‘Biography and history’ by Barbara Caine

2010,  124p & notes

This is only a small book and would have fitted well into that ” Very Short Introduction to ….” series put out by Oxford University Press.  As it is, it is part of Palgrave Macmillan’s series on ‘Theory and History’ which aims at introducing undergraduate students to themes like transnationalism, gender, narrative, postmodernism etc. and history.   It is very clearly written, and while the experience of reading it is enhanced if you are familiar with some of the biographies that she describes (as I am) , it stands in its own right as a review of the methodological and narrative questions raised by the relationship between history and biography.

Barbara Caine was Professor of History at Monash University and is now at the University of Sydney.  Many academics working in biography come from the literary studies area, rather than history.  Her projects and publications testify to her long and deep experience with biography, autobiography and history, and the ways to approach an individual life as an exercise in historical methodology.

‘Ancient Light’ by John Banville

2012, 245 p.

To be honest, I wonder if I’m clever enough to read John Banville.  I’ve read other books of his and admire his smoothness, his archness, his reflexivity and most of all, the control he has over his writing.  It seems that recently I’ve been reading books which, though enjoyable, are a bit flabby and undisciplined.  Banville’s neither of these things.   I’m increasingly feeling that transitions are the litmus test of good writing, and Banville can shape up a long chapter and switch between time periods and plot lines almost without you noticing. He’s good.

There are two main narrative lines in this book.  The narrator is Alexander Cleave, in the autumn of his acting career who has unexpectedly been called up to make a film “The Invention of the Past” about Alex Vander, based on a script written by J. B.  He is rather flattered and surprised to be approached for the part, but his mind is really not on the film.  His adult daughter has committed suicide some time earlier and he can hardly bear to think about it, so his mind skitters off to other thoughts.

Instead, he reminisces about the affair he conducted as a teenaged boy in a small town in 1950s Ireland with his best friend’s mother.  He calls her Mrs. Gray throughout the book, as they indulge in furtive couplings in the laundry and in the midst of the fug of domesticity, and in a rundown cottage in the woods.  You know that they are going to be caught eventually: he tells you as much, and so each time he goes back to describing the illicit gropings and the fervent pumpings, you feel quite nervous for them both.

Banville switches between the two narratives quite effortlessly, while undercutting your faith in the fidelity of the narrator’s memories.  Alexander himself admits that the memories are probably wrong: he has the impression that it was raining during a particular event when he knows that it was a hot and dusty day instead; the details are somehow skewed in his memories and he can’t quite work out what’s wrong with them.  Banville has been leaving hints throughout the book that Alexander can’t be trusted, and finally when Alexander mentions Gary Fonda in The Grapes of Noon I eventually acknowledged that, despite his urbane demeanour and smooth narration, Alexander is a very unreliable narrator.

But that’s not the only thing that made me feel rather stupid in reading this book.  His daughter’s suicide was obviously fundamental to the story, and yet it seemed such an underdeveloped plot line.  In the back of my mind I had something about Cass and a suicide into the ocean below a castle…and Alex Vander, he sounded familiar…  Was there something that I should know that I didn’t?

Well, yes.  This book is actually part of a trilogy and I’ve even read the other two books without realizing that they were all related!!! In fact, I didn’t realize it at all: I had to read it in reviews of the book by people who are obviously more astute than I am. The allusions to the other books and the reflexivity on Banville’s own performance as a writer and puppet master were being piled up higher and higher at the end of the book- and because he is the brilliant writer that he is, they didn’t  sink the whole endeavour as they would in less skilled hands.

Then there’s the vocabulary! I’m no slouch vocabulary-wise but I’d never heard of ‘brumous air’ ‘caducous leaves’ etc. etc. I started writing them down to look up later, but there were too many.  Doesn’t matter- it’s good for me to realize that someone has a vocabulary that far, far outstrips mine.  I wonder if Banville actually has those words in his consciousness all the time, or whether he’s playing a game of word one-upmanship here.

So, while this book made me feel rather abashed and stupid when I finally realized what was going on, I did enjoy it.  The story of the obsession and selfishness of young love stands on its own two feet and doesn’t even really need the other Alexander/Alex Vander  thread at all. Ah, but then it wouldn’t be a Banville, would it?

My rating: 9/10

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library

Read because: I wanted to read a book with chops.

An interesting little slideshow Port Phillip early days

I found this slideshow of images of Port Phillip and its early settlers.  It seems that it was prepared by members of the Port Phillip Pioneers group for their annual Pioneers Church Service held at St James Old Cathedral in Melbourne a few years back.

There’s some here that I haven’t seen before.

http://www.slideshare.net/PortPhillipPioneersGroup/glimpses-of-the-past-presentation

Uplifting Quotes for the Uninspired Historian #18

Actually, a whole article this time.  And not so much ‘uplifting’ as ‘sobering’.

How not to write a PhD thesis by Tara Brabazon.

Weeping Judges

My research interest is Mr Justice Willis and it is almost a reflex action now whenever I encounter a book about 19^th century justice to flip to the index to see if ‘my’ judge gets a mention.  Again and again my heart has leaped at seeing   “Willes, J.” only to look more closely and see that it is Willes (with an ‘e’) instead of Willis (with an ‘i’).  The two judges were roughly contemporaneous and I wouldn’t be the first person to have confused them .   Of course, I’m fairly wedded to the human story in my own Judge Willis, but Judges Willes (with an ‘e’) has a damned good story as well.  Perhaps I should write it when I’ve finished with my man? (Only joking- mostly).

When reading 19^th century press reports of trials, there are stock phrases that are used in describing the demeanour of the judges.  In the court reports, judges might be “twitchy”, they “stifle a groan”, they are “grave” and- rather strangely to our way of thinking today- are sometimes “overcome by weeping”.    Thomas Dixon from the Queen Mary Centre for the History of Emotions has written an excellent article titled ‘The Tears of Mr Justice Willes’ in the Journal of Victorian Culture  2012, Vol 17 No. 1 p.1-23.  It is available on open access here.

James Shaw Willes was born in 1814 and died in 1872. He was born in Cork and was educated at Trinity College Dublin but was called to the English Bar and commenced practice on the Home Circuit.  At the age of forty one (which is young) he was knighted and appointed a puisne judge of the Common Pleas and he presided over a number of sensational and widely reported cases.  Most particularly he presided over the 1865 trial of Constance Kent for the murder of her young half-brother at Road Hill House Wiltshire, a case which was so ably explored in Kate Summerscale’s recent book The Suspicions of Mr Witcher (which I reviewed here). In this case, along with others he heard, Justice Willes was overcome by emotion, breaking down in tears.  According to press reports, in passing sentence on young Constance, Justice Willes ‘bent forward and wept for some few seconds’ and  ‘the learned Judge here again wept, and the solemn words of his sentence were almost inaudible’.  Dixon’s article gives several other examples of Justice Willes’ displays of emotion, before moving to talk about the meaning of tears across history and particularly in the 19^th century.

I have come across several mentions of Justice Willes- in fact, ‘my’ Judge Willis cited him in a court case once.  Indeed, he was highly acclaimed for his judicial knowledge at the time and after, although apparently he had his detractors among some of the other judges (as did ‘my’ Judge Willis who in fact seemed to take pride in his unpopularity with his fellow judges).   Justice Willes seems to have been a deeply intelligent, cultured, literate man.  It would appear that his personal life was rather unhappy, and there are suggestions that he married only to avoid a breach of promise action.  He sat at the highest levels of the judicial establishment in England at the time, and was a member of the Privy Council.   He committed suicide in 1872.  Explanations for his suicide have included his over-sensitive and melancholic  nature, ‘repressed gout’,  the burden on his health of heavy court sittings, and the prospect of potential political scandal.  In his article Dixon looks at the diagnosis of ‘repressed gout’- a malady much in fashion at the time- and its relationship with the emotions.

Thomas Dixon has a 3-part posting on the History of Emotions blog.  It’s a good read, interspersed with video clips and comments on a BBC program (to which Dixon contributed) called  Ian Hislop’s History of the Stiff Upper Lip, which screened in England in November 2012.  I wonder if we’ll see it here in Australia, or whether it will be scooped up under the highly unpleasant Foxtel deal.

I’m fascinated by this whole area of history.  I can see a whole other area to explore in relation to ‘my’ Judge opening up in front of me!

Going down to see them at Geelong

Every Christmas my Uncle Johnny from Geelong would say to me

Coming down to see us, Jan-nine?

Kenny’ll drive you round.

My Uncle Johnny was a broadshouldered, tanned man, butcher by trade, Geelong Football Club player as a young man, and in my mind’s eye he always wore a hat, as men often did in the 1960s.  Kenny was my cousin, and they lived a stone’s throw away from the Cardinia Park football ground at Geelong, about 75 kms south-west of Melbourne.  I must admit we didn’t go down to Geelong very often and when we did it always seemed a monumental trek for a day-trip.  You’d pass the abattoirs in Kensington, the smelly sewerage farm going through Werribee, the You-Yangs in the distance and the yellow tongue of flame flickering above the Corio oil refinery.

But a week or so ago I sat in traffic trying to drive from Bundoora to Fitzroy and it took 45 minutes to travel 13 kms.  Good lord, I thought, I may as well go to Geelong!  And so I did- 75 minutes to travel 95 km (because I live north of the city) on freeway the whole way and not an abbattoir or refinery to be seen or sewerage farm to be smelled-  although there was still the tang of something noisome when we passed an industrial estate on the way.

Geelong is much smaller than Melbourne and its city centre is dominated by the bay and Eastern Beach which is a popular promenade complete with boardwalks, a carousel and sand.   They have some rather cute bollard figures along the boardwalk as a tourist feature, reflecting different aspects of Geelong’s history. There are over 100 of them, created in 1995 by artist Jan Mitchell, utilizing wood from an old pier.  I remember seeing them first in Barwon Heads, but they’ve obviously proliferated!

In Judge Willis’ time (i.e. 1840s) , Geelong very much rivalled Melbourne as the main city in the Port Phillip district.  It was surveyed only three weeks after Melbourne and it developed largely in tandem with it in the early years.  Its post office opened in 1840 (the second in the district); it had its own newspaper when John Fawkner, proprietor of the Port Phillip Patriot published the Geelong Advertiser under the editorship of James Harrison (the maker of the first mechanical refrigeration process to produce ice), and steamers plied the bay regularly between Geelong and Melbourne.  Many of its streets reflect the names of Port Phillip pioneers who had a presence in Geelong as well as Melbourne  (Fyans, Swanston, Lonsdale, Verner, Kilgour, McKillop…)  and there are still several large National Trust properties in the district that were built by wealthy pastoralists in the area.  Corio Villa, which is privately owned, is a beautiful cast iron prefabricated house that has a prime position overlooking the bay (you might remember that I visited the much more humble South Melbourne cast iron ones here).

The Geelong Botanic Gardens, opened just a few years after Melbourne’s were laid out by Daniel Bunce on the crest of the hill that overlooks Eastern Beach and the bay- probably a less than propitious place to establish a botanic garden.  Although quite small, they have all the formality of the Melbourne Gardens and they had- wait for it!- a pelargonium conservatory, although why pelargoniums need the protection of a conservatory is beyond me.  Apparently they were left the money to built it, as long as it was dedicated to pelargoniums (pelargonia?)

Geelong became the focal port for the pastoral industry of the western district. Huge bluestone and brick wool stores were built on the main streets and facing the wharf.  The Australian National Wool Museum is located in one of the most beautiful of them

There is a permanent display at the Wool Museum celebrating the importance of wool to Australia’s economy and national identity.  Its a very hands-on exhibition with lots of wool to squeeze, with some fascinating recreated woolsheds, shearers’ quarters and wool factory workers’ houses.  There is a temporary exhibition space as well.  And what would you find there, you may ask…… NOT DINOSAURS!

They may look like dinosaurs to those of us not blessed with a six year old, but as a tousle-headed little blonde boy announced as he ran from exhibit to exhibit roaring in dinosaur-like fashion (whatever that is), “Not a dinosaur.  Not a dinosaur”.  Instead they were creatures from the Permian era, 290 million years ago.  They were nearly all wiped out by the Permian-Triassic Extinction which wiped out 96% of all marine life, 70% of all terrestrial vertebrates and all insects. None of the creatures shown survived the extinction as such, although some variants of them were the progenitors of the next stage.  The exhibition suggested (although I think that there are other theories)  that this mass extinction was prompted by the lava flows of the Siberian Traps, one of the largest volcanic events on earth that lasted a million years and  covered over 2,000,000 square kilometres with lava.   The exhibition has been extended until 10th June.  It costs $7.50 for an adult and both the Permian exhibition and the permanent wool exhibition  (how poetic) are included in the price.

Then off to our very prosaic motel which certainly looked better on the web than it did in real life: clean, quiet but still a motel.  The next day brunch with a friend that I haven’t seen for ages, then back up the freeway for 95 km again.

So, Uncle Johnny, I did come down to Geelong, even if Kenny didn’t drive me round.

‘Sarah Thornhill’ by Kate Grenville

2012, 304 p.

An author writing a book that is part of a series has to write for two audiences.  The second and later books of a series need to stand alone for readers who are coming to it without having read the other books, and yet those who have read the other books will look for, and hopefully find, larger themes that carry across the work as a whole.

Sarah Thornhill is the final book in what is known as Grenville’s ‘Colonial’ Trilogy.  It picks up the story of William Thornhill that Kate Grenville explored in the first of the trilogy, The Secret River, published in 2005.  William Thornhill, a lighterman on the Thames had been transported to NSW in 1806 for theft, and after his sentence had  been commuted ‘took up’ land  on the Hawkesbury River, with all the consequences for the original inhabitants that such an innocuous term as ‘took up’ elides.

The second book of the trilogy, The Lieutenant  steps even further back in time to the years immediately following the First Fleet, which arrived in 1788. It is based on William Dawes, the astronomer, and his friendship with a young Aboriginal girl, Patyegarang.

This final book in the trilogy returns to the Thornhill family and is told by Sarah Thornhill, William’s youngest daughter who was born in 1816 in the colony as a ‘currency lass’.  She knows no other home

They called us the Colony of New South Wales.  I never liked that.  We wasn’t new anything.  We was ourselves. (p. 3)

This sense of this new, native-born generation of British Australians being ‘themselves’ is captured beautifully in this book.  John Molony has written about this generation in his book The Native Born (Google preview here) and in Portia Robertson’s work The Hatch and Brood of Time.

One of the real triumphs of this book is the narrative voice that Grenville has crafted in her character Sarah.  She is illiterate but quick, and her voice is ungrammatical and conversational.  It is not an act of ventriloquism like Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang, but instead she echoes the cadences and slips of the spoken conversation of an unlettered woman, talking to someone she knows well.

At heart, it is a love story.  Sarah grows up alongside and loves Jack Langland, the son of a white man and an aboriginal mother who is marginally accepted by the white settlers in the surrounding district.  But when Sarah, as a white woman, declares her love for Jack, she runs into the intolerance and cast-iron proprieties of white society and the relationship ends abruptly.  Heartbroken, she marries  the settler John Daunt as a second-best, and gradually comes to love him.  If the book does nothing else, it tells this story well.

But Grenville has another purpose in this trilogy as well.  She has clearly identified ‘reconciliation’ as one of her driving passions in her life as well as in her writing, and I think that it’s the theme that holds the three books in this trilogy together.  The first book grapples with the question of how a good man does terrible things; the second wonders whether there wasn’t another way; this third asks, what can we do if it can’t be mended.  Sarah (and Grenville’s?) answer is to tell the story; say what you know.

How will I ever find a way to tell everything that brought me here?…Of those things left undone that ought to have done, and those things done that we ought not to have done?

Rippling away into all those lives, down along the fathers and daughters and granddaughters. Generation after generation, the things joining us and the things cutting between us.  All made by something done so long ago….If there was anything I could do to mend things, I’d do them…. I’m never going to be able to tell what it was all about… I can only tell what I know. Cruelties and crimes, miseries on every side.  But of all the crimes done, the worst would be to let the story slip away.  For what it’s worth, mine had best take its place, in with all theothers (p 313, 304)

If you follow the public conversation about the nexus between Australian literature and Australian history at all, you will know of the controversy over The Secret River  between Grenville as author and the historians Inga Clendinnen and Mark McKenna.   Grenville’s take on the controversy can be found here on her own website.  She notes in the introduction that she had previously removed this response from the site, but was constantly asked for copies of it.  So, at the risk of giving oxygen to it again, she replaced it on the site.

I do not at all have a problem with authors having a larger message, a deeper purpose, or a moral, political and intellectual impetus for driving for their work. I do have a problem, though, when it warps the logic of the narrative, and I think that this happens here.  Quite simply, I found the ending of the book implausible in terms of the range of behaviours open socially to the characters in the mores of the time and  I was not convinced by the drive that impelled their action.

Nor do I completely believe Grenville’s insistence that the beat-up belongs in oblivion.  In a cheeky little ‘last word’ right at the start, she has an epigraph.

It does not follow that because a mountain appears to take on different shapes from different angles of vision, it has objectively no shape at all or an infinity of shapes.

And where does this come from?  None other than E. H. Carr’s What is History? p. 21.

Some other responses I’ve enjoyed.

Marilyn at Me, you, and books.  http://mdbrady.wordpress.com/2012/07/31/sarah-thornhill-by-kate-grenville/

Lisa at ANZLitLovers  http://anzlitlovers.com/2012/03/25/sarah-thornhill-by-kate-grenville/

Alison Ravencroft’s Meanjin article http://meanjin.com.au/articles/post/the-strangeness-of-the-dance-kate-grenville-rohan-wilson-inga-clendinnen-and-kim-scott/

My rating: 7.5 /10

Read because: it was my book group’s selection for March 2013.

Sourced from: CAE book groups