Nicholas Jose: Invariably, Australia drops off the edge of any survey of world literature.. Oh, it’s a shame we haven’t got any space left, you know 

Lynda Ng: Our most beloved literature is about the losers of history 

 

Anna Funder:- Welcome to Fully Lit, a podcast about Australian writing.  

 

Nicholas Jose: There’s always been a radical disruptive transformative energy that these in the best Australian novels that these contemporary writers particularly Indigenous writers are continuing. 

 

Anna Funder:- I’m Anna Funder.  

In this episode, host Lynda Ng speaks with Nicholas Jose. Lynda is an Aus lit academic and critic, and Nicholas is a writer and former diplomat. 

Together, they survey the Australian novel and its place in world, with the help of readings from Patrick White, Alexis Wright, Christina Stead and many more. 

 

READING Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey 

Anna Funder: It’s time to get fully lit 

 

 

[00:01:21] 

Lynda Ng: I’m here in the studio today with Nicholas Jose, novelist, essayist and emeritus professor at the University of Adelaide. Nicholas was also cultural counsellor at the Australian Embassy in Beijing from 1987 to 1990. So is extremely well placed to talk about the Australian novel and the world. Welcome, Nicholas. 

 

Nicholas Jose: Hi, Lynda. It’s great to be here. 

 

Lynda Ng: Nick, do you think the profile of the Australian novel has changed in recent decades? 

 

Nicholas Jose: Yes, I do. I think due to the glorious flourishing of Australian Aboriginal fiction, on top of poetry and life writing and all the other forms, but particularly the novel, and we can date it to probably Kim Scott in the 1990s and Alexis Wright, whose second novel, Carpentaria, which you know very well, Lynda, having edited a collection on it, that novel of Alexis’ published in 2006 and translated into many other languages, including Chinese, has just changed the map of Australian fiction, and that’s recognised around the world. And she’s not alone. You know, there’s Melissa Lucashenko. There’s Tony Burke. There is Tara June Winch and, you know, other people. Anita Heiss, who have together, really recentered you could say, the field of the Australian novel. 

 

[00:02:53]  

Lynda Ng: Seemed to happen so rapidly. 

 

Nicholas Jose: Yeah, I mean, two decades and it’s just re-energised the whole thing. It’s also opened space for other different kinds of voices, different uses of language, different life experience, so altogether it’s not just Aboriginal fiction. But then the question comes, okay, well, what was it before and you might want to think about, well, why haven’t we had Aboriginal fiction before? And we’ve certainly had a lot of white writing about Aboriginal people, you know, which is problematic to read now, when you read back into some of those historical novels, but also interesting to see what people in Australian fiction were trying to do, and I would want to argue that many of those previous writers were also actually trying to disrupt, be radical in the way they were imagining this country, experiment, try to find space for different voices, their voices, which may be writing as women or as migrants, or from different perspectives. So I think there’s always been a kind of a radical, disruptive, transformative energy in the best Australian novels that these contemporary writers, and particularly Indigenous writers are continuing. 

 

[00:04:18]  

Lynda Ng: If we go right back to like the 19th century novel, the Australian novel before there was an Australia.  

 

Nicholas Jose: Yeah. Well, that’s, that’s that’s an important point actually, you know. 

 

Lynda Ng: But that seems a very, important part of history to remember that, You know, what is the influence, do you think, of those 19th century novels? 

 

[00:04:40] Nicholas Jose: One of the things those 19th century novels were doing, and actually, I would not want to make claims for too many of them, but I think there’s a handful that we can revisit now and, and really value. But I think one of the things that they were trying to do was document. What was it like for those people who came to Australia, you know, from Europe, primarily from Britain, sometimes as convicts transported, what was that like? And this place they arrived in, what was it like? How was it run, issues from the old world; class race, religion.  How were they being continued or changed here? Those are really interesting questions that these early novelists were documenting primarily for an audience back in England. So that was disruptive then because this was, you know, a quote unquote, “New World”, the Antipodes being introduced into fiction. I mean, one writer I really like is Catherine Martin, who wrote a novel called An Australian Girl. And in that, there’s a lot of description of the Mallee country in western Victoria, which is, you know, you drive through it, there’s nothing there. It’s pretty kind of nondescript. But she loves it and she describes it in such incredible detail, botanical and, you know, agricultural, but also people she meets on the road. 

 

[00:06:20] Reading: An Australian Girl by Catherine Martin 

 

 

[00:07:08] Lynda Ng: When was she writing? What period? 

 

Nicholas Jose: It’s about 1880. She taught herself German. You know, she was a migrant child from the Isle of Skye in Scotland, you know, came out as a on some sort of assisted passage to kind of, you know, remove people basically from, from Scotland because they were unwanted and she taught herself German and she read German philosophy. So the book in some ways is unreadable because it’s huge swathes of German philosophy interwoven with description of the Mallee. But, you know, fascinating. 

 

[00:07:47] Lynda Ng: That’s interesting as well, in that you sort of are gesturing to, to that non-anglo history that I think is often forgotten or also sort of sidelined in Australian history. And I’ve been thinking about that as we think about, you know, what is the Australian novel? People like Henry Lawson, who actually had a Swedish background. The orientation of Australia to its history is very much focused on England as the motherland. And we think about these early settlers as coming from England. But as you’ve just sort of suggested, they were they were from all over, they came from Europe, or they came with an awareness of Europe and a fascination with European culture, as well as a relationship to England. 

 

 

Nicholas Jose: Yeah. No, very much so. And it’s very interesting to look at how books actually circulated. And there’s been a recent sort of new history of the Australian novel, and one of the things it shows in its research is that a lot of these novels were published in newspapers and magazines locally in Australia, and never even made it to England. There was a local readership and a very grassroots readership for these stories about life in Australia. So I think there’s a sort of double audience is really what I’m saying. And I think that continues right through. There are authors who will have their eye on the international market, and they didn’t have much choice until the 20th century or the second half of the 20th century, when​​ Australian publishing, you know, became much more, you know, of a serious undertaking. But in the earlier period, you know, London was really the place where you got published and then the books, you know, if you were lucky, made it back to Australia. But they were also being serialised and available to people here. And I think that’s important new research that sort of changes our perception, you know, of why these people were writing and who they were writing for. 

 

[00:09:47] Lynda Ng: That’s interesting as well, in terms of the question of what is the Australian novel and the novel form, because, looking back to this earlier period where novels were often serialised, that’s a very different format than when we think of the novel, which is now, you know, the big book. 

 

[00:10:05] Nicholas Jose: Yes. And it’s a sort of looser format in a way, a kind of baggier format. And you can have digressions and you can have shaggy dog stories and sort of characters wandering in and out. And I think that is also an interesting part of how I see Australian novel writing, that there’s, there’s an attempt to kind of produce a literary work which somehow can encompass the very diverse experience of Australia, you know, including its extremes of, hardship and prosperity and travel, migration in and then migration out, you know, hopes endlessly being dashed. That these, you know, Such Is Life is the great title of one of those novels. But, you know, which was Ned Kelly’s kind of last phrase before he kind of got the drop. But “such is life”. It’s kind of an ironical, very Australian phrase of accepting the unexpected things that happen as part of this, you know, this migration into this place for many people, I think. 

 

[00:11:19] Lynda Ng: That is very much Australian culture, isn’t it? Very much. I don’t know, a focus or a love of the underdog like in America, that people want to write the big American novel. And it seems like in Australia there isn’t that sort of ego that someone thinks that they are going to write the great Australian novel. Our great novelists or our most beloved literature is about, the losers of history rather than the subversive. 

 

Nicholas Jose: Um, often quite political in that way, too. 

 

[00:11:48] Lynda Ng: Marcus Clarke’s For The Term of His Natural Life, again, Rufus Dawes is the great loser, always on the wrong side. And yet that’s such an Australian classic or such an important text in our history. 

 

[00:12:03] Nicholas Jose: It’s a big novel in the way it sets up some of these dichotomies. I mean, really, I’m thinking,  heaven and hell. You know, Australia as Paradise, but Australia also, as has exile, as dispossession and the Australian state once Australia is constituted as a state in that role, too, you know, punitive. 

 

[00:12:30] Reading: Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of His Natural Life 

 

[00:14:03] Lynda Ng: Yes, it was a very harsh environment. The harshness comes from the colony, from the imprisonment and the power differential. And also, in a sense, all the digs at English culture, the anti-authoritarianism, many aspects which I’m recognising as things we think of as Australian traits, or at least we used to.  

 

[00:14:23] Nicholas Jose: Yeah. And for the author there, Marcus Clarke, wanting to be heard, wanting to tell the real story of transportation. He’s on a mission to do that. So that documentation that he’s doing of that is not just like for the historical record. It’s really to change something. 

 

Lynda Ng: You could relate it to modern day abolitionist movements against the prison and the proliferation of prisons.  Australia, federated in 1901. Is it correct to say that ideas about the Australian nation didn’t really coalesce until several years afterwards? 

 

[00:14:59] Nicholas Jose: Um, I’m not sure about that. There was a sort of interest in Australian- ness before that. I think that led up to Federation, you know. So you had the Bulletin magazine published in Sydney, was extremely influential in the 1890s. And the 1890s was kind of the peak of boom and bust. Unionism, strikes, Australia for, Australians, you know, meaning the white man, you know, the English speaking white man. And what was the literature going to be that, you know, reflected that? So we’ve got Henry Lawson writing about battlers in the bush, but the Bulletin was pushing for there to be an Australian literature which wasn’t the same as English literature, it had a different energy. Again reflected life in Australia and if you think of that period around 1900, you know, you’ve got in England pretty refined, high early modernist writers like Henry James, you know, he’s American, but he was living in England and E.M. Forster and, you know, Virginia Woolf’s not far away. It’s a very different world from Henry Lawson and The Drover’s Wife or some of those other Bulletin writers. But there was also pushback against the Bulletin because already many Australians were living in cities, you know, in Sydney and Melbourne, and they were kind of urban and they had the various problems of, you know, of urban life, of earning a living. I think as we move into the 20th century, some of the best Australian fiction actually is around the First World War. 

 

[00:16:42] Lynda Ng: Do you have any specific writers? 

 

Nicholas Jose: Well, yes. Frederic Manning. The book is called The Middle Parts of Fortune, and he was a boy from Sydney who went as a young man to the Western Front. And the book is a description of the horrors of the First World War, from the point of view of the ordinary soldiers of which he was one, in the language of the ordinary soldier. 

 

[00:17:15] Reading: The Middle Parts of Fortune by Frederic Manning.  

 

 

[00:17:52] Nicholas Jose: And that’s sort of classic. It’s not always put at the centre of Australian literature because it’s not set in Australia at all. But there’s an incredible scene when the truckload of Australian soldiers kind of go past and they’re kind of lounging about. They’re smoking. They’re lying on top of each other on the back of this ute, sort of this truck thing, being very irreverent and disrespectful. Typical Australians. But they’re the best soldiers and, you know, so Frederic Manning, they’re shown respect even in this sort of larrikin way. And that’s just a very telling passage in that novel, I think. 

 

[00:18:35] Reading: The Middle Parts of Fortune by Frederic Manning.  

 

 

[00:19:24] Nicholas Jose: And then in turn, that was processed by largely women writers. And so you get Henry Handel Richardson, you get Katharine Susannah Prichard, you get Eleanor Dark and Christina Stead you know, in the 20s and 30s, sort of responding to the lived experience of the war, not the heroic glorification of it a la Anzac Day. Also, those women writers pushing back against this bulletin idea of Australia and sort of maleness, masculinity, mateship from a more urbanised perspective and a more modernist perspective. But they’re also consciously saying, we want a national literature and we will make that literature, and that will be in Australian literature. And sometimes that can, when we look at it, can kind of shade off into nationalism. And you think, well, that’s a view of Australia. But actually those writers, those women in particular were very internationalist as well in their outlook. So I’m thinking of Nettie Palmer, who is a very prominent critic, and she was married to Vance Palmer, who was a novelist, but Nettie was herself passionately Australian in the literature she wanted, you know. So she was a great supporter of Miles Franklin and My Brilliant Career as a sort of breakthrough kind of really Australian novel. But at the same time she went to Paris. She was leftist, part of a kind of international leftist movement. She went to Paris, to the World Congress of Writers, you know, where Christina Stead also was. So you’ve got this interesting double thing within that sort of progressive nationalism before World War Two. 

 

[00:21:15] Lynda Ng: And there is this network of the expatriate community of people going overseas to be educated and then coming back. I think that’s very evident when you look at the teaching of Australia or the establishment of Australian literature in universities here. Yeah. And even the fact that, um, you know, the sandstone universities for so long, you needed to be part of that network to have studied at Oxbridge in order to come back and be employed. 

 

[00:21:38] Nicholas Jose: Yes.​​The whole thing of networks is, is fascinating. And with that letter writing and those women, particularly within Australia, Katharine Susannah Prichard was in Western Australia, Miles Franklin was in Sydney, Nettie Palmer was in Melbourne or for a while in Queensland. They’re writing letters all the time and kind of gossiping and reading everyone’s work and saying, oh, have you read the latest thing by, you know, so-and-so? She’s really gone off and, you know, very, very active sense of community in creating this Australian literature as a, sort of enterprise – without government support, I should add. Because we now, these days, sort of assume that, you know, we’ve got the Australia Council and we’ve got all the Prime Minister’s prizes and all this sort of thing. There’s a whole infrastructure, but there wasn’t anything. Writers formed associations, so there was the FAW Federation of Australian Writers. It was a kind of left wing group. And, you know, they passed round the hat for each other when, you know, they had no money. That evolved into the Australian Society of Authors and these other things now. But there wasn’t really government support. 

 

Nicholas Jose: And when the government support did kick in, it was conservative. Menzies was the Prime Minister. You know, through those post-war years, he was so vigilant about the politics of these writers. And if they were too left wing, they would never they would never get any money. Things were described as kind of propagandist, rants that we would regard now as important fiction, such as Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by they called themselves Barnard Eldershaw, but it was Marjorie Barnard and Flora Eldershaw co-writing, which is itself a very interesting kind of disruption of normal ideas of authorship. You know, you have a co-written novel which couldn’t be published in its unabridged form originally because of its politics. That’s in the 1940s during the war. In that novel, they’re travelling on the same train tracks, you know, from King’s Cross to Penrith, but it ends with the vision of an apocalypse in Sydney. I mean, Sydney just goes up in flames, you know, starting with Sydney University, the great hall’s in flames on the horizon. That’s it. You know, it’s all over. 

 

[00:24:06] Lynda Ng: In this mid-century period, it seems that what you’re picking up on is a formalisation of Australian literature,an official recognition that we do have something called Australian literature and then a struggle between the authors and the government, or between the individual writers, and the imposition of a category of Australian literature on what they are supposed to be writing. And of course, what happens in this mid-century period is the establishment of Australian literature in universities. The very first course, devoted solely to the study of Australian literature was established by A. D Hope at Canberra University College in 1955. And I’m going to quote him, because I love that this was A. D. Hope’s justification at the time for teaching Australian literature. His argument was that Australian literature should be taught as an addendum to existing courses in English literature. Because, and here’s the quote. “Because our native literature is a minor one among the literatures of the world, because it is limited in range and has hardly any writers of first rank, and because it is a branch of English literature in general, it’s study should not be simply an alternative to the study of English literature. It should, I believe, be undertaken only by students who have already undergone or who are undergoing training in one of the major world literatures, preferably that of England”. So I love that this is this was his justification. This is him making an argument for Australian literature.  

 

[00:25:43] Nicholas Jose: That’s so interesting because you get, you know, there’s the nervousness about it, you know, is it good enough? That idea of what did he say? “Very few writers of the first rank”, which is all we want. But there’s that nervousness which, you know, certainly filtered through to a lot of the, um, the sort of criticism of Australian books that those gatekeepers wanted them to be sort of acceptable, you know, polite, tasteful. There wasn’t a lot of room for the ragged edges in that. So that’s one thing, but the other is how that sort of thinking has really, I think, dogged world thinking about Australian literature. So where Australian literature sits in relation to other literatures, the classic case of this for me is that book by the French scholar Pascal Casanova called The World Republic of Letters. The argument is, you can only be world literature if you have been mediated through Paris or possibly New York or London. So you can’t do it on your own. You have to be accepted and measure up somehow or other to these standards of world literature. 

 

[00:27:07] Lynda Ng: You have to enter the world through a European city. 

 

Nicholas Jose: Yeah, exactly. And what that means is that invariably Australia drops off the edge of any survey of world literature. Even with the best of intentions. They start out and you know, you’ve got all the sort of European languages, and then you’ve got the sort of, you know, Latin America and you’ve got South Africa and India, you know, huge literatures and East Asian literatures don’t get much of a look in either, I would say. But then, ah, Australia. Ah, it’s a shame we haven’t got any space left, you know. So it just goes on the end of a list, you know. New Zealand too, and usually drops off the list. So you know that’s annoying. And it’s a frame for viewing literature which isn’t adequate because if you’re in the place reading, writing about where you live, that’s what you’re interested in. 

 

[00:28:07] Lynda Ng: I think that’s the joy of reading local literature. And I still get that thrill when I read Felicity Castagna’s No More Boats because, you know, it’s set in Newtown, or the protagonist works in a bookshop in Newtown, and I’m going, that’s Better Read than Dead. I can imagine myself in exactly the environment that character is moving in, and I still get that thrill from reading local literature where you recognise your home.  

 

Nicholas Jose: And you see, I get that incredible thrill from reading Christina Stead For Love Alone. But she’s walking up and down George Street to save the bus fare so she can get on the boat and leave the country cause that’s her, her destiny, her fate. She has to do it. 

 

[00:28:54] Reading:For Love Alone by Christina Stead 

 

 

[00:30:14] Lynda Ng: So this seems to return us to where we started this conversation. With just how much Australian literature has changed in recent decades. Do you think Alexis Wright signalled this change? 

 

Nicholas Jose: Yes, I think in a word you have to say that. I mean, there were others, but her first novel, Plains of Promise, is incredible. And people didn’t know what to do with it. I reviewed it in the Sydney Morning Herald, and I thought it was a work of genius, but I modestly say I was kind of a sort of relatively lonely voice, then. I think in Plains of Promise, you can see there’s a tension between the publisher’s expectations of what a novel should be and her own sense as a writer.  

 

[00:31:07] Reading: Plains of Promise by Alexis Wright 

 

  

[00:32:28] Nicholas Jose: By the time we get to Carpentaria, she’s just redefining the novel on her own terms. And that includes voice or voices. Her use of the English language is just incredible. It’s poetic, it’s lyrical, it’s yarning, it’s storytelling. She does other voices within the voice. You know, the overall narrative voice, she’s doing the voices of other people and other characters. There’s slang, you know, Aboriginal- English, some Aboriginal language all together in this, you know, singing style. I mean, it’s extraordinary, her prose, there’s nothing like it. So there’s that. But also the scale of the imagination. It’s set in the Gulf of Carpentaria, you know, it’s vast, it’s land, it’s sea, it’s rivers that are bursting their banks. And then there’s ancestral knowledge that the Rainbow Serpent is there. The town is called D’esperance. There’s despair, there’s deprivation, there’s dispossession, and then there are the people getting on with their lives in all that and their dreams and their conflicts and then their fight with Australia, you know, with the Australian state, Queensland government, the mining companies, you know, which at the centre of the novel is this multinational mining company just moving in and disrupting even further. So it’s a very political novel, but it’s also mythical, you know, in the cosmology that enters it.  

 

(00:34:11) READING: – Carpentaria by Alexis Wright 

 

[00:35:50] Nicholas Jose: yeah, Alexis Wright just does something really important and transformative for Australian literature. And that does mean we need to then go back, or we can go back and look at things that came earlier and think, well, yeah, they’re interesting, but something has shifted. And there are things that they’re also not dealing with in those earlier novels. And if you go back just a generation, so Carpentaria 2006, 20 years earlier, well, let’s say 1988, it’s the year of the bicentennial. And there’s a whole lot of celebration of Australia, and there’s literature, novels coming out around that time that are very different from what we’re getting in Carpentaria. 

 

[00:36:42] Lynda Ng: It seems that it’s almost a period that’s taken for granted. These are some of our, you know, biggest internationally well-known authors like Peter Carey or Thomas Keneally, Kate Grenville, Elizabeth Jolley. What sort of cultural shift would you say occurred in this period?  

 

Nicholas Jose: It’s a really interesting question, Lynda, because in some ways, you know, that was a celebratory moment. And I think for literature, after quite a lot of these, these sort of struggles of earlier decades that we’ve been talking about, and the kind of political straitjacket that’s coming in through the, in the post-war period, the anti-communism, the 1950s 60s, a period where, Australian culture has become more confident about itself in a way more relaxed, perhaps a bit more arty or concerned with literariness in the case of writers. So they’re also beneficiaries of postmodernism, you know, spreading internationally and post-colonialism. So a writer like Peter Carey in Oscar and Lucinda, which is a novel he published in 1988, the year of the bicentenary, and won the Booker Prize for. It’s a postcolonial, postmodern novel, so it’s about a relationship between these two people. Oscar and Lucinda. Oscar is a gambler, comes out on a boat from England. Lucinda, she’s kind of a businesswoman in Sydney, and they form an alliance. And it’s funny. It’s kind of witty. It’s ironic. It’s kind of sending up the Victorian novel, and it is incredibly inventive. And it ends famously with this image of a glass church on a barge going up the river, you know, in northern New South Wales, you know, like it’s a magical image, but it’s very much within that sort of spirit of postmodernism, I would say, where writers feel free to invent and play. So it has a kind of sophistication. 

 

[00:39:00] Reading Oscar & Lucinda by Peter Carey 

 

[00:40:33] Nicholas Jose: Reading it now, there’s a kind of discomfort around the silencing that’s going on in it, particularly of Indigenous presence. He’s trying to include all kinds of people. I mean, there’s a whole sequence set in Chinatown in the sort of just around central Sydney, but it’s the Chinatown of opium dens. And, you know, it’s not kind of the whole story. 

 

[00:41:06] Lynda Ng: In this period. Is it safe to say that Australian writers overcame the cultural cringe? Yes. Or is it still present? 

 

Nicholas Jose: Well, no. I think it is safe to say that there was a moment there in the 80s where these writers were celebrated around the world. You know, they had overcome the cultural cringe. Peter Carey, Thomas Keneally and others, David Malouf. The only thing I’d say on that is that they’re all writing about Australia very specifically. So whether they feel that’s their sort of role, you know that imaginatively, they’re not Completely free, but they will be taken seriously if they write about Australia. You know, that seems to be part of the deal. 

 

[00:41:50] Lynda Ng: I mean, I’ve been thinking in this bicentennial period that sort of division that you’re you’re picking up on in Carey’s work. That the silencing of Aboriginal voices became very prominent, of course, in the celebration of the bicentennial and the debates, you know, ongoing today. We do have two separate histories, and that in many ways cannot be reconciled.  

 

[00:42:15] Nicholas Jose: Yeah. And multiculturalism more broadly, I don’t think was a big feature of the bicentennial. It may have been beginning, but in terms of literature, you know, if you think of Christos Tsiolkas, for example, years later, Michelle de Kretser, she comes later. That more inclusive Australian fiction is not really happening at that point. 

 

[00:42:42] Lynda Ng: In terms of bicentennial writing. It hasn’t been forgotten because they’re very important writers, but in many ways they’re less interesting today. There’s a lot of historical novels, and they’re all wonderful writers, but they’re very polished. And questions about why is there this sort of writing that is incredibly polished and has overcome the cringe, but is less interesting maybe, than the messiness, the sprawling epics that Alexis gives us? 

 

[00:43:12] Nicholas Jose: It’s a mixture of the market and formal expectations, but the market is very powerful, and this market we’re talking about for these writers is largely UK and to an extent, US. There’s a sense of what the novel is. It’s 260 pages. It has a plot, it has characters. It’s beautifully written. It contains and limits things in a way, but people were pleased to be able to do that and to win prizes for doing that and to be taken seriously. And it’s not that these writers were not, you know, didn’t have a lot to say. They did, and they said it very well. But there’s a complying there’s a constraint there that I think we feel now. This is where multiculturalism is particularly disruptive because it’s about the English language. What is the English language? And you know what do you have to do to be accepted as a writer in English? And so a lot of the sort of multicultural writers who were experimenting with that and celebrating difference and pushing back came very much from the margins, as you’re saying, through small presses and often through experimental poetry and, you know, other forms before gradually, you know, becoming part of, I don’t like to say mainstream because it’s kind of a very problematic term, but, you know, but they’re accepted and recognised as novelists. 

 

[00:44:49]Nicholas Jose: I think it happens in the 90s. And it’s because the talent is there. And, you know, that the post-war migration, Italian, Greek, Lebanese eventually, and other parts of Europe, you know, so many stories to tell are starting to be told. And then from the region and from Asia at the same time. But, look, you know, this was being encouraged and propped up by multicultural policies. So the Australia Council had a multicultural arts board that was always like a poor cousin, you know, to the actual literature board in the case of literature. And there are writers, Brian Castro is an important example. He wrote his book Birds of Passage, was published in 1983, and it won the Vogel Prize. And Brian was young then, and it was about Chinese Australian past and present, and it was recognised, but only just. And Brian didn’t, you know, he kept writing, but he’s flourishing really. By the end of the 90s and the 2000, he has a book called Shanghai Dancing that is fiction slash memoir. So formally it’s very inventive and disruptive. But it won an important prize,. 

 

[00:46:12] Lynda Ng:  the New South Wales Premier’s Award. 

 

Nicholas Jose: But that’s early 2000. So it takes another, you know, to answer the question when it probably does take another 20 years. So like a whole generational shift and why I guess it’s hegemony. You know, it’s white male Anglo hegemony as the gatekeepers, publishers, funding bodies, university curricula. And not that they’re all men necessarily, because I think, you know, there have been some very prominent women gatekeepers in Australian literature. But, um, but I think that was how Australia was thought of, you know, and you could be, you know, sophisticated and a traveller and all of this stuff. But still, that was what people were looking for. 

 

[00:47:09] Lynda Ng: And we have a very interesting relationship in Australian literature between inside and outside. And it’s a historical relationship. In the past, you had to go overseas in order to succeed, you know, to be taken seriously. You were only a great writer if you made it back in England. Um, and then even today, it’s interesting the way we draw boundaries because they’re, they’re so loose. But someone like Peter Carey has been an expatriate for at least 30 years, and he lives in New York. But he’s accepted unproblematically as an Australian, and he writes Australian stories even though he lives outside the country. And then there are examples, such as the Japanese author Iwaki Kei, whose novel Farewell My Orange was published in 2018. In fact, I was thinking Waikiki’s novel makes a very interesting comparison with Behrouz Boochani book No Friend But the Mountains, because they both came out in the same year. And we’ve got, you know, in 2018 they were both published. And of course, I’m sure everyone’s heard of Boochani’s book by now. It was written in his six years of imprisonment on Manus Island. It’s about a very unfortunate Australian experience that occurs outside of our borders, and Boochani himself had never entered Australia until after the book was published, and won very prominent awards in the Australian literary context. And then we have Iwaki Kei, who is a Japanese author living in Australia. Correct? 

 

 

 

[00:48:33] Nicholas Jose: Yes. And writing about African refugees to regional Australia, you know, where people go and work in abattoirs and food packing. And that’s the background of the story. And it’s very powerful. And it won prestigious literary prizes and recognition in Japan. But in Australia it’s not well known, even though it’s translated from Japanese into English by Meredith McKinney, who is like one of the top world translators of Japanese literature. Who happens to be Australian. It’s published by Europa. That sort of partly based in Italy but published in English. So it has a very global sort of pedigree, but somehow has dropped off the map within Australian literature in the same way that Australian literature drops off the map of world literature very often, so it’s just an interesting sort of little case. 

 

 

[00:49:40] Reading:  Farewell My Orange by Iwaki Kei 

 

[00:51:31] Nicholas Jose: Behrouz Boochani on the other hand, I mean that that is just such an amazing book for so many reasons. Partly it’s process, you know, that it’s kind of a collaborative work. He wrote it in Farsi, and the English version we read has been translated, and it was a text novel, you know, text work as. 

 

Nicholas Jose: Sms. It turns into this book, which I think we can speak of in the context of novel, because it has some attributes of fiction, you know, like it’s set in a parti but for me, what is astounding about that book is the way it analyses Australia and Australian mindsets and Australian behaviours from this microcosm on Manus Island. And so it’s Australian public servants, Australian government sort of instrumentalities. It’s individuals who are somehow just recreating aspects of Australia in this appalling set up, you know. And so it’s so illuminating about Australian attitudes and behaviour in a terrifying way. And yet written by this man who’d never been here. 

 

[00:53:07] Lynda Ng: So I think that is interesting in terms of, you know, how do we define the Australian novel and who do we consider Australian writers. 

 

[00:53:17] Nicholas Jose: Yeah. Well, I mean, I would just take a very, you know, broad response to that. You know, anyone in Australia can be an Australian writer. Anyone outside Australia like Behrouz Boochani, who is kind of tuning into Australian issues, can be an Australian writer. You know, that’s all within the scope of Australian literature, potentially. And we don’t need to label. And writers themselves hate being labelled, by the way. And if you ask someone, you know, are you an Australian writer? They almost always say no. You know. 

 

[00:53:53] Nicholas Jose: Even if they’ve lived here all their lives. We came across this years ago. I was the general editor of the Macquarie Pen Anthology of Australian Literature, and we really struggled in that work about ​​does Australian literature exist? Do we do we like that title? You know, because the question of nation can be oppressive and limiting. And in that anthology, we were really trying to kind of broaden the definition, actually, and we included a lot of stuff that wouldn’t be conventionally recognised as literature, you know, that was non-fiction writing, letters, all that sort of thing. And there was a panel at a writers festival where we had various writers who were in the anthology and just going along. They said each of them said, I’m not an Australian writer, you know, I just write. And then one person in the audience got up and said, can I just ask what passports you’ve got? You know what you present when you travel. You know, if you travel, you know, of course, they’ve all got Australian passports. 

 

[00:54:58] Lynda Ng: Do you think the definition of Australian literature changes if you’re inside or outside the country? 

 

Nicholas Jose: I do. It can. And I think that’s a very interesting thing actually about particularly the study of Australian literature outside the country is that people bring different frames to it. They can see the whole history differently. Sometimes I became very aware of that in China, where from this same bicentennial year that we’ve been talking about, 1988 was the first conference of Australian studies in China, in Beijing, and quite a few Australian writers were at that. It was one of the first two Australian studies centres in China at the time. There are now 35 or 36 Australian studies centres in China. So it’s alive and well and has expanded. And what I came to see about that, and I really valued, is that there’s a Chinese version of Australian literature and its history that is different. You know, it’s not the one that I knew. And yet I value that different perspective. I respect it partly because it connects with China’s own situation and own needs. So to give a kind of simple example of that. Initially, when the study of Australian literature got going in China, they were very interested in socialist realist writers because that was what they knew. And they identified Henry Lawson, you know, in that category. And they liked the idea of this being a new literature which has been created by, you know, kind of the working people of Australia pushing back against imperial colonisation. 

 

Nicholas Jose: And they looked for that, and they found it in Henry Lawson, and they found it in a writer like Katharine Susannah Prichard, you know, who was a communist. And then when we get in to the present day, and as these Australian study centres multiplied, they became extremely interested in Indigenous Australian writing. So the writers we’ve been talking about Alexis Wright, particularly because pre that they had identified, for example, Oodgeroo Noonuccal, Kath Walker, Aboriginal poet from Queensland, who herself, I don’t know if she was a card carrying communist, but certainly she saw the struggle for Aboriginal rights as continuous with the struggle for people around the world. And she visited China, so they had a way of positioning Aboriginal literature within their own concerns. And so a lot of Aboriginal literature has been translated into Chinese. It’s widely researched. There’s a university in Inner Mongolia, Inner Mongolia Normal University, which is training up teachers where their particular strength is. Aboriginal literature Mongolian is an Indigenous language in Inner Mongolia, which is kind of embattled against Mandarin Chinese. So there are these interesting kind of affinities that that have emerged. And there’s a Chinese writer who is sort of ethnically Tibetan, who has become one of Alexis Wright’s greatest fans. 

 

[00:58:27] Lynda Ng: These people, studying Australian literature or Aboriginal literature in Inner Mongolia, are they then going on to teach students in Inner Mongolia? Yes. So this is all completely and this is all happening in Chinese? Yes. Right. 

 

Nicholas Jose: Well, in Chinese and in English, you know, because they’re also proficient in English. So it’s a translation process, includes a lot of children’s literature actually, including Indigenous children’s literature. So that’s not something that you would find in an Australian literature course in Australia. 

 

[00:59:02] Lynda Ng: Well, I don’t think we could even find one centre for Australian literature in in the country. 

 

 Nicholas Jose: Well, that’s another story. 

 

 

 

[00:59:17] Lynda Ng: Very unusually, in the literary context, you have actual experience as a diplomat overseas representing Australia. So do you think do you think literature has a special role to play in terms of representing our country, or what is the role of literature? 

 

[00:59:36] Nicholas Jose: Yeah. I think it’s something we feel very uncomfortable about or we handle awkwardly because in many other countries, literature is really valued and they will have a sense of a national literature that they value without it being, um, you know, patriotic propaganda. There’s just a respect for the kind of autonomy of the writer and their capacity to communicate internationally. Um, and when we’re asked to respond in kind, we don’t really know what to do because, um. We want Australia to be seen favourably in these other countries, and we’re anxious about that. And so I think when I say we here, I’m really talking about government agencies are a bit nervous about giving writers too much profile or too much free rein. Now, that’s not to say that we don’t fund translation. We do. And we have delegations that go off. But I think it’s that nervousness. It goes back to the right, back to that aid hope quote about, you know, are we first rank but are we first rank means also are we squeaky clean? You know, which we’re not. And we don’t feel we don’t quite know how to deal with that, I think even now. 

 

[01:01:02] Lynda Ng: So I think a very unusual thing about the formal study of Australian literature is that we have to fight for it. In this country. They have cut courses on on Australian literature. Sydney Uni just a couple of years ago, declined to continue funding the chair of Australian literature. Um, and I find this especially when you talk to people overseas, this is somewhat crazy because, you know, no American institution would question the value of teaching a course on American literature. No one debates in England whether they should study English literature or not. And this is an ongoing debate here. So I think one of the questions or those perennial questions is, you know, is there an Australian literature worth teaching? Can we talk about something such as an Australian classic? What do you think, Nick? 

 

[01:02:01] Nicholas Jose: Yeah. And I’m, you know, asked surprisingly often what is Australian literature and are there any Australian books I should read? Yeah, of course there are. But it is strange that the category itself is kind of under suspicion or regarded as just not being very worthwhile, and it has a reputation of being kind of boring. I don’t think that’s true, but it’s an uphill battle. I mean, to do a PhD in Australian literature is, you know, described as career suicide. 

Um , sometimes. 

 

[01:02:28] Nicholas Jose: So speaking of Australian classics, I mean, you would have to start asking the question about Patrick White. So Patrick White won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1973 and was the first Australian to do so. The second Australian with a Nobel Prize for literature is JM Coetzee, who, migrated to Australia from South Africa around about the year 2000. So he’s been here a long time. He is Australian, but before him there was Patrick White in 1973, and in the citation for that Nobel Prize, the phrase was used that white had written a new continent into literature as if it had never happened before. I heard David Marr, Patrick White’s biographer, talking about this, and he said rather nicely he could just imagine the faint hand-clapping coming from Christina Stead and Henry Handel Richardson and the numerous people who had written Australian fiction before. So Patrick White would have to count as a classic in really any definition. 

 

[01:03:40] Reading: Voss by Patrick White 

 

[01:06:16] Nicholas Jose: And you know, we’re talking about recognising the world we’re in and you recognise the world you’re in. When you read Patrick White. 

 

Lynda Ng: Hugely significant and beautiful. I’m a Patrick White fan, Although I know a lot of people who are not. Very demanding novels, but so beautiful in a strange way, as you’ve talked about, I don’t know that that subversive element in Australian writing. 

 

[01:06:45] Nicholas Jose: And he you’re talking about inside, inside and outside. And he sort of is both, you know, because in the novels sometimes the characters leave Australia, they travel or they come, you know, in Riders in the Chariot, it’s a story of four kind of visionary people, and one of them is a Jewish refugee from the Holocaust. Himmelfarb, you know, who is crucified, literally, by fellow workers, on the outskirts of Sydney. So he’s dealing with the outsider and the stranger and the migrant, and that is still central to our, our concerns around who is and isn’t Australian or what is and isn’t Australia.  

[1:07:27] I mean, David Carter, who edited that Cambridge History of the Australian Novel, in his introduction to that, he struggles to define what a novel is. You know, not just an Australian novel, a novel, but he comes up with this somewhat abstract statement. But but a good statement. “The imagining into being of an antipodean world. We will also have to name Australia.” So it’s the imagining of a another kind of world. He calls it Antipodean world, which we will have to name Australia because we’re stuck with it. 

 

[01:08:12] Lynda Ng: On that note, thank you very much for joining me in the studio today, Nick. This was an exhilarating conversation. 

 

Nicholas Jose: Yeah. Thanks, Lynda. No, it’s been really, we’ve shared an excitement about Australian literature. Whatever else you know might be said about it. 

 

[01:08:27] Anna Funder: Well, the excitement is only just beginning, as our next episode takes us well and truly into the contemporary state of Australian fiction. Lynda speaks with two award winning authors, Yumna Kassab and Mykaela Saunders. 

 

Join us for a wide ranging discussion that maps the relationship between the novel and nationalism, as well as fiction’s ability to reflect a shifting social and political landscape.  

This series is brought to you by Impact Studios at UTS, the Sydney Review of Books with the UTS Writing and Publishing Program, and is produced by Regina Botros. I am Anna Funder, and if you’d like to hear any of our other episodes, look for Fully Lit wherever you get your podcasts.