fiction
Marion Campbell
Kerryn Goldsworthy (ed)
Australian Women's Stories: An Oxford Anthology
OUP $29.95hb, 346pp, 0 19 551295 2
ALREADY THE ANTHOLOGIST OF THE contemporary Australian women's fiction, author of a study of Helen Garner's work, and a short story writer of distinction herself, Kerryn Goldsworthy should attract and engage a broad spectrum of readers with this historical take on Australian women's stories. As her introduction suggests, the anthology involves the reader in the shifting relations of the concepts 'Australian', 'women's', and 'story', and finds, perhaps inevitably, that many of the stories ground moments of subversion, failure, or rebellion in the domestic. While the spectrum of situations covered is broad, the stories are not chosen for their politics nor is inclusion for the sake of multicultural variety a part of the brief here: with the exception of stories from Beth Yahp, Oodgeroo Noonuccal and Alexis Wright, the collection is overwhelmingly Anglo-Celt.
Although Goldsworthy pauses productively on the relation of 'women's' and 'story', her theory of what makes a story is more covert. What is certain is that it doesn't enlist the surreal, the magical, the carnevalesque or anything that partakes of the prose poem. There is little that approaches the parable, like say a Kafka or a Calvino, or a Borges. For that matter there is no grunge, and nothing from anyone alive under thirty-five. There is much that is terrific here both in narrative concept and stylistic detail, but very little disturbing generic expectations. The anthology tends to privilege realist stories ranging in inflection from the impressionist to the expressionist but with narrative muscularity generally strongly in evidence. In addition, it plots a strong and thoroughly engaging narrative line around the history of women's dislocation from their particular social moment. It achieves this with a good balance of the comic, tragic, and the ironic, drawing on the whole from work crafted as stand-alone short fiction. The selection takes us from the terrible eloquence of the violated and murdered body (Mary Fortune, 'The Illumined Grave') to the comic, dystopian narrative of migration (Beth Yahp) but along the way offers unexpected slants on collusion, betrayal, and resistance.
If there were a god of the short story it would have to be like Hermes, flying delivery boy of the open letter and the sealed package, specialist of both inscription and encryption, statement and suggestion. Like Hermes the short story writer also needs to double as a psychopomp or conductor of souls, edging the transient with mortal acuity, lending readers the nerve of vicarious feeling, leaving them with the pulse of what has already passed. But just like Hermes the short story is often a trickster and a thief. Through twist endings, or sleight of hand, mechanical reversals of expectation without emotional undertow, readers can be left feeling short-changed and cross. There is no such card-sharp narrator in this collection, slapping dud epiphanies on the reader's table. On the other hand brevity can play enduringly with paradox and enigma. As Kerryn Goldsworthy suggests in her introduction, Carmel Bird's very short 'The Hair and the Teeth' is all the more potent a decantation because it deals lightly with heavy things. But then, as Nietzsche said, it takes less time to write nobly than to write lightly and straightforwardly. Bird's story uses these apparently trivial mementos, baby hair and milk teeth, to hint that time is that awful burglar no insurance can cover.
In its more leisurely incarnations the story can stretch its concertina to encompass miraculously a sense of what Edmund White has called imaginative 'thickness', a sense of experiential space-time embedding landscapes within landscapes, an inter-spatiality which at once separates and connects human beings. Gail Jones' 'Other Places' is such a haunting and accomplished negotiation of the communicable and the untranslatable. In this context I was disappointed not to see included one of Joan London's complex longer works like 'Maisie Goes to India', a tour de force in its modulation of the subjective and the social, and a vivid documentation of the malaise within a certain Edwardian orientalism.
As a re-write of Lawson's 'The Drover's Wife' Baynton's ever-shocking 'The Chosen Vessel' brilliantly registers in its formal fracturing, through its three different narrative points of view, the violence in the suppression, wilful or unconscious, of the woman's story. If revisionist excavations from the archive like that of Mary Fortune cast illumination on the canon it is still the big names which turn out to be the more assuredly original writers. There are wonderful stories by Handel Richardson, Ethel Anderson, Prichard, Barnard and Stead. Kerryn Goldsworthy has made a telling inclusion from Prichard because her resolute avoidance of the sentimental ending underscores the profound horror perpetrated on Aboriginal children by the official policy of removal and miscegenation practised in this country until the seventies.
Frequently the family itself is the site of oppression: the constraints of femininity and resistance to them lead to some charmingly imaginative experiments in cross-dressing, both in Couvreur's delightful satire, 'Monsieur Caloche', and in Ethel Anderson's evanescently comic piece 'Peronel McCree, and the Sin Called Pride: The Arch-sin'. Anderson is wryly aware of all the contradictions in colonial masquerade, satirising it lightly and taking pleasure in small acts of subversion in this witty rewrite of Cinderella. Stead savagely demolishes the twin sentimental myths of innocent childhood and Australian classlessness in her story of schoolyard pimps and moralists. Richardson's 'And Women Must Weep' is a ruthlessly dry-eyed account of the inexorably miserable evening spent by an intelligent young girl as a wall flower at a country dance. She charts the cruel betrayal by the girl's matronly chaperone, who instructs her to keep smiling and to sit in the front row only to report sourly that 'the girl' hasn't 'taken'. With just a small negative epiphany, the story leaves us with the girl almost terminally humiliated. It is this fierce alliance of sober language with the unpalatable real that makes her a great writer.
Ethel Turner's bright and brisk 'The Carrying of the Baby' moves from the petulant to the tender with humour only slightly tinged with sentimentality: the little story deals without condescension with two impossibly young parents who capriciously shape their gender roles to displace the burden of the baby onto their partner. For me one of the great pleasures of this anthology was Barnard's 'The Persimmon Tree', an exquisitely modulated story of secret identification, approaching love between strangers.
Olga Masters' 'The Christmas Parcel' is as moving an evocation imaginable of the embittering effects of poverty and serial pregnancy. Dramatically intense, it is a finely observed psychological thriller which orchestrates suspense around two mysteries: the source of the mother's fierce negativity and the contents of the Parcel whose arrival she refuses to believe augur any good. While the extracts from novels by Elizabeth Jolley and Thea Astley are not strictly speaking 'stand alone' stories, their inclusion is justified by the range and emotional power of the writing. With its subtly affective layering of memory and desire Jolley's 'My Father's Moon' is a good reminder that the first two volumes of the autofictional trilogy must be counted amongst her great achievements. The extract from Astley's It's Raining in Mango relentlessly augments in the reader the sense of menace and dread with an impending racist conflagration in an outback Queensland town.