AustLit
Introduction from Reading the Landscape: A Celebration of Australian Writing (2018) published to celebrate UQP's 70th anniversary.
This essay is included to celebrate the ongoing vitality of UQP, twenty years after the original publication of The Writer's Press.
Bernadette Brennan is an academic and researcher in contemporary Australian writing, literature and ethics. She is the author of a number of publications, including a monograph on Brian Castro and two edited collections: Just Words?: Australian Authors Writing for Justice (UQP, 2008), and Ethical Investigations: Essays on Australian Literature and Poetics (Vagabond, 2008). Her most recent book is A Writing Life: Helen Garner and Her Work (Text, 2017). She lives in Sydney.
Biography from Reading the Landscape (2018).
Introduction
In 1940 J.I.M. Stewart, the Edinburgh-born novelist and Professor of English at the University of Adelaide, was invited to deliver a lecture on Australian literature. In a breathtaking slight, he deemed no Australian book worthy of his time and chose to speak instead on D. H. Lawrence’s Kangaroo. Eight years later the University of Queensland Press (UQP) was established. Now, in celebration of the seventy years in which UQP has nurtured Australian writers and writing, the Press has given readers a rare gift. Reading the Landscape brings together generations of Australian writers whose new work showcases the rich diversity, quality and relevance of our nation’s literature.
What images or ideas spring to mind when you read the words: Hope, Vision, Legacy? What stories might you imagine when you think about Origins, Country, Frontiers or Heritage? UQP Publishing Director Madonna Duffy selected these seven words as being reflective of the UQP philosophy and focus as it enters its eighth decade. She invited authors whose books have played a significant role in UQP’s success to use these themes as inspiration for the work collected here.
The best anthologies — the ones we keep always beside our bed, in our bag, next to or tucked down the side of our reading chair — delight with their variation. They are equally satisfying when dipped into or read in sustained sittings. Reading the Landscape is such a book. Poetry, fiction, essay and memoir come together in this unique and timely collection; each piece complete and self-contained, yet also part of larger conversations and imaginative journeys.
Since 1968, when it published Roger McDonald’s Citizens of Mist, and Rodney Hall and Thomas Shapcott’s edited anthology New Impulses in Australian Poetry, UQP has been a constant and invaluable promoter of Australian poetry. Then, as now, few publishing houses were prepared to take on the financial risk of producing expensive volumes of poetry for a small market. In 1969, David Malouf approached Frank W. Thompson, then publishing manager of UQP and its associated bookshop, with a challenging proposition. Malouf would deliver his manuscript — which went on to become Bicycle and Other Poems — but only on the condition that it was first published as a paperback, a publishing innovation that was considered radical at the time. The Paperback Poets series was born and heralded a new generation of poets.
In Reading the Landscape, Malouf ’s newest suite of poems, ‘Garden Poems’, is infused with a sense of menace, ‘Everything in the garden/is scary, a murderous/silent soft-kill epic’; melancholy, ‘so much flamboyance in the act of simple dying’; and quiet jubilation, ‘Tumbling in/and out under the radar, honeyeaters,/from hello sunshine to blanket show/rejoicing, as we do,/in the illimitable instancies’.
It is always a source of joy to read new work by old masters; even more joyous to discover strong new work from younger generations. All of the poetry in this anthology is exemplary. Sarah Holland-Batt’s extended elegy, ‘In My Father’s Country’, is exceptional. So too, Josephine Rowe’s ‘All Things Once Molten’, a lyric prose poem of radical being-in-the-world that reflects profoundly on creativity, sensation and loss.
Kevin Gilbert’s poetry collection People are Legends: Aboriginal Poems (1978), was UQP’s first book by an Aboriginal author. Just over a decade later two significant books by non-Indigenous academics appeared: J.J. Healy’s Literature and the Aborigine in Australia, 1770-1975 and Adam Shoemaker’s Black Words, White Page: Aboriginal Literature 1929-1988. By the mid-1990s UQP began in earnest to champion writing by Australia’s first peoples. In 1996 it published Doris Pilkington’s Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence, the next year Plains of Promise and Steam Pigs, debut novels for Waanyi woman Alexis Wright and Goorie author of Bundjalung and European heritage Melissa Lucashenko. In 1988 UQP established the annual David Unaipon Award for the best writing of the year by an unpublished Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander author. They have continued to publish the winner of this award since.
UQP has an impressive list of Aboriginal authors. Four are featured in Reading the Landscape. Ellen van Neerven, of Mununjali and Dutch heritage, narrates the reality of lived racism. In her poem, ‘18Cs’, her ‘protection has gone’. She can no longer ‘skip home’. She’s ‘grown up to a world that was uglier than the one I was promised’. Yet she will not be cowed: ‘courage is telling them what you think of that play, that script they try and write us in will no longer contain us’. In ‘Border Protection’, Melissa Lucashenko draws authority from the songs of Archie Roach, the poetry of Tony Birch, and the words and counsel of Kev Carmody and Alexis Wright to assert defiantly an unassailable right of belonging. Samuel Wagan Watson, hailing from the Birri-Gubba, Mununjali, Germanic and Gaelic peoples, tells a more disheartening story. Feted around the world, he returns to Australia: ‘Back to being a ghost in a province that is home.’ He warns, ‘There is only one sure way to judge the words produced by black Australian writers and that is by recognising the ghosts that appear in their content.’
As this anthology goes to press, there is an increasing groundswell of support for the Uluru Statement from the Heart, which calls for the establishment of a ‘First Nations Voice’ in the Australian Constitution and a ‘Makarrata Commission’ to supervise a process of ‘agreement-making’ and ‘truth-telling’ between governments and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. In a similar vein, in her essay, ‘The Smoke of Several Fires’, Larissa Behrendt makes a plea for non-Indigenous Australians to respect and learn from the land management practices of traditional owners, but moreover insists that we as a nation must move beyond the paralysing ‘us’ and ‘them’ mindset that polarises Australian history to find a ‘more sophisticated, nuanced and inclusive national narrative’.
The contemporary relevance, as well as the outward vision, of this collection is manifest in the way these writers address pressing issues such as robodebt, rental prices, asylum seekers and climate change. Characters negotiate traumatic, and sometimes restorative, forms of dislocation and connection as their worlds collide across time and space. Some have lived through bombings in Baghdad or Syrian warzones, others have fled revolution, others again strive to find and preserve the vanishing links to family murdered in the Holocaust. Repeatedly the questions arise: What does it mean to belong? To speak of home?
Kári Gíslason writes poignantly about his ‘patterns of migration and return’ from Australia to the country of his birth. As he explores the relationship between writing and swimming, he discovers that both activities have become integral to the way he understands his heritage: ‘writing about Iceland had become an act of the water, connecting islands that lay far apart — between them, the light blue sea and the dark waves, handfuls of water just beyond the fingertips’. His memoir, ‘Swimming Lessons’, made me want to rush out and buy a ticket to Reykjavík, having packed goggles and a volume of the great Icelandic sagas.
Julie Koh and Gabrielle Carey also examine the practice of writing, particularly the existential crisis brought on by a loss of faith in creative capability and, even more disorienting, the vocation of a writer. As Carey asks in her essay, ‘Like a Love Affair’: ‘But if all writing is an effort to find that which has been lost, how do I go about finding my lost faith in writing itself? How do I write myself back into writing?’ Her answer is to go back to the book that set her ‘on the path to becoming a writer’: Ivan Southall’s To the Wild Sky. She immerses herself in Southall’s archive only to discover that as she relates her ‘adventures’ to us she has, of course, regained her ‘writing mojo’. Koh is a little more playful. Her short story, ‘The Lion’, begins: ‘Guy de Maupassant lives in a shed at the bottom of my garden.’ De Maupassant fills the narrator’s world. She makes him peanut-butter sandwiches and becomes ‘preoccupied with writing to impress him’. When he eventually vanishes, she is ‘struck with an immeasurable sorrow’. Her description of the inevitable let-down that follows creative production is searing.
It was never going to be possible to include all of UQP’s best-known authors in one anthology. Fortunately, two hugely popular authors for children and young adults have delivered new fiction. James Moloney responds to the years of questioning about what happened to Carl after the conclusion of his best-selling novel, A Bridge to Wiseman’s Cove (1996). And in ‘The Taste of Blue’, Steven Herrick delivers an unsentimental tale of survival in the face of catastrophic destruction.
Each of the twenty-five contributions to Reading the Landscape is introduced by a short author biography. Taken together, they narrate an important, celebratory story about UQP’s history and demonstrate the role that this well-respected publishing house has played in launching and nourishing the work of some of Australia’s finest writers. Peter Carey explains in his memoir, ‘The Road to St Lucia’, how crucial it was that UQP was prepared to back him when he was youngish and unknown to the industry: ‘I had been so often nearly published, and regretfully rejected, so frequently not acceptable at this present time. I was, in one instance, insufficiently distinguished.’
Reading the Landscape appears in 2018 at a time of deep national and global anxiety. These poems, essays, fiction and memoir bear witness to the strength of Australian literature and encourage us to engage with the most serious issues of our time. In her essay, ‘A Loud and Unruly Crowd’, Lily Brett writes: ‘Indifference has always frightened me. Indifference is a perfect breeding ground for hatred. Indifference allows politics of hate to flourish.’ She implores us, ‘polish your conscience. The world needs it.’
Seventy-eight years after Professor Stewart’s calculated disregard of Australian writing, we have an anthology, bookended by two charged and brilliant poems, that demands attention. The opening line of Ali Alizadeh’s ‘Hope?’ sets the tone: ‘And what can we do about it?’ The challenge is laid down. The conversation has begun. The poem’s speaker no longer believes in ‘the promise/of art, because in our situation/as you know, art is either pretentious/wank, or shitty/entertainment’. He does not believe in ‘the beauty of nature’ or ‘the magic of family’. But he thinks there is hope and it is to be found in the collective, in us, who ‘will/resume history’. Similarly, Ellen van Neerven’s final words call proudly for ‘a new coat of oppression. this one’s wearing thin.’
Reading the Landscape bears witness to the strength and importance of Australian writing. Fortunately, UQP is now one of a number of publishing houses working to ensure the health of Australia’s literary landscape. This anthology showcases how twenty-five writers respond to the challenges and beauty of their world; hopefully but a glimpse of what we may come to expect from Australian writing of the future.
Bernadette Brennan
June 2018