Kerryn Goldsworthy

Philip Salom, now in his early seventies, has been a steady presence in Australian literature for more than four decades. Until a few years ago he was mainly known as a poet. He has published fourteen collections and won two awards for lifetime achievement in that field. Having turned to fiction in 2015, he has now published six novels. In Sweeney and the Bicycles, he returns to themes that have woven their way through much of his fiction: identity and selfhood, family and friendship, damage and healing, unlooked-for and unlikely middle-aged love.

Auden said once that you couldn’t teach people to be writers, but that what you could do was teach them grammar, prosody, and rhetoric. This remark or some version of it has become the standard defence, like a chess move, when people attack (as they are strongly wont to do) the whole notion of teaching creative writing at all. Most of the how-to books on the subject begin with some such disclaimer and then, accordingly, confine themselves to technique. Somehow it’s as though people who take upon themselves the task of teaching other people to write feel compelled first to apologise for it and then to shy away from its less tangible demands.

It may be the global unease of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries that is causing Australian writers and thinkers to focus more and more on ‘place’: on the fractures and fissures between the homogenising impulse of the nationalist project, on the one hand, and on the other, the impossibility of constructing Australia as a sociological monolith. The current issues of these two journals explore the profound differences between one ‘place’ and another: between Australia and Elsewhere, mainland and island, the mansions of the haves and the degraded housing estates of the have-nots; between state and state, city and city, city and bush, inner-city homelessness and outer-suburban sprawl. And if you expand the concept of ‘place’ into its metaphorical dimensions, there’s almost nothing you can’t discuss, from the buzz-phrase ‘the space of memory’ through the class-bound notion of ‘knowing one’s place’ to L.P. Hartley’s classic ‘The past is another country; they do things differently there’.

Now in their early seventies, and friends since their late-night meeting over the metaphysical poets and the leftover toast, Burgmann and Wheatley have collaborated on a collection of twenty portraits or profiles of Australian contemporaries who, like them, came of age in the late 1960s and took part in activities and demonstrations against whatever they found most oppressive. Much of this oppression was personified, directly or indirectly, in the figure of Robert Menzies, whose second stint as prime minister of Australia ran from 1949 to 1966. Burgmann and Wheatley make this point in their Introduction: ‘For a twenty-year-old Australian today, who has lived through seven Prime Ministers, it would be impossible to imagine how stultifying it was to grow up under a single one – and a patriarchal, conservative one at that.’

In Western culture’s calendar year, is there some hidden fifth season, and if there is, what is it? The main character of Philip Salom’s fifth novel, a writer called Jack, asks himself near the end of the book whether the fifth season might be ‘Time, which holds the seasons together’, or perhaps the fifth season is simply ‘the Unknown’. Jack is preoccupied with the lost: with those people whose bodies are found but never identified, or those who, suffering amnesia, can’t be identified, but who need ‘to find their proper location in the story. In the seasons. A lost person must be allowed other dimensions.’

The voice on the car radio was not immediately recognisable, nor was the song familiar to me. There was just a smoky laid-back piano and someone singing a song that sounded as though it was from the 1940s: ‘Young lovers, young lovers …’ I thought the voice, whomever it belonged to, had a real musicality in it, a precision of pitch and phrasing in tandem with a kind of liquid sweetness.

Several years ago, on two separate occasions, Drusilla Modjeska and David Marr called for Australian fiction writers to address directly the state of the country in its post-9/11 incarnation. ‘I have a simple plea to make,’ said Marr in the Redfern Town Hall in March 2003, delivering the annual Colin Simpson Lecture: ‘that writers start focusing on what is happening in this country, looking Australia in the face, not flinching … So few Australian novels – now I take my life in my hands – address in worldly, adult ways the country and the time in which we live. It’s no good ceding that territory to people like me – to journalists. That’s not good enough.’

Grandmothers are not what they used to be, as Elizabeth Jolley once said of custard tarts. It’s a point made by several contributors to Helen Elliott’s lively and thoughtfully curated collection of essays on the subject, Grandmothers, and it partly explains why these two books are not as similar as you might expect.