fiction
Strong Women
Nigel Krauth
Eve Sallis
Hiam
Allen &Unwin $16.95hb, 139pp
1 86448 676 7
Rowena Ivers
The Spotted Skin
Allen &Unwin $16.95hb, 315pp
1 86448 766 6
THE AUSTRALIAN/VOGEL Literary Award continues to turn up
outstanding new writing. From the 1997 entries Allen & Unwin are
publishing the winner, Eva Sallis' Hiam, and one of the
shortlisted works, Rowena Ivers' The Spotted Skin.
Both novels focus on a strong woman coping with trauma and
isolation. Both novels address multicultural and feminist issues,
and are written in beautiful, sensual prose. Both are indictments of unreconstructed values that have plagued, and continue to plague, Australian society. Interestingly, these two novels wrench attention away from the supposed current centres of Australian experience, Sydney and Melbourne. Hiam and The Spotted Skin, in different ways, target Darwin and Central Australia.
In Hiam the eponymous central character -- a migrant woman escaping the pressures of transported Islamic life in Adelaide -- hijacks her husband's taxi and sets off on a mad drive. Hiam's journey, across the continent towards Darwin, replicates journeys of discovery typically recognised as claimant procedure for European-based (male) mainstream Australian culture. But this journey, one of discovery and possession by an Arab woman crushed beyond breaking-point by multicultural Australia, invokes many contemporary tragic circumstances and ironies.
Fleeing the most devastating family events (I won't mention them because their unfolding is part of the experience of the novel) Sallis' character takes on the challenge of the entire Australian continental experience. It is a self-rebuilding program undertaken in extreme trauma equal to the severity of the past 'Australian' need to justify present Eurocentric ownership of the land and the nature of our current 'national' identity.
In Hiam an Arab woman does it all over again. She takes the explorer's journey, discovers the interior of the continent, suffers the privations, is brought to the limits of her physical and mental capabilities, is hindered by her own culture's deficiencies, and is helped by locals who traditionally know the geographical and psychological terrains.
And while Hiam carries with her the remembered imagery of a Middle Eastern childhood and the powerful influences of a restricted adult life in ethnic Australia, it is the engagement with the new landscape that clarifies her mental geography.
This novel is, I'm afraid to say on behalf of certain preponderant interested parties, a claiming of Australia by the feminine and the other-cultural. Its brilliance, innovation and daring is undeniable. Every Australian writer --- regardless of gender, creed or track record -- will admire this work. Every intelligent Australian reader will be captivated.
As a writer interested in contemporary Australian identity, I am disturbed by the fact that so few other serious Australian novels have done this drive/journey through the desert centre. Patrick White braved it traumatically in Voss, Frank Moorhouse parodied it in Forty-Seventeen, and Andrew McGahan nuanced it in 1988.
Looking at the number of cross-continent journeys which comprise the serious literature of the USA, it is hard to understand why Australian writing hasn't done the continental trip more often. 'See Australia First,' the Tourist Board hoardings used to say, but denial of the continent has become the norm. These days young writers prefer to see Australia in Melbourne and Sydney coffee-shops; older writers look to the stressed suburbs; some few, young and old, struggle to present regional experience.
The Spotted Skin focuses on Darwin and the Northern Territory more than fifty years ago. It unearths the history of leprosy treatment in Australia -- a history in which the Australian government banished yet another minority group to exile and intense identity-cancellation via administrative procedure.
Rowena Ivers' novel follows the experience of a young Australian woman who is found guilty of having leprosy and is subsequently banished to the leper island off Darwin. Ivers' Cressida is the only white girl on the island -- the rest of the inmates are either Aboriginal or male.
The white girl gets special attention, of course, but this only reflects a situation where two wrongs don't make a right. Forced to a place beyond white society, she is also placed subsequently beyond Aboriginal and male society.
The Spotted Skin is a terrifying novel about categorisation and alienation in the Australian context. The combination of an uncomprehended, frightening disease, an uninformed, prejudiced culture, and a scared, wallowing government administration, produces the setting for a horror suffered by an extensive list of Australian individuals of varying gender, race and creed.
Cressida understands every nuance applicable upon her fallible skin. She knows the division between those who operate from skin and those who operate from understandings beyond it. Her story tests the negotiation between skin and all environments, physical and psychological.
She feels as though she must eat the air to savour it.
Hiam was the choice of the judges for the 1997 Vogel, but The Spotted Skin was vigorously supported as a potential winner. In another year The Spotted Skin might have won. These are two novels of extraordinarily high achievement. The land began to undulate after a while and became increasingly more golden and disturbing. Beautiful colours crept in and were spread through larger and larger paddocks until the fences ceased to be an important part of the picture. At some indefinable point it made the transition from the miserable to the faintly glorious. Pale gold fields rolled from the highway to the horizon, meeting the blue sky in muted splendour. Even the fence posts in the foreground didn't stand out... Something stirred and stared out from within her. She didn't want to see anything like this. She started to tremble and forced herself to focus on the colours of the steel-blue road ahead.
Hiam breaks through the traditional romantic view of Australia. She drives into and beyond the complacent Australian landscape painting. She guns the multicultural, feminist taxi into the future.She holds her hands in front of her on her thighs, or raised like a sleepwalker so aware is she that she shouldn't let them touch anything. They are suspended.