Susan Green

I grew up in Chelsea, one of Melbourne’s bayside suburbs. Our back gate opened onto the beach and I spent a lot of time there, beachcombing. I learned early to look down. Looking down and finding things to pick up is a habit I’ve kept with me all my life.

We moved to Castlemaine when I was seven and the things that I looked down at and picked up changed dramatically. Early on, I was told to watch out for snakes! No more seashells and dead crabs; I saw sparkling quartz rocks; I saw old broken bricks and glass and pottery and rusty bits of metal. When we walked through the massively overgrown cemetery and up into the bush beyond, I saw graves made of different kinds of stone, but also of timber (they’ve been burnt now, and destroyed) and even tin. I was able to pick up old bottles, some made of intriguing purple glass, white doves and clasped hands from the smashed imortelles (those ceramic wreaths under glass domes) and in the Chinese section, a broken terracotta bowl with dragons on it.

( A little aside here. Old Mr Jim Sheehan, who owned the house we rented in Campbell’s Creek , told me that he and his friends used to hide in the cemetery while a Chinese funeral was going on, and then when everyone was gone, nick out and take the roasted pork from the ceremonial oven, and eat it. Isn’t that a great story? Every time I look at this structure, I think of little Jim Sheehan stealing the ancestor’s pork! )

Back to the broken crockery and bottles. These fascinating findings didn’t make any sense to me. I knew they were old, but I didn’t understand what that meant.

I have a vivid memory of the day the penny dropped. My dad and brothers and I were walking in the bush out in the back of Campbell’s Creek and we came across the wreck of a cart. It wasn’t in a creek bed or on a track, it seemed to be sitting all by itself in a little dip in the ground in the middle of nowhere. There were two big wheels made of metal and wood. The metal was rusted, the wood was mostly rotted and fallen away, but it was really impressively big. My dad explained to me that the cart or dray would have been pulled by a horse or bullock, and it must have got bogged. The ground where it sat, unlike the areas around it, had lots of reedy grass and tussocks; this was a soak, dad told me; the water didn’t drain through the soil but just sat there and made the ground soft. The fully loaded dray would have been really heavy; the wheels would have sunk down and got stuck; the people couldn’t pull it out, and so they had to just leave it.

Suddenly, there was a story. A dramatic story. Several dramatic stories. In fact, the possibilities that sprang from the abandoned dray filled my eight-year-old mind. Whose was it? Where were they going? Why? Were there any children? What happened to the stuff on the dray? What happened to the people? Where did they go next? Was it night-time? Did they get lost in the bush? Did they wander away from their cart and fall down a mine-shaft (I’d been warned repeatedly about this) or just keep going until they died?

The old dray was not just a piece of junk, but a time machine.

We’ve had exquisite birdsong – liquid, melodious, varied –   around our place for the past two or three weeks because a pair of Grey Shrike-Thrushes have taken up residence in our street. They swoop between gardens, but are especially fond of our elderly neighbour Margaret. They perch on the sill outside her kitchen  and serenade her; they wake her up at dawn by singing at her bedroom window. The other evening, while I was visiting, one of them was tap-tapping at the glass as if to say, ‘Notice me.’
And this Sunday morning, at about half-past seven, when I was having an early cup of tea out in the garden, birdsong spilled out of next-door’s trees and started my day on a note of delight.
We were unsure at first about the identity of the bird but the handy Simpson and Day Field Guide settled it for us. The Shrike-thrush is, appropriately, of the race harmonica.

The singing this morning reminded me of a poem in a book* my mother gave me when I was little.  I reached it down from a high shelf just now, and found what I was looking for.

ONE SUNDAY MORNING EARLY

One Sunday morning early
I heard the blackbird sing;
From out the olive thicket
His song took wing
What silver coin he had to spare –
The sudden wealth lay everywhere.

It’s a pity it’s ‘blackbird’, not shrike-thrush. Not only are blackbirds a pestiferous introduced species, they scatter my mulch all over the place and besides, they are of the race Turdus.

*One Sunday Morning Early by Irene Gough, illustrated by Noela Young: Ure Smith, Sydney 1963

We were at Southern Cross station after dinner in town, so with a bit of time to spare we went in to the WHSmith bookshop there. Lots of best-sellers on the shelves, but I’ve got enough to read at the moment. Just thought I’d take a peek at the children’s books…
And there was Verity on the shelf. So exciting! Am I a bit pathetic?

This was another score from The Book Grocer. Also $6.00. Like Holloway, it’s a hard cover,  high quality publication from an English imprint (Weidenfeld and Nicholson) – and also right up my alley. While the sub-title does give the reader an idea of  what it’s about,  ‘England, Archaeology and the Imagination’ isn’t the most inviting description. It even sounds a bit stuffy and potentially dull. Or is that just me? I jumped on this, however, because I’d read a great review of it in 2012 when it first came out.

The author is a distinguished British archaeologist, lecturer at various universities and an OBE for his services to archaeology. This book is a wonderful mash-up of memoir, biography, geography, history and poetry as well as an exploration of the archaeology of England.

Here’s an example:

On his very first professional dig, as a member of the team excavating underneath York Minster, Morris helped remove some Roman tiles. Apparently Roman tiles are a dime a dozen. But he took a close look.

The tile bears a stamp: LEG IX HISP – legio IX Hispana, the Ninth (Spanish) Legion. Near the stamp is the paw-mark of a dog that wandered across the tile stack before the tiles were fired. The mason and the dog lived around 1,780 years ago. In these plain traces they are so close. I remember a poem by D.H Lawrence.

Things men have made with wakened hands, and put soft life into
are awake through years with transferred touch, and go on glowing for long years.
And for this reason, some old things are lovely
warm still with the life of forgotten men who made them.

I wonder if there is a book like this about Australia? I’d love to read it.

I bought this beautiful book at The Book Grocer for $6.00 (!!!!) It’s a Faber and Faber hard-cover, with a lovely stiff paper dust jacket, illustrated end-papers and black and white illustrations by Stanley Donwood and beautiful text – prose that reads like poetry –  by Robert MacFarlane and Dan Richards.

A holloway is a hollow way, a sunken path. A route that centuries of foot-fall, hoof-hit, wheel-roll and rain-run gave harrowed deep down into the bedrock.

…by the side of high old ash tree, we found a way back down into the holloway & so there we passed through that hole in the hedge and descended into the holloway’s depth, using ivy as a rope to abseil down the sandstone sides and into the shade.

The bright hot surface world was forgotten. So close was the latticework of leaves & branches & so high the eastern side of the holloway that light penetrated its depths only in thin lances. We came occasionally to small clearings, where light fell & grass grew. IN the windless warm air, groups of flies bobbed  & we, each dancing around a set point like vibrating atoms held in a matrix.

Robert MacFarlane is the author of Mountains of the Mind, The Wild Places, The Old Ways and Landmarks.

I have had an excellent weekend. A really, really excellent weekend. Perhaps it was the sunshine. The birds and the bees and the flowers and the trees are all singing as one with The Beatles – ‘Here comes the sun...’

Warm weather at last. Sunshine! I’ve been dragging the chain with my weeding but over the weekend I whipped the side garden into shape in record time; I think the sunshine was cheering me on, making me work faster.
I went for a drive over to Trentham and discovered that there’s a bookshop there, only recently opened, called Dr B’s Bookstore, in High Street. It’s not large, but the books are really interesting and good and well chosen. I’ve seen the word ‘curated’ used in relation to a small stock of carefully selected merchandise, so perhaps it’s well-curated, too. Anyway,  between us, we bought a swag of books and went away delighted to find such a treasure of a place.
A walk around the town under the still shining sun, and we saw blossoming trees, and new leaves, and masses of bright blue muscari (grape hyacinths), the biggest, fattest ones we’ve ever seen, and ducks on the pond and lots of people out and about enjoying the sunshine (there’s a theme here, isn’t there?) at cafes and the beer garden of the pub or just wandering about like us.

And yesterday I worked on my novel and went for a walk with my husband and dog in the park in the sunshine. Later, we had a friend around for afternoon tea and the pineapple upside-down cake I made (sorry, no photograph, and all but a tiny piece gone down the red lane) was a triumph. Sunshine on a plate with pineapple from the Sunshine State.

And I found out from our guest that the teeny-tiny forks I’ve been using as cake forks are actually OYSTER forks. As you can see from the picture below, an oyster fork (top fork) is sort of trident-shaped – my goodness, a reference to Poseidon, god of the sea? – and a cake fork not so. Our friend told us that our oyster forks were part of 19th century middle-class obsession with gentility – actually touching food was thought to be vulgar, so there were stabbing things to pick up pickles, and tongs for sugar, and racks for toast, and cake servers and fish knives and cake and oyster forks… All made of silver or EPNS (electro-plated nickel silver) to show that not only were you genteel, you were rich as well.  I can well imagine that naughty oysters with their aphrodisiac reputation were not for the pale fingertips of respectable ladies and gentlemen. Not in public, at any rate.

Is the sunshine responsible for my reading, too? It’s absolutely on a roll. I finished The Jane Austen Book Club in a day. It was fun but not a patch on We Are All Absolutely Beside Ourselves; with that one, Karen Joy Fowler has gone to another level.
I’m still going on the John Minton biography; it’s research for my novel. I want to know what kinds of things artists in London in the 1950’s would have talked about.
I picked up a reading copy from the bookshop – the sales rep said it was going to be BIG –  and that it was terrific. The book was Spinster:Making a Life of One’s Own by Kate Bolick – and like Kath from Kath and Kim, I’d have to say, ‘Interesting, but I don’t agree.’
Perhaps it’s just too American for me. And though I understand that Bolick’s intention is to reclaim the word ‘spinster’ for independent single women, her models – or ‘awakeners’, as she calls them –  (Edith Wharton, Edna St Vincent Millay, Neith Boyce, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Maeve Brennan) all except one seem to have been married women. ‘Spinster’ does seem to imply singledom and even solitude. Definitely a break from the boys. The very gorgeous Bolick seems rarely to have been without a boyfriend – she says of herself, that at one time she couldn’t walk down the street without being asked on a date! –  and I think I enjoyed most the parts of the book that read as memoir rather than manifesto or biography. Her family, her relationships with her mother and father, her friendships, her working life… these were much more alive than the stories of the five women.

With that out of the way, I started a new book –  My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante. I’m only forty pages in, but it’s brilliant. It’s such a wonderful secure feeling having a good book to read.

I AM READING:
My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

I’ve just finished Karen Joy Fowler’s Booker short-listed We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, and from the outset I knew. It was right there on the cover. “One of the best twists in years.”
So what is this twist? I kept thinking as I read. The narrator Rosemary tells us that she’s lost contact with her brother Lowell. Sister Fern has disappeared, too –  so it’s likely the twist is something to do with the mystery of the missing sibs. What will it be? Is this a clue? Is that? Interrogating the page for hints and portents isn’t the best way to read, and when the twist came – and here I suppose I am obligated to write SPOILER ALERT! DON’T READ ON IF YOUR ENJOYMENT DEPENDS ON SURPRISE! – I wasn’t actually surprised, because I’d been watching for it. A friend told me she’d almost almost worked it out anyway; I was nearly there too. It comes early, around page 77, and thank goodness for that. Sister Fern is a chimpanzee. With that fact out in the open, the waiting was over and done with and my real enjoyment of the book began.

And it is such a very good book. Intelligent, funny, complex, deeply moving and asking some profound moral questions, it had me thinking hard about what it is to be human. Or a ‘human animal’, as Fowler’s character Rosemary says. I’ve decided to give the phrase ‘human animal’ a whirl myself, for that extra word does change your thinking.

Rosemary’s father is a psychologist; raising a chimp as part of his family is a long-term experiment. Fern and Rosemary grow up together as sisters (one who talks and one who doesn’t) but when Fern begins to show her chimpanzee nature – by biting, hurting, killing a kitten, becoming ‘uncontrollable’ – it’s revealed that she’s property. A thing. She belongs to the university. Though she’s been part of Rosemary’s family for five years, when the experiment has to end, they have no say over what happens to her. She is sold to another university, to be part of other experiments, kept in a cage, artificially inseminated, bred from. The sorts of things we do to animals. Because, well, they’re animals.
“The world runs,” Lowell said, “on the fuel of the endless, fathomless misery. People know it, but they don’t mind what they don’t see. Make them look and they mind, but you’re the one they hate, because you’re the one who made them look.”

A companion piece to Fowler’s novel is the amazing Me, Cheeta. It was also on the Booker list (long- rather than short). My copy doesn’t even credit the author, James Lever; it has an index and a few pages of photographs; it’s a very convincing and clever spoof of the celebrity autobiography –  hilarious, gossipy, possibly libellous, and a wonderful portrait of the so-called golden years of Hollywood. It begins:

Dearest humans,
So it’s a perfect day in Palm Springs, California and here I am – actor, artist, African, American, ape and now author – flat out on the lounger by the pool, looking back over this autobiography of mine…

Cheeta, in case you didn’t know, is the chimpanzee who co-starred with Johnny Wiesmuller in the early Tarzan movies. At the end, when Cheeta is reunited with the aged, dying Johnny by his pool in Mexico, what has seemed like a comic turn becomes  – improbably –  tragic and deeply moving. My copy is (genuinely) tear-stained at that point.

A final word, taken from an interview with Karen Joy Fowler…

The world is a complicated, surprising, often horrible and often beautiful place. I just hope we can keep it. We’re not the only ones who live here.

I’M READING:
The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler
John Minton:Dance Till the Stars Come Down by Frances Spalding

I was recently asked to help judge a fiction prize at the junior campus of my local high school. Sixteen students from years 7, 8 and 9 submitted pieces ranging from half to eleven pages. The winner and runner-up were easy enough to choose; the first was well-written and the second was a cracking yarn. The third place went to a piece of comic writing, and there were a couple of ‘special mentions’ for an intriguing piece of micro-fiction and for experimentation in a variety of genres. Reading and then talking about the stories with my fellow judge was a real pleasure. Well, mostly.

What was not pleasurable was reading nearly all of these stories printed out in sans serif fonts. Serifs are the little bits at the tops and bottoms of these letters here… Or better put by the Oxford dictionary, ‘a slight projection finishing off a stroke of a letter.’

Now, you might say, ‘Font? What’s the big deal?’ The deal is, that I found the ones printed using a sans serif font hard to read. I’m no expert on the history of typefaces, but I think that the reason fonts with serifs are almost always used in books is because they are easier on the eye when you’re faced with large blocks of text. And another reason is maybe I’m just used to reading pages with a particular range of fonts. (And I am getting to My Name is Mina – don’t worry. Here we are…) After loving David Almond’s A Song for Ella Grey, I thought I’d like to read some more of his books, so I borrowed My Name is Mina from the library. I was more than a wee bit peeved to find this when I opened the book at the first page….

‘Grrr! One of my pet hates,’* I thought.  ‘So I am going to hate this book.’
I managed the student’s stories because they were relatively short. Here was a whole book, not just in this handwriting abomination, but also in a number of different styles of hand-lettering and type.
I made myself start reading. I made myself keep reading, for a few pages.
And you know what happened? Then I just read on. And on. I loved Mina.

The moral of the tale is this –  serifs may rule on the printed page, but I can cope with whatever when I love the story.

*The other one is dialogue without talking marks.

Revising and editing at the present. I work at the Bookroom 2 days a week, and I’m aiming  to work on my novel 4 days a week – which leaves me one day off. Today was the day, and my husband took me for a Sunday drive in the pale, end of winter sunshine. We drove through rolling farmland and bush to Heathcote, stopped off for a pastie and a pie at an old-school bakery, stopped at Redesdale to have a cup of tea (from our trusty thermos flask) on the riverbank near the historic iron bridge, and then drove home a slightly different way, through more rolling farmland and bush. The wattle, in the sunlight, was luminous and golden and glorious and glowing; there was a lot of ‘ah’ and ‘oh’; many sighs of delight. After such a long and cold winter, it was a day of spring and beauty and warmth.
Amongst my revising and editing, I came up with a little continuity problem. A wattle problem, actually.
My father had told me that when he was in London in the early 1950s, he was so homesick he felt physically ill. Friends used to send gum-leaves, which he and his friends would burn for the nostalgic, campfire smell. And there was also, in early spring, in posh florist’s shops, wattle. Only they called it mimosa, and it came from the South of France.
In my novel, which is set in London in the early 1950s, my young heroine (I know it is old fashioned, and protagonist is the word to use, but she is my heroine, and I will call her that) is an Australian girl. I show her looking at wattle in the florist’s shop in Bond Street and feeling homesick.
But – wattle in London florist’s shops – was my dad steering me right?  I Googled for information, and found out that acacia from Australia had indeed been planted in the South of France. Rich people had been popping it into their gardens since the 1900’s. And yes, they called it mimosa, and it was in flower in March and April, and it was much sought after as a spring bloom.
However, for the purpose of my story, my homesick heroine has to be looking at wattle after the Festival of Britain, which ran from June till September 1951. It had to be autumn. The spring of the following year was too late.
It’s a bit sad, and I’m not obsessively fussy about accuracy, but you can’t play around with the flowering season. Wattle is spring, so no wattle in Bond Street.

I’VE BEEN READING
I have been reading The Forrests by Emily Perkins, and today I bought Six Bedrooms by Tegan Bennett Daylight. Both of these authors are new to me, and I’ve been encouraged to read them by their interviews with Charlotte Wood in her online magazine, The Writer’s Room Interviews. It’s fantastic, like listening in on the most nitty-gritty literary shop talk ever. Highly recommended!