Five (or more) facts: Toni Jordan

Toni Jordan is the author of the popular, award-winning and internationally published books Addition and Fall Girl. Her latest witty, sweet novel, Nine Days, is the story of the most important day in the lives of four generations of one family. Jordan teaches creative writing at RMIT University in Melbourne and has lectured and presented workshops on writing around Australia. Her short stories and articles have been published widely.

Five (or more) facts:

When I finished my most recent book I went straight from the publisher’s office to the airport, where I flew to Beijing to start my AsiaLink residency. Never a dull moment.

My favourite cocktail is anything with gin in it, and I like it sour and lemony.

I’m currently reading Gerald Murnane’s The Plains. I loved the first half; it’s brilliant writing and very clever. The second half is also brilliant, but it’s clearly meant for people cleverer than me.

When I was a child I wanted to be Wonder Woman. The whole bit. Belt, boots, strapless top, magic lasso—she was kick-arse magnificent.

Last night I dreamt I had a bandaid stuck on my eyeball, and when I pulled it off, half my eyeball came off. I was left with this jagged hole like a broken boiled egg instead of an eye. I don’t know what it means but it can’t be good.

When I’m stuck, or need to take a break from writing, I take Myron the WonderWhippet for a walk. He’s vital to my process and should be tax-deductible.

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Catch Toni Jordan at The Stella Prize Trivia Night on Friday 31 August at 7:30pm alongside Cate Kennedy, Paddy O’Reilly, Emily Maguire, Susan Johnson, Jacinta Halloran and Ruby J Murray. She’ll be reading from her work at The Morning Read session on Saturday 1 September at 10am, and she’ll be discussing dads on Father’s Day, Sunday 2 September, with Tony Birch, Patrick Gale and Deborah Robertson.

On Kate Grenville, politics and imagination

Kate Grenville and I go back years. Four years, to be precise. Not that she is aware of this.

Four years ago yesterday, the Northern Territory Emergency Response was announced by the Howard Government under the guise of moral righteousness. Four years ago on the same day, Alexis Wright won the Miles Franklin for her novel Carpentaria and used her acceptance speech to criticise the Intervention. Four years ago, I was halfway through my Honours degree as I listened to a lecture on creative writing about Indigenous Australia, and the lecturer discussed Grenville’s work.

At the time, it felt like everyone had been talking about The Secret River: an imaginative retelling of the story of Grenville’s ancestor, Solomon Wiseman, and his journey to Australia as a convict in the late 18th Century. It had become the subject of some feisty debate thanks to a 2006 Quarterly Essay by Inga Clendinnen discussing the discipline of history and its relationship to fiction, but also because of its depiction of Indigenous characters, which is where my lecturer dove in.

The Secret River (2005) is the first part of a trilogy about early colonial Australia. The novel traces the character William Thornhill’s journey from England to Australia, where he does his time as a convict before deciding to take land on the Hawkesbury River and make it his own. Crucial as they are to the plot, the Indigenous characters are still peripheral: the story is Thornhill’s, the crises are Thornhill’s, and the epiphanies are Thornhill’s too. But for Grenville as the author, the Indigenous characters were pivotal. As she discusses in Searching for the Secret River, it was the complete absence of any Indigenous people from the stories her family told about their ancestor’s arrival in Australia that encouraged her to write the novel in the first place. She responded to a personal political issue with an act of imagination – to engage with a historical reality through the art of fiction – and The Secret River is the result.

The second book in Grenville’s trilogy, The Lieutenant (2008), still focuses on the perspective of an English man, but it takes a step further by detailing the relationship between Daniel Rooke, an astronomer of the First Fleet, and a young Cadigal woman named Tagaran. The narrative is told from Rooke’s perspective, but Tagaran in particular is given a voice, has charm, humour, independence and a temper, and the Indigenous characters generally are given much more shape and personality.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I find the most interesting thing about The Lieutenant to be the extensive use of Cadigal language and the reflections on the writing of fiction that are embedded in the narrative. Many of the issues Grenville came up against relating to colonial Australia and writing about Indigenous Australia were the catalysts for the research that would become the basis of my own PhD. And while my own fiction has moved in a much different direction, in the final frantic few months of thesis rewriting and revision, I’ve been going back through Grenville’s work and thinking over those questions that pushed me towards my project in the first place: what are the differences between fiction and other kinds of writing? What are you ‘allowed’ to do as a white writer writing about Indigenous Australia and what is considered bad form? Are there, or should there be, limits on fiction that falls into this political context? How does identity – and the political implications of identity – influence what fiction can do?

More than just meaty topics for academic discussion, those kinds of questions have become crucial to my negotiation of fiction and art in general. Australia is still a colony. The Intervention continues. The politics of Australian fiction is important. What we do with our imaginations influences what we do with our realities, so what do we do next?

Kate Grenville is currently working on the third book in her trilogy. She will be discussing The Secret River and her own reading habits as part of the 2011 MWF Schools’ Program.

“I was able to play with the truth”: Creating History

A friend of mine is at this moment in Iceland, digging through library rooms, sneezing from archival dust, and loving every moment of it. She is doing research for a historical novel, based on the life of an Icelandic woman who lived in the 1800s. This intrepid dipping into the history and, indeed, mind, of a person long gone is an experience shared by Peter Rose, Lisa Lang and Michael Meehan

Peter Rose is well known for his memoir The Rose Boys. His latest offering is a novel, Roddy Parr, which tells the literary insider tale of Roddy Parr, amanuensis to lauded author David Anthem. In name, biographical and autobiographical writing are different to fiction. But writing fiction requires the same attention to detail, the same consciousness of a multifaceted and continous being. Rose says of his characters that he has to know ‘how they dress, what they read, who they sleep with … they must become vivid, plausible, almost historical’. They’re not passive creatures: ‘I hear them babbling away in my head’.

A few years ago, Lisa Lang published Chasing the Rainbow, a book on Edward.W. Cole, a significant and prolific figure in publishing in the 1850s. She has now fictionalised Cole’s life in her novel Utopian Man. His history may be described as checkered – he sold lemonade in the gold rush fields, later sold pies, and once travelled to Adelaide in a wooden boat. He then put an advertisement in the newspaper for a wife: ‘She must be a spinster of 35 or 36 years of age,’ he declared. This was before he installed himself as a bookseller in Cole’s Book Arcade, which included a Chinese tea salon at the height of the anti-Chinese sentiment in Australia.

What is it, Lang wondered, that fiction could offer this abundant, larger than life story? ‘It gets us inside the heads of the characters.’ The ‘intensity of the inner life’ is served better by fiction than non-fiction writing, she concluded. The public details of Cole’s life were there for the taking, but what of the more personal details, the childhood memories, the blush of feeling?

Michael Meehan has published four novels, the latest of which is Below the Styx. Martin Frobisher’s name is familiar to connoisseurs of Tudor history. But the newer Frobisher is more like a sleuth than a courtier (though he is interested in the art of lying); he’s searching earnestly for the truth about well-known Australian, Marcus Clarke. Earlier this year, the Meehan family celebrated their 100th year in the country up in the Mallee. Michael’s grandfather had insisted on a total break from the Irish Meehans, many of whom opposed his union with his chosen wife. With all that excitement in one’s background, it’s not surprising that Meehan has written about history, but not to rechart it – instead, ‘Hope, desire, dream and dread’ is the realm of the novelist. Documentary history ‘will take you a certain distance’, as will oral history (though it’s ‘notoriously unreliable’), but you must ‘fuse’ this research with sensation and feeling, because that’s why readers read – not facts.