No, I'm not talking about writing this time, although there's no danger of me giving up my day job for that, either (thanks, Australia Council).

I'm talking about this, from the 1995 Sandover Medal presentation at Burswood.  Were we the most inappropriate entertainment for a footy award night ever?  I think yes.  And this was the good bit.  We did a musically clever mingling of the Dockers and Eagles theme songs (well, Nikki did, anyway), but I can't post that because the bits with us performing, replete with Dockers and Eagles jerseys and socks, is just too much.  We were much, much better in bars when people were drunk.  And were not footballers.

FYI, Trevor Jenkins is a well-known ABC sports commentator in Perth, and a genuinely lovely man.  He thought we were funny.

because he said this here:

My basic objection to religion is not that it isn't true; I like plenty of things that aren't true. It's that religion grants its adherents malign, intoxicating and morally corrosive sensations. Destroying intellectual freedom is always evil, but only religion makes doing evil feel quite so good.

I haven't written a genuine* letter to the editor since I was sixteen, but I was moved to do so by this article by Rosemary Neill in the Australian's Review liftout.  While I understand that journos must find a controversial line in any given issue, the article was insulting to those of us who work hard at our craft, and it misrepresented books such as Requiem and Marty's Shadow by emphasising their darkness and failing to describe the emotional, artistic and literary texture of those works.

My letter, published in this weekend's Review, said:

I don’t know what books Rosemary Neill has been reading, but there must be a bit of the-blind-men-and-the-elephant syndrome at work in young adult and children’s literature. Requiem for a Beast may well be very dark, but it is also terribly moving and thought-provokingly beautiful; Marty’s Shadow may contain a near-suicide scene, but I read it as a novel about the redemptive power of love; and I would far rather my 11-year-old daughter read Gleitzman’s Then than watch Neighbours. And if there is a skerrick of evidence that teenagers have been traumatised by reading so-called gritty YA books - which, after all, can so easily be put down - I’d like to see it.

There was a whole lot more I wanted to say, but for want of space could not.  Here, then, is a quick but by no means exhaustive run-down of my comments on the article:

1. Re swearing in YA books:  If a writer uses 'bad' language merely for shock value, the only people who will be shocked by it are 'old' people, because in my experience, young people don't even notice it's there.  A more important point is surely whether the language fits the context.  My second novel, Skating the Edge, contains quite a few uses of the word fuck, because it is largely set in an adolescent psychiatric hospital, a setting in which the use of language is not noticeably restrained.  The Push, on the other hand, contains one single instance of the word, shown to be as shocking as it was in 1950s Australia.  In any case, there is far more swearing online, on air, and in the playground than your average teenager is ever likely to come across in a novel.  It is a non-issue.
2. Re 'gritty'.  Gritty or edgy seems to be a code word for 'working class'.  Books like Requiem for a Beast, Marty's Shadow, Sleeping Dogs, Deadly Unna, Bill Condon's books (to name a few) all deal with non-whitebread, non-middle-class experience.  To most reviewers and journalists and critics, however, these are alien worlds that are threatening to the middle-class adult reader.  (Prove me wrong.)
3. Re 'taboo topics'.  Neill complains that she's read books for teenagers about 'depression, suicide, underage sex, date rape, pack rape, transsexuality, murder, infidelity, self-harm, drug addiction and war atrocities.'  To me, it's not the topic that is the issue - it is the way the topic is treated.  Anybody who has heard Morris Gleitzman talk about the process of writing Once will know the profound effect it had on him, and that he was extremely aware of the issues inherent in presenting such material to young people.  The YA writers I know who deal with challenging subjects are similarly conscious of the powerful effect of the well-written novel, and do not want to leave readers with an impression of unremitting bleakness.  They also know that developing empathy and understanding is one of the functions of reading fiction, and will not short-change readers by avoiding topics that might be uncomfortable for some adults. 
4. Re 'trauma.'  The argument goes that because counsellors were traumatised by listening to the accounts of 9/11 survivors, kids will be similarly traumatised by reading 'gritty' books.  Huh?  That's right - people listening to the real, traumatic accounts of a real, traumatic event are affected in the same way as young people reading a carefully crafted, edited, put-downable piece of fiction.  This is a damnable minimalisation of trauma, and its logical disconnect is breathtaking.  While books are powerful, and can have powerful effects, it should be self-evident that there is a world of difference between real suffering and suffering conveyed through the contrivance of language.
5. Re the Children's Book Council.  Does it need an overhaul?  Do we need to change the name so that it adequately reflects the fact that many of its awards are or can be for content suitable to young adults? I say yes to both.  James Roy, on this point, commented that 'I think the CBC did a good thing adding the Early Childhood Reader category so that there would be less confusion when people like Crew/Ottley /Tan did 'mature' picture books/graphic novels/whatever term you prefer. How can you judge Requiem against Cat In, Dog Out, for example? Or something by Bob Graham vs The Watertower? Clearly, different categories were called for.  Sadly, the teacher-librarians and the public didn't go with them on the reshuffle . I think an overhaul of the CBC after this year would be over the top, but they might need to do more to push the notion that a picture book doesn't have to be for pre-schoolers.' 
6. James Roy also said 'For me the controversy over the themes and language in Requiem is just a media beatup. Did any of these people read JC Burke's Tom Brennan? Of more interest is how we keep a level playing field in these awards, and educate the public/librarians on not getting hysterical when a graphic novel is violent or profane?'

I need to get back to finishing my very non-violent and unprofane chess novel now.  Any comments on the above are welcome.


* I've written plenty of fake ones, but that's another story.

I used to play classical guitar.  I stopped when I realised I couldn't make the sounds in my head come out of my fingers, and I'm still not sure whether this was a wise or foolish decision.  Perhaps by now the Bach Preludes would have untangled themselves and I could do the hideous stretch needed on the Choro de Saudade.  Perhaps.

But I've been thinking recently about my teacher, the brilliant, messed-up and long-dead Brian Black, who told me a story, probably apocryphal, about the great Segovia.

The story goes that Segovia was visiting Perth (or Australia - the place isn't important), and a rich woman asked Segovia for a private masterclass.  Segovia refused, the woman insisted, and eventually Segovia gave in.  The woman sat down, played her piece, and waited for Segovia to comment. 

After a long, uncomfortable silence, Segovia said, 'Madam, if you have nothing to say, say nothing.'

Ouch. 

There are probably many morals to that story, including the one that says money doesn't buy you talent, and, knowing the macho culture the classical guitarists I knew strutted about in, something about women not having the goods for the guitar.  *Insert counter-argument here.*  But it always comes back to me when I'm struggling with the whole writing/life/work, can-I-really-be-bothered-doing-this thing.  Do I want to say something badly enough to keep on?

Well, yes. 

There's also the question of pleasure.  Maybe the rich woman loved the guitar, and Segovia robbed that love from her through his cruelty?  Writing fiction is intrinsically pleasurable.  And addictive.  (It also, if you go by Margo Lanagan's latest, leads to an enduring love of red wine.)

So, if you want to write, get rid of the Segovias in your mind, and write. 
 

You're in the final throes of a novel.  This is always painful, but it's even more painful when you suspect that your plot is coming apart at the seams, and you lost your sewing kit somewhere around chapter 15.  Characters have not arc-ed, your premise is wobbly, and your hope that it would be the one novel that you wouldn't have to spend more time rewriting than writing has been cruelly dashed.  Your hopes and your disappointment are no less painful because you've been through this a good eight or more times before: you are like the reincarnated bowl of petunias in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, plummetting to earth and wailing, "Oh no, not again."**

In this dire environment, there is only one comfort.  The original 90210 series is newly, miraculously and weekly available from your local video store.

Heavens be praised.



** In fact, this is occurring in more than  the world of writing, but I digress.

My puppy turned one yesterday.  As I've had a series of hideous pet disasters ending in the death of my pets and/or others' (cat-eating escaped greyhound, myxamatotic rabbits etc), I feel rather relieved (although the pup was chewed on by an escaped Husky a few months back.)   Here is the dog doing his thing.

I was very pleased to have The Push reviewed by Ian Nichols in this weekend's West Weekend Magazine.  There's nothing like a review in your hometown, I have to say.  The review started, 'a premier exploration of the vague boundary between young adult and adult novels', which seems to be something I've been hearing a lot of. I can see the point of the argument - when is a book for teenagers not a book for teenagers? - but my teenaged readers seem to like it as much as older folk.  But my next ones will be much more firmly audience specific, I think (see the s*x in cars entry previously).  Watch this space.

Well, I survived my speech to the Western Australian Children's Book Council, although I was so nervous beforehand I could barely eat (now that's nervous!).  There was a bit of the blind-man-and-the-elephant going on: the next day one person said, 'I hear you were talking about the need for teacher-librarians in this country', and another said, 'I hear you were tlaking about s*x and cars.'  Both, in fact, are true.

I also went 'yippeee' at the wondrous Matt Ottley winning the CBC Picture Book of the Year for his powerful Requiem for a Beast.  (I also had a brief whinge about James Roy not being shortlisted for the Older Readers' category for the superlative Town.)

Here's an excerpt from the teacher-librarian bit of my speech.  The s*x in cars is strictly for a live audience.

Judith Ridge recently commented that YA literature in Australia is not as ground-breaking as it used to be.

And I think she’s right – there’s a kind of cautiousness at work, a hesitance perhaps - not in all work, but in enough to be noticeable. 

Perhaps this is cyclical – a more conservative phase following the lively period of the 90s, where people like John Marsden and Sonya Hartnett and Gary Crew and Margaret Clark and Glyn Parry redefined YA literature in this country.

But perhaps it is also the effect of the haemorrhage of teacher-librarians from high schools in this country - something people like Agnes Nieuwenhuizen has been decrying for years.

Teacher-librarians are the ones who are able to argue – to nervous principals or snappy parents – why we need, for example, to have books on the shelves about gay teenagers, or drugs, or abortion, or whatever topic it is that’s frightening the horses this year.

Without well-trained, well-resourced and well-supported teacher-librarians – librarians with budgets that are robust and expanding, budgets that don’t get cut every time the school needs a new computer, or the gym refurbished – it is too easy for hesitancy to creep in.

But we need to convince parents, principals and governments why losing or under-resourcing teacher-librarians is a national crisis.

We need to communicate why books matter, from kindergarten to university and beyond.

We need to have more reviews of young adult and kids books in the mainstream newspapers.

We need to have a national advocacy organisation for reading – a coalition of the willing – to get out there and argue the case, and to get books, libraries, writers and readers in the media more often, to lobby those who need to be lobbied, to put in submissions to Senate committees, to push for inquiries into reading, literacy and literature. 

We’ve got the Children’s Book Council, English Teachers’ Associations, School Library Associations – surely we could get together and find a way to present a consistent, coherent message to the people who need to hear it – those who write the policy and hand out the money.

If we had a robust and growing reading culture, to which teacher-librarians are absolutely essential, it follows that we would create more daring, more boundary-testing literature.

Because writers cannot be fearless unless there is a culture that supports them - that allows and fosters lively debate, a culture that is alive and vigorous - a culture that is the opposite of hesitant.

 

I didn't realise The Push was up for an award so soon after publication, so it's all the more delightful to be on the shortlist - and in such great company too.
This is what the judges said:

This is a fascinating work which evokes the historical setting of early 50s Sydney, via an 18-year-old girl's introduction to 'The Push'.  It's also a subtle exploration of the emotional pull between freedom and commitment.  This is a riveting narrative in both its subtle ambiguity concerning character and motivation and for its skilful capture of 1950s Australia with such an unerring accuracy.   It details one of those pivotal times (like the 1960s and the 'flower children' movement), in Australian society, except that the ideas of The Push were the often unacknowledged precursor to flower power.  This little minority group in Sydney was experimenting with political, social and sexual freedom in the context of a very hidebound society. Erica's friendship with Trish, Vanessa and Johnny will change her life forever.  The writer makes no judgments but shows how her protagonist is drawn into this daring group and will have to make many sacrifices if she is to survive within it. The ending is left open and offers many resonances for teenagers today confronting similar choices.



I'm also giving the address at the Western Australian Children's Book Council dinner tonight, at which 117 people are turning up.  Not that I'm nervous, but I did have a dream all the guests were all in my house, which must have had Tardis-like qualities, as in its real-life dimensions we'd get to six people in the living room before we'd get to the sitting-on-laps stage. 

Brisbane streets are full of helpful instructions, but this one was the best.

I'm giving up YA fiction until I have some sustained time to do it, and am having lots of fun writing a novel about chess (well, it's 'about' chess in the same way that The Push is 'about' The Push, but we won't quibble about that) for upper primary kids.  Chess is suprisingly well suited to narrative, and the other bonus is that chess players, being such a delightfully nerdy lot, have obliged me by providing a bunch of quotes that are usefully metaphorical, and which my fictional chess coach, based on my real chess coach husband, can quote.  I particularly like H.G. Wells' 'There is no remorse like the remorse of chess', although I wouldn't vouch for its accuracy.  

But I was bothered by a quote attributed to Kasparov, saying that 'Women, by their nature, are not exceptional chess players: they are not great fighters.'  I think he means in a competitive sense, rather than in a general sense of being able to struggle, but nevertheless I want to take issue with it, because I'll put money on the fact that women have the aptitude to play chess, but I suspect they dont' have the desire.  I'm not sure sure this article is the answer either.  Food for thought.





 

  


All singing, all dancing ... the launch of the Push is on Thursday night.  I'm paranoid that I'll get the flu before Thursday arrives, for reasons will become evident on the night, but am delighted at the prospect of having all the aspects of my life intersecting in one place in one evening.  Once upon a time this would have freaked me out.  Ah, maturity.  

I didn't realise how many people around Perth know Laurie Apps, who is launching the book.  Laurie is, amongst other things, a media commentator and lecturer and president of the Fremantle Tennis Club, and everyone from Hansard reporters to old teaching colleagues to my former drama teacher know him.  He's also a thoroughly decent bloke.  

And, on a completely different subject, this blog from Aidan Chambers on prizes and what they're for is just brilliant.

There's something inherently good about thrillseeeking, and it's made me feel braver about what I'm attempting with writing, which is rather like this picture.  I also, on holidays, went vertical at 160km an hour.  Whacko. 

Freedom and The Push

Like the grasshopper in the fable, they lazed in the sun or in the gloom of a hotel bar, gambling, drinking, fornicating and endlessly talking.  John Tranter on The Push.

At 18 I was disaffected and restless.  Fashion bored me; I tried on ideas.  I considered joining the Communist party, the police, a Buddhist monastery; I went to a fundamentalist church and eagerly awaited visions; I hitch-hiked to the Cross with backpackers and drank cask wine with street kids.  I fought with my friends and read indiscriminately:  Anna Karenina; 1984; Keats, Blake and, of course, Plath; Virginia Woolf and Anais Nin; Hesse, Freud and Jung.  There were no Australian writers; I wanted other.  Nothing was big or tragic enough for me; I wanted extremes and discomfort, in literature as in life.  And then, one day in a book shop in Sydney in January 1988, I found a copy of The Female Eunuch.

I still remember the body-blow it was, reading it.  Nothing prepared me for its searing intelligence; even if I didn't agree with, or even understand, all of its arguments or observations, the way it planted its feet, put its hands on its hips and made confident assertions about the world was utterly compelling.  It talked about female experience; it ws refreshingly direct; it spoke a truth that nothing else I had read described.  When I finished it, I wanted to know: who was Germaine Greer, and where did she come from?

Where Germaine came from - and where the style of argument that underwrote The Female Eunuch came from - was The Push.

The Push was a bunch of libertarians of different stripes, who got together in the pubs of downtown Sydney for three decades from the late 1940s.  They argued about equality and freedom; they drank at the pub and gambled at the racetrack; they had sex with whoever they wanted without emotional attachment - in theory, anyway.  They believed in the idea of permanent protest, taking the view that governments, no matter their political persuasion, ended up behaving in the same, freedom-curbing way.  Most of all, they believed in cutting through the 'bullshit' of everyday ideas, questioning, questioning, questioning all the way.

The Push had no interest in promoting any cause or persuading anyone to join it, so when it fizzled out in the 1970s, it left few traces of itself outside of Sydney.  But it influenced a huge number of people: Clive James, Barry Humphries, Margaret Fink, Eva Cox, Germaine Greer, Paddy McGuiness, and later, Anne Summers and Wendy Bacon - people who are unknown to anyone under 20 today.

The Sydney of the 1950s was divided between slums and suburbs, and if you wanted excitement, there was the Cross, the UK or The Push.  The Push was tantalizing to young, restless people, and in the novel, I wanted to see what would happen if I put two lively, restless girls under its spell.  I've always been fascinated by how ideas of decorum can change over a single generation; like Bye, Beautiful, The Push also explores the idea of two generations rubbing uncomfortably against each other.

The quotes at the beginning of the chapters in The Push are from the Women's Weekly, which from the mid 1950s had an advice column for 'teenagers' as they were becoming known; the published letters showed a lot of anxiety over what was proper behaviour around members of the opposite sex, as well as stern advice about taking yourself in hand, getting a grip, or putting up and shutting up.  My favourite is, 'Sit at home and wake up to yourself as a girl who wants to have her cake and eat it, too, or learn tatting to fill in the lonely hours', closely followed by 'Bad breath is most unpleasant to suffer, but I really feel that cigarette breath can hardly be classified as bad'.  Reading those columns, you can get an idea of how stark a shock it would have been to come across The Push, with its good-looking , intelligent men and women completely disdainful of 'decorum'.  Although the women of The Push later complained of their treatment at the hands of Push men, they were positively liberated compared to their mothers and sisters, despite the real risks they took in flouting conventions like remaining a virgin until marriage.

The Push taught Germaine Greer intellectual rigour and, probably more importantly, intellectual bluntness, the same bluntness that is evident in The Female Eunuch - the bluntness that took my breath away as an 18 year old.  Its influence is still with her: a recent Sydney University graduation ceremony, she was quoted as saying, 'Freedom only exists insofar as you are prepared to exercise it' - a classic Push position.

When I finally got to university, I discovered that The Push's ideas were still influencing young thinkers and activists.  I finally got to live out the ideas I had only read about - to test them out and decide which ones to keep, and which ones to turn away from.  I also learnt about the huge divide between theory and practice, lessons that Push women had experienced, sometimes painfully, a generation or more earlier.  The Push is not a book about ideas per se, but how ideas - especially ideas about freedom - can and do change lives, in small ways and in large.  I hope my readers will finish this book and think in a new way about the world they live in - and, most importantly, to think about what freedom is, and where it begins.

I've been a 50s/60s music tragic for most of my life, so compiling the soundtrack for the launch of The Push will let me subject punters to all of my AM radio favourites:  Gene Vincent, Lonnie Donegan, Neil Sedaka, Everley Brothers, the Big Bopper, Johnny O'Keefe, Bill Haley*.  Oh yes.  I've also thown in a few pre-fame Beatles tracks - Long Tall Sally and (slightly post 50s) How Do You Do It.  (They were so raw and so good in those early years. Sigh.)  

The launch is 3 July.  I'm tempted to ask people to wear 50s dress, but that could be frightening (picture skirts with lots of petticoats and headbands for the girls, BrillCream for the guys. I think not).  Mind you, if anyone wants to dance like this, they're quite welcome.





*I remember hearing somewhere that Bill Haley married his 13 year old cousin at some point, but I can't find a reference to it anywhere.  Maybe it was some other 50s rocker.  Anyone know? 

**  It wasn't Bill Haley, it was Jerry Lee Lewis.