s ‘gender trangressive’ hero/ine cycles through a shadowy, post-pandemic Melbourne full of misfits and pseudo-criminals. The well-drawn supporting cast assists Sal but, more importantly, each attests to the beauty of the individual in its many, varied forms. Post-apocalyptic fiction can be a strange beast. While it often appears, on the surface, to constitute a warning against violence caused by unrestricted technological advancement, (nuclear, machine/computer or biological advances being the popular favourites) the protagonist/s all too often solve their problems with the same violence (Mad Max, Terminator, The Omega Man etc.). Thus the warning goes unheeded – we must always use violence to solve our problems being the underlying message. Thankfully, Westwood avoids this, positing a new future wherein Sal and her friends solve their problems (mostly) through dialogue and ingenuity. This brings a warmth to the narrative. A sense of caring and community invests Sal’s close-knit band, creating a world in which conflict can be resolved rather than perpetuated.

With one important exception.

In a novel that passionately champions freedom, that gives these fringe-dwellers a voice, Westwood perpetuates the concept of the silent, implacable ‘other’. In The Courier’s New Bicycle, this silent, unheard-from and unexplored group are the majority of citizens who have accepted the new ultra-conservative and religious paradigm. They are the new Communists, Muslim Fundamentalists – insert favoured enemy here (North Koreans, Iranians…) A faceless conglomerate, rather than a collection of individuals. They are the easy enemy to hate. They’re the bad guys. The reader never gets to talk to them. We encounter a few, but we do so always in a situation of conflict. We do not see inside their houses or meet their parents or read their books. It’s still the same coin, with ‘them’ and ‘us’ on opposite sides, never the twain to meet. Westwood just flips it over.

In one passage of conversation with this enemy, Sal states, worryingly, “I have no idea what page you’re on… but I doubt it’ll ever be the same page as me.” But if we are to avoid the sort of future Westwood and other post-apocalyptic writers imagine, we must move beyond the concept of the unknowable ‘other’. We don’t have to like what these ‘others’ are doing, we don’t even have to sit by and let them do it – as long as our opposition allows them the rights we ask for ourselves – but we must understand who they are and why they’re doing what they do. We can’t do that unless we meet them and talk to them. The beauty of any narrative form is it has the capability to allow us to cross the boundaries of nationality and language, as well as those we proscribe about ourselves. To sit in the home of a Taliban fighter or share a drink with a lesbian or have a chat to a battery chicken farmer. Our narratives must break down the barriers of communication, not reinforce them.

This is a small criticism, however, of an otherwise strong book, full of interesting swerves of prose and plot. The Courier’s New Bicycle will reinforce the reputation Westwood established with her Aurealis award-winning short story, ‘The Oracle’ and her first novel, The Daughters of Moab. She joins a growing and increasingly impressive list of Australian speculative fiction authors exploring new narrative forms combining the excitement of new worlds with strong humanist themes born of prose with genuine literary merit. Buy it, read it, enjoy it, just remember, as you wheel through our possible future with Sal, everyone is worth getting to know – even religious fundamentalists.

Peter Hickman is a Melbourne writer and editor and was a judge for the 2011 Aurealis Awards.

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.

Have you got one of those relatives, the kind who insists that the answer to all the world’s problems is to bring back hanging? You know who I mean. They usually live in a fantasy land called the Good Old Days. Yes? Well, I have just the Christmas present for them.

Simon Adams’ study of hanging in WA from 1844 until 1909 does not come to any shocking conclusions. From the first establishment of the Swan River Colony, Indigenous people and ethnic minorities felt the noose tighten more often than white, Anglo settlers. The book walks through and around the stories of executed Aborigines – who could still be hanged publicly long after the spectacle had been abolished for any other criminal – convicts and Irish Catholics, Chinese, Japanese, Afghans and bad mothers. It is not a simple catalogue of the dead. Adams zooms in and out to give us the wider cultural, legal and historical picture in addition to the specifics of each chosen case. Technological advances in the execution process and changing views on the public display of the execution are discussed. He has also travelled to the crime scenes and pored over the archives.

Adams opens the book with a description of the 1844 hanging of a fifteen-year-old boy called John Gavin/en at Fremantle. The boy was a Parkhurst Apprentice. This meant that he was not strictly a convict; he was a juvenile offender who had been pardoned because it would obviously be more useful to the Empire to have him labouring on a farm in the colonies rather than clogging up Parkhurst prison. He was publicly hanged for murder on the basis of his confession and the testimony of the victim’s mother. What a great start.

However, as Adams argues, the attractions of the law and exemplary justice to a group of people on the edge of the world are understandable even if we find them abhorrent today. Control, order, safety. Respectable men must be able to carry on their business and respectable women must be able to walk the streets. Rape was a capital crime in the late 1800s and Chapter 4, which looks at rape, illustrates an 1862 case in detail. It was one of six rape cases where the death sentence was imposed. Twelve other sentences of death for rape were commuted to life. Adams suggests that fears about those ‘sub-human’ Irish convicts and the imbalance in numbers of men and women in the colony led to the hanging of Joseph McDonald for raping another man’s wife. By comparison, other rapists had their sentences commuted because the rights of Indigent nine-year-old girls and Aboriginal men were less important. As Adams says in his introduction, ‘We see our history at its most unedifying’.

The first men to be hanged in the West were the Batavia mutineers (1629) and the last man to be hanged, in what was also the last Australian state to abolish hanging, was the serial killer Eric Edgar Cooke (1964). Adams wisely leaves that story out in order to focus on the less infamous. The story of Cooke has been the basis for other books by Robert Drewe and Estelle Blackburn. The story of Tagh Mahomet’s murder at the Coolgardie Mosque in 1896 was also described by Hanifa Deen earlier this year. Martha Rendell, the last woman to be hanged in WA, has become the subject of a novel by Anna Haebich. Crime spices things up and gives us good stories. It adds the darkness we need to horrify and fascinate. What differentiates Adams’ book is a historian’s care for the details and the supporting references – but he also tells a good story. This is a very readable book which uses hanging as a focal point for a wider study of Western Australia. I accept that you probably won’t convince your problem relative that stringing ‘em up is not the answer, but you just might make them think.

The work begins with the line, ‘You’re a good neighbour’, from ‘The Art of Courting’. The second-person point of view is notoriously difficult and I am impressed by the way you handle it, and by the shifts in point of view through the stories. In ‘Your Project’ you ask the reader to walk around in a pair of very difficult shoes. Can you tell us a little about working from the different conventions of point of view?

Second person can be tricky but there’s something I find quite freeing about it. It has a particular quality that allows me to experiment with language. ‘The Art of Courting’ is about a single woman in her forties who engages in a series of flirtatious games with a new neighbour. So the story itself has a sense of play and the language does too. There’s also an element of voyeurism about this story and the use of second person to place the reader in this woman’s shoes magnifies that. Different points of view work for different stories and I don’t have a particular favourite. I find that the characters and what the story needs dictate which point of view I use.

‘Kicking Dirt’ is a rich story: there really is a novel’s worth of back-story and presence here, skilfully managed. This ‘sense of the whole’ of the larger story indicated by the short form is something I’m very interested in. Is there a novel in the wings? A screen play? Why the short story form?

That’s what I love about the short form; the way it’s a slice of a larger world, a glimpse of something bigger. For me, the characters are fully-rounded people, with their own lifetime of history and quirks and experiences, and I always hope that translates to the page. I want my reader to be able to imagine a life beyond the brevity of the story.

I love short stories – both reading and writing them. There’s this idea that gets put about that they are a training ground for writing a novel. I completely disagree. The novel and the short story are two completely different beasts. And speaking of novels, yes there is one in the wings. I’ve been working on it in a very part-time way for the last five years in between editing and child wrangling. It’s frustratingly, tantalisingly close to being finished. I had a residency at the Varuna Writers Centre earlier this year where I cracked a problem that I’d had with it for months. But then it got sidelined. I became immersed in the editing process for Two Steps Forward, then various major editing projects took over, and now there’s all the publicity work for this and another book I’ve edited. I’m itching to stop talking about writing and actually do some! I have some time set aside in January when I’ve promised myself I’ll do nothing but focus on the novel. I’m sure the long break will actually prove beneficial, allowing me to come to it fresh, but I’m craving being in that space again with those characters.

‘The Third Child’ also deals with the almost ‘underground’ reality of women and pregnancy, in particular, women in miscarriage and ‘mothering’ is one of the themes of the collection. I know from your work at Overland that this is a deeply personal realm for you. Can you talk to us about the process of writing painful subject matter, and also on having that work edited and then published in the public domain?

I haven’t heard it put like that before – ‘underground’ – but it’s such an accurate description. Miscarriage is so common – women experience 55,000 miscarriages each year in Australia alone – but it doesn’t get talked about openly at either a private or public level. And yes, this is very personal subject matter because I experienced a miscarriage myself, which I wrote about for Overland, but I also wanted to deal with miscarriage through fiction because it’s rarely represented in anything other than clichés. I wanted to write about characters that were authentic, and really draw the reader into the complexity of the experience. Having this story go out into the public domain has been quite challenging because it is linked closely with my own experience, but it seems to have struck a chord with so many people. It’s the story that has been singled out the most – by both men and women – so readers have obviously connected with it. That’s been very gratifying.

‘Tangerine’ is also a poignant slice of the ‘difficult life’ that is not much talked about and, in my opinion, would make an excellent short film, as would many of the stories in Two Steps Forward. Are you purposefully ‘cinematic’ in your approach?

It’s interesting that you should say that. I don’t set out with the intention to be cinematic and yet the opening scene of ‘Tangerine’ arrived in my imagination much like a complete movie scene. I saw a man and a young girl standing together on a platform in the middle of the night. They were ill-at-ease with each other, and I wanted to know why this was, and what they were doing on that platform. The story unravelled from there. I’d love to see ‘Tangerine’ as a short film (any interested filmmakers out there?!).

I was lucky enough to have a filmmaker make a book trailer for Two Steps Forward using snatches of text from ‘The Art of Courting’. It really is a piece of art in its own right. The footage is stunning, but he also really captured the style and essence of that story, and of the collection as a whole. It’s quite something seeing your words come alive in a different medium.

How did you get involved with Affirm Press and the SHORTS initiative?

I saw Affirm’s press release calling for submissions to their Long Story Shorts series of six collections by newer writers. Given that it’s so difficult to get a collection published unless you’re already a well-established author the initiative was perfect for me. As it was for 450 other writers. Affirm Press were inundated with manuscripts and spent months wading through them. Fortunately for me Two Steps Forward was chosen as the series’ swansong. And it’s been a brilliant ride.

Two Steps Forward can be purchased at all good book stores.

I reviewed it, so I can’t honestly say that not being a subscriber meant I missed out on the goodies in the 200th anniversary issue, but that was the one that had Karen Hitchcock and Janette Turner Hospital along with Christos Tsiolkas, and the wonderful ‘Before Elapsing’, in which Derek Motion got twenty poets together to write a poem. (I’ll also cheat by bringing up Anwyn Crawford’s classic piece on Nick Cave, which was a while back now but really too good not to mention.)

And the materialism of left cultural critique has really come into its own with the Meanland Reading in a Time of Change project – it’s usually the first thing I turn to. Now more than ever we need to grasp how technology and economics (of publishing, of audiences, of the very business of being a writer) aren’t the outside of literature, but right there at its heart, from the three-decker novels of the nineteenth century – reading in a time of long train journeys – and the little mags and haute bourgeois patronage systems of Modernism, to the digital conniptions of the present. Meanland are (is?) right on the money following the new technologies, and I say that as a bit of a change-fearing Luddite.

Subscribing also means supporting the blog, which is now an essential part of Overland. One of the noticeable things about the Overland blog is how commenters mostly try to keep their manners: the epic dispute about the literature of commitment, for instance, was a model of good humour. (On the other hand, things did get a bit rough over Jacinda Woodhead’s refusal to be utterly thrilled by the accession of Julia Gillard, but then it was a pretty emotional moment for a lot of people.)

Being grown-ups, Overlanders don’t expect everyone to like them all the time – far from it – so I won’t pretend I think everything in the mag is wonderful. (And, um, could you maybe think of not printing the poetry on coloured paper (204)? Hard to read.) But otherwise we wouldn’t have those exchanges that start:

‘Did you see X’s article/story/poem/review in Overland? Wasn’t it crap?’
‘I quite liked it actually.’
‘Eee-yew, why?’

Right there you’re off and running. One might even suspect Overland sometimes of being happy to give people the shits, and not so secretly either. It’s the grit in the ointment, the spanner in the works, a bunch of people who believe in something bigger than themselves and getting on. Long may it and they thrive. Subscribe!

My Dog Gave Me the Clap
Adam Morris
Fremantle Press

Personally I feel sorry for the dog. Maybe dogs don’t care about these things but if someone gave me the clap, I reckon they’d be mortified if I wrote a book about it. Thankfully, Adam Morris deals with Feathers the dog and his main character Saul’s ‘green wang’ problem early on in this hilarious book. Feathers exits stage left at the end of chapter one and the reader can breathe, smile with relief and move on to Saul’s philosophising about how easy it would be to get laid if he were gay, his negative thoughts about his negative thoughts diary and a series of rather nasty ‘incidents’ involving Akubra hats, shotguns, Russian dancing and a chookhouse.

Saul’s list of desirables is a job, a girlfriend, a car and somewhere to live other than his mate Ralph’s chookhouse. He had a good job relief teaching once, until a regrettable Hunter S Thompson moment. Thank goodness the students had left or he might have been arrested and sacked. For his next job interview he wrote eight pages of performance criteria on ‘learning grids, appropriateness, guidelines, equivalent experiences, team leaders … Where had all the men gone?’

His last girlfriend was three years ago. Now Saul has difficulties hiding an erection in the welfare office queue. He’s getting flashbacks of the porn he watched last night and pondering on the sex lives of the oddly unattractive couple ahead of him. ‘Maybe one of them had persuaded the other to do something regrettable in the bedroom last night, maybe there was an embarrassment in the air neither could stomach bringing up …’

If Saul sounds like a sad, loser anti-hero, it’s because he is. This is the Australian version of the White Male F*ck up Novel after all. Underlying most of Saul’s problems and nasty incidents/accidents is alcoholism and the accompanying depression but Adam Morris is deft and subtle enough in his writing to avoid mentioning these clangers and just concentrates on the disaster area.

I can recognise some of Saul’s ‘incidents’ (but not the dog one) – his fumbling interior monologues on trains, his disconnect with community – and it makes me wince, just a little bit. My Dog Gave Me the Clap is a very funny book – a giggle-helplessly-in-the-dentist’s-waiting-room kind of funny. The problem with laughing at Saul’s f*ck ups is that any schadenfreude is followed by an uncomfortable niggling feeling that I am a mere shandy away from Saul’s hopelessness. Halfway through a moment of cracking up over another of Saul’s mid-trip delusional balls-ups, I am suddenly sobered by a vague memory of the day we took those strange pills, went to the buskers festival and offered up ourselves as props …

After a counselling session with the local priest, Saul begins to rally. ‘Saul felt lighter than when the day had started. He felt similar after vomiting from too much drink. That fresh empty feeling, that good empty feeling.’ Sometimes I just wanted to look away. I couldn’t. But I wanted to.

Saul’s observations of people can be acute and beautiful: the kindness of the lonely farmer who fed him breakfast and told him he was okay after a drinking session/photoshoot/shotgun incident gone horribly awry the previous night; the woman upstairs whose midnight lover doesn’t argue or put out the rubbish. There is also a strange beauty to Saul’s self-immolation. Call it a Flaming Lamborghini, except I don’t reckon he could afford to destroy himself with one of them because he doesn’t have a job right now.

Saul’s creator Adam Morris swears that despite being a musician and lad like Saul, this is not one of those autobiographical first novels. Righteo. Adam Morris’ dog says he resents the implication. Fair enough. Despite these conflicts I found My Dog Gave Me the Clap to be a funny, strange and compelling read.

Ghazal Games
Roger Sedarat
Ohio University Press

Experimenting with traditional poetic form is not a new concept. John Keats wrote his poem ‘On the Sonnet’ warning of the dangers of constraining the ‘muse’ to strict form. Imagist poets like Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell adapted the haiku form to English-language verse. Where there are rules, there are rebels.

But the act of experimenting with form is arguably less about rebellion and more about determining what said form is really capable of achieving by exaggerating its conventions. In hindsight it can be said that most poetry is to some degree a reaction against the poetry that came before it, but that the act of ‘reacting against’ is in itself a kind of homage. Poetry that deliberately sets out to experiment with form is the most transparent kind of poetic homage, validating the traditional form for its potential relevance to contemporary culture.

Interestingly, in the first few pages of American-Iranian poet Roger Sedarat’s collection, Ghazal Games, I got the sense that the poet was almost self-conscious in his rebellion. Like the insatiable child who knows he’s doing something naughty, feels kind of bad about it, but powers on indulging his curiosity despite himself. This is partly due to Sedarat’s embracing the convention of humble self-referencing at the end of a ghazal, like this section at the end of ‘Ghazal Game #2: Pin the Tail on the Middle Eastern Donkey’:

Let’s say you hit the target. What’s the point?
It’s not like you really win the donkey.

A live sex act too freaky to recount
Traumatized me, the woman, the donkey…

If Lennon was the Walrus, I’m at best
The camel, maybe even the donkey

The repetition of the second last sound and the last word of each couplet is one of the ghazal’s defining features. Sedarat cleverly manipulates the couplets, using rhyme and unique phrasing, engaging the Western reader who may not be accustomed to the technique, and pleasantly surprising readers who expect the traditional repetition. Sometimes, for instance, instead of repeating the exact word, Sedarat creates identical sounds with alternative words and meanings, such as in ‘The Persian Poet’s Recipe for Qormeh Sabzi’:

Quick! Hide this ghazal deep in your Qur’an.
(Terrorists don’t understand the Qur’an.)

Would you eschew convention? Follow these
Lines to a place where truth, at its core, can

Enjamb ghazal couplets, proclaim an end
To Ramadan, and dine on the Qur’an.

Stew meat, spinach, onion, parsley, tareh,
Fenugreek, black-eyed peas, peppercorn and

Aside from these subtle variations on the ghazal form, Sedarat has literally made games out of some of the poems, encouraging interactive readership – a rare feat for a book of poems. There is a true/false challenge, a match the poet to the couplet, and the reader is even challenged to illustrate (if only mentally) each couplet in the poem ‘Ghazal Game #9: Illustrate the Comic Strip’. This is all more than just for entertainment. The poet is actually demonstrating the numerous narrative values of the classic poetic form.

Thematically, there is no one central topic in Ghazal Games. There are a few subjects which stand out, however. Firstly, a number of the poems are dedicated to protesting Iran’s corrupt elections and the brutal treatment of protesters after the fact. This theme is mentioned on the jacket cover, which accurately suggests that: ‘Perhaps most striking is the use of the ancient ghazal form to challenge the Islamic Republic of Iran’s continual crackdown on protesters.’ The most striking of these is ‘Ghazal for Neda’, which begins:

All Persian poems now rhyme with Neda.
Her name in every poet’s breath, “Neda.”

No one believes the UK murdered you,
We know it’s a state-created myth, Neda.

It’s not what was or what has come to pass:
We die online, in real time, with Neda.

Secondly, several of the poems are distinctly confessional and explore themes of mixed cultures, family and religion. Amongst the most interesting of these is ‘Sonnet Ghazal’, which is about a man’s sexual attraction to his Persian wife. In the poem the speaker simultaneously indirectly apologises for his poem in the lines: ‘I know; this ghazal objectifies her, / Ignoring feminist criticism.’

As a woman and a feminist, I have to disagree – objectification hadn’t entered my mind until I got to those lines. There is a lovely admiration for female sensuality in the poem that actually demonstrates her power over him, and, more importantly perhaps, his willingness to be overpowered by her. Further, as a Persian woman, to read about another Persian woman in a contemporary Western publication outside of the context of whether or not she should be allowed to wear a hejab was a very welcome relief. At last I could read something that humanises the Middle Eastern woman in amongst all the bad politics and frantically opinionated rhetoric.

Finally, there is a running poetics and experimentation discourse through Sedarat’s poems. He demonstrates the appearance of the ghazal form in daily life in poems like ‘Found Ghazal’:

(New York Subway) “If you see something,
“Say something.”

(Poet’s talk with his son) “You hungry?” “Yeah.”
“What do you want to eat?” “Something.”

(Poet’s wife after work) “I’m one fried banana.
I also think I’m coming down with something.”

(Beatles song) “Something in the way she moves at-
tracts me like no other lover. Something…”

Ali Alizadeh’s review of Petra White’s The Simplified World on the Heat Poetry Review stirred up some heated discussion of what constitutes radical poetry (amongst other things). Some have suggested here on the Overland blog that in order to be a published poet in Australia, a degree of conservatism such as an adherence to traditional lyric aesthetics which is usually the result of academic study is paramount. Roger Sedarat’s book is evidence that academic study and paying homage to a classic poetic form can be radical, both aesthetically and in subject matter.

Buy it on Amazon.

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.

Ivan Sen’s debut feature film was 2002’s Beneath Clouds: a road movie about two Indigenous Australian teenagers trying to escape the depressing realities of their lives by fleeing to Sydney. It’s a solid film and I was thoroughly looking forward to Sen’s third feature, Toomelah. Especially as it was the only Australian feature I chose to see at the festival. Not for lack of choice and possible quality mind you; Scarlet Road, which I wanted to see, was sold out and I knew Sleeping Beauty would be in theatres soon.

Toomelah takes its name from an Indigenous mission in northern NSW that Sen’s mother originates from. The film tells the story of Daniel (Daniel Connors), a ten-year-old boy who stops attending school and drifts into the small time drug trade of the community. His parents provide little in the way of parenting and he adopts marijuana dealer Linden (Christopher Edwards) as a role model.

Sen spent a month in Toomelah observing the community and in a Q & A after the screening stated that every line of dialogue is taken from a community member he recorded. After this he went away for three months and formed his notes into a structure. Sen returned to Toomelah and filmed the script himself with little crew. The low production values come across in the film. Natural lighting is regularly used and the camera work is shaky and handheld, almost Dogme 95 in style. This works with the realism of the film but interestingly the image is not gritty but clean.

Sen is the archetype auteur. He writes, directs, shoots, edits and composes the soundtrack. This seems not to reflect any sort of egomania however; in the Q & A, Sen was softly spoken and considered. One man asked how Sen handled filming explicit content with the main character a minor. Sen replied that he filmed the scenes involving drugs and violence without Daniel present and then cut to Daniel in the same location. This careful approach worked well and I didn’t notice Daniel was never in shot during illegal activities until told.

White Australians are a peripheral presence in the film. There are only two white characters and they are seen just twice, in long shot, without dialogue; they are police officers shaking hands with the drug dealers they are supposed to be investigating. This is a different and enlightening take on the usual portrayal of police-Aboriginal relations, depicted in films like Sen’s own Beneath Clouds. Instead of unwarranted harassment the police are ineffective and disinterested.

Casting a child as the protagonist and many other children as important characters is a clever choice. Things get progressively worse for Daniel but we don’t notice partly because of the cute factor and partly because it is Daniel’s future being destroyed, so there are no immediate effects. It is as if the audience is fooled into a sense of complacency that is only revealed late in the film.

In the Q & A one lady said she found the content confronting. Sen replied that ‘for some it’s confronting. For some it’s daily life.’ So while I feel Sen did know the effect of having children in such troublesome situations on parts of the audience, it wasn’t out of any deviousness but a desire to show life as it is in Toomelah. This seemed to be confirmed to me by a surprising amount of laughter during the screening. While there were some amusing parts, I tend to think the laughter came mostly from the members of Toomelah’s community that had been bussed down for the screening. It’s always entertaining to see the familiarity of yourself, your friends and your home on screen.

Unfortunately, I feel the acting and the occasionally awkward delivery of dialogue held the film back. Sen used many non-professional actors from the community. This can often work wonders but, for whatever reason, doesn’t quite come together here. Nonetheless it is a subtle and intelligent film that I would like to see again because I feel something more is going on. I look forward to Sen’s next films; I’m sure his varied style will one day yield something great.

In 1994 three French speleologists discovered a cave hidden behind an old rockslide in southern France. Inside they found a particularly beautiful cave with rock paintings eventually dated to 32 000 years before the present. They are the oldest known cave paintings, preserved so well because of the rockslide protecting what was once an open cave from the elements, animals and humans. It is called Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave after one of its discoverers, Jean-Marie Chauvet, and a natural rock arch nearby.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams has all the hallmarks of a Werner Herzog documentary – the voiceover and awkward interviews – except that this is a 3D film. The cave is closed to the public and Herzog received special permission from the French Ministry of Culture to enter the cave and make the documentary. There were heavy restrictions however. Herzog was only allowed a four-person crew including himself, small battery powered lights, they were not allowed to leave the narrow path built through the cave and had a very limited period to film.

Add to these obstacles the fact that Herzog doesn’t like 3D and, justly, believed it to be ‘a gimmick of the commercial cinema’. He ended up choosing the technology as the best way to represent the contours of the cave paintings, as the artists incorporated the cave’s lines into their work. Unfortunately for Herzog and the cinematographer Peter Zeitlinger, 3D technology was undeveloped in documentary films and the crew had to experiment along the way.

It was worth it. In a theatre with 3D really is the only way to experience this film, and the caves. It’s a spectacular experience that encourages a feel for the depth of the cave and textures of the paintings. There are long sequences where the camera lingers, panning across the rock walls and capturing the flickering light on the impressive paintings.

Herzog positions the scientists he interviews as almost an important a part of the story as the cave paintings themselves. Personal detail is what gives the history character, whether it be a young French scientist who admits to Herzog he was in the circus before being drawn to archaeology or hand prints throughout the cave that are identified as being by the same cave artist because one of their fingers is unusually short.

This is the soul of Herzog’s film and relates to what he is trying to convey about the cave paintings. He sees these paintings as the birth of art, or at least the first known evidence for art. In the Upper Palaeolithic age Neanderthals and Homo sapiens were knocking about at the same time. There is no evidence of Neanderthals making art and Herzog suggests that our creation of art was the birth of our soul.

Herzog does his best to evoke the spirit of the painters by exploring the music they made on flutes carved from bone and how they hunted as well as with the haunting soundtrack. Cave of Forgotten Dreams is a sensual film with the music and smell of the Upper Palaeolithic time nearly as important as the visual art. But in his always omen sprinkled voiceover Herzog suggests that the ‘abyss’ of time between the creation of the art and our era means we may never know the artists’ intention. One scientist interviewed discusses how humans likely thought about the world in a completely different way, where the natural environment could impart information and there was no line between human and nature. Herzog contrasts this romantic idea with an incredible and frightening postscript that I don’t want to give away except to say: albino crocodiles in a scene reminiscent of the iguanas in Herzog’s 2009 film Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans.

The Chauvet Cave continues to be closed for preservation and this film may be the only way the general public will have to experience it’s profound beauty. It raises the interesting question of whether it is better to preserve the site by not allowing anyone to see it or to open it up for all but slowly and inevitably destroy the cave. As Herzog mentions in the film, the French government are discussing responding to this dilemma by building an exact model of the cave as a theme park.