Day 3: Sunday 23 February
Carol headed first for a session themed on ‘mythic beings’, where writers Julienne Van Loon and Alexis Wright chatted with fellow author Geordie Williamson. Each woman has written a book based on traditional stories. Van Loon’s novella Harmless takes the ancient Buddhist stories known as the Jataka Tales and appropriates them for a contemporary Australian context. She started with 20 of the little stories with the intention of putting their contents into a single narrative, but soon found that two tales were taking over so she set the others aside. The result is a concise and very readable story of less than 150 pages.
The novella, it seems is back in fashion. Later in the day. Van Loon was back on stage with scriptwriter academic, Ron Eliott, and Melbourne-based writer, Angela Meyer, chatting with Perth author Annabel Smith about the shorter forms of fiction—novellas, short stories and flash fiction. Not everyone likes flash, because the word count is so limited that it’s almost impossible to tell a proper story. Most pieces of flash are vignettes rather than real narratives, although they are perfect for tiny slices of life, character studies and descriptive pieces. The topic widened with a discussion of reasons for writing short fiction (‘To get an answer to a question’/ ‘To contemplate a question’/ ‘To explore different genres’.)
Returning to the morning session, Alexis Wright has written The Swan Book, in which she investigates her own fascination with swans while examining dreamtime stories of Indigenous Australian. Part-Indigenous herself, Wright speaks with love and nostalgia of the lessons from the tales learnt at the knees of her indigenous family. Wright says that in The Swan Book, she was seeking to give expression to the indigenous sense of interconnectedness.
Later in the day, Carol saw Wright again, on the biggest panel of the festival. Five other writers joined Wright: Clarrie Cameron, Kim Scott, Alton Walley, Tyson Mowarin and Stu Campbell. They work in various media—children’s books, adult books, interactive e-books, and graphic novels. Stu Campbell describes Indigenous rock art as ‘the world’s oldest comic books’. Scott echoed Wright’s words of earlier in the day: ‘Stories are important in establishing relatedness’. As younger men using more recent discourses of race and technology, Scott, Campbell and Mowarin contrasted sharply with Clarrie Cameron, who still refers to European Australians as ‘whitefellas’ while he proudly wears the label ‘blackfella’. Cameron has made the transmission of indigenous narratives his life’s work and passion. He praises Indigenous humour, and says that humour has pulled his people through some hard times.
Alexis Wright added to her talk of the morning by saying that part of the reason she writes is to show people what damage is being done to the country by indiscriminate mining activities. Like the younger men, she has also written stories designed to improve the literacy skills and cultural knowledge of Indigenous children.
The writer’s craft was laid bare in the morning session on the interplay between narrative and structure in novels that Ilsa chose to attend. The panellists were Eleanor Catton of New Zealand, Britain’s celebrated veteran fiction-writer Dame Margaret Drabble (18 novels, the latest being The Pure Gold Baby) and Jeet Thayil of India, hosted by Geraldine Mellet. Common threads emerged among the three authors. First, the importance and necessity of time: Catton’s 2013 Man Booker winner The Luminaries had been preceded by two years of reading, while Drabble’s latest work had sat with her as a possible topic for 40 years, and Thayil’s book had taken more than five years end-to-end. Second, the novelist very rarely knows where he or she is going—‘I don’t know the structure until I’ve been working on it a few years, until it is revealed to me in an almost divine way. It’s like launching a boat in the dark with no known destination,’ said Thayil. Third, the apparent straitjacket of an imposed or pre-planned structure yields a sort of freedom within its confines—‘Those limits promote creativity,’ said Catton. Thayil added that it was important to put in the hours, ‘to turn up at your desk for work’, while Drabble engagingly admitted, ‘I just put things that I like in my books, at random really’, adding that she was writing a novel that she might continue writing till the end of her life: ‘I don’t want to end it, why finish it? I’m happy writing it.’
Ilsa found her morning session with former military lawyer and British army major, Rabia Siddique, almost electric. Siddique’s story Equal Justice (2013) narrates her personal battle against gender discrimination in the army. She was in conversation with Geraldine Mellet. Born in Perth of Australian-Indian parentage, Siddique first started toughing it out as a re-entry migrant to Perth in the 1970s after an earlier education in India. Her over-anxious migrant father counselled her always to ‘fit in.’ A series of happenstances brought her to join the British army as a lawyer. You could argue that she simply left (and largely rejected) her father’s culture to adopt another equally patriarchal one, the military culture, where she proceeded to ‘fit in’ with a vengeance. She was, and still is, convinced that you can serve people and do good while working from within in a military framework. Posted to help with the reconstruction of post-war Iraq in 2005, Siddique was a unique kind of soldier: female, Muslim and Arabic-speaking. She won the trust of many Iraqi colleagues. So it was that she was the negotiator of choice in a dangerous and violent standoff with insurgents who had taken her special forces colleagues hostage, and then turned and took her party hostage too. She displayed heroic courage and sheer ‘cool’, but when she almost miraculously returned alive to base, she was aghast to be told virtually to toddle off for a Bex and a good lie down with a cup of tea while the men did all the military debriefing—and eventually garnered all the medals. Her name barely figured in the internal reports of this tense incident. Refusing to be sidelined, she took the issue to court, and won. This while simultaneously dealing with IVF treatment and an ectopic pregnancy (she now has triplet sons), and her husband’s cancer diagnosis.
Carol’s other morning panel was about letters (those things you used to write with a pen and put into an envelope). British journalist, Simon Garfield, Australian historian author, Clare Wright, and Australian author, Gabrielle Carey, discussed the passing of the letter with nostalgia, under the benign supervision of freelance journalist, Tony Malkovic. All would love to save the letter from its seemingly inevitable fate, and were encouraged when nearly half the hundred or so folk in attendance said they still write letters regularly and have no intention of stopping. They gave some wonderful examples of the uses of old letters in research and bemoaned the fact that emails will either be wiped from computers or hidden behind long-forgotten passwords, so will not be available to tomorrow’s researchers.
It seemed appropriate that this wonderful three-day brain-fest should almost literally end in tears, though not of joy, at the afternoon session attended by Ilsa, which was focused on a new book, A Country Too Far, that seeks to give asylum seekers and refugees a voice (the book proceeds have all been donated to the cause). Emotions were high and tears were shed in the context of recent events that had seen 23 year-old Iranian Kurd Reza Berati lose his life in the detention centre riots on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea. Some of the key players in the book were onstage: Thomas Keneally (no introduction needed), Australian novelist and academic, Debra Adelaide, former Vietnamese ‘boat-person’ and author-advocate, Carina Hoang, and Young Australian of the Year 2013 Akram Azimi, a Hazara Afghan and former asylum seeker 13 years ago, now undertaking a triple major degree in Law, Science and Arts. They spoke with New Zealander novelist, Rosie Scott. The Q&A session revealed such big names among the audience as human rights barrister Julian Burnside, who cautioned that his estimate of public support for the government’s current asylum seeker policies stood at about 70 per cent of the population. There was a general sense of outrage at the ineluctable logic of deterrence: to make things so painful for asylum seekers arriving in Australia as to be worse than the horrors from which they had already fled. Azimi was particularly eloquent in his exploration of the paradoxical disjunct between the compassion and mateship natural to the Australian psyche and the parallel hatred expressed for ‘the other’, while Hoang pointed out that a) there was no ‘queue’ to jump, and b) when her 16 year-old sister had no boat to escape in, she instead travelled on foot across the border into Cambodia, where she was gang-raped, imprisoned and abused. Debra Adelaide said quite simply that on this issue, she was ashamed to be an Australian. The session boiled down to stark moral issues: can literature help to recalibrate a nation’s compassion and what exactly is the writer’s higher duty to truth?
Click here for our review of Perth Writers Festival: Day One
Click here for our review of Perth Writers Festival: Lionel Shriver and Martin Amis
Click here for our review of Perth Writers Festival: Day Two
Perth Writers Festival
Perth International Arts Festival
www.perthfestival.com.au
20 – 23 February
