Creative nonfiction - Ashley Hay's Gum: The Story of Eucalypts & their Champions

One of the few male participants in the AWW challenge, Mark Web, yesterday posted an interesting blog about his participation in the challenge. In his post, "In which I become less impressed with my AWWC achievements", Mark notes that, while completing the challenge and achieving his goal of reading and reviewing ten books by women, he gained the impression that he was reading a majority of women writers this year, but his actual tally for reading came out at, roughly, 50/50. His experience demonstrates just how insidious and tenacious unconscious gender bias can be.

As part of my task hosting the AWW challenge, I have approached numerous men of my acquaintance over the past six months or more, including a current editor of a kids literary magazine, a high school English teacher, an ex-book seller, the owner of a writing school, a journalist and a psychologist, a geologist and an ex-judge. Of these, only the latter two expressed any interest in reading and reviewing a book written by a woman for this blog; both, it may be significant to add, are retired and have elected to review nonfiction. The others all had good excuses, none of which, they claimed, had anything to do with gender bias. One did say, though, quite unselfconsciously, that he just wasn't that interested in books written by women.

Today's guest reviewer is author Dr John Martyn. He has elected to review Ashley Hay's 2002 nonfiction title, Gum: The Story of Eucalypts and Their Champions (Duffy & Snellgrove, 2002).

Martyn writes:
 
This highly readable book ought to become a classic. While its core theme is the eucalyptus tree in all its diverse forms, more-especially it's about the people who explored, studied, named, championed, painted and caricatured Eucalyptus and its sister genera, and it even extends to those who propagated and sold the trees in Australia and spread them around the globe. It covers a large spread of Australia's post-colonial history from an intriguing and novel angle.

For example, one chapter follows the life of Ferdinand Von Mueller (or "Baron Blue Gum" as he was known) the young German pharmacist and amateur botanist who became a champion of the eucalyptus tree. He established the National Herbarium of Victoria and in 1857 became the first director of Melbourne's Royal Botanic Gardens. The book also cameos the amazing journeys of Major Thomas Mitchell who accurately surveyed vast tracts of a eucalypt-mantled landscape through which there were almost no roads (and certainly no maps, mobile phones or GPS's to navigate by!). And in which it was often impossible to see the next-nearest hill or ridge-line through a never-ending frieze of forest trees.

These people, and others of their eras, worked amongst a flora that was largely alien to them, across a landscape that was virtually unknown to westerners, whilst also trying to sustain their family relationships at home during long absences in the bush. So as well as covering the establishment of the systematics of a vast and complex flora, the author highlights the ups and downs of their family lives, their interpersonal relationships, their personality quirks and also their inevitable struggles with the bureaucracies and politicians of their day.

The author also reaches into the artistic realm of the eucalypt, which was the subject of many of the magical paintings of artists like Hans Heysen and also the evocative cartoon drawings of May Gibb. Train driver and passionate eucalypt lover Stan Kelly faithfully recorded more than 600 species as watercolours, which have been published in two volumes; he desperately wanted to paint them all except that the botanists were working faster than he was in describing and defining new species, and he had to admit defeat. And the research on this beautiful and sometimes bizarre tree continues – there are decades, probably centuries of study still to be done but, in the meantime, please read this book!

Dr John Martyn was born in Cornwall and came to Australia in 1970 after mapping in the Rift Valley of Kenya for his PhD in geology. Although he has lived in Sydney since 1979, much of his fieldwork as a minerals exploration geologist over the last 30 years has been in Western Australia. He is the author of a number of nonfiction titles, including Field Guide to the Bushland of the Lane Cove Valley and Sydney's Natural World. 

Note: Ashely Hay's 2010 novel, The Body in the Clouds (Allen & Unwin 2010) has been received to great acclaim.

• Longlisted for the 2012 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
• Nominated for the 2011 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for best first novel in the south-east Asia and Pacific Region
• Nominated for the UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing in the 2011 NSW Premier's Literary Awards and 
• Shortlisted for the Fiction category of the 2010 Western Australian Premier's Book Awards.

Hay is also the author of a number of nonfiction titles, including The Secret: The Strange Marriage of Annabelle Milbanke & Lord Byron (2000), Herbarium (2004), and Museum: The Macleays, Their Collections, and the Search for Order (2007).

The Golden Stair: Kate Forsyth's Bitter Greens: review by Margo Lanagan

Kate Forsyth is a novelist and poet best known for her award-winning Young Adult Fantasy series. April sees the launch of her book for adults, Bitter Greens, here reviewed by author Margo Lanagan.

Margo Lanagan writes:

The year before last, I wrote a Rapunzel story. It began with the prince arriving at Rapunzel's tower to find her severed plait of golden hair tumbled in a pile on the grass. As he mourned over it, the witch rode up. She captured him, took him to her castle and imprisoned him in a dungeon. There, the single strand of hair that he had souvenired sprang to life, insinuated itself into the padlock and released him, and led him through the castle to rescue Rapunzel from her prison room.

KateForsyth has found a stash somewhere of just such live, enterprising threads. Her new book for adult readers, Bitter Greens, is a turf-to-tower-window braid of live, red-gold hair. It's a big, glorious read, full of love, lust, pain, politics, blood red and blue, and some of the best frocks and the worst fleas ever.

Forsyth binds three main strands into this glowing cable. First, via the life of Charlotte-Rose de Caumont de la Force, who published 'Persinette' in her Les Contes des Contes in 1698, she leads us into the staggeringly ornate, crowded, venal, powdered-and-patched court of Louis XIV. Through Charlotte's eyes we witness the scandal, the witch-hunting (literal and figurative), the favour-mongering and the grinding of the intricate machine of court etiquette—all revolving around the spoilt, unsmiling King whose attention, like a toddler's, must be caught in just the right way if the sun is to shine in Versailles. All this determinedly superficial making and breaking of livelihoods and reputations finally gives way in the dead-serious matter of the persecution of the Huguenots, which forces the Protestant Charlotte-Rose to choose between exile and banishment to a convent. 

The second strand of the story is the Rapunzel tale itself. Forsyth takes this up just as Charlotte-Rose did at the Abbey of Gercy-en-Brie, amplifies and vivifies it, anchors it firmly in late-Renaissance Italy and winds it through the Charlotte-Rose story. "No one can tell a story without transforming it in some way," says Charlotte towards the end of the book, and this is a fairytale retelling that grows layer on layer, allowing us to glimpse a whole society from Medici to mendicant even as we revel in the magic at work upon, and within, the poor imprisoned mask-maker's daughter Margherita.

***

Margo Lanagan is an internationally acclaimed writer of novels and short stories (her list of prizes can be found here). She lives in Sydney. Her most release is Sea Hearts. She maintains a blog and can be found on Twitter as @margolanagan.

Beautifully written and astounding: AWW Short Stories via Paddy O'Reilly.

Short stories are perfect for the age of short attention spans, according to some. But not according to P.A. O'Reilly. O'Reilly, whose novel The Fine Colour of Rust was released on March 1, finds short story collections by Australian women both "beautifully written" and "astounding." She provided AWW with her "starter list".

O'Reilly writes:

The idea of the Australian Women Writers 2012 Challenge is brilliant – not only bringing into focus the gender imbalance in coverage of books, but actually doing something about it. And the reviews are evidence that readers are thrilled to be discovering new books and authors. Now I hope you’ll allow me to add another flavour to the challenge: short stories.

I’ve read plenty of comments about short stories being perfect for the contemporary world because, well, they’re short. Short attention span of the digital age, people having less free time, perfect length to read in a commuter ride and so on and so forth.

I think that’s rubbish. The less free time idea seems to presume that most people in ye olde reading days used to sit down for a ten or twenty (or, in the case of some doorstoppers, fifty) hour stretch to read. I imagine the butler brought meals and visitors were turned away at the door, ‘I’m sorry, but madam cannot be disturbed - she is Reading a Novel.’ The majority of readers have always picked up a book when they had a couple of free hours or at bedtime or on that commuter ride, and read a chapter or two.

And the short attention span? Tell that to someone who spends three solid hours struggling with a  computer that’s eaten a document or minuting a meeting at work or looking after a two-year-old.

So here’s my proposition. Don’t try reading reading short stories because they fit into a busy lifestyle or you catch the tram to work or you can only concentrate for twenty minutes (!). Try reading short stories because beautifully written ones are astounding. A short story is designed to be read in a sitting and I urge you to get up after that reading and leave the story inside you to do its work. When you read a collection of stories, try to resist the urge to read one straight after another. Think of how you feel after gorging on a whole box of chocolates.

You may think you don’t like short stories much, but chances are you still remember a few. Man turns into a bug, village has a lottery, something about an overcoat. Yet it’s not the plot that makes a short story memorable. A short story works in a different way. It travels through you, into your hidden places. There is a single essence to a short story but it flavours everything you know. A short story has what in cooking we call umami. And in a short story, the extraordinary power of words is there, pulsing in front of you, each word essential, each word working with all its possibilities.

Try reading some short stories by Australian women. You probably know the names of our world famous short story writers Cate Kennedy and Margo Lanagan. If you haven’t yet, read them. But in recent years there have also been quite a few collections by other women writers published in Australia. Here’s a starter list of contemporary Australian women short story authors who’ve published recently - so many straight off the top of my head that I had to sort them alphabetically. I think you’ll love them.

• Julie Chevalier - Permission to Lie
• Amanda Curtin - Inherited
• Irma Gold - Two Steps Forward
• Catherine Harris - Like Being a Wife
• Karen Hitchcock - Little White Slips
• Tiggy Johnson - Svetlana or Otherwise
  Jennifer Mills - The Rest is Weight (forthcoming) 
• Josephine Rowe - How a Moth Becomes a Boat 
• Gretchen Schirm - Having Cried Wolf
• Leah Swann - Bearings 
• Tara June Winch - Swallow The Air

No doubt I’ve left out many wonderful writers, so please add o the list in the comments section. Also, I’m woefully uninformed about speculative fiction, horror and SF collections - do give us some recommendations.

Paddy O′Reilly is from Melbourne. Her work has been published and broadcast widely both in Australia and internationally. Her short story collection THE END OF THE WORLD garnered much review coverage in Australia and was shortlisted for several awards. Her debut novel, THE FACTORY, was broadcast in fifteen episodes as the ABC Radio National Book Reading in 2009. She has also written screenplays. Paddy has spent several years living in Japan, working as a copywriter and translator.

 

Paddy's new book The Fine Colour of Rust is currently on sale as an ebook via the following bookstores participating in the challenge (careful of the price differences).

ReadCloud bookshops participating in the AWW challenge include:

Australian Online Bookshop
Shearers Bookshop, Leichhardt, NSW
Pages and Pages Booksellers, Mosman, NSW.
The Book Shuttle
Better Read Than Dead Newtown, NSW

Booki.sh shops participating in the challenge include:
Avid Reader, Brisbane
Readings

If you are an Aussie bookshop participating in the challenge and you're not represented here, please let AWW know.

 Do you know any other recent outstanding collections of short stories by Australian women that could be included here?

"Unexpectedly hopeful and funny": Jaye Ford reviews Nicola Moriarty's Free Falling

Jaye Ford is an internationally published Australian author of suspense novels. Her first novel, Beyond Fear, was the highest selling debut crime novel in Australia last year. It also sold in Europe and will be translated into six languages this year. Her second novel, Scared Yet, is released today (March 1, 2012).

For the Australian Women Writers Challenge, Jaye has chosen to review Nicola Moriarty's Free Falling. It was a novel that touched her deeply, for reasons she explains.

Jaye writes:

In Nicola Moriarty’s Free Falling, Belinda is on a downward spiral as she struggles to cope with the sudden death of her fiancé, Andy. Her almost mother-in-law Evelyn is on her own difficult journey but actually free-falling – from planes. For a story about grief and closure and finding yourself after the pain of loss, it is unexpectedly hopeful and funny.

I write thrillers and for several years, haven’t dipped into much beyond the crime genre. But that’s not the reason why, after only a couple of pages, I wasn’t sure I could write an objective review of this book.

I lost my father last year and, strangely, I have a friend called Belinda who lost her husband of less-than-a-year while she was pregnant with their first child, as Moriarty’s Belinda discovers of herself. For me, this story was difficult to read, both for the reminder of my own and my friend’s loss and for the light touch on such painful subject. Also, because it brought me to tears several times while I was on a long-haul international flight.

As I read Belinda’s point-of-view, I kept wanting to get her some help and find her better friends. While Evelyn was written as hard and unforgiving, I empathised with her need to deal with the loss of her son in her own way.

That’s not to say Moriarty hasn’t done a terrific job, demonstrating she has her own fair share of her family’s genes – her sisters Liane and Jaclyn are bestselling authors. In Free Falling, Belinda and Evelyn are believable and sympathetic in their sorrow. In telling their stories, they both skirt around the intense pain of Andy’s loss – Belinda trying to avoid the truth of her future and Evelyn attempting to ignore her past. And don’t we all do that?

There is also humour – nutty moments that work amidst the sadness. Just like real life. The ending is sweet and hopeful - and although at the start, I thought it wasn’t a book for someone who was grieving, I’m not sure something sweet and hopeful would be so bad.

Jaye is a former journalist and public relations consultant, who now writes full-time. Her website:

www.jayefordauthor.com

To win one of 20 Jaye Ford book packs, see Random House's promotion (competition closes 02/02/12). 


Print copy available from AWW supporters:
Pages and Pages Booksellers, Mosman NSW
Better Read Than Dead, Newtown, NSW
Abbey's Bookshop, Sydney
Umina Book Bazaar
The Book Shuttle

Ebook available from AWW supporters
Avid Reader, West End, Brisbane, QLD
Readings, Vic
Fullers, Leichardt, NSW
Australian Online Bookshop. 

If you are an Aussie Bookshop who has been actively supporting the AWW challenge and you're not represented here, please let AWW know by leaving a comment.