Helen Garner’s ‘Yellow Notebook’

Reading Yellow Notebook, the first volume of Helen Garner’s diaries, is a richly rewarding experience. I find myself constantly looking up or turning away from the brief vignettes and shorter reflections; looking up because I feel that she has illuminated something about how it feels to be alive in the world simply by recounting her own lived experience, her unvarnished observations; turning away because I want to wince in pain at the pain that she is describing. Garner is in her early forties during the mid-1980s, she is a published author and known public figure both in Melbourne and in the Australian literary scene. However, she is racked by feelings of self-doubt and inadequacy. Self-proclaimed intellectuals and ideologues not only make her feel uncomfortable, they make her feel sometimes angry, often inadequate.

Some of the most powerful entries in Yellow Notebook revolve around the theme of domesticity. Critics have long decried or even dismissed her work as overly domestic and, therefore, trivial but no one is as critical of this as she herself is. What has come to be recognised as one of the strengths of her fiction was, she felt and was often criticised for, then seen as its main weakness.

The domestic sphere of this first volume of the diaries is dominated by the collapse of Garner’s second marriage to F. Her reflections about the shared space of a family home, however, are dominated by another aspect of this theme: housework. How is it possible for a woman who is a wife and a mother to immerse herself in the creative life of an artist when she is also the one solely responsible for the cooking and the cleaning, the managing and the maintenance? Indeed, Garner’s portrayal of the inequality inherent in her otherwise passionate and romantic marriage is shocking. How did men, let alone a relatively youngish man in the 1980s, ever think they could get away with it?

Garner’s anger and frustration, her conflicting scepticism and romanticism, have turned my mind to an old theme of its own. I don’t think that the feminist gender lens is the only lens that this question of the relationship between domesticity and art can be seen through. After all, now that we are all sharing the housework in our relatively egalitarian bourgeois family homes, aren’t we all just equally unhappy? Coming back to Garner’s frustration as a writer, what I think I want to say is that I have always understood that marriage and family life are incompatible with a writer’s life. The structures, expectations, compromises – frankly, the burdens – are antithetical to the needs and interests of a creative artist regardless of their gender or sexual orientation. Notions of sharing and togetherness threaten to extinguish rather than nourish the individual identity without which being an artist would be meaningless.

How can I say this as a married man and father who has always aspired to be a published author? Isn’t it hypocritical and self-serving? Am I not just speaking from a position of male privilege and entitlement? Well, no, I don’t think so, so at least I am going to try to explain myself. When I first met E, I knew that I wanted to marry her and become a father figure to her two children. Indeed, as soon as the opportunity presented itself, I set about and was eventually successful in becoming their adoptive father. Few things in life have given me greater pleasure than the two of them choosing to call me ‘dad’. E and I both knew that we wanted to have a third child together and we were able to do so. L is now eighteen years old and studying at university.

How does all of this match up, Garner’s frustration, my qualms, and the choices that I made? I cannot say it any more simply than this: I knew that the choices I was making were incompatible with my life as an artist. I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to write either my masterpiece or my minor-piece. If my contribution to the financial security of the household constructed between E and I had relied on what I earned from my writing, the children would have gone without and E would have realised sooner or later that she would be at least a little bit better off supporting three people rather than four, because the other thing I haven’t mentioned is work. I knew that the choices I was making to marry E, adopt her two children and father a third would mean that I would have to continue working full time as a teacher and that there would be no prospect of retirement before the age of sixty-five. Unless, of course, we opted for some alternative kind of off-the-grid communal lifestyle from which the children would probably have emerged as reactionary right-wingers and which E and I were not temperamentally suited to anyhow. So, no, we opted for the bourgeois nightmare of the steady soul-destroying jobs and stable incomes because we wanted to raise our children as well as we could in the world as it presented itself to us.

So, why did I make those choices to marry E and have children? Because I loved her and I wanted us to have a family together. I didn’t choose this because I didn’t want to write. I chose this because I wanted to be a father and I chose it in the full knowledge that it would prevent me from living the autonomous creative life of an artist. By the by, the contemporary world is littered with the stories of families and children’s lives shattered by their parents – usually their fathers – who pursued their literary and artistic ambitions at their expense. However, I am even prepared to go so far as this: despite the terrible history of the behaviour of married men, I am still glad that Capital and The Communist Manifesto, that War and Peace and Anna Karenina, that Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, that The Rainbow and Woman in Love exist in the world as I have found it for me to read them. And I know that Helen Garner is too. I am no less pleased and grateful that she has made the courageous decision to publish her diaries.

The Map’s Folded Away; Farewell Robert Adamson

by Adrian D’Ambra

Robert Adamson – “But since this news that I’ve got four months to live, I just said, that’s interesting. I can have a great four months. I can get my last book finished and be with Spin (a rescued bowerbird, “my soul’s friend”) and Juno and on the river. I was more worried about Juno than dying.”

“I have no one to blame. If this cancer (liver) came from the time I was drinking too much, that’s what happens. If it came from when I was taking drugs, or if I just wore myself out, it’s no one’s fault.  The doctors did their best. It’s God and nature – that fits in with Spinoza.”

“A couple of times I nearly died. I was always worried about things I hadn’t done. But now I can see even if I lived another 20 years, there’s not a huge lot more.”

On Mondrian’s “search for order… he kept refining it and making it purer and clearer. That’s what I tried to do in my poetry, hone it back and back and back, just the essence.”

– from his final interview with Susan Wyndham. Robert Adamson spent almost all of his life – the best of it – living on the banks of the Hawkesbury River. Survived by Juno Gemes, he died on 16 December 2022.

A Bend in the Euphrateshttps://soundcloud.com/bloodaxe-books/adamson-euphrates

Scary Monsters Come to Life; Michelle de Kretser’s double-hander

by Adrian D’Ambra

Michelle de Kretser’s double-handed novel, Scary Monsters, occupies or emanates from so many different binary contexts: leftist progressivism and rightist authoritarianism; the remembered and therefore reconstructed twentieth century and the imagined and therefore speculative twenty-first century; a female narrator breaking down taboos about women’s sexuality and menstruation and a conformist male narrator who is so complicit in the authoritarian social and political structures of Australia in the near future that he rationalises his own self-interest as social conscience; whiteness and skin colour; expatriate travel and immigration; inclusivity and assimilation; old world Europe and new world Australia; colonial domination and postcolonial hybridity.

A context that interests me greatly is the way in which the novel fits itself into the as yet incomplete and unresolved twentieth century civil war between socialism and fascism. Lili’s story, for example, concludes with the 1981 celebration of the election victory of socialist candidate for the French presidency, Francois Mitterrand. Hands, arms and voices are linked in solidarity in the cobblestoned streets of Montpellier as comrades and sympathisers spontaneously break into renditions of ‘L’Internationale’. Bodies are embraced and entwined in an erotic corollary in Lili’s tiny bedsit. Apart from the shadow of the psycho killer and his ghostly white female accomplice in a van, Lili’s narrative concludes on this unashamedly nostalgic and emotionally charged evocation of the victory of progress and reason over tyranny and racism. It is as if the ghosts of the Resistance fighters who had been tortured and executed by the Nazis have finally been laid to rest and a new world of democratic socialism can arise from the defeat of the old.

That was what the world looked like when I was twenty-two. We chanted, ‘They shall not pass!’ and believed that the monsters had been put to rout. All around me, people were striking matches and flicking on lighters that they raised high, hundreds of dithering little flames. ‘L’Internationale’ started up. Lucio sang in Italian, grandly off key. In the distance, tiny lights pinpricked a massive façade – the prisoners in Le Château were holding up matches at their windows. When I saw all those shaky lights answering one another across the dark, I thought of an orchard breathed into new life by white blossom.

Meanwhile and simultaneously, Lyle’s story gullibly outlines the development of an increasingly dictatorial and intolerant system of post-truth, post-trumpian governance in Australia. The religion of Islam has been outlawed and Muslims have been forcefully converted to Christianity, their obligatory attendance at Sunday church monitored via a compulsory app. Voluntary euthanasia is being transformed into a compulsory culling of the over seventy-fives as a means of addressing the housing shortage and promoting the intergenerational transfer of wealth and opportunity. Significant portions of Sydney have been abandoned to environmental collapse, vast swathes of the countryside have become Permanent Fire Zones and Melbourne is almost permanently blanketed in smoke, ash and cinders but it is illegal to discuss the PFZs or to criticise the federal government’s ‘no-climate policy’. Anyone convicted of a criminal offence can be ‘repatriated’ to the country of their birth or their parents’ or grandparents’ countries of birth, thus securing the compliance of the overwhelming majority of the Australian population. Migrants are not only expected to adopt Australian norms and mores such as our obsessions with real estate and consumerism and our valorisation of aspirational greed in every aspect of our lives from education and social mobility to workplace ruthlessness and individual self-improvement, they are also required to abandon their languages, beliefs and cultural practices.

Immigration breaks people. We try to reconstitute ourselves in our new countries, but pieces of us have disappeared. Immigrants are people with missing pieces.

The light-hearted humour of de Kretser’s social satire of academic and literary life in Australia in The Life to Come (2017) has been eclipsed by the darker political satire of Scary Monsters. In terms of that unfinished twentieth century civil war between socialism and fascism that I mentioned earlier, it seems to me that de Kretser has done more than roll the dice in a piece of speculative fiction. Like the aging mother, Ivy, who is being sacrificed to her son and her daughter-in-law’s greed so that they can secure their ‘forever home’ and climb the corporate and social ladders, de Kretser has read the cards and seen who is winning and just where we might be heading in this country. The monsters have not been put to rout. They’ve been working in classrooms, government departments and corporate boardrooms across the land. They’ve been in public service and private practice, administering and abiding by fully legal regulations. They’ve been turning back boats and incarcerating refugees, filibustering any progress on climate change and human rights. And, most importantly, they’ve been collecting and analysing the data on every single aspect of our lives as well as addicting us to the uses and abuses of that data.

Postscript 2024: A companion novel? Hanya Yanagihara’s post-pandemic speculative fiction To Paradise.

The Living Sea of Waking Dreams; Them us were we you?

by Adrian D’Ambra

“She had grown up, she realised too late, in the autumn of things, an extraordinary world – its ancient rainforests, its wild rivers, its beaches and oceans, its birds and animals and fish, all were to her a path to freedom and transcendence, and none – she only now saw – were but a transitory wonder so soon to vanish until all that remained for a short time longer were human beings. But just for a short time. They could not survive alone, outside of the wonder – what could? – and so that time too would end.”

Richard Flanagan’s extinction novel, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, digs deeply into the history of his own writing, reaching back through the briefly retold story of the abducted Tasmanian Aboriginal girl Mathinna in Wanting (2008) to his first novel from 1994, Death of a River Guide. Whilst that first novel revolves around one death and a multitude of life, for this most recent piece of incendiary storytelling Flanagan has flipped the coin to focus our attention on the story of one life, Francie’s, and a multitude of death: vanishing, extinction, the depletion, exhaustion and destruction of life on planet Earth. The long, sad, final story of Francie’s life is that of her children’s refusal to let her die, their lives and stories told only in relation to their weakness and selfishness as they refuse to respect her wishes or autonomy in preference for their own.

“The more she thought about it the more she wondered if maybe that’s what humans can’t do. Live with beauty. That it’s beauty they can’t bear. That what was really vanishing wasn’t all the birds and fish and animals and plants, but love. Perhaps that’s what she was trying to stop vanishing before it was too late. Sometimes she felt love had dried up like a riverbed in drought.”

Meanwhile the threat of catastrophic species depletion is all around them and everyone they interact with but invisible in terms of their engagement or concern, despite the massive blanket of bushfire smoke from the burning continent that is suffocating every state and capital city on the east coast of Australia. And in their torpor human beings begin to disappear themselves, not yet burning, starving, drowning, swept away as a species but piece by piece, digit by digit, limb by limb, sense by sense, as they exchange their consciousness and consciences for perpetual immersion in the online world, nature and reality for artifice and delusion. Bleak is the vision. Profound the loss. Uncomprehending the anger.

“She had learnt that people were remarkably unobservant, thinking they were seeing the same person when that person was vanishing before them. Bit by bit they dissolved and yet no one seemed to notice. The more things changed the harder people stared into their screens, living elsewhere, the real world now no more than the simulacrum of the screen world, their real lives the shadow of their online lives. The more people vanished the more they asserted themselves online as if in some grotesque equation or transfer. Meme artist, influencer, blogger, online memoirist. She wondered if the more they were there the less they were here? Did she know?”

Flanagan takes the modernist-post-modernist tropes of the inadequacy and impossibility of language, strips them of their theoretical baggage and redeploys them to question why it is that we have failed utterly to communicate with each other about that which is most obvious, most pressing and most important: our relationship with the planet, our unsustainable depletion of the resources we consume to maintain the unrewarding lifestyles to which we aspire and the climatic and environmental catastrophe in which we are apparently now inextricably embedded. Again, stripped of its literary conceits, the failure of language is writ small at the quotidian human scale in the refusal of Francie’s children to let her go, to let her escape the hideous death-in-life to which they have condemned her. And. Alongside this, of course, are the major failures, our inability and unwillingness to see, to speak, to demand or initiate the changes in priorities, policy and behaviour that we know are essential to secure the viability of humanity and the planet.

“Were words? As Francie pointed.

“Well: were they what?

“As if they too were already then falling apart, so much ash and soot soon to fall, so much smoke to suck down. As if all that can be said is we say you or if that then. Them us were we you?”

Athena’s little owl drops two liquid notes… Paul Genoni and Tanya Dalziell’s ‘Half the Perfect World’

by Adrian D’Ambra

Something greatly to be hoped is that the 2018 publication of Paul Genoni and Tanya Dalziell’s ‘Half the Perfect World’ by Monash University Publishing might lead to the reissue of Charmian Clift’s island memoirs ‘Mermaid Singing’ and ‘Peel Me a Lotus’. Some thirty years ago I bought a copy of ‘Peel Me a Lotus’ along with the Meredith Trilogy by George Johnston, all four volumes published in Australia then by Flamingo/Fontana. I suppose I bought them because I had read the first of the Meredith volumes, ‘My Brother Jack’ fifteen years earlier at school but not only did I not re-read it, neither did I read ‘Clean Straw for Nothing’, ‘A Cartload of Clay’ or ‘Peel Me a Lotus’. ‘Half the Perfect World’ has prompted me to rectify this shortcoming. Whilst Johnston’s coming of age narrative about David Meredith may have appealed to earlier generations of serious readers on the basis of its literary earnestness, having just read ‘Peel Me a Lotus’ for the first time I can tell you that the lightness of touch and deftness of descriptive atmosphere of Clift’s memoir of their first year on Hydra have weathered the decades since the late-1950s very well indeed. Her ability to characterise without caricature sets her apart from both Johnston and Durrell.

Go to ‘Hydra’

Go to ‘Writers, Dreamers and Drifters’

Writers, Dreamers and Drifters

The Tender Skin, an Island Idyll, Hydra circa 1960

for CC, GJ and LC

the idyll calls out to you

alone, at last, again

with images of sun-burned stone

and burning sun

an atmosphere devoid of air, the

silent hammer of the sound

as blue on blue together slam, welded shut

in the heat of an iron horizon

the idyll returns to you in images of a sea world

afloat upon the sea

island, mountain, shoreline, bay, the

steep descent, the half-moon, horseshoe

curve, an agony of blinding summer heat

tubercular winter solstice waiting

calling out to you, returning, waiting

an early suicide, an untimely death, the late poems

remembering an early cubist conundrum, the

blue-faced guitarist with his broken yellow box, the

ancient pine, the anvil of the sun on stone

or the moon above the envelope and thumb, the

monastery wading, shimmering between the highest point of land, the

lowest point of night and sky

and still the memory lingers like an artwork

suspended in the void of space above the sea

it speaks of languages, expatriation, anonymity and

infidelity, its humiliations blooming as

regret and reminiscence collect, collide

and we find ourselves washed up

again, alone, at last, always

on the shoreline we deserve

drowned, drunk or simply down at heel

but then, then, the younger men and women that you were

decamped, decoupled and recombined in misbegotten masks

ancient caricatures of laughter and despair

your bodies’ essences exhausted, squeezed out

like bitter lemons, olive oil or vinegar

upon an ever-opening eye-shaped scar, the

wounded flesh, the wounded women and men

that you were, cutting freshly at

the tender skin

by Adrian D’Ambra

Go to ‘Hydra’

Go to Paul Genoni and Tanya Dalziell’s ‘Half the Perfect World’

Go to ‘the columned bronze, the missing lighthouse’

Go to ‘Poetry from ancient places’

This Angel Feeling: Tim Winton’s ‘The Shepherd’s Hut’

Arthur Boyd, Wedding Group, 1957-58

This is a hard read in a powerful yet forbidding narrative voice. I found the words and stories so confronting that I retreated from them into visual imagery of the landscape and characters. The extreme writing and strained voice of this novel contains the allegorical suggestiveness of visual art, most suggestively for me of Arthur Boyd’s images of The Bride Series of 1957 and 1958. What happens at the shepherd’s hut in Winton’s novel is an allegory of the historical Christian crucifixion and the ongoing search for redemption told in the extreme vernacular of a brutalised and uneducated Australian boy who oscillates between playing the roles of Judas and Jesus, ministering angel and harbinger of death. The words in Winton’s novel are a battering ram of human indignity, brutality and suffering that speak to us of the violence of patriarchy and the ignorance of Australian masculinity, alongside a spiritual investigation of suffering and surrender worthy of Patrick White, the weight of unbearable truth and metaphysical anguish.

Arthur Boyd, Persecuted Lovers, 1957-58

by Adrian D’Ambra

The Salmon and The Grizzly

by Adrian D’Ambra

“It is during this middle part of the season that a fable like one of Aesop’s appears in Bevo’s pre-match notes four weeks in a row. It is titled The Salmon and The Grizzly. Come the spawning season, the Salmon must not only swim up-river against the current, it must also get past the Grizzly that waits at the rapids to catch the Salmon as it leaps in the air. The Grizzly, who has paws as sharp as steak knives and slavering jaws, represents our deepest and wildest fears. For the Salmon to spawn, to create its own history, it has no choice – sooner or later, it has to leap past the Grizzly.”

– Martin Flanagan, A Wink from the Universe, (Viking, 2018), p. 151

A Brave and Beautiful Book; ‘The Green Bell’, a memoir by Paula Keogh

by Adrian D’Ambra

The words in this title – a brave and beautiful book – are the commendation from Rodney Hall for Paula Keogh’s memoir of love, madness and poetry, The Green Bell, which was published in Australia by Affirm Press in 2017. Keogh reconstructs a profoundly difficult period of her life when, as a young student, she suffers a mental breakdown and admits herself as a voluntary patient to M-Ward in the Canberra Hospital where she is subjected to electroconvulsive therapy – shock treatment – but where she also meets and falls in love with the poet Michael Dransfield, who is being treated for drug addiction. It is September/October 1972. Michael will be dead the following April.

In retrospect from the distance of more than four decades, Keogh writes with compelling lucidity about the experience of losing one’s sanity, as captured in these two quotations:

‘This is my madness, and I can’t tell it as it is. Madness is anti-story, anti-chronology, anti-plot, anti-character. It breaks language. It throws mud in the face. It makes story impossible. The minds within the mind won’t let me be. [. . .] In the eye of the storm of madness there’s a kernel of sanity that’s so clear and so true, you think you’re in the presence of Truth distilled and laid bare.’ – The Green Bell, (Affirm Press 2017), pp. 55, 64

She introduces her memoir by quoting in full the third part of Dransfield’s poem Geography:

in the forest, in unexplored
valleys of the sky, are chapels of pure
vision. there even the desolation of space cannot
sorrow you or imprison. i dream of the lucidity of the vacuum,
orders of saints consisting of parts of a rainbow,
identities of wild things / of
what the stars are saying to each other, up there
above the concrete and minimal existences, above
idols and wars and caring. tomorrow
we shall go there, you and your music and the
wind and i, leaving from very strange
stations of the cross, leaving from
high windows and from release,
from clearings
in the forest, the uncharted
uplands of the spirit

Dransfield is remembered by his biographer Patricia Dobrez (Michael Dransfield’s Lives: a sixties biography, Melbourne University Press, 1999) in the Australian Dictionary of Biography in the following entry:

Michael John Pender Dransfield (1948-1973), poet, was born on 12 September 1948 at Camperdown, Sydney, second child of native-born parents John Francis Dransfield, clerk, and his wife Elspeth Gladys, née Pender. Michael was educated at Brighton-le-Sands Public and Sydney Grammar schools. After ‘dropping out’ of the universities of New South Wales and Sydney, he worked intermittently on newspapers and as a government clerk.

For Dransfield, 1968 was a significant year, marked by an addiction to morphine, the severance of his relationship with Kathy Rees (to whom many of the early poems were dedicated) and the challenge of being balloted for national service. A protester against Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War, he was eventually excused from service, possibly for health reasons. While living at Casino he wrote of his preoccupations: love, pain, addiction and an inhospitable society; a major poetic symbol was the decaying country house, Courland Penders, into which he built his nostalgia for an older civilization. His work was accepted by Rodney Hall, poetry editor of the Australian.

Next year Dransfield grew his hair longer, joined Sydney’s counter-culture and, until early 1972, lived with the Sydney artist Hilary Burns. He was of tall and slender build, with stooping shoulders. Hall discerned that ‘there was a grace about him’, and was struck by his charm, generosity and talent for friendship. At intervals, when either hitchhiking or riding his motorcycle, Dransfield established ‘a circuit of friends from Melbourne to Brisbane’.

Celebrated by the editor Thomas Shapcott as being ‘terrifyingly close to genius’, Dransfield joined such members of the ‘Generation of ’68’ as Robert Adamson, John Tranter and Nigel Roberts in a rebellion against older, conservative poets, like James McAuley and A. D. Hope. His work appeared in Meanjin Quarterly, Southerly, Poetry Australia, Poetry Magazine (New Poetry from 1971) and ephemeral magazines. University of Queensland Press was to publish all Dransfield’s books: the first, Streets of the Long Voyage (1970), won a University of Newcastle award; it was followed in 1972 by The Inspector of Tides, and by Drug Poems which explored states of mind through drug consciousness and served his aim of social protest.

In the ‘Nimbin spirit’, Dransfield quitted the city and moved with Hilary to Cobargo where he began to circulate the manuscript of Memoirs of a Velvet Urinal (published posthumously, 1975). He suffered a motorcycle accident in April 1972. In October he received a $2500 grant from the Commonwealth Literary Fund to work on a book of prose. After many desperate months in and out of Canberra Community Hospital, trying to shed his addiction to heroin, he returned to Sydney. Dransfield died in a coma on 20 April 1973 in the Mater Misericordiae Hospital, North Sydney, and was cremated with Presbyterian forms. The coroner found that his death followed a self-administered injection of an unknown substance. During the last months of his life Dransfield had met (in Canberra hospital) a soul mate Paula Keogh and experienced a last rush of creative energy which resulted in The Second Month of Spring (1980). The manuscript was edited by Hall who also brought out selections of Dransfield’s unpublished work, Voyage into Solitude (1978) and Michael Dransfield (1987).

Keogh’s memoir, The Green Bell, deserves to be widely-distributed and well-read. I have also been disappointed to learn that there is no current edition of Dransfield’s poetry in print; neither Rodney Hall’s Collected Poems (University of Queensland Press, 1987) or John Kinsella’s selected edition, Michael Dransfield A Retrospective (University of Queensland Press, 2002). Surely this needs to be rectified.

Guardian Angels; Heather Rose’s ‘The Museum of Modern Love’ and Marina Abramović’s ‘The Artist is Present’

A beautiful leitmotif running through Heather Rose’s impressive 2016 novel, The Museum of Modern Love, is the imagery of the guardian angels overlooking artists and other creative people. Readers enjoying this aspect of the novel might also appreciate Wim Wenders’ haunting and haunted 1987 film Der Himmel Über Berlin, known in English as Wings of Desire. Such a beautiful film, so sensual and emotive, yet deeply rooted in the physical reality of the historical world.

I read the closing chapters of The Museum of Modern Love yesterday. Rose takes the reader to the seventy-fifth and final day of Marina Abramović’s performance piece, The Artist is Present, from the New York Museum of Modern Art in 2010. Rose has transformed this gruelling three-month endurance of the artist into a very moving and complex thread in Australian literature. Her commitment to truth in art is evident throughout the novel in her understanding and description of Abramović’s achievement and her allusion to Tolstoy in the naming of her central fictional character: Levin. A very fine read indeed.

by Adrian D’Ambra

Go to ‘those who seek a home…’