Friday Five: Books Read in August

1. Roseblood by Paul Doherty (Headline) - In 1455 as war approaches, the House of York and Lancaster battle things out with a sick Henry VI on the throne. There is a lot of assumed knowledge about who is on which side before we even get to the multiple turncoats. The plot revolves around a secret diary containing incendiary claims - “A chronicle of scandalous secrets affecting the royal family as well as that of the good duke [York]. It is the work of a former royal physician.” Many people are searching for it, to claim legitimacy or otherwise to the throne. The villain of the piece is LeCorbeil (French for crow, which is depicted on the standard), “LeCorbeil is many things: a town in Normandy, the place of a hideous massacre; the name of a Frenchman who hates the English Crown, and Beaufort in particular; as well as a group of mercenaries skilled in the crossbow.” Besides the death and slaughter, there are many historical descriptions and set pieces, but they are no substitute for strong characterisation, leaving this a difficult novel with which to engage.
2. Gingerbread by Helen Oyeyemi (Picador) - For this magical realism in a dark-fairytale-that-could-easily-cross-to-horror sort of way rather than the twee and sparkly kind, the comparisons with Angela Carter are well deserved. Perdita Lee, a girl who is depressed and may take her own life (and whose name literally means 'lost'), lives with her mother, Harriet, in West London. She has a strange quartet of dolls in her bedroom, who are partly plants (elms, palm trees, crimson petals and living hair), and other furnishings also seem alive. Harriet bakes gingerbread with magical and potentially healing properties, as she tries to ingratiate herself with the PTA. Perdita is in a deep coma: has she taken an overdose, eaten too much gingerbread, or visited Druhástrania? This is a fantasy land where Harriet's best friend, Gretel, lived. Perdita goes to find Gretel and experiences adventures with wells, magic beans and a world of characters that may or may not come from Harriet's past. Gingerbread is an orginal, compelling and disturbing work from a bright British talent.
3. The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin (Picador) - Bruce Chatwin was a journalist for the Sunday Times. He wrote Songlines in 1987 as part of his fascination with travel and nomadic lifestyles. Songlines connect the land and its stories for Indigenous Australians and each tribe has their own way of singing the land to understand its past, present, future and the way it connects us all. The book blends fiction and non-fiction and is part memoir; part travelogue and part anthropology, as a fictional character named Bruce travels to Alice Springs and joins a land surveyor mapping a proposed rail route to Darwin. Although beautifully written with marvellous descriptions, the tone is very much of the time and feels inappropriate now as an 'otherisation' of Indigenous Australian culture and a certain white superiority in trying to describe it: while trying to ascertain the sacred sites which should not be touched by the railway, he climbs Uluru, which he calls Ayers Rock, without apparent irony. It is a bold attempt to explain a culture, but it is an impossible task and problematic at best.
4. The Wife's Secret by Barbara Hannay (Penguin) - While travelling in Townsville, this was recommended to me by a bookseller, due to the fact that Hannay is a local author. I would not have read it otherwise. It's what's known as a 'second-chance romance' as Lisa and Rolf have divorced; he has moved north to be an author, and she has remained in the coastal town to do something-or-other wholesome. When Dave sets up a restaurant, Lisa may find love again, but when Rolf returns with a glamorous actress and young publicist, she may not. This is played out against the background of a cyclone and a community coming together. It's supposed to be feel-good and heartwarming, and according to many reviews on Goodreads, it is.  
5. The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O'Farrell (Tinder Press) - With over 400 pages, this novel takes a long time to say not very much, but it does so with clear images and descriptive prose. Lucrezia di Cosimo de’ Medici d’Este was married to Alfonso II in 1558, aged 13. She died three years later of pulmonary tuberculosis, but almost immediately after her death there were rumours that she had been poisoned on the orders of her husband. Maggie O’Farrell has taken this concept and expounded upon it, with imagined emotions and a twist or two. She makes much of the fact that women had no autonomy and were the chattels of their male relatives, forcing a feminist revisionism into an anachronistic historical period. The portrait, which is a major plot point (and didn’t actually exist) is painted by several different people who specialise in different aspects – one does cloth; one does hands; another the landscape. The supposed twist is obvious, and the ending is unsatisfactory. 

Friday Five: Value Portraits

A few weeks ago I organised a workshop in Canberra for my work team. As part of a session about our organisation's values (respect, integrity, collaboration, excellence and innovation), I took them to the National Portrait Gallery, where we all chose an artwork of a person who we felt represented those values, and shared our findings with the group. These are the results:

Adam (Adam Goodes), 2014 by Alan Jones

Adnyamathanha/ Nurangga man Adam Goodes (b. 1980) is a former champion AFL footballer who played 396 games with the Sydney Swans. Recognised as one of Australia's great footballers, he is a dual Brownlow medalist, a four-time all-Australian, and a member of the Indigenous Team of the Century. With his cousin and fellow Swans star, Michael O'Loughlin, Goodes established the GO Foundation in 2009 to provide educational opportunities and mentoring for the next Indigenous generation. Awarded Australian of the Year in 2014, he has challenged endemic racism both on and off the field. After his early retirement in 2015 following repeated on-field heckling and a lack of support from the AFL, he co-founded the Indigenous Defence and Infrastructure Consortium, which helps First Nation businesses work in long-term building projects.

Goodes' pride in his cultural heritage and the dignity on his stand against racism inspired Alan Jones, a self-confessed Swans supporter, to paint this dual portrait for the Archibald Prize in 2014. "I have enormous respect for the strength and integrity he shows both on and off the field. Adam is an amazing athlete but also so much more than that; he is a son, a brother, an extremely proud Indigenous Australian... and a great role model in so many ways."

Dr Joan M Redshaw by Barbara Tribe 

Joan Redshaw AM (1921-1944), medical practitioner, graduated from the University of Sydney in 1944 before travelling to London to complete post-graduate studies in paediatrics at the Great Ormond Street Hospital. Returning to Australia in 1948, she became the first woman ship's surgeon to be employed by the Orient Line, famously performing an appendectomy on the Red Sea. On board, she met Captain Arthur Strong, whom she married in 1949. For twenty years from 1951, Redshaw was a paediatrician and general practitioner in Nabiac, on the mid-north coast of New South Wales. A member of the Women's Advisory Board to the NSW premier, she spent twelve years on the council of the Medical Association. As president of the International Women's Association, she campaigned against child marriage and female circumcision; her local community involvements included crisis accommodation for women affected by domestic violence, and alcoholic programs.

Barbara Tribe was a significant sculptor and the first woman to win the New South Wales Travelling Art Scholarship. She spent most of her career in England, exhibiting with the Royal Academy and the Royal Society of British Sculptors.

Quentin Bryce (2016) by Michael Zavros

The Hon. Dame Quentin Bryce AD CVO (b. 1942), academic, lawyer and human rights advocate, was the first woman to be appointed governor-general of Australia. Born in Brisbane, she spent her early childhood in Ilfracombe in central western Queensland. She attained degrees in arts and law at the University of Queensland, where in 1968 she became the first female member of the law faculty. By the time she retired from teaching in 1983, she was increasingly involved in human rights and advocacy work. Between 1984 and 1993 she was director of the Queensland Women's Information Service, director of Queensland's Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission and the Federal Sex Discrimination Commissioner. In 1997 she became principal and chief executive officer of the Women's College within the University of Sydney. Six years later she became governor of Queensland. In 2008 she was appointed Australia's 25th governor-general, and served in this role until March 2014.

Michael Zavros commenced work on this portrait in 2015, when Bryce became chair of Queensland's Special Taskforce on Domestic and Family Violence. Zavros included the proteas as the emblem of the Taskforce, but also to signify the sitter's strength and wisdom, and the dignity of her longstanding commitment to justice and human rights.

Professor Penny Sackett, astronomer and physicist (2011) by Andrew Mezei

Penny Sackett (b. 1956), physicist, astronomer and former Chief Scientist for Australia, gained her PhD in theoretical physics at the University of Pittsburgh. In 2002 she was appointed director of the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Australian National University. Responsible for the Mount Stromlo Observatory, she had to endure its destruction by bushfires in January 2003, and negotiations for the insurance payout and rebuilding of the heritage-listed facility. Sackett was one of an international team of 73 astronomers who discovered the first known earth-sized planet orbiting a normal star other than the Sun in the inner Milky Way in 2006. Appointed the Chief Scientist for Australia in late 2008, Sackett remained an adjunct professor at ANU and continued to supervise research students. She resigned as Chief Scientist in 2011, announcing that she intended to contribute to science in other ways.

Entering this portrait in the Archibald Prize for 2011, Andrew Mezei said that he aspired to paint Sackett after hearing her speak on the radio. He wrote: 'She responded to scepticism about climate change with eloquent reasoning … I wanted to show her femininity as perfectly compatible with her impeccable focus on facts.' The setting is imagined, though informed by various images of Mount Stromlo Observatory.

Lowitja O'Donoghue (2006) by Robert Hannaford AM

Lowitja O'Donoghue AC CBE (b. 1932), Indigenous rights campaigner, is a Yankunjatjara woman. Removed from her mother at the age of two, she was raised in a mission home and worked as a nurse before joining the Department of Aboriginal Affairs in 1967. By 1975, she was its regional director in South Australia. She was Foundation Chair of the National Aboriginal Conference in 1977 and chaired the Aboriginal Development Commission from 1989 to 1990. O'Donoghue was Australian of the Year in 1984, when she became the first Aboriginal person to address the General Assembly of the United Nations. While Chair of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission between 1990 and 1996, she helped to draft the Mabo legislation. Currently she is Patron of Reconciliation South Australia and of the Lowitja Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health.

Robert Hannaford said of O'Donoghue that he observed a 'vast understanding and sympathy in her face, a sadness', but also thought she looked 'fantastic in that light I've got in that studio'. The pair became friends during the many hours of sittings involved in creating the work.

Significance Supersedes Style

Demons at Dusk by Peter Stewart 

Temple House Pty Ltd

Pp. 326

It took Peter Stewart almost 30 years to write Demons at Dusk and he has researched it thoroughly. The book explores the most infamous massacre in Australia’s history by combining official records and transcripts from the trials to recreate the story of what happened that day, the events leading up to it and its aftermath. It is written in a very straightforward and basic tone with no embellishments and seems more of a text book or a schoolchild’s history than a novel. It is, however, a very important story and needs to be told, which may perhaps mitigate the poor writing style.

In 1838 on a remote cattle station on the NSW frontier a free settler who looked after the property (William Hobbs) invited a group of Aboriginal people from the Weraerai to Myall Creek station with the promise of protection from the bands of marauding troopers and stockmen who roamed the countryside. They developed a close relationship, particularly with Old Daddy, a big elder, Charley, a young boy, and Ipeta, a woman with whom one of the younger hutkeepers, George Anderson, had some sort of relationship. While Hobbs was away, a group of powerful settlers came to the station and massacred 28 unarmed Indigenous Australians.

The massacre itself was not unusual, as many similar events occurred across the country, but it stands out as significant in history as being the first time the murderers were prosecuted. George Anderson’s evidence was instrumental in bringing justice to the Weraerai, and death to the murderers. This is a known story, but Stewart questions why Anderson would speak up, so he introduces a love interest, which many critics find jarring. They argue that for a story based on historical fact, it makes no sense to invent a fictional romance, and detracts from the magnitude of the event.

Because so much of the story is taken verbatim from contemporary letters, newspaper reports and court transcripts, the introduction of assumed emotions is incongruous and the tone becomes preachy and didactic. Some disquiet has also been raised over the perceived patronising effect of a white author putting words into Australian Aboriginal English: “And de tings don’t belongem to eachfella. Everything belongem everyfella. Everyting belongem all mob."

Stewart tries to introduce the tropes of foreshadowing and hindsight. The former is unnecessary: if people know this story, there is no surprise, just horror, so there seems little reason to try and build tension in this portentous manner: “They sat and ate and talked and laughed, unaware it was to be their last meal together, for twenty-four hours later Death would come to the Weraerai camp.”

The horrors of the massacre itself are stated baldly through flashes of atrocity. There are critical complaints that the novel would work better as a film, and on this occasion it is deliberately written in a screenplay style.

"Baby wrenched from mother’s arms and thrown to ground… Sandy and Tommy lunge forward to protect… Two shots ring out… Sandy and Tommy fall to the ground… Sandy struggles to feet, sword slashes back of his neck, severs head… Bobby’s wife knocked to ground, her baby grabbed… Mother wails… Baby screams as held by legs and head smashed against tree… Mother slashed with sword… Terror… Head hacked off…"

Stewart also attempts to explain the particulars of the court case and the attitudes of the time through patently unrealistic dialogue. Much of the court-case communication is taken verbatim from the transcripts of the trials with, as Stewart writes, “only very minor additions to illustrate how someone may have been feeling or to highlight the importance of a particular piece of evidence.” This level of gauche intervention makes it more like one of those American documentaries than a novel.

Defenders of the novel argue that many Australians know little of their nation’s history and they rely on novels to tell them of the past as all they learned at school were tales of British colonialism. They say that the florid writing style and undisciplined language is forgotten as the reader progresses through the power of the narrative. Should we overlook the literary failings due to the historical significance of the story? Stewart is to be commended for bringing this outrage to the attention of a wider audience, no matter what the standard of the prose in which he does it.