Emily Bitto on The Strays
When I began to write my debut novel, The Strays, I had very little idea of the specifics of plot and character, but there were a few things I did know.
One was that I wanted to write what I like to think of as an “outsider novel” along the lines of other books I have loved, such as Brideshead Revisited and The Secret History. I was drawn to the ambivalent perspective of the observer on the periphery of a world she both romanticises and resents because she will never truly be a part of it.
I also knew I wanted to write about a group of people attempting to separate themselves, to a certain extent, from mainstream culture. These groups fascinate me, whether religious cults, hippy communes or artist colonies, because of their utopian aims and the way they inevitably seem to crumble as a consequence of all-too-human conflicts.
The time period stumped me for a while, though. Initially, I thought about locating the novel in the 1960s, when utopian communities were all the rage. But then I remembered Heide, always a cultural landmark for Melburnians, and the stranger-than-fiction events that took place within the circle brought together by John and Sunday Reed, which included some of Australia’s most well-known modern painters: Sidney Nolan, Albert Tucker and Joy Hester.
I was particularly drawn to 1930s and 1940s Australia because of the stark divide between the mainstream values of the time and the lifestyle and values of the avant-garde art world. There were very serious consequences back then for making the “wrong” kind of art: obscenity trials were rife, and artists were being shut out of galleries and academies if they chose to embrace modernism rather than replicate the sedate landscape painting that characterised the Australian tradition.
Despite the fact that we still witness the occasional art-world controversy, such as the 2008 scandal surrounding photographer Bill Henson, it seems to me that the risks faced by artists, at least in the western world, are far less serious today than they were 70 years ago, and so, too, the sense of daring and exhilaration that attends avant-gardism is also lessened.
I read a lot about the Heide Circle, initially thinking that I might fictionalise some of the events that took place within it. However, I eventually decided to use this material more as a jumping-off point rather than as the basis of my own narrative, partly because the real lives of the Heide artists were so eventful I was afraid they would read as melodrama on the page.
Readers looking for a fictional Sidney Nolan or a Sunday Reed in The Strays will be disappointed. What I have tried to capture, however, is the romance and excitement of that circle; the sense of the new that stirred the stale waters of outer Melbourne when a group of artists came together to work and live side by side, to buck the establishment and create their own small utopia within the confines of an old house and a large, thriving garden. It is by that aspect of the Heide story, rather than its literal events and characters, that The Strays was inspired.
Christine Kenneally on The Invisible History of the Human Race
All books have many back stories. The Invisible History of the Human Race has at least three. There’s the back story of craft. Non-fiction writers often talk about the moment they first encountered a classic book or article that showed them what the form could do. I have heard many talk about the day they read George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia or Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer, and it changed everything.
I wish my writing origin tale was as epic. Certainly, when I was young I encountered stories that will always stay with me, like the day I crept into my parents’ bedroom and read about the Jonestown massacre in Time magazine. I never thought about who wrote that piece. I assumed the story was a faithful transmission of a completely devastating event somewhere out in the world.
It was a long time before I understood consciously that this effect was a hard-won goal. The writer had to embed themselves in other worlds and systems of knowledge, they had to labour to collect a mound of facts, and then they had to select and structure them, all so the reader would feel that they – the writer – had simply got out of the way of the story.
This was one of my conscious goals with this book. I don’t claim to have pulled it off, but I wanted to explore the pleasure and the pathos of being genetic, and to convey, at least a little of it, without getting in the way.
The book has an intellectual back story as well. Once upon a time I looked to academia for the answers to the big questions, but I found I was funnelled into smaller and smaller paths, when my taste runs to the big and impossible. With all due respect and gratitude to academics and the absolute necessity of their picky, exacting focus, it was in non-fiction that I found the freedom to ask the questions I wanted to ask. It was also in non-fiction that I found my way to the answers, many of which came from hard-working, highly focused researchers, and some of which came from messier, more unconventional places – like the everyday lives of people and the unquantifiable things that happen in them.
Of course, every book has a personal back story. Mine can be explained by a single anecdote. When I was eight, my homework assignment was to draw a family tree. I raced home in excitement to share the project with my parents, but the way they reacted took me by surprise. They were indignant. Why? You could say that taking years and years to write this book was my way of answering that question.
Does that make the book an albatross slung around my neck? I suspect all writers know books are quite handy when you have a big dead bird on your hands and need to find a use for it. In my case, the act of considering – not just carrying – the albatross made me equally curious about why that experience mattered so much to me when another child in my shoes might not have been so struck.
Some of my siblings had a similar experience but it didn’t wind itself around their neck in the same way. We take a unique mix of DNA and happenstance into every event we encounter. Writing The Invisible History of the Human Race has been my way of exploring that, and of living it.
• The Invisible History of the Human Race is published by Black Inc Books
Sofie Laguna on The Eye of the Sheep
I knew Jimmy Flick, the young narrator of my novel, The Eye of the Sheep, was going to be imaginative, that he would be anxious, and that he could be very manic. I knew his thoughts would not play by the rules, that there would be no limits to the ideas he would explore. I knew his inner life was going to be fun for me. He would bring no formal education to his discoveries; his understanding of the world would be based on a patchwork of dreams, imaginary science and facts, as well as his own intuition.
I relished the idea of writing a sustained narrative in the voice of this charged, vulnerable, precious little boy. I knew I was going to care for him immensely, which meant the stakes in his story would be high. I knew the power he held would be in the way he saw the world; though Jimmy’s understanding would be naive, it would also be empathetic, often profound, intuitive and poetic. Jimmy was on to a higher kind of truth and I loved him for it. His voice would be the easiest voice in the world to dismiss – the voice of a very young “mentally challenged” boy from a poor family – yet it would be his voice that held a unique and necessary wisdom.
I felt fiercely protective of this character and I wanted to find a way to right his difficult, unfair world. At the same time as being courageous, Jimmy carried inside himself a death wish. He did not know if he could reconcile himself to a world without his mother. He gave the world a single final chance, and when it failed him he longed only to immerse himself in water. It is in water that he discovered a light; the same light from the eye of the sheep, the light of eternal life, of his mother’s love, the light of warning, of promise – the light of peace. Jimmy wanted to drown himself.
I wanted to save Jimmy from this. And I wanted to save him with language. As much as this book is about a character and his journey, it is also about language – its musicality. It is difficult to say where a story ends and the music of language begins – for me they need to work together. My writing is about feeling for the characters, and it is about language. Each is as important as the other.
Working in such a young voice, with a mind that might today be labelled as “different” or “disabled” or “challenged” or whatever, gave me the freedom to be as idiosyncratic and as playful as I wanted to be. I loved that. And I loved my Jimmy.
It’s so hard how children come into the world so innocent and have to find a way to survive when life can be so unfair and so confusing. Maybe I am trying to right wrongs with these young voices, I don’t know. Jimmy’s voice was there, ready to be written – his errors, his inability to wait, his gift for love and warmth and acceptance of others. All of it shown to the world – to the reader – by using language in inventive, unconventional, musical ways.
I never wanted Jimmy to lose his dad. I wasn’t trying to say anything like: “if a man hits you, you need to leave him.” I didn’t think anything like that when I wrote the book. The book isn’t that simple – and neither is violence. Jimmy’s dad loved the people he hit. I don’t know if that is a politically correct thing to say, but it’s true. And Jimmy’s mum loved the man that hit her. And their love was not based on all the wrong things – it wasn’t all just addiction or co-dependence or whatever. It was romantic love too. That made it complex and difficult.
But I wasn’t preoccupied by this – I was busy identifying with Jimmy. He made me laugh so much, and cry. I still think about him a lot – I think about Jimmy being out there in the world for me, and I feel grateful, and proud of him.
• The Eye of the Sheep is published by Allen and Unwin
Ellen Van Neerven on Heat and Light
The process of writing a first book is often as much about the writer as the book, and I certainly felt I needed to make a statement.
Heat and Light is a fictional journey in three parts. All three parts I was working on at the same time; they came together that way, but at one stage they seemed like they would be three separate books. It’s the way I work a lot of the time – I triangulate; three narratives bring a certain kind of truth you can find only through comparison and association. The three parts, Heat, Light and Water, involve the past, present and future, and it is the way they blend that creates the sensibility of this work of fiction, which is difficult to characterise.
The future is presented in Water, set in 2022. Australia has become a republic and there have been major legislative changes to affect the lives of Indigenous Australians. A “super island” is being built, where Indigenous people are encouraged to go and live, creating a new nation. This is a faulted plan, to say the least, and a resistance is formed.
I’ve been writing for a long time and I have always interpreted my life and my surroundings as fiction. I started forming this idea while taking the water taxi from mainland to island, and island to mainland. I also watched a German film called Frauensee (Woman’s Lake), about a fisherwoman, that also had that sort of repetitive movement. The push and pull of water – a constant resistance – was one of the senses I held when writing.
Essentially the story hopes to ask questions about Indigenous governance, land rights, identity and action. It has a strong environmental sensibility, too, and like some of the other narratives in Heat and Light, I explore unlikely love, in this instance between a woman and a plant-human hybrid. This is the story that seems to inspire the most reactions from readers, and of course I am just one of many non-white writers that are playing with the speculative – Aunty Alexis Wright and the Dominican-American Junot Díaz are two of my favourites. Indigenous people face huge climate-related challenges for which I don’t have solutions, but imagination is wings and I encourage deeper thinking on these issues.
With Heat, about the implications of the past on a Yugambeh Bundjalung family living on Queensland-New South Wales border country, and Light about young people growing up in present-day Brisbane, place is listed as the primary inspiration, from which characters and situations ascend. I feel place more when I’m separate from it. And of course we reassess our lives when we go overseas. I’m in Austin, Texas, now, travelling with the book and writing the new one. The more distance I have from the book, the less I know what it might be about.
Maxine Beneba Clarke on Foreign Soil
Foreign Soil is about people trying to find a place for themselves in the world – about the search for a true place to call home, about the things we gain when we migrate, and the all-consuming heartache of our leaving, even as we find the very things we’re looking for.
Foreign Soil is set one still day in New Orleans; on a velvet black night in a Sudanese village; in a scorching Melbourne apartment block; on a volatile London street; in a Sydney schoolyard; in a steamy wet season in the Jamaican hills.
When I was working on these stories, there was no overt consciousness of place. My own African diaspora background just worked its way into the content. My Jamaican and Guyanese grandparents were descendants of slaves taken from Africa during the Atlantic slave trade, and brought to the West Indies.
Both sets of grandparents migrated to post-war England in the late 1950s, where my parents then grew up. This better-opportunity migration is the one which faces my young protagonist Millie, at the conclusion of the story Hope, and which the central character, Nathanial, also contemplates in the story Big Islan.
The mass migration of the Windrush generation to Britain in the 1950s fuelled a bitter English nationalism, culminating in events such as the Notting Hill race riots. The story Railton Road is set around this time, in the Black Panther activist squats of Brixton. It examines what this kind of disenfranchisement can do to a generation, the ways in which they learn to fight back. The story Harlem Jones takes us to black Britain some 50 years later, at the time of the 2011 Tottenham riots.
Then there’s my parents’ migration to Australia in the mid-1970s, just after the white Australia policy. The story Shu Yi is based on my own experience of growing up Australian-born, but with black skin in white, middle-class Australia. I see the locations in Foreign Soil as being a part of my own Australian story, which now takes in four continents of migration.
Stylistically, I was very concerned about voice while writing this book. Spoken word has always been my first love – I’ve performed on stages and airwaves across Australia and internationally for almost a decade now. When I was writing the stories in Foreign Soil I set out to replicate what I would do at the microphone – to transcribe the sounds, accents, rhythms of speech on to the page.
The story Gaps in the Hickory, set in Mississippi and New Orleans, is written in a distinct southern vernacular so that the reader cannot elect to escape the accent and its histories. The story Big Islan is written in a distinct Jamaican-accented English. Part of the story David is written in English as a second language. The way we speak, our choice of words, our rhythms, our pauses, tell so much about who we are, where we’ve been, and sometimes even where we’re heading.
Then there’s the final story. Written just before publication, The Sukiyaki Book Club is about a young, black, single mother struggling to find a publisher for her book of stories in an industry that’s convinced that, although they may be well-written, her stories are not Australian enough, not nice enough, not entertaining enough for the broader reading public. The rest, as they say, is history.
• Foreign Soil is published by Hachette
Joan London on The Golden Age
I wanted to write about the 1950s, the time of my childhood, when the schools were overflowing with baby-boomer kids – sometimes more than 50 in a class. I have memories of huge gravel playgrounds, and suddenly I remembered lining up in long queues in the sun for a polio injection from a nurse at a table on the verandah.
I remembered my mother’s stories of the terror of polio in the 40s, of not allowing my older sisters to go to public places or to swim in the river. I remembered seeing children wearing callipers.
It was also a time of postwar European immigration. “New Australians”, as they were called, provided a small, fascinating glimpse of difference in the Anglocentric society of Perth. In many ways we still related to England as the mother country. The royal visit to Australia in 1954 was a huge event in our lives.
I started to research polio in the Battye library, the West Australian local history library. I discovered there was an old pub called The Golden Age in an inner-city suburb of Perth, which in 1949 had been converted into a children’s polio convalescent home to service the years of the great postwar epidemics. I photocopied an invaluable collection of memories of the place by ex-patients which had been produced for their 20-year reunion, and a plan of the building. I met and interviewed one ex-patient. But all the events in my novel, and the characters, except for the taciturn gardener Norm Whitehead (whose name I found I couldn’t change) are fictional.
The Golden Age was closed for polio patients in 1959, and later knocked down to make way for a freeway.
The central story is the love that develops between two patients, Elsa Briggs, aged 12-and-a-half, the eldest daughter of an Australian family, and Frank Gold, aged 13, the only child of Hungarian Jewish refugees to Perth after the second world war.
It’s an ensemble piece that includes the stories of patients and their families, as well as some staff members. The action occurs around the time the new young queen and her duke made their first visit to Perth in February-March of 1954, an event that created unprecedented local excitement.
I was six-years-old in 1954; I was interested in revisiting that time from the perspective of now. It was still very much a colonial time, the attitude to royalty was reverential: the second world war was still not far away. Many of the fathers of children my age had been servicemen in the war.
It seems to me now that this period in the early 50s was a crossing-over time: these children are part of the huge generation of baby boomers – they will belong to an era of great change in Australia, a time of reclaiming and forging our own identity, of the influence of waves of immigration from Europe and Asia, of breaking away from the English colonial model and from the moral attitudes of preceding generations.
But in the end, it also became an exploration of the resilience of children during illness, their vulnerability to the ethos of the families they come from, and the decisions we make about how we live.
Elsa and Frank, and their precocious love, are like precursors of this generation.
The 2015 Stella prize will be announced at a ceremony in Melbourne on 21 April
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