Books that Made Us: The companion to the ABC TV series

By Carl Reinecke

A cultural history of Australia told through our fiction.

Australia's novels lie at the heart of the country. Capturing everyday lives and exceptional dreams, they have held up a mirror to the nation, reflecting the good and the bad. In this companion book to the ABC TV series, Carl Reinecke looks at the history of Australian culture through the books we have read and the stories we have told.

Touching on colonial invasion, the bush myth, world wars, mass migration, the recognition of Indigenous sovereignty and the emergence of a modern global, multicultural nation, Carl examines how these pivotal events and persuasive ideas have shaped some of Australia's most influential novels, and how these books, in turn, made us.

In a panoramic account of Australian fiction stretching from Marcus Clarke to Melissa Lucashenko, Patrick White to Peter Carey, and Henry Handel Richardson to Michelle de Kretser, this is a new history of key authors and compelling books that have kept us reading and made a difference for over 200 years.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Nov 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781460713501

Carl Reinecke

Carl Reinecke has worked as an associate producer on a number of television series and films in Australia and abroad. He wrote about the history of Donald Horne's The Lucky Country in Meanjin, and his other articles have been published in Inside Story, Griffith Review and the Sydney Morning Herald.

Book preview

CONTENTS

Foreword by Claudia Karvan

Introduction

1. The experiment

2. An Australian Australia

3. Modernity in the emptiest of lands

4. Outrage and dissent

5. How to be an Australian

6. The vital decade

7. Something sinister

8. Australia II

9. Success in an endless race

10. Brighter futures

11. Withering on the vine

Acknowledgements

Notes and references

Index of names

About the Author

Copyright

Foreword

More Australians are reading books than ever before. And I’m no different. I was a voracious reader as a child and in my twenties, but my focus dipped when kids came along. Now they’re grown up I am returning to the books that have been patiently waiting to be read – and I promise my kids that I didn’t resent their intrusion on my book reading life . . . too much!

I’m a big believer that sharing our stories – whether it’s through music, art, conversation, inhabiting a character or writing – gives our lives meaning. Maybe it’s because I stopped studying science in Year 10 but there’s a line in Muriel Rukeyser’s poem ‘The Speed of Darkness’ that says it all for me: she writes that the universe is not made up of atoms, it’s made up of stories. Books are doors not mirrors. Through books you can travel to far-off places without leaving your bedroom. You can live a thousand lives and be transported in time, become immersed in the landscape of the writer’s imagination and experience heartbreak and love. It’s not just about escaping into a book, it’s also about being held. The very act of reading is a private interaction that no one else can share. You are never alone reading a book. It teaches you to enjoy your own company. It forces you to ask questions and to empathise. It’s been deemed a subversive act. The more you read, the more you discover you don’t know.

In my life as an actor, I’ve been lucky enough to appear in screen adaptations of some of Australia’s favourite novels, such as My Brother Jack, True History of the Kelly Gang and Puberty Blues. There’s an inordinate amount of waiting around on set, travelling and living away from friends and family for long periods, and books have always provided me with reliable solace. But like most readers, my taste is pretty scattergun and arbitrary, so I was thrilled when I was asked to host the ABC series Books That Made Us because I wanted to learn more about Australian books.

The three-part series delves into books that have really struck a nerve, books that push us to think differently about ourselves. For my role as host, I had to read almost thirty novels, ranging from Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of His Natural Life to Melissa Lucashenko’s Too Much Lip, and the task was an intense, focused gift, like a mini-university degree in Australian literature. It gave me the opportunity to reflect on our famous historic novels and also to understand the bedrock from which our contemporary stories are being forged. I was able to meet some of our most beloved and brilliant writers, and experience the places that inspired their magical stories.

The most exciting thing I learned about on this journey is the triumphant emergence in Australian publishing of extraordinary Indigenous voices. Kim Scott, Melissa Lucashenko, Tara June Winch and the inimitable Alexis Wright are all recipients of our greatest federal literary prize, the Miles Franklin, and their books are illuminating to read.

It was a privilege to meet Alexis Wright and read her novel Carpentaria. It’s a work of art and she has rewritten the rule book on structure, storytelling and how we should read Australia. I’d never understood cyclical or time continuum until I read Carpentaria. The future is in the past and the past is in the present. This book uses a fourth tense – not past, present or future, but simultaneous – where the spiritual, real and imagined worlds all exist side by side.

Alexis said that Carpentaria was not written from the ‘paternalistic viewpoint from which Australia typically portrays Indigenous people – as pathetic welfare cases unable to take care of ourselves’. Her book is a testament to the survival of a culture, just like That Deadman Dance, Too Much Lip, The Yield and the many other novels written by First Nations authors. Reading these novels, I was challenged by how often white Australians focus on the loss, the crimes and the regrets, but neglect the wit, resilience and spirituality of First Australians. We’ve all been impacted by colonisation in different ways but these books build a movement of Indigenisation. Bring it on! Wesley Enoch says it so succinctly: ‘If we tell our stories, you can no longer oppress us.’

I embarked on the role of host with a moderate degree of trepidation, mainly at the hours of reading it would involve. But I underestimated how emotionally challenging the journey would be. Words are powerful. Given the territory that these novels traverse – genocide, penal cruelty, suicide, heartbreak – I guess I should have belted myself in for a rocky ride.

It was edifying to revisit one of my favourite Australian novels, The Secret River, and explore how this book can speak so differently to Indigenous and white readers. Kate Grenville’s historical novel brought the uncomfortable fact of our country’s massacres into popular culture and its honesty charted new territory for Australian literature. But it also elicited a strong response from people like Nakkiah Lui, who felt angry that white people didn’t already know the truth of their history.

Writers aren’t famous for seeking out the limelight, and my role as interviewer isn’t naturally in my wheelhouse, so I couldn’t have been more grateful for the generosity of all the writers who met with me. I usually go by the old adage, you should never meet your heroes – but Helen Garner is the exception to the rule. She is as present and honest in the flesh as she is on the page. And what a pleasure to re-read Monkey Grip thirty years after I’d first read it. It’s timeless. Revisiting Patrick White’s books was also reassuring. His words hold as much impact for me now as they did when I was in my twenties.

I was already a fan of Richard Flanagan’s writing but I’d never read Death of a River Guide. It holds one of my new favourite quotes: ‘Death is not the complex matter, life is.’ And having never heard of Sofie Laguna before, I’m now categorically a fan girl. I’ve read all four of her adult fiction novels and I won’t miss the ones to be published in the future.

Trent Dalton, Tom Keneally, Tim Winton and David Malouf could not have been warmer or more available. I feel so lucky to have spent such a luxurious amount of time with all of them discussing their important works.

The Jerilderie Letter is a revelation and if you haven’t read it yet, you must! It brings Ned Kelly to life as a living, breathing man instead of the myth, and was the lightning rod for Peter Carey’s novel True History of the Kelly Gang.

To meet Michael Mohammed Ahmad and hear how Australia’s racism galvanised him to tell his own story and initiate a writing movement was a highlight. I also learned about courage from Craig Silvey, who diligently researched and wrote the story of a trans kid, in his novel Honeybee.

One of the novels on my reading list was Charlotte Wood’s The Natural Way of Things, a divisive book which I’d avoided reading because I’d heard it described as being about misogyny. But when I finally read it I was pleased to be electrified by a story celebrating female friendship, courage and instinct.

This scribe of Australian writers are deep thinking, empathetic and courageous, and they all carry with them a weighty sense of responsibility and an understanding of what it is to tell a story.

One of my most significant relationships, the one with my mother, pivots almost entirely around books. Book recommendations, discussions about books, angry disagreements about books. Our relationship has benefited from the massive education I’ve received in Australian literature during the course of this series and I’m reminded daily that it is in the sharing with others that books grow into an even more powerful and nurturing force.

I joined the ABC’s Books That Made Us series because I wanted to read more Australian books so that I could better understand this place we call home. But I can also thank this journey for improving my reading habits. I’m now trained to never leave the house without a novel in my bag. There’s always fifteen minutes somewhere in the day to dip into a book.

Claudia Karvan

Introduction

In her acceptance speech after winning the 2020 Miles Franklin Award, Wiradjuri author Tara June Winch described how her novel The Yield was ultimately ‘about memory, about the trauma of remembering and forgetting’. In this ‘dance of remembering and forgetting’, Winch questioned why so many Australians have not learned ‘the true history’ of their country.¹

The British marine lieutenant Watkin Tench was one of the first to attempt a ‘true history’ of Australia. In his two books, A Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay published in 1789 and A Complete Account of the Settlement of Port Jackson published in 1793, Tench provided an account of the First Fleet’s early years in the new colony, intending to report the ‘facts . . . simply as they happened’. He described a ‘remote and barbarous land’ populated by ‘roaming savages’ who were ‘astonished and awed by our superiority’. To his eyes they were marked by a ‘natural hideousness’ that was so repugnant it was ‘hardly possible to see anything in human shape more ugly’.² Surveying Australia in the present day, Tara June Winch argued in her speech that ‘respect’ was still an idea too often absent ‘in the Australian vernacular’. She urged her audience to go beyond ‘empty words’ and grasp the Wiradjuri concept of yindyamarra: ‘to be equal in respectful ways, to be flowing back and forth from two shores’.

This was an idea that Tench would probably have struggled to comprehend. He initially dismissed the Indigenous languages he heard as ‘harsh and barbarous’, and drew a stark contrast between an Indigenous ‘savage barbarity’ and a European ‘progress of reason’. And so his account of the beginnings of Australia’s settlement and colonisation was one of the first crucial contributions to an imperial project that Tench hoped would ‘transfuse into these desert regions knowledge, virtue and happiness’ – an endeavour that Winch noted meant that ‘the bullet was the means of the physical subjugation; language was the means of spiritual subjugation’.³

What transformations have occurred to convert Tench’s ‘facts’ into Winch’s novel, a book rich in the Wiradjuri language? Why and how did the words and fictions of a European literary tradition come to define and reimagine a place on the other side of the world? How did the tradition of Australian fiction, with its rich array of important and influential novels, reflect and shape the radical changes of Australian society and culture? This book seeks to make sense of the distance between Tench’s words and those of Winch and in doing so find an adequate response to Winch’s challenge to better understand ‘what will you refuse to forget’ and ‘what will you endeavour to remember’.

The many changing representations of Australian life in the books that make up Australia’s literary history are crucial to unpicking Winch’s challenge. These range from Miles Franklin’s unabashedly optimistic My Brilliant Career, published in the early years of Australian Federation, to Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip, published seventy years later with its inner-city drug-taking bohemians and failed love affairs; from the nostalgic family histories of Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet to the modernist explorations of Patrick White’s Voss; from the nineteenth-century bushranger adventures in Rolf Boldrewood’s Robbery Under Arms to the 2018 gritty comic drama Too Much Lip by Goorie writer Melissa Lucashenko.

Despite their differences, these and many of the other novels considered here drew on a shared literary heritage. It’s a tradition that encompasses a litany of authors, each with their own distinctive preoccupations and stylistic expectations: patrician stylists such as Henry Handel Richardson and the dedicated communist Katharine Susannah Prichard; literary celebrities like Peter Carey and the less well-known Joseph Furphy; dissectors of social mores like Frank Moorhouse and the hermitic abstractions of Gerald Murnane. Australian literature brims over with conflicting personalities and seemingly irreconcilable works. Ours is a literary history of individual writers and distinctive books, political campaigns and ambitions, unexpected successes and frustrating disappointments. And it continues to grow every year, accumulating more books, more authors and even more diverse fictional worlds. Here, there is a lot to remember.

Peering into such a teeming past, I have selected a sample of influential books, almost all novels, to explore. I have treated them as stepping stones in the complex, crowded history of Australian literature and culture. This book grew out of research for the ABC television series Books That Made Us, and complements it by unpicking in detail the real-life biographies of a few dozen works and investigating why they were written, how they were received, and what audiences at the time thought of them. This is a granular approach that, in telescoping from the particular to the general, reveals new patterns and relationships in Australia’s intellectual and cultural history. It is an approach that is also made possible by, and indebted to, the many biographies, histories and articles dealing with Australian writers, publishing and novels published in recent decades. Building on these works, a panoramic history becomes possible, interweaving the history of key Australian books with international changes and local cultural and social shifts.

Fiction, and novels in particular, are intertwined with Australian history. Growing in popularity throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, novels were integral to the process of European settlement and colonisation.⁴ In the exchange of goods, ideas and people that made up the imperial system, novels were both compelling fictions and affordable commodities for the British public and Australian settlers, objects that could answer the question – what was Australia like?

Writers like Henry Lawson were praised for their ability to capture the ‘reality’ of Australia in their fiction, and throughout the twentieth century this would prove an enduring reflex, with local fiction called on again and again to define what it was to be Australian. In this way some of Australia’s earliest literary critics, including Nettie Palmer and her novelist husband, Vance, were as much analysts of Australian identity as they were of Australian fiction. And it is in the arena of literary fiction that competing ideas of Australianness were often prosecuted, sparking some of the most contentious and public debates in Australian history.

As such, this book touches on some of the big ideas in Australian culture. The notion of a distinctive, recognisable Australian identity would prove an enduring, influential cultural idea throughout the twentieth century. The boundaries of Australian nationalism were dramatically redrawn in the decades after the Second World War, with the ‘new nationalism’ of these years embracing the new and the international while rejecting a racially exclusive national identity. However, this embrace of newness also foreshadowed the dramatic realignments that neoliberalism, referred to locally as ‘economic rationalism’, would have on Australian society. From the late 1970s, neoliberalism has reoriented and redefined the Australian economy, society and culture at a remarkable pace. While many of its key expectations are familiar and uncontroversial today, neoliberalism, with its bipartisan consensus about reducing government support, and cultural rhetoric of international competition, success and excellence, marked a critical turning point in Australian history. Just as nationalism, and then new nationalism, would remake Australian society, so too has neoliberalism profoundly affected and reshaped Australia.

This book also explores some of the most influential styles and genres that shaped Australian fiction, including realism, the lifelike depiction of everyday life, and the much more contentious category of modernism. Although modernism is a label generally applied to the European avant-garde which emerged during the early decades of the twentieth century, it has its own distinctive regional history, with roots that extend at least as far back as the 1920s. It is a literary style that sought to challenge its readers with non-realistic techniques and contemporary political ideas. The social realist novelists in Australia – left-wing and communist writers who sought to produce social change through their recognisable depiction of everyday life – were central to an Australian modernism.⁵ Patrick White was a successor to this modernist tradition, even as he rejected it and renovated it in his own image. The ‘fabulists’ and magical realists of the 1970s onwards, writers who took their cues from other regional forms of literary modernism from South America and elsewhere, added to this tradition. The emergence of a remade, grungy social realism, expressed by Helen Garner and later Andrew McGahan and Christos Tsiolkas among others, has also proven influential.

The elusive idea of influence has shaped this history of Australian fiction. In examining the intellectual and cultural history of Australia, it was the key criteria in determining which books to include and which to leave out. As such, I have skipped over or only briefly touched on some of the most stylish and insightful of Australian writers. The decision to exclude books by Randolph Stow, Elizabeth Harrower, Robert Drewe, Jessica Anderson and Madeleine St John – to name just a handful – was painful but necessary, in order to produce a brief, comprehensible history of local fiction.

The books I have included are not intended as entries in an Australian literary canon; on the (admittedly problematic) grounds of literary merit alone, there are dozens of others that would demand inclusion.

The very mention of a canon is a contentious topic. Sometimes defended as a defence of a culture’s most important masterpieces, canons are often criticised as an exclusionary exercise in list-making. They are collections that can leave out minority writers who fail to fit into fashionable literary expectations, and are commonly little more than a marketing gimmick, reducing a diverse literary history to a handful of books that, more often than not, have fallen out of copyright.

Threading these different ideas is the sense of a canon as a bulwark against a cultural heritage under threat, defences against an imminent loss. Much as the first Canon, an Ancient Greek artistic treatise on the proper representation of ‘the human body’, was itself lost and is only known through its absence, Australian literature itself is no stranger to periods of scarcity.⁶ It has endured long periods of obscurity when few Australian books were published, once-popular books have fallen out of print and authors dropped into relative anonymity.

These days, sadly, such a fate looks like it is encroaching on local writing once more. In 2017, Patrick White sold just 2728 books, and Christina Stead, whose novels were not published in Australia at all until the 1960s, sold only 199 copies.⁷ Sales aren’t everything, but considered against the diminishment of literary institutions over the past forty years it seems conceivable that the popular knowledge of Australian writers and books may fade once again. It is over thirty years since an accessible narrative history of Australian literature was published – a gap which is made even more conspicuous considering the number of richly researched academic books, biographies and articles published in the intervening years.⁸ This book is designed to address this telling absence and presents a general narrative, wide-ranging approach to the cultural history of Australian literature. Yet it does so while remaining conscious that the past will inevitably reject attempts at overly neat categorisations. This isn’t the definitive history of local fiction, but instead an invitation to readers interested in Australian writing to keep exploring the novels that make up the diverse, vast quilt of Australian literature.

‘Dead ground,’ according to the late critic Clive James, ‘is the territory you can’t judge the extent of until you approach it.’ It is a military term describing the space obscured by the subtle fluctuations of a landscape; when ‘seen from a distance, it is unseen’.⁹ Australian literature and culture have their own regions of dead ground. The frequency of place names like ‘Massacre Waterfall’, ‘Skeleton Creek’ and ‘Murdering Gully’ attest to a grim history of Indigenous dispossession and death.¹⁰ But there are also areas of Australian literature and history that when seen from another angle extend far further than first appearances might suggest. In following Australian literary history from one work to the next, I hope this book opens up some of these possibilities.

In an account like this it can be tempting to see Tara June Winch’s victory at the Miles Franklin Award as a reassuring, inexorable endpoint to Australia’s literary history. Yet there was nothing inevitable about it. Set against any number of obstacles Winch’s success was the product of her determination, hard work and talent. Hers are the skills and habits of a capable writer, one supported and developed through an extensive Australian literary infrastructure of prizes, grants, publishing contracts and high-profile awards. There were few of these when Miles Franklin established her eponymous prize in 1958. Franklin’s annual award for novels ‘of the highest literary merit’ that presented ‘Australian life in any of its phases’, was the product of her scrimping and saving in the last decades of her life, and revealed only in her will.¹¹ Set up ‘for the advancement, improvement and betterment of Australian literature’, the ambition of Franklin’s award was to create a more stable means of rewarding and supporting local novelists than the sporadic encouragement she received.¹² Her bequest was her attempt to offer a helping hand to future writers, to encourage them to explore ‘the hopes and hardships, the dreams and despairs, the political and social experiments’ that have defined Australian culture and history.¹³ It was a prize that could, seventy-two years later, reward Winch’s novel, a book filled with the Wiradjuri language, by a Wiradjuri author who was determined to reimagine the many possibilities of Australia’s complicated histories.

1

The experiment

Amid the crockery, leg irons, seeds and goats transported on the First Fleet were some 4000 volumes of religious material. Intended to transform the 736 convicts onboard from ‘felons into farmers’, this mixture of Bibles and pamphlets encouraged their fallen readers with ‘Dissuasions from Stealing’ and ‘Exhortations to Chastity’.¹ The convicts arrived in an area where ‘many of the rocks’ displayed engravings of ‘figures of men and birds’.² These images, numbering in their thousands and stretching back over 6000 years, testified to the rich heritage of the twenty-nine different clans who made up the Indigenous peoples of an area soon renamed Sydney.³ These intricate linguistic and visual networks of culture – including songs, paintings and ceremonial dancing, all with significance and meaning built up over many thousands of years – were utterly foreign to the new arrivals.⁴

Instead, the marines and convicts relied on expectations of this unknown place formed, almost exclusively, by what they had read rather than what they had seen. Novels, increasingly popular in Britain throughout the eighteenth century, were some of the most accessible and influential forms of literary imagining for these new arrivals.⁵ And one of the most celebrated among them was Robinson Crusoe, published sixty years before the First Fleet landed. Written by the ‘seditious libeller’ and ‘spectacular bankrupt’ Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe was the story of an imperial slaver shipwrecked on a ‘desolate solitary island’, who overcomes the adversity of his isolation.⁶ It would have proven a compelling fiction for Europeans like Watkin Tench, casting ‘an anxious eye’ onto a shoreline with ‘nothing but hills . . . clothed with trees’ and pinpricked with ‘many fires’.⁷ The novel was also imbued with the racism of the period; the island’s local population are described as ‘savages’, vicious ‘man-eaters’ or loyal servants.⁸

Unsurprisingly then, early depictions of Australia’s Indigenous people tended to conform to these literary expectations, while their exploits were described in the florid language of an eighteenth-century gothic romance. So it was that Watkin Tench would quote the Wangal man Bennelong as declaring that one woman was ‘his property’, and that he would ‘part with her to no person whatsoever until my vengeance shall be glutted’.⁹

At the same time it is possible to track how the Indigenous people around Sydney integrated the new visitors into their own networks of literary understanding, with drawings of ‘European ships’ appearing in sites around the area.¹⁰ We can even read Bennelong’s own words, taken from a letter dictated a few years after his visit to Britain in 1792: ‘I am at home now. I hope Sir you send me anything you please Sir. Hope all are well in England.’ These differing forms of literary address, one formal and melodramatic, the other polite, conversational and immediate, suggest that from the start the colonisation of Australia was marked by the intersection of two ‘radically different’ ways of reading and writing the world.¹¹

The colonial authorities in London regarded the colonisation of Australia as above all ‘an experiment’ – one intended to reform and resettle convicts, creating a vast continent farm that could develop into a new society, not simply a jail.¹² The vision of improving settlers and convicts in this new outpost soon led to the creation of a number of schools, with Australian-born settlers recording much higher rates of literacy than their British counterparts within a few decades.¹³

Before long, in the words of one convict, books would prove ‘very valuable here’, and the first subscription library was established in 1826. However, early colonists remained hungry for stories of adventure; the only novels requested through the subscription library were the historical romances of Walter Scott, works that proved enduringly popular throughout the nineteenth century in Australia. The most popular local novel for many years was Henry Kingsley’s The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn, a romantic saga of the changing fortunes of a family of English squatters in which a massacre of Indigenous people was depicted ‘off-stage’.¹⁴

The violence in Geoffry Hamlyn echoed a wider, more methodical erasure of Indigenous peoples. Alongside earlier massacres, the creation of ‘legal institutions and legal ideologies’ by the middle of the nineteenth century introduced a systematic process of dispossession of Aboriginal people. The banning of Indigenous people from schools, introduction of curfews, increased formal segregation, and establishment of controlling so-called ‘protection boards’ were all powerful tentacles in this new regime.¹⁵

They were also the fruits of the move towards Australian self-government in the decades after the gold rushes of the 1850s. Keen to emphasise the ability of local governments rather than the British Colonial Office to manage their own affairs, colonists came to rely on the policies and ‘language of colonial conquest and racial superiority’. The British