Brian Castro addressing the crowd

Rare Books Exhibition Opening "Australian Fiction" June 5, 2003

Brian Castro

Australian fiction, by its very nature, it seems to me, has always possessed a split personality. This is not unique to new cultures. Historically imprisoned in the English language, albeit arising out of a distant, exotic region, a part of Australian writing has always struggled to please a distant market, while the other part strove to create a literature all its own. For roughly a century and a half, there was no choice but to enslave itself to Britain. There was no audience or publishing industry for it to do otherwise.

So much so that Katherine Susannah Prichard was told that her title Working Bullocks would invariably turn British readers away. Though in my view, a small vowel change in the second word would have solved that problem. When she wrote Intimate Strangers in 1937 expressly for the English market, (having now learned to employ catchier titles), readers there turned up their noses at what could justifiably be termed a compromised novel. Many Australian novelists after her have mutilated their work simply in order to be published in Britain.

The difficult condition was that if one wanted to create a national literature, then one first had to create the marketplace for it. But then how would one create a marketplace if there were no indigenous publishers? It was a Catch-22. The missing premise in this otherwise workable hypothetical syllogism is governmental support, which of course, did not exist for a large proportion of these writers or for any incipient publishing industry.

So what we see in this exhibition is the evidence of that almost impossible enterprise: the painful efforts; the titanic struggles; the heroic optimism and withered hopes.

For me, being amongst these books is to fully come alive. It's the opposite of old tomes and dead authors. I feel I am among the more fully conscious of individuals. People who possessed that invaluable talent of having overheard themselves responding to a higher sensibility. These were pioneers, their backs broken from work, confronting the usual desert silence. I can hear Inky Stephensen cracking cooling type over his trays. I can see Frank Dalby Davidson smoothing down cheap paper with uncut edges, wrapping the cardboard covers with blue butcher's paper, lugging his novels from door to door.

My father, had he been in Australia in 1931, would certainly have bought Davidson's Man-Shy, and he would have been disappointed to find that the title referred to a cow and not to a clandestine oriental brothel. And he would have contemptuously torn out each of Davidson's pages, which were handily not stitch-bound, for this was the way my father used to read when he crossed Hong Kong harbour in the mornings, casting each leaf upon the waves. That gesture is probably a metaphor for the way many readers nowadays disengage with the text, skimming and skipping so the book can be finally cast away upon the sea of other books, plot upon plot.

Anyway, never one to back off from quick cultural analysis, I find that the litmus test of a literature is always to fall back on old familial practices. Short of tearing out pages in a rare books exhibition, I should probably ask what, for example, would a skimmer make of a century and a half of Australian fiction? At first glance, simply by looking at first lines, it seems Australian novelists are preoccupied with landscapes and seascapes.

In the breathless stillness of a tropical afternoon, when the air was hot and heavy, and the sky brazen and cloudless, the shadow of the Malabar lay solitary on the surface of the glittering sea.

Marcus Clarke has my vote for the best meter of any opening line. I wish I could have written that instead of It was a dark and stormy night. Undoubtedly Clarke, had he sent his manuscript in now, would have been edited to the deadening beat of the latter so that the plot could emerge earlier.

Christina Stead's menacing adjectives have always made Sydney inhospitable:

The hideous low scarred yellow horny and barren headland lies curled like a scorpion in a blinding sea and sky.

This was definitely not in the brochure for Sydney 2000.

Having arrived on shore now, it seems location figures largely, particularly in global positioning. Frank Hardy is keen to situate us immediately and apparently accurately, with GPS precision:

One bleak afternoon in the winter of 1893 a young man stood in the doorway of a shop in Jackson Street, Carringbush, a suburb of the city of Melbourne, in the colony of Victoria.

Even with my Melways, I'm not sure where I am, but David Malouf informs us with his opening line that:

Named like so much else in Australia for a place on the far side of the globe that its finders meant to honour and were piously homesick for, Killarney bears no resemblance to its Irish original.

But any assurance about place can be quite illusory. Especially when that schizoid pair M. Barnard Eldershaw wrestle the compass for dialectical space:

The first light was welling up in the east. In the west a few stars were dying in the colourless sky. The waking sky was enormous and under it the sleeping earth was enormous too.

Randolph Stow doesn't beat around the bush trying to locate himself for us. On the verge of breakdown, the house or dwelling is always under threat:

And he screamed: The house is bleeding. There is nobody inside, he said.

The menace of strangers and home invasion remains extremely high on the list of alarums, and alertness to border protection is always a good way to begin a novel.

Unless, of course, one finds a Pacific Solution; which Albert Dorrington undoubtedly did, in his collection of stories called Castro's Last Sacrament. Published in 1900, the summary of this tale is worth quoting from Richard's catalogue in full, because its racy plot is something I intend using for my next fictional autobiography:

Castro was the publican of the Orient Hotel on Thursday Island. Herrick, a keen young fellow, is sent to the Island by the Torres Strait Pearling Company, and the old timers, led by Castro, play a trick on him. It all goes innocently enough until, late at night, when Castro, drunk, and disguised as a Papuan chief (part of the trick), goes to bed with Mrs. Castro, his attractive Italian wife. The young man thinks the publican's wife is being violated by an intruder, goes to her rescue and is knifed by Castro. He dies, but had been able to wound Castro in the fight. A priest is called to minister to the publican, and Castro's wife exasperated at the brutality of her husband, slips Prussic acid into the chalice with the wine. At the end of the story both men are dead.

And this is the bit from the catalogue I like best:

The heat, boredom, hard work, sexual tension and casual violence all go together to create a minor masterpiece.

Xavier Herbert, reliably obsessive about heat, casual violence and sexual tension, often forgets who is foreign and who indigenous when describing visitants:

The small boy was Aboriginal - distinctly so by cast of countenance, while yet so lightly coloured as to pass for any light-skinned breed, even tanned Caucasian.

While poor fellow Seaforth McKenzie, filled with anxiety and despair over whatever defense a house could afford against intruders in 1953, sought refuge by ringing someone:

It was, I found, the most difficult night telephone call I had ever made.

With a name like that, I'm sure Seaforth wanted to be a millionaire, but even the eponymous G.C. Bleeck, Australia's in-house pulp fictionist par excellence, with 300 novels to his name, only made the equivalent of $21,000 in 20 years of writing. Now, that's something I can sympathise with.

On the other end of the phone-line, George Johnston, incapable of economy in real life, confessed the phantom lives of siblings sparingly:

My brother Jack does not come into the story straight away.

Johnston knew, of course, that sentimentality was the greatest enemy of literature. All visitors to its door should be, in some sense, strangers.

Patrick White had no such worries when it came to introducing them, interrupting the desert emptiness with characteristic dryness:

There is a man here, miss, asking for your uncle.

While a mile away, in the old brown house on the corner, Helen Garner was not weight-watching in case of any abrupt arrival of gentlemen callers, and begins her novel quite bluntly with:

… we ate bacon for breakfast every morning of our lives.

*************

Well, I suppose it's a travesty to graze in this fashion, without partaking of the whole repast.

At the end of the day, where do these first lines leave us? Do we come up short? Do we read on? Do they capture the essential elements of Australian fiction?

I think the answer can be found in Joseph Furphy's Archimedean exclamation in his first line:

Unemployed at last!

This to me is the greatest call to freedom an Australian writer can make.

But I suspect the greatest challenge facing Australian fiction today is not the struggle to enliven a national literature or to re-invigorate a marketplace. The greatest obstacle is not difficulty of publication, but the vain and futile promise of super-stardom. The greatest danger now is over-publishing and over-hyping, which, as Salman Rushdie said, creates under-reading.

It's not just a question of too many novels chasing too few readers, Rushdie says, but a question of too many novels actually chasing readers away.

In a globalised marketplace, will Australian literature be homogenised into something that is simply a good, easy read? Will it consist of formulaic plots for profit? Will authors be able to demonstrate a freedom from stating the obvious?

These new forms of commercial imperialism are rivalling the old colonization of narrative, and if I could end where I began, with Katherine Susannah Prichard, I sympathise with her indignation, which has an almost prophetic quality, when her husband handed out leaflets advertising her book.

"You can't sell books like soap", she said to him.

According to her, his intentions were clean, but his means were questionable when it came down to DIY. Unfortunately means and ends have now become so convoluted that the product looks very much like soap and the only benchmark is marketing success, leading to the result that few readers can distinguish between what is talent and what is mere celebrity.

So let us recover our memory before it is too late. And thank goodness the writers of the books you see here were mainly unemployed. For here is a harvest of almost one and a half centuries of struggle, defiance and sedition rarely seen in any exhibition. And it is all gathered in a resonant space which is open and approachable. I remember how, as a student at Sydney University many years ago, the Rare Books Department was located in the basement of Fisher Library, where students feared to tread, and periodically a singular tome would rise from the depths and appear behind glass in a cabinet which was strategically placed opposite the toilets.

So thank you Richard, for this inspiring festival of fiction, which has led me to re-read some of these books in their entirety. For this collection must surely represent one of Monash's better performing investments and I'm honoured to be able to declare it open. Please join me in raising your glasses and let's read on.

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