Australian Fiction

For the inhabitants of mainland Australia, ‘history’ is often complicated by the sheer fact of geography. Instead of one central node, European colonisation expanded from multiple centres, each isolated in space and founded on differing socio-political premises over staggered periods of time, and each with populations too various in background to allow much in the way of agreement about some völkisch collective past.

Ten years in the making, Matthew Condon’s vibrant modern epic, The Trout Opera, has been worth the wait. It has an expansiveness and generosity of spirit that has become uncommon in Australian fiction (unless we think of an altogether different book, but on a similar scale, Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria, 2006). Sent in 1996 to report on the slow death of the Snowy River, Condon met the storied old-timer Ron Reid, who in his more than eighty years had rarely left the Dalgety region. From Reid’s yarns came the germ of a novel. Essentially, it is an affectionate and many-stranded variation on that old cultural chestnut in Australia: the search for the original of ‘Banjo’ Paterson’s ‘The Man from Snowy River’.

This novella is crammed with incident. It includes domestic violence, a decomposing corpse, incest, child abuse, alcoholism, murder, attempted murder, an unnamed and oddly passive baby, guns and a hair-raising cross-country chase. Roy Stamp, a one-legged alcoholic in a car (he can drive), pursues his fourteen-year old daughter, Ruby, and his twelve-year-old son, Mark, because the boy has seen, through the window of a locked shed, the body of their mother. Realising that their father has killed her, the children flee in a van. Despite being bashed over the head (with his wooden leg), being shot in the eye with an air rifle, and being run off the road at high speed, like a cartoon character, Roy seems indestructible and keeps popping up, whatever the children do to get rid of him. Unable to drive, Mark’s contribution is to hold the uncomplaining baby, to shoplift food and disposable nappies, and to steal petrol.

The style of Sonya Hartnett’s storytelling has changed considerably since she published Trouble All the Way (1984) at the age of fifteen: her finely groomed prose is much tighter than it was then. Her tales brim with nuance and, though straightforward, are disarmingly sophisticated; her weighty symbolism, saturating the most desiccated of landscapes, is one of the finest in our national literature. In an attempt to catalogue her original voice, Hartnett has often been classified as a children’s or young adult fiction writer, categories that she has resisted, often vehemently, for many years. Although her novels continue to adopt child and teenage perspectives, her literary preoccupations span all ages.

It is a treat to see ten of Laurie Clancy’s short stories collected in this volume, his third. Given their quality, it is not surprising that seven of them have already been published in magazines and anthologies. But to read them together is to see their interdependence, their thematic patterns. All deal with male experience, beginning with that of the fourteen-year-old Leo, on the brink of sexual knowledge; and moving on to stories of middle-aged men contemplating the emptiness of their lives. The collection concludes with two stories about death, one from cancer, one from AIDS.

Aphelion can be called a family epic in that it is long and has many characters. The title of the novel refers to the sun; a character explains that ‘there is a point in astronomy when a planet is at its furthest point from the sun, the slowest point in its orbit. It’s called aphelion. I guess it’s the darkest point.’ In this, her second novel, Emily Ballou uses overlapping and intersecting voices. Six characters – five of them female – contribute to the novel’s complex chorus of memory and reflection over time.

In her fourteenth novel, in a career that began in 1980 with Fortress, Gabrielle Lord returns to the series of books that feature the troubled and trouble-attracting private investigator, Gemma Lincoln. Shattered, the fourth in the series, is the most densely and effectively plotted of them. Gathered here are key people from earlier novels: Gemma’s lover, the undercover policeman Steve Brannigan; her best friend, Sergeant Angie McDonald; a former street kid called the Ratbag; Gemma’s sometime colleague Mike Moody. Still shadowing Gemma’s life are the memories of the murder of her mother and, much later, her successful but nearly fatal efforts to clear her father of that crime.

Making Noises is the second self-published novel from Melbourne author Euan Mitchell, and follows in the footsteps of his best-selling début, Feral Tracks (1998). Like Feral Tracks, Mitchell’s new book is partially inspired by his own life experiences, in particular his time spent playing in pub bands and working at Ausmusic.

There is something of the Famous Five about this book, largely due to the central character. It is the 1870s and botanist Ingrid – ‘a woman in trousers’ – is on her horse, Thistle, collecting specimens in Western Australia. She and her father, who dearly misses her back in Adelaide, are writing and illustrating a book on wildflowers. Ingrid is practical and can fix a broken water pump; even though she is considered eccentric, people seek her advice.

Drift is a complex and ambitious piece of young adult fiction that attempts, and partially achieves, an exploration of myriad existential themes. Through the tale of Undine, the adolescent daughter of an idiosyncratic family, claustrophobically trapped between magical realms and reality, Penni Russon embarks on a sometimes baffling journey through parallel universes, string theory and the physics of chaotic coexistence.