Poor Fellow, My Language: What Language Is This?

And so I pick up this book, runner-up for the 2011 Miles Franklin, and the apparatus of mediation and apperception – everything from The Australian Book Review to The Independent to The New York Times bestseller's blurb – says it's great – "fierce economy of style" and so forth: and I pick it up and find that it's written in dead-speak. Perhaps, I think, this is meant to be some sort of analogue to the early C20th newspaper accounts of disasters; perhaps it's meant to be like that. (This is the first chapter, where the murder takes place in the storm.)

I am slightly surprised to find, in the second chapter, Quinn, the falsely accused brother of the 12 year old girl, isn't 13 or 14, but 16. That seems old, for the father to have been so worried about them in the storm and flood. You'd expect a lad of 16 to have some physical strength and sense, enough to look out for a 12 year old; enough, at least, for that thought to have crossed the father's mind, even in a monstrous storm.

And then, in the midst of the stiltedness, the book begins to be populated by sentences like this: He steadied himself against a tree and was afraid. (p. 24).
??
"He was afraid and steadied himself against a tree"?

Quinn, waking from a nightmarish dream, frantically struggling with his gas mask, says to himself: Move it, move it, move it. (p. 32)

Not in 1919, in Australia, he doesn't. The Australian idiom was "Move!" or "Move your arse!" "Move it!" is American.

He closed his eyes to better enjoy the sun's warmth. – General tone & flavour. (p. 37)

Quinn visits Mary, his mother, who is dying of influenza. She speaks of going into the murdered girl's bedroom, hoping in her grief that handling the girl's things, reciting lines of poetry over and over again, can bring her back.
She says to Quinn: Your father hates that I go in there. (p. 57)

That's a particularly New York Jewish construction. You'll hear it in Woody Allen's early films. Neither Mary nor anyone else would have said that in outback NSW in 1919. There's no indication in the book that Mary's first language is Yiddish.

The woman in question was perched in a green armchair. Her thin and restless fingers wrung a pair of black gloves in her lap, as if to death. Her husband stood at her shoulder and each of them wore a startled, pensive expression like they had steeled themselves for bad news so many times that their faces were permanently set thus. (p. 62)

If the narrative voice of this novel is, in its stiltedness, attempting to evoke the starchiness of early C20th Australian newspaper speech, then "like" meaning "as though" is completely out of place. It is an Americanism that became familiar to Australians when American TV did; it entered Australian English (where it still clangs) no earlier than the mid-'50s. Combined with the fussy and self-important "thus," the passage becomes a whipsaw of USUK usages posing as a period Australian sentence.

The mise en scene is muddled... The hardscrabble of dry land and people driven crazy by poverty is well evoked (the Irish placenta on the river flats… Although by this time you are ready to suspect Kurosawa or the Chamberlain affair).

What's not clear is how the lush orange and nectarine orchards near the richer part of the town (named Flint), relates to the rest, where the water ends, how the grass high as his knees could survive away from the river. The farmer that must have brought his flock up here to graze – whereabouts would he have gone afterwards? What of the sheepdogs? (Never a bark, a nose, a threat of being sniffed out; never another allusion.)

It's all very well for The Independent to say the descriptions of the Australian bush have "a precise and transporting intensity." The Independent has no way of knowing these descriptions haven't got a feasible, realized geography. The Independent would never have let D.H. Lawrence get away with crap like this.

I have no objection to Australian writers or anyone else using American or English idioms whenever they like. What a good novel requires is that writers know what they're doing, where and what period the expressions they're using come from, and what their origins suggest; writers need to use them to build to deliberate and successful effect. Novelists need an ear for dialogue...

I don't even care that by my lights this is a bad book. Bad books sell well all the time; in certain moods I'm ready for a really bad book.

My real objection here is twofold: that the writer has no ear and no idea; and that that the "critical" apparatus of at least two countries has made a concerted effort to tell me this is a good book. More than a good book, a Miles Franklin runner-up. Does the critical apparatus of two countries have a tin ear? Doesn't it know what it's doing? (Doesn't it know that it doesn't know?) (Is it just that the cheques keep clearing?)

There are Henry Lawson stories that are pitch-perfect, still, a hundred and twenty years later. The Slap is pitch-perfect. They're written in a particular language.

This book's not alone in its lack of an actual language.

Another recent award-winning Australian novel featured, in its first chapter, an American soldier in WW2 Sydney describing Australian mouths as being (as thin as) "letter-boxes," when the word the character would use is mailslots – the American word, where the emphasis lies on the horizontal line the character is actually registering. A page or so later this same man sees a girl sitting on her "bottom" and not on her butt or ass…

So I end at my beginning. What language is this, where Australian characters normally speak Yiddish or standard American, and American characters speak in English euphemism?

==

Womersley, Chris, Bereft: a novel, New York, Silver Oak, 2012
McConnochie, Mardie, The Voyagers, a love story, Melbourne, Penguin, 2012.

==

I didn't finish Bereft; I read slightly past the 100-page mark, where I found it turning into a detailed treatment for the film it always wanted to be. (I won't mention Quinn training himself to be still for hours on end, to avoid snipers in the War, and then standing still in the bush, and noticing his stiffness after, as though it were not routine.)

I've only read the online chapter of The Voyagers.

I haven't read the rest of these novels. If I'd been in a bookshop looking for something to buy, the clear lack of command of the material in these books would have killed the sale.

Poor Fellow, My Language: 'Im Bugger-Up.

It was when I was editing library catalogue headings for the University of Sydney, around 1996-1997, that I first began to realize just how non-standard Australian English had become. I had been gone from the country about 15 years at that stage, and so had lost any sense of the texture of Australian life.

Since then what seems to me to have been some kind of linguistic – movement, more than revolution – in the quality press. Fairfax, to be particular: I have not been able to overcome my dislike of the Murdoch media long enough to actually read The Australian since 1975.

I used to read The Age andThe Sydney Morning Herald online before going to work. I did that from late 1996 till, I suppose 2008, when they had both become tabloid: everything was sport, conflict, sex, crime – lurid and inescapable. I found that frustrating because I wanted to know what was going on, and footy and gangland murder, drug arrests and police corruption were what I was being given instead of political and social coverage. I used to find Michelle Grattan interesting and informative, but her column appeared to have denatured itself. The books pages – originally updated weekly, and particular to the papers they appeared in, first became more toothless, then began to be updated less and less frequently until they finally became one page pointed to by two different URLs, and almost changeless.

However, the period between 2001 and 2007 was interesting because language which had never before been in the register of newspapers of record regularly appeared on the front page, and this language was what would once have been called "coarse."

The first example that comes to mind is the word "stoush." It means "fight" – verbal or physical conflict long after the initial point of contention or conflict has been identified, and argued about. Originally the word belonged to the street. It would have been used in good and earnest by the Irish gangs of Sydney before the turn of the last century, and to comic effect by C.J. Dennis in the 1920s.

These words are Australian in the sense that they have been in Australian English for a long time (carried over from Cockney or London working-class or criminal or semi-criminal speech). They have not been part of the standard Australian English. Thirty years ago they were archaic. But like "bonza" and others, they have been resurrected and injected into the mainstream of Australian English as Australian identifiers.

To complain about "the coarsening of language" is not only to sound Victorian, but to miss the point.

Language like this is intensely political. It does not signify the sudden inclusion of formerly excluded groups, a new and pervasive flavour of Scottish shop-stewards, as it were.

This kind of language was being introduced and intensified as the "children overboard" incident was passed on as truth so John Howard could win a Federal election, as boats of Afghani or Iraqui refugees were being intercepted by the Australian Navy and turned back to Indonesia or offloaded at the prison on Christmas Island, as refugees were imprisoned in horrifying camps near Woomera or other places on the mainland or off-shored to camps / prisons on Nauru (paid for by Australian taxpayers), as the infamous Cronulla riots occurred.

Language like this is:

a) historically Australian, and so guarantees the "Australianness" of what is being said - that the matter is particularly or primarily Australian, unconnected to other happenings elsewhere, or virtuously Australian - that this should be thought or done to or for, by, with, or from Australia(ns)...
b) inflammatory

And, being inflammatory, it limits the scope of what may be readily perceived about what is being said.

It's the language of and imprimatur for right-wing street-thuggery, a la National Front, but without the embarrassment of an explicit political link.

Free Will and Determination

With more 

• anger
• humour
• history
• geography
• moxie
• wisdom 

 and sheer philosophy than ever before -  the Knitting Alone post originally called "The Myth of Balance" has become the first part of:

"Free Will and Determination" - an essay on the blog at Red Lemonade.

:)

Shock! Horror!

The new job's not hideous!

This is kind of what it's like.

My Father, Geranium, South Australia, 1919

How Memory Works

Because memory is visual verbal and communal and rehearsed, it can disappear under dominant images. I lived in L.A. for about ten years. I've been to Venice Beach a few times (housecleaning, showing a friend from home who wanted a particular book). And so I have visual and muscle memories of the canal, the boardwalk, and the cavernous 2nd-hand bookshop that had been there for years. (That must have been in '91.)

After seeing Dogtown and Z-Boys I now have visual memories of Venice Beach since the 1970s, when I was actually living on the bottom edge of the other side of the world in small patch of rich dairy-farms, and on the edge of the Nullarbor Plain, and in Melbourne.

So what happens in a densely populated, media-rich location such as L.A., is that underground movement proliferate, document and ultimately broadcast themselves; the wealth generated by corruption is so fabulous it makes its own myths – Chinatown and the rest of L.A. noir from Chandler on – I will mount that film festival sooner or later – and these images become our not only our images, but also our memories. We remember going to the pictures; we remember what we saw. Seeing them was what we did.

I almost remember World War 2: until Sputnik it was the largest thing in our mental landscape. My parents and brother had lived through it. The first film I have a whole sense of is The Dam Busters. The radio serial we all listened to was Five Fingers. (Adapted and directed by Morris West. Yes, that Morris West).

I remember having anxiety dreams about the Korean War. I remember the Catholics fleeing the Communists, an exodus from North Vietnam – a 16mm film at school shown by a visiting priest.

There was nothing epic, filmic, beautiful, dramatic, noteworthy, about going to work or church or school, cooking, gardening, going to the beach or the hills.

And so to the vexed matter of Australian film.

There had been a silent film industry which never gained a truly sound footing.

Efftee Studios and Cinesound Productions foundered, in 1935 and 1936, repectively, on the Australian Government's failure to introduce a quota for domestic films. (The British did introduce one, giving rise to the "quota quickie" and, via Korda's Private Lives, to Von Sternberg's failed I, Claudius.)

Once Efftee and Cinesound and failed, there were very few Australian films. Some wartime action/morale boosters (40,000 Horsemen, directed by Charles Chauvel, The Kokoda Trail, directed by Ken G. Hall), and then almost nothing.

The only genuinely working production facility in the country was the Commonwealth Film Unit, the documentary arm of the Commonwealth Government. (Tim Burstall, Bruce Beresford, and Mike Thornhill worked there.)

When I was seven or so there was Smiley Gets a Gun at the drive-in; the same night, before it, a trailer for The Sundowners. We never saw that. My family didn't go to the pictures much and this kind of thing rubbed us the wrong way: Peter Ustinov & Robert Mitchum weren't Australians, couldn't get the accent, didn't reflect our lives; the flick was a foreign concoction, an exotification, a falsification, and we weren't going to pay to go to it.

(At the same time, when I saw South Pacific I kept wanting the camera to swing around and see us. I spent decades waiting for them to turn and see us.)

And so, from the mid-'30s until the early '70s, there was a dearth of images of Australia connected to anything the movies and the world thought important: and which we, therefore, might also find  defining and iconic now that cattle-drives and droughts and generally faux-Western tropes had stopped reflecting our lived experience in even the remotest, most analogical way. (1)

In 1971 there was Walkabout, another exotification, a journey with a hilariously mad geography.

Australian Literature was by and large out of print. Henry Lawson and Judith Wright existed in school editions, like Nevil Shute, Colin Thiele, and Kylie Tenant. Frank Hardy wrote on the Gurindji struggle for land rights. Wake in Fright was passed from hand to hand among teachers who'd never intended to be teachers (a terrifying Lord of the Flies at the edge of a country school). White was... too unique, adult, aristocratic, sophisticated, bizarre, to become a generally understood vision. (2)

Lawson's world was 70 years gone. For sense of place attached to the memorable – it all boiled down to the stark landscapes and dispossessions and implied genocides in the Wright.

1975, Picnic at Hanging Rock. And there, finally, the hills we'd driven through since I'd been a small child; the hill I'd looked at through my schoolroom window as a young teenager: stubble in summer, green in winter, round, low, inevitable, the true last shape of mountain and stone.

But Picnic gave rise to a spate of chocolate-box historicals, and The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith was something you could only watch once, like Wake in Fright.

When I go to think of Australia there's only a rectangle of yellow-green, fading into over-exposure.

...

My family's photos have been largely destroyed. I met my father at the back door by chance one morning in 1988, as I came home from an errand; his hands were full of packets and books of old photos I'd never seen. He was on his way to the incinerator. (I'm so like him in so many ways I know what he was thinking. My mother had died; his life was over; there was no point to the images.)

Seeing what he carried I took everything with a cheerful, "I'll take those, Dad" – so smoothly I'm still amazed at myself – and mailed them to our L.A. address. When I sorted, ordered, and annotated them (nothing between 1927 and 1947 had been dated), I realized there were dozens from the 1950s that have utterly disappeared.

Nostalgia for the Light begins as an account of the astronomical telescope in the high desert of Chile and ends with a consideration of the deliberate suppression of evidence of the dispossession of the indigenous population before the suppression of evidence of mass murder by the Pinochet regime. That felt very familiar.

...

My parents were both very good dancers. My father loved musicals; my mother loved dramas.

"Cities are supposed to stimulate you, but Adelaide just puts me to sleep," a cousin of mine said to me a long time ago. Every time the tram crossed Greenhill Road on its way to the Bay I agreed, and thought of my mother wrestling with the washing and the shopping and the garden (that hard Adelaide clay), thinking of Joan Crawford.

...

So, if memory is visual and verbal and communal and rehearsed, then what is memorable is determined by authority. In colonial situations what the colonizing power wants suppressed will be buried. What the colonizing power thinks important will be believed to be important, and what the colonizing power deems unimportant will fade into unimportance.


Because the political has inserted itself into the personal, the personal is political. We must remember and create our own stuff. Our masters won't.

===

1. There was something called Jack and Jill: A Postscript, which arrived (I seem to remember a film can of huge diameter) when I'd asked for something else for my Film Study class in 1971. It came from something called the South Australian Film Corporation, instead of from the Education Department. I showed it, having nothing else: it turned out to be about a bloke with a motorbike and his mate and his girlfriend. It had been shot on weekends over 5 years, as funds and the availability of the actors allowed, by Phillip Adams. (He never did anything as unfunded, difficult, frustrating, unrecognized and unrewarded again. He continued in advertising.)

2. Having Patrick White for your national novelist is like having Pablo Picasso for your portrait photographer.

History

The three most unlikely sentences of my life:

My father in law fought at Guadalcanal.
Fresh out of high school, my husband's uncle worked on the Manhattan Project.
As a child my mother in law used to play with Shirley Temple.

History isn't history - it's close and palpable.

By contrast my own history seems bleached, leached, and empty.

Is it the massive documentation of the Americans in WW2, the doccos, the movies, the books and doccos and movies about the development and invention of the atomic bomb (which is the final image of that war, not the bombing of London or Dresden, nor the piled and walking skeletons of the camps)?

Is this bleach of memory another facet of empire, anything local overwritten by the Cold War and its genesis at Almagordo, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the vivid nuclear nightmare of forty years - my own nightmare since the Korean War?

Is it the goddam silver screen, and our theatres bought and closed and replaced by chains and contracts for American films, American tv product dumped overseas, another massive cultural overwriting...

Or is this fading into white created by being far away, on the southern edge of the Pacific, never a major actor in the world's great events (disasters though they be), a colony of another, previous empire of dominant images, with a colonial past we don't dare remember?