Patrick White Award, prizes, lists, elephant stamps and so on

The brilliant David Foster has won the 2010 Patrick White Award, and used his acceptance speech, as he is wont to do whenever he wins something, to attack something or somebody else.

Sigh. Apart from anything else, it's not usually a matter of writers 'putting their hands up' for prizes and awards; usually it's the publishers who put books in for prizes and awards, and I'm guessing the publishers would scream blue murder, and I can understand why, if a writer (a good writer, anyway) these days said No no, leave me out of it. It might even be in some of their contracts. All very well for Patrick White, whose publishers were British and didn't give a toss what was going on in Aw-stralia. Times have changed.

On the other hand, the guy is a genius. There are many Australian writers whose work I admire and some whose work I love, but for sheer power and originality of vision and style I think Foster is up there with (to list them in order of birthdate) Joseph Furphy, Christina Stead, Patrick White, David Ireland, Les Murray, Gerald Murnane, Barbara Hanrahan and Alexis Wright. There's them, and then there's everyone else. And all of them, apart from Alexis Wright, who's lovely, were and/or are known for their intermittently difficult, prickly, eccentric, combative and/or contrary-Mary moments. So I suppose it goes with the territory.

This is my Aust Lit List of writers -- not of 'favourites', for my favourites list is quite different, but of people I think were or are genuine originals and geniuses -- and I can just imagine the trouble it could get me into, but here I stand, etc.

And it's an opportunity to explore a different issue that has been bothering me more and more in the wake of the publication last year of the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature, which with the exception of such actual scholars of Australian literature as Professors Ivor Indyk and Peter Pierce seemed to be read by critics and commentators not for what was actually there, but rather almost exclusively in terms of who did or did not get an elephant stamp to say they'd been picked for the First Eleven.

But for me, and I'm guessing for most or all of my fellow editors, it was far less a matter of 'who was in and who was out' than of what was in, and what it was for, and how it fitted together with all the other things that were in, within the stern constraints of our word limits.

So while that's my personal Who's Who list up there, my personal What's What list of poems, stories and novels is quite different: individual works that, for whatever reason, and almost independently of their writers, are simply scarily, eerily good, that move and startle and resonate and go on resonating, in a way that defies analysis. If I could teach an Aust Lit course based solely on the texts that I personally think are magical in this way -- not 'representative' of anything or anyone, not there for any educative or ideological purpose, just magical, like a swirling snow globe or a glowing old-fashioned night light -- it would look like this:

Jessica Anderson, The Commandant
Thea Astley, A Kindness Cup
Marjorie Barnard, 'The Persimmon Tree'
Charmian Clift, Images in Aspic
Delia Falconer, 'Republic of Love'
Helen Garner, The Children's Bach
Jack Hibberd, A Stretch of the Imagination
Elizabeth Jolley, My Father's Moon
Baz Luhrmann, Strictly Ballroom
David Marr, Patrick White: A Life
Olga Masters, 'The Christmas Parcel'
Les Murray, 'The Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle'
John Shaw Nielsen, 'Let Your Song be Delicate'
Kenneth Slessor, 'Five Bells'
Ethel Turner, Seven Little Australians
Don Walker and Steve Prestwich, 'Flame Trees'
Peter Weir, Picnic at Hanging Rock

Glenda Guest and Siddon Rock

What's she doing writing a blog post about a book she hasn't read, you ask. Well, for one thing I'm waking this blog out of its five-month coma to try yet again to get some order into my thoughts on the topic I know better than any other, that of Australian writing -- though the idea of 'Australian writing' gets more and more problematic as the intertubes kick internationalism along. (On the other hand, I did hear some very nasty, and stupid, nationalist stuff coming out of Central Europe on the radio yesterday so there is obviously resistance to the inevitable.)

Anyway, I'm trying a trick that's often successfully used by bloggers who want to kick-(re-)start their sites and that's to vow to post something -- anything, no matter how brief or glancing -- every day. There's something about the discipline of this that I really like; blogging is not so far away from meditation. And staying in regular touch with developments in my own main skill set can't possibly be a bad idea.

What's inspired me to start today, though, is the news this morning that first-time novelist Glenda Guest has won the Best First Book prize in the Commonwealth Literary Awards for her novel Siddon Rock.

There'd been a bit of a subdued buzz about this book, and Guest herself, after the novel was shortlisted, and I expect her and it to get more publicity in the wake of the win. What with her success there and the brief synopsis I've just read at the website of her publishers, Random House, I'm now curious and enthusiastic enough to seek it out and make the time to read it:

When Macha Connor came home from the war she walked into town as naked as the day she was born, except for well-worn and shining boots, a dusty slouch hat, and the .303 rifle she held across her waist.

Macha patrols Siddon Rock by night, watching over the town’s inhabitants: Brigid, Granna, and all of the Aberline clan; Alistair in Meakin's Haberdashery, with his fine sense of style; Sybil, scrubbing away at the bloodstains in her father's butcher shop; Reverend Siggy, afraid of the outback landscape and the district’s magical saltpans; silent Nell with her wild dogs; publican Marg, always accompanied by a cloud of blue; and the new barman, Kelpie Crush.
It is only when refugee Catalin Morgenstern and her young son Josis arrive in town that Macha realises there is nothing she can do to keep the townspeople safe.

On hearing of her success, Guest told the Guardian that she was 'standing here like a stunned mullet', an epithet that no doubt left English punters bemused at the strange ways of colonials. 'It's not about the money,' she said, 'it's not about the credit, it's about being given verification that this is any good, that I can actually write."

Literary prizes revisited: a simple case of misidentification

Thanks to some up-to-the-minute Facebooking by Judith Ridge of Misrule, I have just seen the shortlist for the 2009 NSW Premier's Prize for Fiction, the Christina Stead Award. It consists of five of the six books I predicted, utterly wrongly, would make the shortlist of the Miles Franklin Literary Award, plus one extra: Helen Garner's The Spare Room, Kate Grenville's The Lieutenant, Julia Leigh's Disquiet, Joan London's The Good Parents, Steve Toltz's A Fraction of the Whole and Tim Winton's Breath. The one I did not predict is the Julia Leigh; the one I was wrong about in the other direction was Murray Bail's The Pages.

I feel that at least a little of my shattered cred has been restored. They were the right books -- I merely backed them for the wrong prize. Hmf, details.


Cross-posted from Still Life With Cat

New books

Amanda Lohrey's Vertigo, newly out, is one of those beautiful little hardback novellas where the design of the book-as-object seems entirely of a piece with the writing. Lohrey seems more and more to be formally separating out the writing of fiction and non-fiction, and finely negotiating the nature of ideology and its manifestations in each.

Like her two previous novels, this one is about a couple: here it's a pair of relatively young tree-changers (tree and sea, actually), both with the kind of working life you can pack up with your laptop as long as you're going somewhere that has broadband. They quickly realise that they need to change the shape of their own sense-of-self to adapt to a different kind of place: the house, the landscape, the geography, the town and the dangers are all different. I've reviewed this for the October issue of Australian Book Review.

Kate Grenville's The Lieutenant comes out in October and I'm halfway through it for a review for the Age. Like her last, The Secret River, it's set in the early years of the settlement of New South Wales and it revisits the subject of contact history and conflict. Grenville found the material for this one while researching The Secret River and in some ways it seems like a part of the same project, material not so much rehashed as approached from a different set of angles.

This historical novel is based on a number of real people and its climactic episode is an unspeakable punitive expedition -- also historically documented; it took place in 1790 -- on which the men in the party are given hatchets to remove the heads of Aboriginal 'offenders' and sacks in which to bring back the heads. There's an easily recognisable fictional portrait of Watkin Tench, and the main character is also based on a real person, a mathematician and astronomer called Lieutenant William Dawes, whose diaries Grenville discovered in her research for The Secret River.

(Five-Greats Grandpa Marine Private Thomas Chipp, who arrived in the First Fleet and served in Tench's company, appears to have gone to Norfolk Island in October and thus been spared the possibility of being ordered to go on this murderous expedition, but it's not beyond doubt.)

Although I haven't yet read them, I've also been intrigued by descriptions of the two books that won the inaugural Prime Minister's Literary Awards, The Zookeeper's War by Stephen Conte and Ochre and Rust: artefacts and encounters on Australian frontiers by Philip Jones. Intrigued enough, in fact, to plan to go out and buy them both; it would be particularly interesting to read the Jones in tandem with the Grenville. From all accounts, the judges seem to have made a couple of inspired choices; among other things there's a lovely balance, no doubt serendipitous, between an anthropologist examining the very objects that symbolise the complex beginnings of post-settlement Australia, relics at the heart of contact, and a novelist with the confidence to branch out beyond the 'Australianness' boundaries that for various reasons still make themselves felt in the writing of Australian fiction.

I could be making a fortune

I predicted in that last post two days ago that Steve Carroll would win the Miles Franklin Award and I have just discovered that he did.

*Does Grace's "I told you so" dance from Will & Grace*

2008 Miles Franklin Literary Award

Without Michelle de Kretser's The Lost Dog on the shortlist I've kind of lost interest in and therefore track of the Miles this year, but have been reminded today that the dinner at which the announcement will be made (by Geoffrey Rush, I believe) is on Thursday night.

There's a shortlist of five -- Gail Jones' Sorry, Steven Carroll's The Time We Have Taken, David Brooks' The Fern Tattoo, Alex Miller's Landscape of Farewell and Rodney Hall's Love Without Hope. I'm tipping Carroll.

Australian Book Review: reviewing competition

Press release from ABR:


2008 ABR Reviewing Competition – entries close 30 June

It's on again – the 2008 ABR Reviewing Competition – and the first prize is now worth $1000!

First prize: $1000 and publication of the review in ABR and at least two future commissions
Second prize: $250
Third prize: a set of Black Inc. books, valued at $200

All reviewers are eligible – including past and present ABR contributors. This competition is a particularly good opportunity for younger and emerging writers and students who wish to establish a career in reviewing.

All categories of books are eligible, including fiction, non-fiction, poetry, children’s and young adult books. Reviews should be 800 words. The book being reviewed must have been published since January 2006. Please click here for full details in the entry form.

Entries close 30 June 2008. Winners will be announced in the October 2008 issue of ABR.

Please pass this on to interested colleagues and students.

For further information, e-mail: abradmin@vicnet.net.au; telephone (03) 9429 6700 or visit the ABR website: www.australianbookreview.com.au

Absolutely revolting!

In an article in last Saturday's Australian, Beth Driscoll reminds us that the Prime Minister will be the final arbiter of his new and lucrative prizes for literature. The man who thinks Bill Henson's beautiful, powerful, emotive photographs 'absolutely revolting' will be having the last word on which books represent the country's best literature.

The judging panels -- Peter Pierce, John Marsden and Margaret Throsby for fiction, Sally Morgan, John Doyle and Hilary Charlesworth for non-fiction -- were, if their response to this news was anything to go by, invited to be judges without being told that their decisions would be subject to Prime Ministerial approval and/or veto, and were apparently not told until after they had already accepted and could not get out of it without looking bad from a number of angles.

That was a piece of appallingly bad management on the part of the administrators. And while one understands why the PM might want to have a say about the winner of a prize with his name on it, the inclusion of this very unusual and highly contentious condition suggests to me that whoever was developing this project behind the scenes knew less about literary prizes and the administration thereof than was required not to stuff it up before it had even got off the ground.

Pierce and Marsden voiced their disquiet at the time. Think how much worse they must be feeling about it now that we have so much more precise an indication of the Prime Minister's taste and discernment when it comes to judging the arts. What a good thing Vladimir Nabokov doesn't qualify for this prize, what with being Russian, not to mention dead. Clearly he wouldn't stand a chance.


Cross-posted at Pavlov's Cat

NSW Premier's Literary Awards: The Lost Dog gets (some of) its deserts

Michelle de Kretser's The Lost Dog has won the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction and the Book of the Year Award in the 2008 NSW Premier's Literary Awards. I'm hoping this will be just the first of many. Previous raves about this book are here and here. Thanks to Ampersand Duck for this news.

Barbara Jefferis Award, continued; Aust Lit; the lives of animals; various other stuff

The Barbara Jefferis Award, discussed in the post before last in the context of a rave about Michelle de Kretser's The Lost Dog, was in the event won by poet Rhyll McMaster for her first novel Feather Man. Which is indeed a fine book, as I've said at some length already here, and which certainly addresses, directly and on a literal level, the empowerment of girls and women.

But.

I don't know, maybe Michelle is one of those writers, like Elliot Perlman, whose work violently divides those who read it. (Perlman, whose very very long and very very detailed novel Seven Types of Ambiguity was treated to an absolute stinker of a review by Peter Craven of the kind Craven had hitherto reserved for Simon During's book about Patrick White, is regarded -- mainly on the strength of this novel -- by the French in particular not only as a very important Australian writer but as a very important writer, period. Other critical responses were dotted all along the spectrum between these two positions. Perlman's book has a dog in it, too; his name is Empson, which is one of the things that enraged Craven.)

Or maybe people think if there's an animal in the title it can't be a serious book. If so, this is sad, for there is a time-honoured and honourable tradition in Australian literature of writing about animals and putting them in your title. A quick trawl through the colourful history of the Australian short story yields the following by-no-means-exhaustive list of titles: 'The Dog', 'The Cow', 'The Bull Calf', 'The Jackass', 'The Dingo', 'The Donkey', 'The Ant-Lion', 'The Galah', 'The Pelican', 'The Seahawk', Tell Us About the Turkey, Jo', 'The White Turkey', 'The Grey Kangaroo', 'The Grey Horse', 'The Black Mare', 'Wild Red Horses', 'The Red Bullock', 'The Red 'Roo', 'The Rainbow Bird', 'The Powerful Owl', 'Singing Birds', 'The Woodpecker Toy Fact', 'The Three-Legged Bitch', 'The Loaded Dog', 'The New Australian Dog', 'Thylacine', 'Serpents', 'Snakes', 'A Snake Down Under', 'The Turtles' Graveyard', 'Goldfish', 'The Mullet', 'The Snoring Cod', 'Getting to the Pig', 'The Woman Who Wasn't Allowed to Keep Cats', 'My Bird', 'His Dog', 'Hawkins's Pigs', 'John Gilbert's Dog', and 'Nobody's Kelpie'.

Perhaps some people may think The Lost Dog "about" (and only about) a dog, and "therefore" can't be Art. Perhaps some people may have forgotten the extraordinary power of the animal symbolism in the work some of the 20th century's great writers -- Lawrence's foxes and horses, Woolf's spaniel, Hemingway's bulls and fish, Les Murray's magical animal poems, Coetzee's dogs and frogs and other critters of all kinds and the absolutely deadly serious life philosophy behind his representations of animals and our relations with them.

For we are lucky enough to have in Australia not just one but two truly great thinkers and writers who can elevate these matters to a place where no intelligent reader can ignore the dilemmas they represent even with respect to that most alien of creatures, the bat: Coetzee as a man who fearlessly follows a trail of logic with no failure of nerve and arrives at a radical point of understanding, Murray from a point of view profoundly spiritual, a conception of being and presence arrived at via Catholicism, observation and imagination all at once. Here is Coetzee's tough nut (an old bat, even) Elizabeth Costello, in full flight, on bats and being:

What is it like to be a bat? Before we can answer such a question, [philosopher Thomas] Nagel suggests, we need to be able to experience bat life through the sense modalities of a bat. But he is wrong; or at least he is sending us down a false trail. To be a living bat is to be full of being; being fully a bat is like being fully human, which is also to be full of being. Bat being in the first case, human being in the second, maybe; but those are secondary considerations. To be full of being is to live as a body-soul. One name for the experience of full being is joy.

Now if one were not aware that Les Murray had written 'Presence: Translations From the Natural World' some years earlier than this, his bat-poem would seem for all the world like a direct response, or amplification, of it, as though in conversation with Coetzee which for all I know he has been, in fact it seems very likely. I wish I'd been there.

Bats' Ultrasound

Sleeping-bagged in a duplex wing
with fleas, in rock-cleft or building
radar bats are darkness in miniature,
their whole face one tufty crinkled ear
with weak eyes, fine teeth bared to sing.

Few are vampires. None flit through the mirror.
Where they flutter at evening's a queer
tonal hunting zone above highest C.
Insect prey at the peak of our hearing
drone re to their detailing tee:

ah, eyrie-ire, aero hour, eh?
O'er our ur-area (our era aye
ere your raw row) we air our array,
err, yaw, row wry -- aura our orrery,
our eerie ü our ray, our arrow.

A rare ear, our aery Yahweh.

Cross-posted at Pavlov's Cat

Carn Michelle

I see from the current Sydney PEN newsletter that Michelle de Kretser's novel The Lost Dog has been shortlisted for the inaugural Barbara Jefferis Award, and the winner will be announced tomorrow.

(This is the prize that caused such a fuss last year when first announced, mainly because it's for women writers only. [UPDATE: My bad, my very bad, for this is completely wrong: it is open to novelists of either or indeed any sex whose book represents women and girls in a positive light; see comments thread.] Oh noes! What about Teh Menz Liberation, huh? Huh? Etc.)

As you can see if you read the link, this is a very handsome prize. Quite apart from the $35,000, there is the warm glow of winning an award named in honour and memory of a woman who contributed so much for so long to Australian literature -- and associated also with her husband John Hinde, long-standing and much-loved ABC film critic, whose will provided for the establishment of the award in his wife's name.

Peace and all to the current Miles Franklin judges, some of whom are mates of mine, but it's a matter of absolute gobsmackedness to me that The Lost Dog didn't even make the longlist for the 2008 Miles F award. It fits the award's criteria (which de Kretser's previous novel, The Hamilton Case, did not), and it's one of the best Australian novels I've read not just over the last year but for a very long time. I've got nothing against the other books that made the Miles F longlist; I just think The Lost Dog is better than most if not all of them -- for all kinds of reasons, but mostly, I think, for its delicate balance of intellectual sophistication and genuine, intense, beautifully realised feeling. That, and the fact that by about three pages in you find yourself thinking 'Oh my, this book was written by a grown-up.'

This is the review of it that I wrote last year for the Sydney Morning Herald:

The Lost Dog
By Michelle de Kretser
Allen & Unwin, 364 pp, $35 (hb)

Tom Loxley is on a kind of rural retreat when his beloved dog goes missing in the bush. Over the course of the story his search for the dog is interspersed with episodes of back-story: the story of his early childhood in India, his cramped teenage years in Australia, his unlucky and thwarted parents, and most of all his strange, tender relationship with the mysterious Nelly Zhang.

Tom is an academic working on a book about Henry James; he has anchored his racially complicated heritage in English literature. This novel is haunted by James in all kinds of ways, not least by a preoccupation with the idea of haunting itself, as well by the idea of yearning. On the surface Tom’s yearning is for the lost dog, and for the beloved who refuses to become a lover, but these things are situational and remediable; what can’t be changed is Tom’s family history and geography, the complex fate of the post-colonial.

This book is so engaging and thought-provoking, and its subject matter so substantial, that the reader notices only in passing how funny it is. At one point Tom goes to ask the neighbour Corrigan to keep an eye out for the dog, whereupon the narrator produces a sentence worthy of Patrick White: ‘When the Australian desire to provide assistance meshed with the Australian dread of appearing unmanly, it produced the bluff menace that was Mick Corrigan’s default setting.’

Michelle de Kretser is one of those rare writers whose work balances substance with style. Her writing is very witty, but it also goes deep, informed at every point by a benign and far-reaching intelligence. She is still winning prizes for her 2003 novel The Hamilton Case and she is certain to win a few more for The Lost Dog. Publishers Allen and Unwin have shown their faith in her by publishing this novel as a beautifully-designed hardback.

But I only had a 320-word space and they're meant to be brief, lively, accessible shorts; if you want a good, serious, insightful, detailed critical response, go and have a read of James Ley's full-length review in the Age. (Whenever I hear someone say 'Oh but Peter Craven is the best critic in the country', I have a little smile to myself, because while there are things about Craven's writing (not his criticism, so much) that I do admire very much, it's quite obvious to me that the best critic in the country is in fact James Ley.)

And just as an added bonus, that beautiful cover and design are courtesy of the lovely and talented Ampersand Duck. What more could any reader possibly want? Here is A. Duck's fabulous post about working on this novel; give yourself time (a cup of coffee, say) to read and savour this lovely detailed post.

Cross-posted at Pavlov's Cat

Predicting the Miles Franklin shortlist

Some time in 1981, I made my first-ever soufflé (cheese), from a recipe by Julia Child. To my astonishment, it rose, and it stayed risen. It was delicious. It was, in a word, perfect.

And I have never made another one. I figure the only direction one can go from there is south and I go south way too often by accident as it is.

By the same token, a freak effort off the top of my head last year meant that a couple of hours before the Miles Franklin Literary Award shortlist was announced, I listed my prediction and got a perfect score, which means that any attempt to do it again is doomed to failure.

However, here on the day before the shortlist is to be announced, pressure is being applied. It's sheer madness, considering I have actually read fewer than half the novels on the longlist -- this reviewing-four-novels-a-week-for-the-SMH caper means that my reading patterns have radically changed. But okay, for what it's worth, here is my prediction:

I predict that the judges will take the slightly unusual step of choosing a longlist with only four novels on it rather than five, and that those novels will be, in alphabetical order, Careless, Carpentaria, Dreams of Speaking and Silent Parts.

And I think Carpentaria will win.

New prize for writers: the Barbara Jefferis Award (part 1)

From Susan Wyndham in last Saturday's Sydney Morning Herald:

'... the Barbara Jefferis Award ... is launched today by the Australian Society of Authors.

Offering prizemoney of "at least $35,000", the award will be given annually from next year to "the best novel written by an Australian author that depicts women and girls in a positive way or otherwise empowers the status of women and girls in society. The novel may be in any genre and it is not necessary for it to be set in Australia."

Among the country's most generous book awards, it is funded by a $1 million bequest from Jefferis's husband, John Hinde, the ABC film critic who died last year. Hinde has also funded a new film script award for the Australian Writers' Guild.

Rosalind Hinde, a Sydney biologist, said her father established the Jefferis Award in his will with "the very clear and strong intention to honour my mother's writing, her feminism and her devotion to other writers".'


I'd hoped to have a long, considered post about this award up at this site before I went to bed last night, but the more I think about it, the more worms -- big fat wriggly ones -- I realise there are in this particular can. Here are a few of them:

What is an Australian author? What does 'positive' mean, and what 'empowers'? What is a level playing field, and why do we need one? How are women currently represented in Australian fiction, how were they in the past, and why is it more complicated than a simple 'for women only' literary prize? Why do people think it's their right to condemn and interfere with what other people choose to do in their wills with their own money?

So I am working on a long post trying to tease out all the different strands of our assumptions about writing and writers, about essentialism and feminism, about nationalism and whatever the other thing is, that are woven tighly up in this new award and the discussion about it. But I may, as Captain Oates remarked, be some time.

New prize on the horizon (with the inevitable segue to Patrick White)

Susan Wyndham at Undercover has some advance knowledge of a new Australian literary prize to be announced at the end of this month.

If it's as lucrative as the Miles Franklin and its terms 'are likely to be inspiring to some but also controversial', then it should get a lot of press when the official announcement is made on March 31. What the 'controversial terms' part suggests to me is that the prize may favour a particular demographic. The young? The female? The gay or lesbian? The *gasps, makes sign of cross* multicultural?

If that's the case, here in the land of literary hoaxes, such a substantial offering will no doubt attract people out to make some sort of point. I know other countries have literary hoaxes too, but it seems to me that what with Ern Malley, Gwen Harwood, Helen Demidenko, Paul Radley, Wanda Koolmatrie, Wraith Picket and that's just off the top of my head, we are punching well above our weight.

I've been on a few judging panels for literary prizes over the last decade or two, and in that capacity have kept an increasingly jaded and suspicious eye out for anything that looks as though it could be a hoax. Most of these things are perpetrated by people out to either get around the terms of the prize in order to (a) win it (Paul Radley's uncle wrote the book he won the Vogel with), (b) fight skirmishes in ideological/aesthetic flame wars (Ern Malley), or (c) (closely related to (b)) make various ideological/political points (Demidenko, Koolmatrie, Harwood, Picket. Spot the real person in that list).

The 'Gotcha!' impulse behind this kind of thing has always struck me as a bit of a double-edged sword. If the motivations of the people behind the Wraith Picket/Patrick White hoax (and I still think that if they were going with anagrams then they should have called him Keith Crapwit) had been different, they could have spun that puppy 180 degrees and said 'Look: no fewer than twelve literary experts have said this guy isn't any good. Perhaps it's time to re-evaluate him. Perhaps his work was mediocre all along.'

Not that I would ever claim such a thing myself, believing as I do that literary value is not absolute, and belonging as I do to the generation for whom Patrick White's work was a major formative experience, for whom his literary gifts are self-evident, and for whom his ideological freight was and is a great deal less simple and more radical than was claimed in Simon During's correct-line little book. But it's something that they could, if they'd been on the other side of the culture wars, have very easily done.

As it is, the conservative hoaxers seem to have shot themselves in the foot. What they wanted was to cause further damage to all those naughty lefties who are trying to destroy "our" heritage by not teaching Australian literature in "our" universities. (Which is, of course, factually quite wrong, as with the claims from other conservative culture warriors that "the feminists" have been silent on the subject of repellent fundamentalist-Islamic practices and beliefs regarding women. When in doubt, make stuff up.)

What they have created instead, quite unintentionally I'm sure, is a new upsurge of interest in White himself: there's now a blog devoted specifically to an online Patrick White reading group, an upcoming conference devoted specifically to his work and reputation, and an all-day event at the National Library, where Friday March 30th will be Patrick White Day.

But creating this new wave of interest in a writer who was an acknowledged homosexual and whose work introduced the country's fiction readers to new ways of thinking about Aborginal Australia, about class relations, about multicultural issues long before that was what they were called, and about autonomous, unforgettable female characters at the centre of a story (Theodora Goodman, Laura Trevelyan, Elizabeth Hunter, Ellen Roxburgh ... the list goes on) may not have been quite what the conservative elements had in mind when they set out to humiliate the contemporary literary left and score points in the culture wars.


Cross-posted at Pavlov's Cat.