Chapter 1: What themes are explored in Keridwyn Dovey's work?
Reading Dickens in Australia, what a kangaroo hunt can tell us about how we imagine ourselves, foxes in cities and writing about working lives. Hi, welcome to the Bookshelf on ABC Radio National or wherever you get your book-filled podcasts. I'm Kate Evans on my own this week, but please don't worry, Cassie McCullough is fine and will be back next time.
This week, Keridwyn Dovey on the inner worlds of work, Tom Keneally imagines the life of the youngest son of Charles Dickens, and American writer Joan Silber's interwoven lives from Istanbul to New York and Berlin. Hello, Ken. Hi. Hi, Jo. Now, I think we should also acknowledge that these are very strange times where reading and researching might take a different form.
So I'm interested to find out what you're both reading at the moment. So, Jo, let's start with you. What do you turn to?
Well, I've actually been reading aloud to my partner who's been cutting down on his screen time. So we've been delving into a biography of Napoleon, which is, I suppose... not a bad choice in that it's quite removed in time and place from where we happen to be now.
And how are you finding it?
Oh, it's long, it's quite intriguing, but there's lots of military tactics that I have to say I don't always completely appreciate.
And which biography of Napoleon is it? Because I think there's quite a few out there.
Yes, it's Andrew Roberts and it's called Napoleon the Great.
Now, Ken, before we get to your work-based reading, what else do you read at times like this?
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Chapter 2: How does Tom Keneally portray Charles Dickens' son in his novel?
But Ken, you're also interested in what Australians used to read, particularly in the colonial period. But how well can you track reading rather than just, say, the history of publishing?
Oh, you can track reading quite well through... Library resources and academics and other folk are putting together a whole load of material that really tracks what libraries used to lend in the 19th century, so we can see what kinds of books people are borrowing.
And we also know a lot about what kinds of books were being shipped out to Australia, what kinds of books and journals as well, and magazines. And you can also tell a lot about what people are reading or were reading in the 19th century
through the Australian journals, because the Australian journals published a lot of Australian material, but they also serialized an awful lot of mostly British, but also European literature at the time, either legally or illegally. I mean, they often pirated this material. But it can also be really, really good. And you can be surprised at how interesting colonial popular fiction was.
And I don't just mean Henry Lawson's story, as good as they can be. I mean a whole load of writers that we've probably forgotten who wrote a lot of crime fiction. I mean, remember that the first crime novel, the first detective novel in the world was published in Australia or published by an Australian.
Is that The Mystery of the Hanson Camp?
No, no, way before that, back in 1853 by John Lang. It's called The Forge's Wife. It's a wonderful novel. I mean, it's a bit creaky as well, but it's a, It's a really buoyant, bouncy novel with a detective from Sydney who's a very tough guy, although he has some sort of sentimental features as well. But he's a very tough guy. He beats up a man in his cell, for example, and he's corrupt as well.
He takes money. It's very Australian. It's a very Australian account of a detective. But he's the first detective in a novel in the Anglophone world.
And that is such a long tradition of writing about corrupt cops in Australian crime fiction. But there is so much that you could study when looking at the history of colonial fiction. But in your later study, Ken, you've chosen to focus on one particular trope and how it sort of plays out in colonial fiction. And that's the kangaroo hunt. Now, why that?
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Chapter 3: What insights does Joan Silber provide about interwoven lives?
So the weeping stag, for example, in English fiction, and if you think of... Shakespeare and so on, the weeping stag is a thing. And it goes back a long way in hunting literature. Hunting literature goes back a long way. But in Australia, the weeping kangaroo is new. That image comes and goes really through the 19th century.
And until you get to Ethel Pedler's beautiful sort of children's fantasy at the end of the 19th century, Dotting the Kangaroo, people might know. And there you have a kangaroo that also weeps. And that kangaroo weeps in sympathy with a lost little girl that the kangaroo takes into her pouch and looks after. And the kangaroo also weeps because she's lost her own child. So she's been hunted.
And while she was being chased, she lifts her joey out of her pouch to lighten the load and also to try and survive. And with the intention of going back after the hunt is over, if she survives, to pick up her Joey and recover her child. But when she goes back, she can't find her Joey. Her Joey's gone and she weeps.
And there's that and so much more in this book of yours. It's called The Colonial Kangaroo Hunt. It's co-authored with Rachel Weaver and it's published by the Mygunya Press. So this is the point actually where I'd like to bring you back in, Jo Lennon, and that's on the question of using animals in fiction.
Because I've read the first four short stories out of your collection, even though it won't be out for about another month or so. And that collection is called In the Time of Foxes. But as you listen to Ken there talking about the way that animals appeared, the role of the kangaroo in colonial fiction, what were you thinking, I guess, as a writer and as a reader?
Well, hearing the discussion about the kangaroo hunt in fiction, I couldn't help but think of the famous Australian film, a couple of decades old now, I think, called Wake in Fright, which features
a kangaroo hunt towards the end, and it's this really dark, nightmarish sequence that is, I think, used there to illustrate something that's quite dark and tortured about the characters' emotional states.
So sometimes I think animals are used to tell us something about the humans that they appear alongside, and sometimes they appear on their own terms as creatures in their own right that exist in the natural world of which we are a part. And in my book, I think foxes are very urban creatures, much like humans.
And so the fox appears as a kind of spirit animal that speaks to themes of adaptation, survival and reinvention that emerge through the stories in the book.
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Chapter 4: How does Ken Gelder analyze the role of colonial kangaroo hunts in literature?
That's supposed to be where we get our foxes in Australia from. They're extremely good at adapting and extremely good at surviving. I mean, you know, the introduced species in colonial fiction can play out in all sorts of ways. I mean, the most obvious examples would be sheep and cattle. The first fleet brings over sheep and cattle and people start to farm as quickly as possible.
Cattle escape and become a bit feral for a while. Horses escape. We know about Brumbies, and so we have a lot of introduced horses in Australia that are now feral. Lots and lots of animals get introduced.
Sparrows get brought over to Australia in the 1870s, and there's a beautiful children's story by Marcus Clark, I think published in 1870 or so, about a sparrow that again escapes and has to make his own way in the world in Victoria. But sparrows get introduced in 1870 or thereabouts, Lots of other kinds of birds and, of course, fish and so on get introduced.
And in the 1860s and 1870s in the colonies in Australia, acclimatization societies get set up. And acclimatization societies are there to advise people on what species to introduce. So they give advice on what species of fish to introduce to Australian rivers and so on. And that's where we are today with a whole load of residues of introduced feral species that we can barely control.
And I suspect we could do a whole edition of the bookshelf just talking about the dog in fiction. Now, why don't we move on to your assigned reading, as we like to call it. So, Ken, we gave you Thomas Keneally's novel, The Dickens Boy, and Joe Lennon, we gave you Joan Silber's Improvement, and we might begin there.
Fox in the snow Where do you go to find something you could eat?
You're listening to The Bookshelf with me, Kate Evans, and with guests Ken Gelder and Joe Lennon. And the next book on our radio bookshelf is by American writer Joan Silber. Now, she's one of those quietly impressive novelists who's written eight books of fiction, including In My Other Life and Household Words. And she's also written a book called The Art of Time in Fiction.
And just from that title, I want to read it. But Jo, you and I have read her latest called simply Improvement. Now this book begins with a young woman named Raina. She's a single parent and her boyfriend Boyd is off in the big house. He's in Riker's prison. But what else do we need to know about her?
This novel takes us to a world that starts out being very squarely about New York and New York in the recent past. So we have a scene that takes us to Hurricane Sandy, for instance. And Raina is living in Harlem. She has a young son and she's trying to get by.
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Chapter 5: What is the significance of the kangaroo hunt in Australian colonial fiction?
The only other person who does really is Plorn's older brother, Alfred, who's already in Australia now. And it's quite successful as a squatter. Everyone in Australia seems completely forgiving of Dickens, who by the end of the novel dies. So the novel takes you to 1870 and then produces an outpouring of grief for the dead Charles Dickens.
And there's a funeral, a state funeral, I think, really, in the novel that's staged, which is pretty true. There were funerals for Dickens in Australia. That's really where the novel takes you, I think, to the end of Dickens and the assessment of Dickens' reputation. And Plawn seems to want to leave that reputation, his father's reputation, intact.
So, Ken, there are so many things about Dickens' life that are fascinating. The question of his influence internationally, but even if we're just thinking about Australia, his influence on Australian literature is also extremely interesting. But if we're just talking about this as a novel, how did it work for you?
Well, not all that well, I think. I mean, one of the problems is that Plawn himself is not a very interesting figure either. and didn't do all that well. He fell in love, and there's some of that romance in the novel. But nothing much happens. And as someone who's written on the colonial kangaroo hunt, I was really disappointed that there's no kangaroo hunting in the novel.
You occasionally see kangaroo skin, tobacco pouches, and someone is wearing a kangaroo coat and so on. But You know, there's actually not much adventure in this novel, and it's partly because Plawn is a relatively unadventurous type. So he's quite modest in his ambitions. You know, he's a bit moral. He's a little judgmental.
He's a weak figure, and he's more acted upon than acts, and so that makes him a bit passive. And, of course, he is completely... under the shadow of his father, whose novels he's never read, actually. So one of his embarrassments is that he's never read any of his novels, and all the settlers around him are quoting Dickens at him, and he doesn't really know where the quotes come from.
So he's also a bit humiliated. And I think all of that makes for a character who's not especially engaging.
I can see the appeal of using a character like this as a hook for a novel. And there were things about Keneally's descriptions that I enjoyed, like taking us into a place like Wilcannia, which in the period he's writing about is a thriving port.
Or there's another side character, a man named Squeaker, who is described, it says, he occupied his silence as other men occupied their boundary rider's hut. And I enjoyed that. But if the sort of conceit of Dickens' son had been pared back more, I think it would have been a more satisfying novel for me.
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Chapter 6: How do foxes represent urban adaptation in Jo Lennon's stories?
And there are other characters in this collection of yours who I could imagine being turned into fiction. A space archaeologist, a woman scientist. But given that here on the bookshelf we're particularly interested in the practice of reading... You have profiled people for whom the work of reading is part of what they do. What other work of reading was part of your interests?
So one of the essays is actually about two bibliotherapists who work out of the School of Life in London. They were the first people to kind of come up with the idea of They knew Alain de Botton, who started the School of Life. I think they knew him back in uni. And they came up with this idea. They had been sort of self-medicating with books their whole lives, like you and I do as well.
And they came up with this idea of actually doing reading prescriptions for people. So one-on-one counselling sessions where somebody could tell them where they were at in their life, or maybe they stuck in a reading rush and then wanting to change what they read. And then they would actually give them a prescription and they would come away with a whole new set of books to read.
They ended up coming out to the Sydney Writers Festival a few years ago and they did some beautiful sessions here, bibliotherapy sessions. How do you feel though about somebody else giving you a prescription for reading? Initially I was quite put off by it because I think I was too proud to take something like that on board.
I've always believed in sort of serendipity of how you find the next book that you read and actually Virginia Woolf was very evangelical about that. She believed that the next book was would find you rather than the other way around. But I have to say that the experience of getting their prescriptions and they sent me off to read books that I had not actually even heard of.
So it reminded me how many books there are in the world and that you sometimes do need help finding them. But then also just getting to know them and how they worked. And the bigger kind of picture behind the work that they were doing, often it was people in times of terrible grief and suffering who were coming to them.
And just through this very gentle, simple way of just guiding them to those next books that they were going to read, they were actually able to, I think, change lives in that sense. And they also only prescribe fiction. So I know, you know, you're such a great reader and lover of fiction. And for me too, it's my first love.
And I really appreciated that, that they don't prescribe, you know, self-help books or biographies or nonfiction. They actually believe that fiction and And particularly literary fiction, which makes them sound snobby, but they aren't.
They're actually basing it on research that's been found that literary fiction in terms of that empathy surge that you get as a reader, it has a much bigger impact on our brains than genre fiction or trade fiction, which isn't to say that, you know, it's better in any, you know, qualitative sense. sense. But I think the impact on our brains of language is very interesting.
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