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An emerging sisterhood of women
Katherine Bode has given us her introduction to How I Pawned My Opals and Other Lost Stories and, as the best introductions do, she gives us a greater appreciation of the work of Catherine Martin. Martin’s own life informed her independent and strongly delineated female protagonists. It is Bode’s fascinating insight that although Martin, with her depiction of Stella Courtland in her most famous work, An Australian Girl, has long been seen as responsible for creating a uniquely Australian form of the ‘New Woman’, these lost stories show that she conceived of this figure as a global phenomenon, an emerging sisterhood of women independent in thought and action. Read more…
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Canberra is more than politics
August is writers festival time in Canberra. The Obiter team is pleased that this year’s program features Canberra-born and raised author Anna Snoekstra who set her first novel, Only Daughter (Harlequin, 2016) in Canberra. Canberra is so much more than the politicians it has to accommodate up on ‘the hill’ and Snoekstra, like Christie Thompson in Snake Bite (Allen & Unwin, 2013) and Omar Musa in Here Come the Dogs (Penguin, 2014) shows a deeper, darker, side to the city.
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What we’ve been reading
Karen enjoyed a week on the fascinating island of Malta in the company of The Kappillan of Malta, a 1973 novel from Nicholas Monsarrat – of The Cruel Sea (1951) fame, the only one of his novels still widely read. It is about a Catholic priest supporting his congregation in the catacombs of Valetta during the dreadful bombings of the Second World War but weaves the whole history of the island, from St Paul to its British governors, into the priest’s inspirational sermons. Whether it is a thinly veiled history or lumbering fiction – reviews have been decidedly mixed – Karen loved her time in both the island and Monsarrat’s book.
Often you stumble upon unexpected threads running through your reading. Rarely are they unintended yet as glaringly obvious as substance abuse has been in Aidan’s reading of late. From two classics; Luke Davies’ Candy (Allen & Unwin, 1998) and Hunter S Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1972), to contemporary novels Kate Tempest’s The Bricks that Built the Houses (Bloomsbury, 2016), Peter Polites’ Down the Hume (Hachette, 2017), and Jenny Valentish’s memoir Woman of Substances (Black Inc., 2017), Aidan’s reading has been dominated by drug use and addiction. Hopefully Johann Hari’s Chasing the Scream (Bloomsbury, 2015) will be something of a salve.
One thing leads to another with much of Jane’s reading. Her recent immersion in Elena Ferrante’s world made her pick up another novel set in Naples. Shirley Hazzard’s beautiful The Bay of Noon (1970) is in many ways a love song to the city. Jane also recently read the 2016 Booker Prize winner, racing to finish it in time for the announcement of the 2017 shortlist. She laughed out loud in Paul Beatty’s The Sellout (Oneworld, 2015), but wonders, was she supposed to? She is still trying to work out what the final intent of the novel was, while also wondering where her own life would have gone if Career’s Day at high school had been so, well, interesting.
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