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Australian novelists are finally gaining the recognition they deserve

Caroline Baum surveys the country’s literary landscape

Carpentaria by Alexis Wright photo courtesy Giromondo publishers

Gone for a Song by Jeff Waters photo courtesy Jeff Waters

Alone on the Soaks by Alec Kruger photo courtesy IAD Press

18 May 2008 - The Sunday Times UK - British readers have come to know only a handful of writers from down under: Peter Carey, David Malouf, Shirley Hazzard, Thomas Keneally and Geraldine Brooks, who win important international awards. Yet there is a vast continent of other voices crowding the landscape.

The two bestsellers of literary fiction currently walking off the shelves of Australian bookshops represent the contrasting facets of contemporary Oz lit. First, there’s the latest from Tim Winton, who is now regarded as the preeminent voice of Australia’s coastal communities. Riding a wave of publicity, Breath is a rites-of-passage story set on the deserted beaches of Western Australia. It explores the theme of mateship at the heart of Australian literature through the macho combination of surfing and sexual danger, and ticks every box in terms of what readers have come to expect from Oz writing: a unique sense of place, where nature is a threatening force, combined with language that is visual and rich in metaphor. Australian writers don’t do magical realism (Richard Flanagan’s gothic historical fantasy, Gould’s Book of Fish, is a notable exception), but they do imbue the real world with heightened sensations - a natural reaction to the harshness of the light and the vastness of the empty landscape.

The other hit novel, Helen Garner’s The Spare Room, is an unflinching, searingly honest and sparse urban tale of friendship tested by illness. It could be set in London as easily as Melbourne. Unlike Winton, its author, widely esteemed as one of the country’s finest in both fiction and nonfiction, has no international profile. Part Didion, part Drabble, Garner has a spiky yet vulnerable sensibility, and her writing often tackles tricky, uncomfortable areas of personal morality. She enjoys cult status and has inspired a younger generation to tackle the same terrain of inner-city blues.

In between the coast and the city are the bush and previously neglected rural communities, struggling against drought, unemployment and isolation. They have become fertile territory for a new wave of women writers. The Sri Lankan migrant Michelle de Kretser’s The Lost Dog is a cross-cultural, time-shifting meditation on nature and art, as well as a mystery. Julia Leigh takes readers deep into the wilderness and the mythology of the Tasmanian tiger in The Hunter. Charlotte Wood captures the claustrophobia of small-town life, seen through the eyes of a foreign correspondent returning from war zones during a family crisis, in The Children. These writers create characters for whom the unsaid is more eloquent than the spoken, reinforcing the notion that Oz lit excels at relationships as arid and parched as the land itself. This is not the place to come looking for a lush love story or a grand passion.

Always great travellers, Australian writers feel increasingly confident beyond their own borders. Their stories are set anywhere, anytime. For a contemporary take on the dark side, look no further than Christos Tsiolkas, whose Dead Europe mixes brutal realism with folk tale to explore present-day truths many would prefer to leave buried. Then there’s the phenomenon of Markus Zusak, the 33-year-old author of The Book Thief. Currently topping the charts in America and Brazil, and with foreign rights sold just about everywhere, this truly original retelling of the Holocaust as narrated by Death has an irreverent, sometimes humorous, tone that is perhaps typical of the Australian personality: even confronted with the most terrible history, it takes nothing at face value and delights in turning every notion and convention upside down.

Many Aussie writers, including Hazzard, relocate themselves, not just their fiction. Gregory David Roberts, a convicted criminal, has moved to India, the setting for his blockbuster epic thriller Shantaram, which goes from the slums of Mumbai to the mountain gorges of Afghanistan. (Johnny Depp has bought the film rights.) With millions of readers worldwide already, the long-overdue sequel is one of the most eagerly awaited events in publishing.

Crime is part of the DNA of Australia’s earliest identity, so it should come as no surprise that the genre is thriving there. Last year, Peter Temple became the first Australian to win the world’s top crime-writing award, the Duncan Lawrie Dagger, with The Broken Shore, a complex tale of coastal-development politics and racial tensions. On a more politically incorrect note, Shane Maloney gives crime fiction a twist by adding an element of farce. His laconic and satirical Murray Whelan series follows an ineffectual, shambolic Labor political adviser who stumbles on bodies and scandals while struggling with the pressures of life as a single father. Whelan has become one of Australia’s favourite antiheroes, embodying that quintessentially Oz quality known as larrikinism, a laddish disrespect for authority. The parochial specifics of language and locale have not prevented him from finding an international fan base - the series is published in the UK by Canongate.

Meanwhile, Flanagan has turned his hand to thriller-writing with a modern-day fable, The Unknown Terrorist, that became an almost instant bestseller. Dedicated to the Australian Guantanamo inmate David Hicks, this story of mistaken identity fuels post9/11 paranoia with its portrayal of venality among shock jocks and corrupt cops in Sydney. A high-profile ecowarrior, Flanagan is one of a handful of writers in Australia prepared to be political on the page - a risk in a country with a hedonistic lifestyle. Taking a break from controversy, he has been helping Baz Luhrmann with the screenplay for his new film, Australia, a romance set in the outback’s rugged cattle country.

Giving historical fiction a new lease of life, Kate Grenville’s The Secret River contrasts the struggle of a convict settler and his wife from the East End with the lives of neighbouring indigenous tribes. The novel predates the Australian prime minister’s apology to Aboriginal people for the forced removal of children from their families, but echoes its sentiment. Not that the conflicts between native peoples and white settlers have been resolved, as Andrew McGahan, a hard-drinking cane-cutter-turned-writer, demonstrates in The White Earth, an award-winning novel that hits a tender spot in the national psyche.

Yet the mood for change has already translated to the page. In a new climate of reconciliation, Aboriginal writers are at last finding not only their voice, but a public eager to hear their point of view. When Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria, a saga of life in a coastal community, won Australia’s leading literary award, readers flocked to it, undaunted by its 600 pages of dense, idiosyncratic, vernacular prose, no doubt hoping to find the indigenous equivalent of Cloudstreet, the novel that put Winton on the map. Whether this interest represents a genuine turning of the tide, only time will tell, but Oz lit has a more distinctive voice than ever before because of it.

Source: The Sunday times UK

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