books

The pioneering legacy of No Fixed Address

Music / / 6 minutes of reading

Picture the scene. It’s 1982 and Australia’s future prime minister Bob Hawke – then the shadow minister for industrial relations – has accepted an invitation to launch a mini-album by an emerging Indigenous rock-reggae band called No Fixed Address. Hawke’s daughters are fans, and he recognises the importance of both the release and the symbolic gesture of a white politician endorsing it. There’s just one sticking point: the final song is called Pigs.

They’re always on the move

They call them the boys in blue

They’ll kick you in the head

Until they leave you dead

It is difficult to imagine even the current prime minister – a self-confessed music tragic – launching such a provocative release today. But Hawke goes ahead with it, saying the album is great – “but that’s not to say that every man and woman in blue is a thorough bastard”. The band’s drummer and leader, Bart Willoughby, turns around. “Yeah, there are good police out there – we just haven’t met any yet,” he shoots back.

The story of this radical group is told in a new book of the same name by Donald Robertson; on the back cover, Goanna’s Shane Howard describes No Fixed Address as “the tip of the spear” that plunged into the dead heart of middle Australia.… Read more..

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Nina Simone’s Gum: Warren Ellis (in conversation)

Music / / 3 minutes of reading

In 1999, Nina Simone gave her final performance in London. It was at the Meltdown Festival, which that year was curated by Nick Cave.

In an introduction to a new book by his bandmate and collaborator Warren Ellis, Nina Simone’s Gum, Cave recalls being summoned backstage by the legendary singer, who demanded he introduce her as follows:

“I am DOCTOR Nina Simone!” she roared.

“OK,” Cave replied.

In front of an awestruck audience, Simone sat down at the Steinway. She took a piece of chewing gum from her mouth and stuck it on the piano. “She raised her arms above her head and, into the stunned silence, began what was to be the greatest show of my life – of our lives – savage and transcendent,” Cave writes.

At the end of the show, Ellis lurched towards the stage as though possessed. Reaching the Steinway, he peeled off Simone’s gum and tenderly wrapped it in a stage towel. This he kept with him for the next two decades, until it went on display at Cave’s Stranger Than Kindness exhibition at Copenhagen, Denmark in 2019.

And now the gum is the subject of a short, wryly funny book. It poses a number of questions: what meaning do we place on seemingly insignificant objects?… Read more..

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Bringing Boy Swallows Universe to the stage

Theatre / / 4 minutes of reading

On the face of it, bringing Trent Dalton’s 471-page debut novel Boy Swallows Universe to the stage sounds impossible. The Brisbane-based author summarises his initial response to playwright Tim McGarry – who approached him with a proposal to adapt his massive manuscript before the book had even been published – as “good luck to you, mate”.

At close to three hours, broken by a short intermission, Boy Swallows Universe is a big night out. That’s nothing, though: the first of McGarry’s 10 drafts took a full six and a half hours to be read out by the cast. “It was a very difficult novel to unpick; every moment is interdependent on the other,” McGarry says.

But at a preview performance this week at QPAC, time (to borrow a phrase from the final scene) does not exist. Led by a bravura performance by Joe Klocek as Eli Bell, who is on stage and narrating almost throughout, the stage adaptation is taut and tense. It was received with a standing ovation.

Boy Swallows Universe was a publishing phenomenon rarely seen in Australian literary fiction. A year ago, HarperCollins announced the book had sold more than half a million copies since its publication in July 2018.… Read more..

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Questions Raised by Quolls

Environment / / 4 minutes of reading

All Harry Saddler really wanted to do was to see a quoll in the wild.

It was November 2019, and the Melbourne-based author was enjoying a surprise publishing success: his small book, The Eastern Curlew, a telling of the extraordinary migration of Australia’s largest shorebird, had sold through its hardcover print run, opening a new niche in Australia for natural history writing.

This was when Australia’s Black Summer bushfires were beginning to choke the eastern states, and before the pandemic that would force Saddler to write from home. It changed his focus. “It became impossible to write about the state of the environment in Australia and not confront those things head on,” he says.

Saddler’s new book, Questions Raised By Quolls, became more a work of moral philosophy than natural history. Written quickly, it became part-treatise on the legacy of colonialism, part-family history: Saddler’s ancestor Michael Farrell was transported as a convict to Sydney from Ireland in 1816.

“I think that aspect of the family story in the book was a way to write about the human effects of colonialism without co-opting other people’s stories,” Saddler says. “I touch on the damage done to Indigenous societies in the book too, but I was conscious that those are not my stories to tell.”… Read more..

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Guardian Book Club: Jimmy Barnes

Music / / 4 minutes of reading

When singer Jimmy Barnes’ memoir Working Class Boy was released in 2016, it caused a sensation. Barnes’ account of his childhood went beyond the usual adjectives like “raw” and “harrowing” on the cover to something much more purgative: here was one celebrity memoir that hadn’t been written for the sake of a generous advance. Barnes had wrestled the demons of a traumatic childhood in private for decades. Now he was doing it in full view.

The other thing that made Working Class Boy so shocking, frankly, was that Barnes had written it himself. Wasn’t piano player Don Walker the literary genius behind Cold Chisel, with “Barnesy” the red-faced screamer out front? Barnes further upended expectations by gambling on the story of his pre-fame years first, but his way of telling it was riveting. His voice was urgent, empathetic, as wry as it was moving, with a gut-wrenching turn of phrase.

Inevitably, the sequel Working Class Man followed. This was the proverbial sex, drugs and rock & roll memoir that perhaps was originally craved, and certainly expected – but it was far more compelling for us knowing where Barnes had come from. Jimmy Barnes – the rock star, and sometimes the caricature – had been a fixture of Australian life for so long that we had underestimated him.… Read more..

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Andrew McGahan 1966-2019

Miscellaneous, Qld Politics / / 4 minutes of reading

If you grew up in Brisbane in the 1970s and 1980s, Praise, the debut novel by Andrew McGahan, was to the city’s literature what the Saints’ (I’m) Stranded was to music. Appearing in 1992, when it won the Vogel award for best unpublished manuscript, it captured the town’s torpor and the ambivalence of its inhabitants better than any book since David Malouf’s Johnno.

But whereas Malouf luxuriated in detailed poetic descriptions and may have been the first writer to describe Brisbane as a “big country town” (and Johnno moved at about the same pace), Praise was full of pent-up energy. A classic of Australian dirty realism, it’s a novel in which not a lot happens – but like Brisbane itself, all the action is happening beneath the banal facade, fuelled by frustration and repressed rage.

“Look at this city,” complains one of its minor characters, on holiday from a bigger, brighter world. “There’s nothing happening. There’s no one on the streets. How can you stand it?” Gordon (whose very name is used as a metaphor for the town’s plainness) replies that things are happening: “You just have to look a little harder. At least no one bothers you. There’s worse places than Brisbane.”… Read more..

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