Welcome to On Our Reading Radar - our monthly live discussion thread.
This May, inspired by Helen Garner’s The Children’s Bach, I’m asking:
Which books or films would you recommend from AUSTRALIA OR NEW ZEALAND?
and also:
What else have you enjoyed reading / watching / listening to / experiencing this May?
I’m thrilled to be joined by author Catherine Chidgey, who’s typing with us in the middle of the New Zealand night! I’ve got a few questions for her up my sleeve - please do join in with your own.
Please share your thoughts on the live discussion thread TODAY, NOW at 1.30-2pm GMT (or do add your thoughts later on). All participants will enter the draw to win a copy of Catherine Chidgey’s brilliant last two books, The Axeman’s Carnival and Pet.
I regret I was unable to join the discussions The Children's Bach, but I really enjoyed the audio edition, read by the author. Did anyone else find a little bit of Oscar (from Oscar and Lucinda) in Dexter? Both are a bit haphazard, dippy but also destructive in their own way.
Regarding Australian writers, in case nobody has mentioned Gerald Murnane - a careful writer of beautiful prose, not easy but very rewarding.
As for other reading, nothing to do with Australia or New Zealand, I have just finished a wonderful memoir called The Electric Woman, by Tessa Fontaine, who recounts her brief but profound experience with a travelling carnival sideshow which coincides with her mother's decline/slight recuperation/decline from devastating stroke.
Thank you all so much for providing me with a whole new reading list. I could not think of any New Zealand or Australian writers but, surprisingly, I’ve read quite a few of these books. And I always loved Katherine Mansfield…
I’m currently reading A Town Called Solace by Mary Lawson. Quite light but a bit of a page turner. After that I’m hoping to find time to read Fourteen Days edited by Margaret Atwood and Douglas Preston and Little Boy Lost by Marghanita Laski.
The last book I gave to someone special was One More Kilometre And We’re In The Shower by Tim Hilton.
Thank you Catherine. I’ll be back to this thread with a notebook later, and hopefully heading back to Aotearoa next year very well-read and up to snuff on my NZ authors.
I'm just about to file (!) a review of Cairn by Kathleen Jamie - she's an extraordinary writer. In fact GRACE - you might love her as part of your Scottish reading.
I’ve read everything she’s written and never head north of the border without my copies of Findings and Sightlines! So good to hear there’s more of her writing on the way. I love the way she tells it like it is ...about nature writing...‘It’s not all primroses and otters’.
A shout out for The Coast Road by Alan Murrin - I went to his launch for it. We used to work together as booksellers and it's incredible to see his first book out in the world!
Other recommendations: I really enjoyed seeing TWO Katie Mitchell productions. Lucia di Lamermoor at the ROH was wonderful - the split stage worked really well. Bluets at the Royal Court didn't quite do it for me - somehow I worried it lost the wood for the trees, or however that expression goes.
I’m just back from an expedition around the Scottish Islands and so Adam Nicolson is my current project. Sea Room, about the Shiants, and The Seabird’s Cry.
I have just finished The Vanishing Point, NZ writer Andrea Hotere’s debut. She's the daughter of one of our most famous painters and one of our most famous poets. With the painting Las Meninas by Diego Velázquez at its centre, it’s a wild ride that takes in the 17th century Spanish court and 1990s London! Thrilling, erudite, intense.
Catherine: As seen below, many of us know and love the work of Jane Campion. Are there other great NZ or Australian filmmakers out there we should know about?
I just heard Jane Campion speak at the Auckland Writers Festival. She charged onstage, arms spread wide to display her heavily sequinned batwing gown – what a superstar! Christine Jeffs made one of my favourite NZ films, Rain, based on the masterpiece novella of the same name by Kirsty Gunn. Jeffs is set to release A Mistake this year, which I can’t wait to see – it’s based on the wonderful NZ novel of the same name by Carl Shuker and is about the fallout when surgery on a young woman goes wrong. (She also made Sunshine Cleaning starring Amy Adams and Emily Blunt.)
Lee Tamahori is best-known for Once Were Warriors; his just-released film The Convert is an epic depiction of pre-colonial Aotearoa (NZ).
I loved David Michôd’s Animal Kingdom, about a Melbourne crime syndicate and the family caught up in its machinations, and writer/director Jennifer Kent’s The Nightingale is a visually stunning account of a young woman bent on revenge in 1820s Australia.
Pip Adam is a really exciting contemporary NZ voice. Her work is experimental, daring – it pushes at the boundaries of what fiction can do. Her most recent novel, Audition, is the story of three giants travelling in a cramped spaceship; if they stop talking, they keep growing. Adam’s work is always political on some level, and this book, ostensibly sci-fi, also manages to talk about the consequences of those on the fringe being punished for taking up too much room.
Chris Tse is our current Poet Laureate (and our first and only queer Chinese Poet Laureate!). His 2014 collection How to Be Dead in a Year of Snakes interrogates Chinese NZ history, unpicking the story of the 1905 murder of a Cantonese gold prospector, committed to draw attention to a crusade to rid NZ of Chinese immigrants.
Anna Smaill was longlisted for the Booker for her dystopian gem The Chimes. Her new novel Bird Life
To the classics: Janet Frame is one of our best-known writers (already nicked by a couple of you!), and her work is enjoying renewed attention in 2024, the centenary of her birth. Her 1990 autobiography An Angel at my Table, made into a film by Jane Campion, broke the mould for autobiographical writing in its departure from the dry, factual recording of a life to something that often approaches poetry. A must-read. I return again and again to her 1961 novel Faces in the Water, which draws on her time in psychiatric institutions when she was misdiagnosed with schizophrenia. It’s one of the most achingly beautiful, humane books I’ve read.
Katherine Mansfield’s short stories ring as true and cut as deeply as they did when they were first published in the early 20th century. At our local botanic gardens there is even a “feature garden” that recreates the Edwardian NZ setting of one of her most famous stories, ‘The Garden Party’ – complete with fake food!
Patricia Grace was the first Māori woman to publish a collection of short stories. Her 1986 novel Potiki engages with the all-too-familiar issue of the development of ancestral Māori land by Pākehā (white NZers) – something that Grace has experienced and resisted in her own life.
Catherine: I loved your most recent book, The Axeman’s Carnival, which won the biggest NZ fiction prize, and your previous book Pet also met with widespread acclaim. Thanks to Europa Editions, I’m thrilled to be giving away a copy of each book to one lucky participant on this thread. Could you give us three sentences each about these two books?
The Axeman’s Carnival is the story of a marriage in crisis on a failing farm. When childless Marnie brings home an abandoned magpie chick to raise, her dangerous husband Rob, a champion axeman, grows ever more volatile. But Tama the magpie begins to talk, becoming an internet sensation and the thing that might save the couple financially – if Rob doesn’t wring his neck first.
Pet is set in 1984 NZ, when Justine, a motherless 12-year-old, falls under the spell of her glamorous new teacher Mrs Price. When a thief begins stealing from the children, Justine is not sure where her loyalties should lie, and as much darker events begin to unfold, she learns the price of refusing to believe truths that call into question her own judgement. Part psychological thriller, part coming-of-age story, Pet will keep you turning the pages until its shocking conclusion.
The Axeman’s Carnival is told entirely from the point of view of Tama, so here he is opening the book: “A long long time ago, when I was a little chick, not even a chick but a pink and naked thing, a scar a scrap a scrape fallen on roots and wriggling, when I was catching my death and all I knew of sky was the feel of feathers above me, the belly of black as warm as a cloud above me, when I was blind, my eyes unsprouted seeds, my eyes dots of gravel stuck under skin, when I was a beak opening for nothing nothing nothing, she lifted me into her pillowed palm.”
(And also Tama, mimicking the cop show Rob watches: “I will take you DOWN, motherfucker.”)
In this scene in Pet, the class’s pet axolotl has been injured, supposedly by a crab shell dropped into her tank:
“We could all see Susan’s injured leg now, cut halfway through, the foot almost detached.
‘No way a dead crab could do that,’ muttered Amy.
I didn’t think the crab looked sharp enough to have caused such a bad wound either – but I supposed Mrs Price knew about these things, because she was the teacher. She slid the scalpel from the dissection kit and gave it to Karl. ‘Cut it off,’ she said.”
Catherine: Why do you think it’s hard for Australian and NZ writers to get recognition in the rest of the world? What do you think could be done to change this? If we’re keen to discover more about them, are there any cultural hubs, websites or publications that you’d recommend for us to check out?
You know, in our online world, I’d like to think geography doesn’t matter…but the tyranny of distance (to quote iconic NZ pop group Split Enz, who are quoting Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey, who is in turn quoting American geographer William Bunge) means that we can’t easily do bookstore events in NYC or zip across to the Edinburgh Book Festival. It’s expensive to bring a writer to the other side of the world, so unfortunately we miss out on those in-person opportunities that can be vitally important in reaching new readers. Please do spread the word about the fabulous books appearing down under! (I’m very happy to be pimped on social media!)
TRUST ME SHE LOOKS A LOT ROUGHER THAN HER PROFILE PIC
Sorry. Tama again.
The Spinoff is an excellent NZ website covering current affairs and cultural life, with a dedicated books section featuring some brilliant long-form features, reviews and interviews. The website ReadingRoom covers the local literary scene and publishes a free NZ short story every Saturday. Landfall is our longest-running and most esteemed literary journal, while Starling offers an outlet for stunning work by NZ writers under 25. I’m proud to have conceived and to organise the Sargeson Prize, our richest short-story competition; you can read previous winners on our website: Across the ditch, as we say, the Australian Book Review is a must-read each month, and there’s the wonderful companion podcast released every Thursday, showcasing poetry, fiction and interviews.
I’ll admit I struggled to find NZ authors to read while I was there. The paperback books are an odd size and surprisingly expensive. I did read The Whale Rider by Witi Ihimaera while I was there last time though.
Hi, Bernadette here. I really enjoyed the Regent's Park walk on The Children's Bach. I found myself thinking about some of the comments for a long time afterwards, particularly about the use of music potentially as a 'third space'. I think it was Emily who said that. I've also ready The House of Grief and, like Catherine, found it deeply compelling.
I recommend All the Birds are Singing by Evie Wyld, which is partly set in Australia. It's quite a mysterious book with an unusual structure, one timeframe going forwards and the other backwards in time. The main character's past experience on remote sheep stations in Western Australia seems to inform her present on a remote English island. The nature writing is beautiful and the atmosphere of the book has really stayed with me. (My daughter did it for English A level though and hated it!)
Also, thanks for remembering my wisdom re the third space of music! I try to keep it in mind while forcing my own children through their morning music practice...
Also wanted to share this from Julia, who can't join at the moment:
"I'm afraid I really didn't take to The Children's Bach (too fragmented for me) but please could I suggest Picnic at Hanging Rock (one of my favourites from the last few years) and a selection of Katherine Mansfield's stories for future walks next time you're considering Australia/New Zealand."
A question now that I hope doesn't make me look too prejudiced:
New Zealand, where you are, is just next to Australia, and in the UK we tend to group the Antipodes together. Is this appropriate or are they in fact quite separate writing communities and cultures?
They feel very separate. This is something that comes up with reliable regularity at book festivals and in Serious Discussions About Literature, but it never seems to change! New Zealanders might tell you that the reason we’re so different is that all the convicts went to Australia while all the good honest farmers came our way, but you probably shouldn’t put much stock in that theory. Weirdly, we tend to ignore each other’s literature…we pay much more attention to work from the UK and the US. I think that old cultural cringe is still in force – the idea that if it comes from this part of the world, it can’t be much good. It’s maddening.
I've come up with quite a long answer for this! I'll break it into contemporary and classic.
As far as contemporary writers go, I adore the work of Kate Grenville, who writes with both precision and poetry. The first book of hers I read was her 1994 novel Dark Places. Set in Edwardian Sydney, it tells the story of Albion, a man who sexually abuses his daughter Lilian – however, it contains very little physical violence, mainly because of Granville’s decision to write in the first person, as Albion. In a speech about the writing of the novel, Granville said, “This is a book in which the whole of the surface is a lie. The reader is forced to enter this lie of the surface, to collude with Albion.” It is in fact a prequel to her novel Lilian’s Story, also highly recommended, which gives an entirely different and more honest take on this deeply disturbing father-daughter relationship. At the moment I’m loving reading her most recent novel Restless Dolly Maunder, shortlisted for the Women’s Prize, and based on the prickly, problematic, enigmatic figure of her maternal grandmother.
Laura Jean McKay’s work is highly original, risky, bold. The Animals in That Country won prizes in her native Australia as well as the Arthur C Clarke Award in the UK for the best science fiction novel of the year. Written – coincidentally – on the eve of the pandemic, it tells the story of a flu that sweeps Australia and enables those infected to understand what animals are saying. I’m about to appear with the author at an Australian literary festival, and I can’t wait to talk talking animals (since my novel features a talking magpie).
YEAH ACTUALLY THE MAGPIE WROTE IT. NOT CHIDGEY. THOUGH SHE’S HOOVERING UP ALL THE GLORY. (PS I’M THE MAGPIE.)
I’m so sorry…Tama Magpie seized control of the keyboard for a moment there. It won’t happen again.
I admire Charlotte Wood for her fiction as well as for her writing on the craft of writing (she penned a brilliant book on creativity called The Luminous Solution). Her 2015 novel The Natural Way of Things is a searing take on the double standard applied to women caught up in sex scandals with influential men. Brutal and unforgettable.
I’m so intrigued by this cheeky magpie I’m going to have to read it!
Has anyone read Jungfrau by Dymphna Cusack? Set in Sydney in the 1930s. I though it was an astonishing read but can’t seem to persuade anyone else. My pitch to Persephone sadly failed.
You can’t talk about classic Australian literature without mentioning Patrick White, the first Australian writer to win the Nobel (in 1973). I love him for his refusal to play the publicity game as much as for his books. His 1976 novel A Fringe of Leaves, about an Englishwoman shipwrecked in the 1830s off the coast of Queensland and rescued by the land’s Aboriginal inhabitants as well as by an escaped convict, was one of the first books to really examine and bring together the key players in Australia’s difficult history.
Peter Carey wrote the Booker-winning classic Oscar and Lucinda, published in 1988. It was so important to me when I was figuring out how to write a novel back in the mid-90s. It taught me the power of the magical, unexpected, Big Scene – in this case, a glass church transported on a barge. His 1981 novel Bliss, about an ad exec brought back to life, is a masterclass in the blackest of comedy.
Lastly, the work of Colleen McCullogh figured prominently in my Catholic childhood. I wasn’t really exposed to “highbrow” literature at home, although I did grow up in a house of readers. I remember in particular McCullogh’s scandalous blockbuster The Thorn Birds,
FINALLY, SOME MORE BIRD ACTION. POWER TO THE UNDER-REPRESENTED VOICES! #DIVERSITY
Apologies – that was Tama again. Anyway – I remember The Thorn Birds, the bestselling Australian book of all time, sitting on our bookshelf in the lounge. It’s a sprawling family saga about an Irish family who settle on a remote Australian sheep farm, the scandal being an affair between the beautiful Meggie and a Catholic priest. Obviously, these were the sections I read furtively when my parents weren’t around!
The Godwits Fly by Robin Hyde, especially because I was entranced by the discovery that they used to ring the cathedral bells in Christchurch (before the earthquake) when the godwits arrived from their long migration south. That seemed magical to me.
I happened to arrive with the godwits so I went birdwatching to see them.
I’m thinking Janet Frame has to be mentioned. I’ve read a lot of her books and especially loved Living in the Maniototo. I only have to mention these places to my daughter and I’m taken there on my next visit😀
Thank you so much, Grace! Gosh, I started writing that book last century, when I was 24 - a lifetime ago! Still close to my heart, in that a lot of it is autobiographical. I read a passage from it at my dad's funeral in 1995 - I wrote the book while he had cancer - and then two years ago I read a companion passage at my mum's burial. So yes, a very personal text.
Catherine: Our May 2024 book is The Children’s Bach by Australian writer Helen Garner. First published in the 1980s, it’s recently been republished alongside some of her other work and met with long-overdue acclaim over here. Are you familiar with Helen Garner’s work? Would you recommend anything else by her?
I loved Garner's very first book, Monkey Grip, published in 1977 and based on her 1970s diaries. It marked an important turning point in Australian writing, when a female and feminist voice burst onto the scene – a voice that documented motherhood, the domestic, the body. I came to it in my early twenties, and – drug addiction aside! – it spoke to me of my own Antipodean childhood and adolescence in a way that the texts we’d studied at school never did, much as I loved them (Wuthering Heights, Pride and Prejudice, To Kill a Mockingbird). It spoke of sun-heat, water, the outdoors, a back yard that ‘smelt like the country’.
Garner is known equally well for her non-fiction, and her 2014 book This House of Grief has stayed with me – an account of the trial of a father who drove his three young sons into a dam, where they drowned. Was it deliberate? A terrible accident? Garner’s personal reaction to and obsession with the case are as riveting as the tragic details and the court-room proceedings.
Another book by Lloyd Jones...The Book of Fame. I’ve recommended it to so many rugby fans. It’s about the first All Blacks tour of the U.K. in 1905. Little was expected of them but they stormed it.
It was quite the scandal...I have a lot of affection for Witi, and it may have been just a case of forgetting to attribute notes he'd taken years before, but it was quite the scandal.
The jet lag wasn't too bad at all. I use an acupressure app called Uplift which is AMAZING - everyone should know about it! Perhaps it's mind over matter, but I don't care, because it works for me.
It's a bit of fluff, really, but entertaining when you don't want anything too demanding. We're watching Slow Horses at the moment and I have to be wide awake to keep up with that!
If you are late to the thread, please do feel free to post your recommendations here at a later date - we'd love to see them.
I regret I was unable to join the discussions The Children's Bach, but I really enjoyed the audio edition, read by the author. Did anyone else find a little bit of Oscar (from Oscar and Lucinda) in Dexter? Both are a bit haphazard, dippy but also destructive in their own way.
Regarding Australian writers, in case nobody has mentioned Gerald Murnane - a careful writer of beautiful prose, not easy but very rewarding.
As for other reading, nothing to do with Australia or New Zealand, I have just finished a wonderful memoir called The Electric Woman, by Tessa Fontaine, who recounts her brief but profound experience with a travelling carnival sideshow which coincides with her mother's decline/slight recuperation/decline from devastating stroke.
This writer is going places.
Thanks so much for these, Maggie!
Nor to forget Pet by Catherine Chidgley.
Thank you, Enid!
And yes, great addition!
My best New Zealnd The Bone People Keri Hulme All by Janet Frame Birnam Wood Eleanor Catton and all Katherine Mansfield stories set in New Zealandc
Thanks Enid!
And as for the Thornbirds on TV - such a guilty pressure for a self confessed (and often insufferable) literature snob.
Haha...I won't tell anyone!
Thank you all so much for providing me with a whole new reading list. I could not think of any New Zealand or Australian writers but, surprisingly, I’ve read quite a few of these books. And I always loved Katherine Mansfield…
Hello Mari - thank you! Katherine Mansfield is definitely moving up my list of possible future book club picks.
Some more recommendations by email from Caroline:
I’m currently reading A Town Called Solace by Mary Lawson. Quite light but a bit of a page turner. After that I’m hoping to find time to read Fourteen Days edited by Margaret Atwood and Douglas Preston and Little Boy Lost by Marghanita Laski.
The last book I gave to someone special was One More Kilometre And We’re In The Shower by Tim Hilton.
The winner of the books will be notified by email...
good luck!
Thank you so much to Catherine Chidgey for joining us.
And also to Sue, Sarah and Grace.
Thank you! And apologies for interjections from Tama Magpie...he's been at the cooking sherry.
On that note, it's time to bring the live discussion to a close...
Thanks so much for having me! Lovely to connect.
Thank you Catherine. I’ll be back to this thread with a notebook later, and hopefully heading back to Aotearoa next year very well-read and up to snuff on my NZ authors.
Fascinating fact alert - Richard Curtis (yes he of Love Actually etc) was born in New Zealand!
I did not know that!
I'm just about to file (!) a review of Cairn by Kathleen Jamie - she's an extraordinary writer. In fact GRACE - you might love her as part of your Scottish reading.
I’ve read everything she’s written and never head north of the border without my copies of Findings and Sightlines! So good to hear there’s more of her writing on the way. I love the way she tells it like it is ...about nature writing...‘It’s not all primroses and otters’.
For sure! So glad to find a fellow fan.
A shout out for The Coast Road by Alan Murrin - I went to his launch for it. We used to work together as booksellers and it's incredible to see his first book out in the world!
Other recommendations: I really enjoyed seeing TWO Katie Mitchell productions. Lucia di Lamermoor at the ROH was wonderful - the split stage worked really well. Bluets at the Royal Court didn't quite do it for me - somehow I worried it lost the wood for the trees, or however that expression goes.
Also, more broadly, does anyone have any tips for anything else they've loved this May?
I’m just back from an expedition around the Scottish Islands and so Adam Nicolson is my current project. Sea Room, about the Shiants, and The Seabird’s Cry.
Wonderful.
I have just finished The Vanishing Point, NZ writer Andrea Hotere’s debut. She's the daughter of one of our most famous painters and one of our most famous poets. With the painting Las Meninas by Diego Velázquez at its centre, it’s a wild ride that takes in the 17th century Spanish court and 1990s London! Thrilling, erudite, intense.
Catherine: As seen below, many of us know and love the work of Jane Campion. Are there other great NZ or Australian filmmakers out there we should know about?
I just heard Jane Campion speak at the Auckland Writers Festival. She charged onstage, arms spread wide to display her heavily sequinned batwing gown – what a superstar! Christine Jeffs made one of my favourite NZ films, Rain, based on the masterpiece novella of the same name by Kirsty Gunn. Jeffs is set to release A Mistake this year, which I can’t wait to see – it’s based on the wonderful NZ novel of the same name by Carl Shuker and is about the fallout when surgery on a young woman goes wrong. (She also made Sunshine Cleaning starring Amy Adams and Emily Blunt.)
Lee Tamahori is best-known for Once Were Warriors; his just-released film The Convert is an epic depiction of pre-colonial Aotearoa (NZ).
I loved David Michôd’s Animal Kingdom, about a Melbourne crime syndicate and the family caught up in its machinations, and writer/director Jennifer Kent’s The Nightingale is a visually stunning account of a young woman bent on revenge in 1820s Australia.
I’m going to have to come back and make a list. This is so helpful. Thank you.
Crikey 5 mins left...
Argh!
Catherine: Could you recommend 3 contemporary and 3 classic NZ writers for us?
Pip Adam is a really exciting contemporary NZ voice. Her work is experimental, daring – it pushes at the boundaries of what fiction can do. Her most recent novel, Audition, is the story of three giants travelling in a cramped spaceship; if they stop talking, they keep growing. Adam’s work is always political on some level, and this book, ostensibly sci-fi, also manages to talk about the consequences of those on the fringe being punished for taking up too much room.
Chris Tse is our current Poet Laureate (and our first and only queer Chinese Poet Laureate!). His 2014 collection How to Be Dead in a Year of Snakes interrogates Chinese NZ history, unpicking the story of the 1905 murder of a Cantonese gold prospector, committed to draw attention to a crusade to rid NZ of Chinese immigrants.
Anna Smaill was longlisted for the Booker for her dystopian gem The Chimes. Her new novel Bird Life
YESSSSS!
…is a gorgeous evocation of madness and grief.
To the classics: Janet Frame is one of our best-known writers (already nicked by a couple of you!), and her work is enjoying renewed attention in 2024, the centenary of her birth. Her 1990 autobiography An Angel at my Table, made into a film by Jane Campion, broke the mould for autobiographical writing in its departure from the dry, factual recording of a life to something that often approaches poetry. A must-read. I return again and again to her 1961 novel Faces in the Water, which draws on her time in psychiatric institutions when she was misdiagnosed with schizophrenia. It’s one of the most achingly beautiful, humane books I’ve read.
Katherine Mansfield’s short stories ring as true and cut as deeply as they did when they were first published in the early 20th century. At our local botanic gardens there is even a “feature garden” that recreates the Edwardian NZ setting of one of her most famous stories, ‘The Garden Party’ – complete with fake food!
Patricia Grace was the first Māori woman to publish a collection of short stories. Her 1986 novel Potiki engages with the all-too-familiar issue of the development of ancestral Māori land by Pākehā (white NZers) – something that Grace has experienced and resisted in her own life.
And when you think how close Janet Frame came to a lobotomy.
I know...such an unthinkable prospect.
I remember reading my first Mansfield short story at university and being blown away. So good.
I think Mansfield can be read over and over. I never tire of her short stories.
Thank you both of you!
sorry , I have to leave the thread now and go out
No prob, thanks for joining!
Before someone else nicks this one, I am longing to recommend Janet Frame as a wonderful NZ author. Her memoir An Angel at my Table is extraordinary.
I really love An angel at my table
Agreed. Very important to me as a fledgling writer.
Catherine: I loved your most recent book, The Axeman’s Carnival, which won the biggest NZ fiction prize, and your previous book Pet also met with widespread acclaim. Thanks to Europa Editions, I’m thrilled to be giving away a copy of each book to one lucky participant on this thread. Could you give us three sentences each about these two books?
The Axeman’s Carnival is the story of a marriage in crisis on a failing farm. When childless Marnie brings home an abandoned magpie chick to raise, her dangerous husband Rob, a champion axeman, grows ever more volatile. But Tama the magpie begins to talk, becoming an internet sensation and the thing that might save the couple financially – if Rob doesn’t wring his neck first.
Pet is set in 1984 NZ, when Justine, a motherless 12-year-old, falls under the spell of her glamorous new teacher Mrs Price. When a thief begins stealing from the children, Justine is not sure where her loyalties should lie, and as much darker events begin to unfold, she learns the price of refusing to believe truths that call into question her own judgement. Part psychological thriller, part coming-of-age story, Pet will keep you turning the pages until its shocking conclusion.
I'm excited to share these with one lucky winner!
Me I hope haha my recommendations are The Whale Rider and Rabbit Proof Fence
Thank you Geraldine! Great tips.
And, would you like to share a favourite line or two from each book too?
The Axeman’s Carnival is told entirely from the point of view of Tama, so here he is opening the book: “A long long time ago, when I was a little chick, not even a chick but a pink and naked thing, a scar a scrap a scrape fallen on roots and wriggling, when I was catching my death and all I knew of sky was the feel of feathers above me, the belly of black as warm as a cloud above me, when I was blind, my eyes unsprouted seeds, my eyes dots of gravel stuck under skin, when I was a beak opening for nothing nothing nothing, she lifted me into her pillowed palm.”
(And also Tama, mimicking the cop show Rob watches: “I will take you DOWN, motherfucker.”)
In this scene in Pet, the class’s pet axolotl has been injured, supposedly by a crab shell dropped into her tank:
“We could all see Susan’s injured leg now, cut halfway through, the foot almost detached.
‘No way a dead crab could do that,’ muttered Amy.
I didn’t think the crab looked sharp enough to have caused such a bad wound either – but I supposed Mrs Price knew about these things, because she was the teacher. She slid the scalpel from the dissection kit and gave it to Karl. ‘Cut it off,’ she said.”
Tama has some great lines!
All the BEST lines!
Catherine: Why do you think it’s hard for Australian and NZ writers to get recognition in the rest of the world? What do you think could be done to change this? If we’re keen to discover more about them, are there any cultural hubs, websites or publications that you’d recommend for us to check out?
You know, in our online world, I’d like to think geography doesn’t matter…but the tyranny of distance (to quote iconic NZ pop group Split Enz, who are quoting Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey, who is in turn quoting American geographer William Bunge) means that we can’t easily do bookstore events in NYC or zip across to the Edinburgh Book Festival. It’s expensive to bring a writer to the other side of the world, so unfortunately we miss out on those in-person opportunities that can be vitally important in reaching new readers. Please do spread the word about the fabulous books appearing down under! (I’m very happy to be pimped on social media!)
TRUST ME SHE LOOKS A LOT ROUGHER THAN HER PROFILE PIC
Sorry. Tama again.
The Spinoff is an excellent NZ website covering current affairs and cultural life, with a dedicated books section featuring some brilliant long-form features, reviews and interviews. The website ReadingRoom covers the local literary scene and publishes a free NZ short story every Saturday. Landfall is our longest-running and most esteemed literary journal, while Starling offers an outlet for stunning work by NZ writers under 25. I’m proud to have conceived and to organise the Sargeson Prize, our richest short-story competition; you can read previous winners on our website: Across the ditch, as we say, the Australian Book Review is a must-read each month, and there’s the wonderful companion podcast released every Thursday, showcasing poetry, fiction and interviews.
Links here:
https://thespinoff.co.nz/
https://newsroom.co.nz/readingroom/
https://www.otago.ac.nz/press/landfall
https://www.starlingmag.com/
https://www.waikato.ac.nz/about/faculties-schools/arts/writing-studies/sargeson-prize/
https://www.australianbookreview.com.au/
https://www.australianbookreview.com.au/podcast
I’ll admit I struggled to find NZ authors to read while I was there. The paperback books are an odd size and surprisingly expensive. I did read The Whale Rider by Witi Ihimaera while I was there last time though.
It's true, books are expensive in NZ.
These are such great resources, thank you so much.
Across the ditch - i love it.
Since we have the North Island and the South Island, we also like to call Austrlia the West Island.
Hi, Bernadette here. I really enjoyed the Regent's Park walk on The Children's Bach. I found myself thinking about some of the comments for a long time afterwards, particularly about the use of music potentially as a 'third space'. I think it was Emily who said that. I've also ready The House of Grief and, like Catherine, found it deeply compelling.
I recommend All the Birds are Singing by Evie Wyld, which is partly set in Australia. It's quite a mysterious book with an unusual structure, one timeframe going forwards and the other backwards in time. The main character's past experience on remote sheep stations in Western Australia seems to inform her present on a remote English island. The nature writing is beautiful and the atmosphere of the book has really stayed with me. (My daughter did it for English A level though and hated it!)
Also, thanks for remembering my wisdom re the third space of music! I try to keep it in mind while forcing my own children through their morning music practice...
I LOVE that Evie Wyld book.
In fact, I've just realised we discussed it as our 48th book for Emily's Walking Book Club!
Ah, I'm a newcomer and didn't realise. I bet it provoked some good conversations.
YES it did! I sometimes wonder if we should have a re-run of some truly brilliant books... Maybe one a year.
Hi Bernadette great to have you on here.
I don't know the Wyld, Bernadette, but it sounds intriguing. And I'm all for birds!
Hello - I'm a big Helen Garner fan and excited to discover your work, Catherine.
Thank you, Sarah!
Also wanted to share this from Julia, who can't join at the moment:
"I'm afraid I really didn't take to The Children's Bach (too fragmented for me) but please could I suggest Picnic at Hanging Rock (one of my favourites from the last few years) and a selection of Katherine Mansfield's stories for future walks next time you're considering Australia/New Zealand."
Two great recommendations!
Picnic at Hanging Rock is one of the scariest books I've read! Wonderful stuff.
A question now that I hope doesn't make me look too prejudiced:
New Zealand, where you are, is just next to Australia, and in the UK we tend to group the Antipodes together. Is this appropriate or are they in fact quite separate writing communities and cultures?
They feel very separate. This is something that comes up with reliable regularity at book festivals and in Serious Discussions About Literature, but it never seems to change! New Zealanders might tell you that the reason we’re so different is that all the convicts went to Australia while all the good honest farmers came our way, but you probably shouldn’t put much stock in that theory. Weirdly, we tend to ignore each other’s literature…we pay much more attention to work from the UK and the US. I think that old cultural cringe is still in force – the idea that if it comes from this part of the world, it can’t be much good. It’s maddening.
Catherine: are there any other Australian writers you’d recommend?
I've come up with quite a long answer for this! I'll break it into contemporary and classic.
As far as contemporary writers go, I adore the work of Kate Grenville, who writes with both precision and poetry. The first book of hers I read was her 1994 novel Dark Places. Set in Edwardian Sydney, it tells the story of Albion, a man who sexually abuses his daughter Lilian – however, it contains very little physical violence, mainly because of Granville’s decision to write in the first person, as Albion. In a speech about the writing of the novel, Granville said, “This is a book in which the whole of the surface is a lie. The reader is forced to enter this lie of the surface, to collude with Albion.” It is in fact a prequel to her novel Lilian’s Story, also highly recommended, which gives an entirely different and more honest take on this deeply disturbing father-daughter relationship. At the moment I’m loving reading her most recent novel Restless Dolly Maunder, shortlisted for the Women’s Prize, and based on the prickly, problematic, enigmatic figure of her maternal grandmother.
Laura Jean McKay’s work is highly original, risky, bold. The Animals in That Country won prizes in her native Australia as well as the Arthur C Clarke Award in the UK for the best science fiction novel of the year. Written – coincidentally – on the eve of the pandemic, it tells the story of a flu that sweeps Australia and enables those infected to understand what animals are saying. I’m about to appear with the author at an Australian literary festival, and I can’t wait to talk talking animals (since my novel features a talking magpie).
YEAH ACTUALLY THE MAGPIE WROTE IT. NOT CHIDGEY. THOUGH SHE’S HOOVERING UP ALL THE GLORY. (PS I’M THE MAGPIE.)
I’m so sorry…Tama Magpie seized control of the keyboard for a moment there. It won’t happen again.
I admire Charlotte Wood for her fiction as well as for her writing on the craft of writing (she penned a brilliant book on creativity called The Luminous Solution). Her 2015 novel The Natural Way of Things is a searing take on the double standard applied to women caught up in sex scandals with influential men. Brutal and unforgettable.
Thank you for the reminder about Kate Grenville, somehow she’d dropped off my reading radar.
I’m so intrigued by this cheeky magpie I’m going to have to read it!
Has anyone read Jungfrau by Dymphna Cusack? Set in Sydney in the 1930s. I though it was an astonishing read but can’t seem to persuade anyone else. My pitch to Persephone sadly failed.
Haha - for those who don't know, Tama the magpie is a key presence in Catherine's book, The Axeman's Carnival!
You can’t talk about classic Australian literature without mentioning Patrick White, the first Australian writer to win the Nobel (in 1973). I love him for his refusal to play the publicity game as much as for his books. His 1976 novel A Fringe of Leaves, about an Englishwoman shipwrecked in the 1830s off the coast of Queensland and rescued by the land’s Aboriginal inhabitants as well as by an escaped convict, was one of the first books to really examine and bring together the key players in Australia’s difficult history.
Peter Carey wrote the Booker-winning classic Oscar and Lucinda, published in 1988. It was so important to me when I was figuring out how to write a novel back in the mid-90s. It taught me the power of the magical, unexpected, Big Scene – in this case, a glass church transported on a barge. His 1981 novel Bliss, about an ad exec brought back to life, is a masterclass in the blackest of comedy.
Lastly, the work of Colleen McCullogh figured prominently in my Catholic childhood. I wasn’t really exposed to “highbrow” literature at home, although I did grow up in a house of readers. I remember in particular McCullogh’s scandalous blockbuster The Thorn Birds,
FINALLY, SOME MORE BIRD ACTION. POWER TO THE UNDER-REPRESENTED VOICES! #DIVERSITY
Apologies – that was Tama again. Anyway – I remember The Thorn Birds, the bestselling Australian book of all time, sitting on our bookshelf in the lounge. It’s a sprawling family saga about an Irish family who settle on a remote Australian sheep farm, the scandal being an affair between the beautiful Meggie and a Catholic priest. Obviously, these were the sections I read furtively when my parents weren’t around!
Oh how I adored The Thornbirds! Or maybe I adored the film version even more...Richard Chamberlain as Ralph de Bricassart..
Siiiiigh!
Great to have your recommendations Catherine thank you!
I do have a pile of favourites here too...
The Godwits Fly by Robin Hyde, especially because I was entranced by the discovery that they used to ring the cathedral bells in Christchurch (before the earthquake) when the godwits arrived from their long migration south. That seemed magical to me.
Yes, isn't that a glorious detail!
I happened to arrive with the godwits so I went birdwatching to see them.
I’m thinking Janet Frame has to be mentioned. I’ve read a lot of her books and especially loved Living in the Maniototo. I only have to mention these places to my daughter and I’m taken there on my next visit😀
Hugely important writer. A miracle-weaver.
Beautifully published by beloved Persephone Books!
As well as sharing our tips I'll be asking Catherine some questions over the coming half hour. Do please chime in with tips or questions!
Waving to Catherine...I read In A Fishbone Church in the run up to a visit to my daughter in NZ and loved it.
Thank you so much, Grace! Gosh, I started writing that book last century, when I was 24 - a lifetime ago! Still close to my heart, in that a lot of it is autobiographical. I read a passage from it at my dad's funeral in 1995 - I wrote the book while he had cancer - and then two years ago I read a companion passage at my mum's burial. So yes, a very personal text.
Hi Grace, thanks so much for joining.
Catherine: Our May 2024 book is The Children’s Bach by Australian writer Helen Garner. First published in the 1980s, it’s recently been republished alongside some of her other work and met with long-overdue acclaim over here. Are you familiar with Helen Garner’s work? Would you recommend anything else by her?
Hi everyone! Pleased to be joining you.
I loved Garner's very first book, Monkey Grip, published in 1977 and based on her 1970s diaries. It marked an important turning point in Australian writing, when a female and feminist voice burst onto the scene – a voice that documented motherhood, the domestic, the body. I came to it in my early twenties, and – drug addiction aside! – it spoke to me of my own Antipodean childhood and adolescence in a way that the texts we’d studied at school never did, much as I loved them (Wuthering Heights, Pride and Prejudice, To Kill a Mockingbird). It spoke of sun-heat, water, the outdoors, a back yard that ‘smelt like the country’.
Garner is known equally well for her non-fiction, and her 2014 book This House of Grief has stayed with me – an account of the trial of a father who drove his three young sons into a dam, where they drowned. Was it deliberate? A terrible accident? Garner’s personal reaction to and obsession with the case are as riveting as the tragic details and the court-room proceedings.
Thanks so much for this Catherine - those other two books by her have just been republished along with The Children's Bach over here.
Also loads of people have mentioned to me how amazing her diaries are!
my favourites include : All of Jane Campion films
Witi Ihimaera - the Trowenna Sea
Mr pip by Llyod Jones
The Bone People by Keri Hulme
warm wishes from Sue
Another book by Lloyd Jones...The Book of Fame. I’ve recommended it to so many rugby fans. It’s about the first All Blacks tour of the U.K. in 1905. Little was expected of them but they stormed it.
thanks Grace . I'll look outfor that one
Oh interesting that you mention The Trowenna Sea...that attracted quite a bit of controversy here when it was released - plagiarism accusations!
Oh Goodness , I didn't know that !
It was quite the scandal...I have a lot of affection for Witi, and it may have been just a case of forgetting to attribute notes he'd taken years before, but it was quite the scandal.
Hello Sue - thanks so much for sharing these!
I was so thrilled to meet you Catherine for a London event recently. How's the jet lag now you're back in NZ? Is it worse going one way or the other?
The jet lag wasn't too bad at all. I use an acupressure app called Uplift which is AMAZING - everyone should know about it! Perhaps it's mind over matter, but I don't care, because it works for me.
Everyone, welcome to our live discussion thread, please introduce yourself when you get here. We'll begin the discussion in earnest at 1.30
Catherine - holler when you get here! I'm so impressed that you're still awake at half past midnight - how did your binge-watching of Bridgerton go?
I'm here! I managed 1.3 episodes. V impressed at Colin's makeover.
I'm really ashamed to admit that I've not watched any Bridgerton.
It's a bit of fluff, really, but entertaining when you don't want anything too demanding. We're watching Slow Horses at the moment and I have to be wide awake to keep up with that!
Though only 1.3 episodes makes me feel less inclined to worry about it!
Oh that's of the new series. I've watched the others. Total frothy escapism!
Qu! Do I need to keep refreshing the page to show new comments?
Yes I think refreshing is a good idea - browsers can be a bit slow to catch up and register them.
That should have been a colon, not an exclamation mark. I'm not THAT perky at this time of night.