AusLit101: on Voss and Monkey Grip

Two Thursdays in a row I’ve climbed the short steep steps outside the Wheeler Centre, each time with a half-read novel in my bag. First Voss, then Monkey Grip: two very different books.

And, in the space of one hour on each of these evenings at the Wheeler Centre’s  Australian Literature 101 series, two very different literary critics have shared their thoughts on these Australian classics and on what they mean to our literary landscape.

These two books, one that I’ve now nearly finished in the few hours since the session ended, are flooding my mind and my diary with very different thoughts and ideas, about writing and life.

Last Thursday the book presented at the Wheeler Centre was Voss, the author of which is Australia’s only winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Patrick White.

The presenter was Peter Craven, critic and cultural commentator, seeming ever so slightly bored to be there but more than happy to talk about Patrick White, about how White “imagined us into being”, and what this meant to Australia.

Tonight the book was Monkey Grip, originally published by McPhee Gribble because it was a bit radical. The author is Helen Garner, writing of and from within the Melbourne that she knew, in the ’70s.

Kerryn Goldsworthy was the presenter this time. She was given a copy of Monkey Grip for her twenty-fifth birthday, the year after it was published. She spoke about the book as one who loves it and for whom it resonated, most particularly at the time but, one senses, even now.

My copy of Voss, half read before I put it down to start Monkey Grip for this week’s talk, is smooth and nearly new and cost me $5 on a bargain table. It’s a Vintage Classic, print tight and thick on cream pages. It sat unread on my shelf for nearly two years and now is waiting on my bedside table until I get back from my journey to 1970s Melbourne.

Monkey Grip has my mother’s name inside the front cover, and the date, January 1979. It was published in 1977, so maybe it did not immediately seem so relevant across the continent, far away, where the sun sets into the ocean and the changes of the seasons are easily missed.

The book falls open in a precise spot, where a few pages are falling out. All through the text, against the small print on brown pages, there are pencil marks. I recognise what I think might have been my mother’s concerns, her interests, back then.

There are lines beside the paragraph on children delimiting the scope of women’s lives and freedom. Grey pencil runs under those phrases where something is captured, purely and cleanly in prose, something messy about love, or loneliness, or addiction.

Voss impressed me from the beginning; I saw the characters of Laura and Voss drawn so densely in the opening chapter. I read on through their meeting in the garden, their meeting of minds or souls; of recognising each other’s flaws. Peter Craven placed the novel in a hierarchy of worth. He said it was a parallel of Moby Dick. He was certain of Patrick White’s place in the canon of literature in English – not up to the mark of James Joyce, of course, but as “good as Beckett or Nabakov”.

Kerryn Goldsworthy spoke tonight of what makes a classic. Critics don’t decide what makes a classic, she said, but readers do. She spoke of the second wave feminism of Monkey Grip – how it was not just about the fight for equal pay but also about women working out how to live their sexual lives. Goldsworthy said that Monkey Grip, and Jessica Anderson’s Tirra Lirra by the River, both with main characters named Nora, marked the beginning of a period when more female writers were able to get their work published.

Monkey Grip makes me want to write more, and it makes me think I can, and should, write with more surety than I do, in this voice that I have, this voice that is mine.

Reading Voss, I admire it and appreciate it, but I struggle for the vision – struggle to ever imagine having the vision to be able to write like that. That’s to be expected, you might say, for it is Patrick White after all.

Reading Monkey Grip, I think instead, I don’t need that vision – I have my own, I just have to free up my mind and my words and let it come, with the clarity of my own voice, and thought, and imagination.

Social media: between friends and strangers

Lately I’ve been pondering the situation that all of us using social media or blogs have faced at some stage – or will inevitably face – that of having one’s ideas challenged. Sometimes the challengers are rude, sometimes not; sometimes they are friends or acquaintances, often not.

For me, the challengers on Twitter are almost always strangers. It’s rarely worrying – if the comments are thoughtful and reasonable, I think about it and respond accordingly. It is, after all, what must one expect if putting one’s ideas into a public forum.

If the comments are rude, I ignore it or make a joke of it. I wish that people would express their disagreements by arguing reasonably against the ideas instead of rudely attacking or dismissing, but otherwise it is no big deal, because these rude people are inevitably strangers.

But recently a post of mine on Facebook attracted a comment from a friend that still makes me angry, two weeks later, every time I think of it.

The post was about the suspension of the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards. I wrote:

Important Queensland programs going down the tube already – less than two weeks since the election. Unbelievable. Axing the QLD Premier’s Literary Awards will save all of $250,000 out of a budget of billions. Watch the cultural exodus begin again.

A friend, who is also a family connection, responded in a manner that wasn’t rude (and compared to most online commentary, is positively innocent). But it was thoughtless and they didn’t offer an argument to support their viewpoint. The comment read:

What’s so important about an award for literary? 250K, no wonder why they scrapped it. I mean come on.

I wrote a few short lines back pointing out that I’m a writer so maybe that would give some clue as to why I think it’s important. My response was completely measured, and in hindsight I think that’s part of the reason I keep thinking about it: because I really wanted to get angry about it. I wanted to say exactly what I thought about the comment’s lack of respect for me as a writer and for the craft of writing.

I’ve let it lie. After all, the comment was not rude and I probably have no right to feel offended. But the fact that it bothered me so much has got me thinking.

As I increase my social media presence, the lines are blurring between friends and strangers, and between the media directed primarily at strangers – this blog and my Twitter account – and that which is open only to “friends”, or at least to people I know – Facebook.

Where once my political opinions mainly stayed on Twitter, they’re now straying onto Facebook. And so it seems I must face the disagreement of people I actually know – far harder than the angry comments of strangers.

Many of my friends are cut from very different political cloth to myself. Some of my friends question why I associate with others who hold an utterly different viewpoint and whose interests, beliefs and even fashion choices are anathema to them.

So there are bound to be disagreements. Mostly, my friends will argue their point with purpose and logic. They’ll have a reason behind their beliefs and to some extent will recognise what lies behind my contrasting beliefs. But sometimes they don’t, and this is when it gets tough.

If I don’t like it, I guess I could stick to bland status updates and photos of cute animals on my Facebook page.

Somehow, I don’t think that’s likely, and in the end I am happy to argue, debate and discuss. I just hate comments that shut others down or that have no valid reasons behind them.

But it’s vital to be exposed to different views in order to be an engaged citizen of a democracy, and if one of the ways that happens is through my social media friends or by strangers on Twitter, then so be it. But along the way I had better hope for patience, and know when to let things go.

Pedder Dreaming: Forty years since the flooding of Lake Pedder and the beginning of a movement

Ten days ago, Senator Bob Brown delivered the 2012 Greens Oration, on the 40th anniversary of the founding of the United Tasmania Group, the first of many in a series of green political parties that have formed across the globe since that time.

This year also marks forty years since another key event in the green movement: the flooding of Lake Pedder, in the mountains of Tasmania.

The battle to stop construction of the Franklin River Dam during the late 1970s and early 1980s is perhaps the most well-known environmental battle in Australia’s history – and a successful battle at that. But this campaign had its roots in the fight to save Lake Pedder, a fight that was made famous in part through the photography of Olegas Truchanas.

Truchanas was a Lithuanian immigrant who, in the aftermath of his experiences in World War II and having left his homeland behind, developed a passion for the Tasmanian wilderness. Through his photography, he sought, in the words of Natasha Cica, to “bear witness to its remarkable beauty, to document, to protect”.

He was part of a group of Tasmanian artists, writers and photographers who journeyed to Lake Pedder to record and capture its unique and outstanding beauty, and who were strongly opposed to the Hydro Electric Commission’s plan to build three dams that would flood the lake, drowning its sandy beaches.

This group and in particular Truchanas himself are the subject of a 2011 book by Tasmanian writer and academic Natasha Cica, Pedder Dreaming: Olegas Truchanas and a lost Tasmanian wilderness. This beautiful book tells the story of Truchanas and of the period leading up to the flooding of the lake not only with words, but with visuals: Cica’s narration is intimately connected to photography and art.

The book is visually stunning, with matte pages lending a softness to the images reproduced throughout. This is fitting, given that Truchanas’s photos were known for their softness as a result of the single, “lousy” lens that he had for his Nikon 35mm camera.

The photography in Pedder Dreaming is essential to both the book and the story. Through the course of nearly 250 pages, Lake Pedder is captured in so many ways: soft in the morning light, still and monochrome under the moon, rich and colourful, reflecting the mountains and the trees.

Of course, Lake Pedder is no more: those who fought for the original lake’s preservation refuse to call the new body of water by the same name. The original lake had a maximum depth of around 3m with two islands; the new lake extends to 43m deep in parts, and has 45 islands. The new lake is not really a lake at all – it is a reservoir, an artificial impoundment.

Pedder Dreaming illuminates the scale of the tragedy of Lake Pedder, but it is done without drama or prosthelytising. Cica’s narration touches on the divided nature of Tasmania today and on the unique closeness of the island community, then and now. The story is told largely through the eyes of those who were there at the time, including Melva Truchanas, artists Max Angus and Trish Giles, and educator Elspeth Vaughan.

It reveals their sense of what was about to be lost and of the emerging environmental ethic in Tasmania, an ethic that took so much of its inspiration from Olegas Truchanas. Truchanas was the first to navigate the full length of the Serpentine and Gordon rivers in a kayak in 1958, photographing his journey along the way. He used his photography to show Tasmania’s wilderness beauty to a wider audience, fighting to save Lake Pedder “by mesmerising people with its beauty”.

Olegas Truchanas’s voice ends with the flooding of the lake in 1972, for he drowned the same year while attempting to repeat his journey down the Gordon River. He had lost all of his negatives and slides from his first trip down the Gordon during the 1967 Tasmanian fires. The battle for Lake Pedder was lost, but he knew that the Gordon faced a similar threat and felt that a future campaign to save it would require its beauty to be captured on film.

Then, as now, development projects are usually spoken or written of in terms of a particular anthropocentric benefit, most often in terms of economics and opportunity. Pedder Dreaming is the story of people who questioned this framework and questioned the right of humans to destroy a place like Lake Pedder.

The title Pedder Dreaming means many things throughout Cica’s book and resonates in a number of ways. For me, the story of Lake Pedder adds strength to a particular dream that I have: that we may one day accord to the natural environment the respect that it deserves, for its own sake and not for our own.

Laughalot

It’s that time of year again, comedy time, when you can’t pass the Melbourne Town Hall without being accosted by people in attire ranging from normal to very abnormal, all of whom would like you to take a flyer. Towards the end of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, if you’re lucky, this is also the place to score two-for-one tickets, sometimes from the comedians themselves.

The way in which MICF seems to create a community of comedians and comedy-appreciators is one of the best things about it. The door person for one show might be performing at the same venue a few hours later, swapping places with the comedian currently on stage. There’s invariably some level of interaction in most shows I’ve seen, so it’s not the time to be shy if you’re sitting at the front. The range of events in terms of price, notoriety, age and topic means that the cliché “there’s something for everyone” is not far from the truth.

That being said, it can be hard to find that “something” in a comedy program containing, according to Victorian Premier Ted Baillieu’s little blurb in the inside cover, 430 events. The best idea is not to think about it too hard and just jump in head first. Daunted by the volume of the program, that’s been my approach in the past – dicated by what I’m invited to by friends or by who’s offering two-for-one tickets on the sidewalk. This year, failing to find any of the comedians that I actually know in the program (I think this was due to impatience or really bad index use, as I’ve since discovered that many of them are performing after all), I signed up to review six shows that are a fairly random selection.

Two of these took place last night, so expect to see my reviews popping up on Crikey’s blog Laugh Track very soon. Last night was a great start to my experience of the festival – warm weather always makes me feel more kindly to Melbourne than winter, and meant the atmosphere in the city was actually festive. In spite of rushing to make the first show and almost missing it due to the tram being packed with footy fans headed for the MCG (I had forgotten about the impact of AFL on public transport), it turned into a fun night, thanks, of course, to the comedians. One tends to forget that the benefit of comedy is, quite simply, that you laugh – a lot.

I’ll be reviewing the following shows for Crikey’s Laugh Track:
Matt Grantham – How Many Politicians Does it Take to Change a Lightbulb?
Dixie’s Tupperware Party
David O’Doherty is Looking Up
Little Dum Dum Club
Hayley Brennan – Attention Seeker
Ryan Walker – Man Up!
Akmal
Hannah Gadsby – Hannah Wants a Wife

(Edited 18 April to include links.)

What might have been lost

We stood under an overcast sky last night at Sidney Myer Music Bowl, clouds glowing orange with the lights from the city. As the twilight deepened, Bon Iver‘s support act, Sally Seltmann, began her set, and I felt that to be here, in this big and rushing city, was not so bad after all. In the midst of bustle and busyness, of traffic jams and too many shops, the place and the moment was an oasis to remind me of all that was good.

We bought tickets to Bon Iver late last year. At that point, a few very difficult months loomed ahead of us due to circumstances outside our control – a period of time that offered no surety as to how it would turn out in the end. The tickets were a promise for the future, an acknowledgement of hope.

So when the delicate but rousing first chords of “Perth” rang out to the audience of 12,000, I looked up to the orange sky, felt the music sweep into my body, and the sense of happiness was complete. To be there was magic; those first chords took it to a whole new level. A few drops of rain fell, a gentle reminder of the city in which we stood, and then the rain left us for the rest of the night: for the next two hours of incredible, inspiring music.

I fell for Bon Iver’s first album For Emma, Forever Ago while I was staying in a hostel on a Canadian ski mountain nearly three years ago. It fitted perfectly, and it never occurred to me that perhaps the environment was right: headman Justin Vernon wrote the album while holed up for the winter in a hut in the Wisconsin mountains, and he says he would have moved to Australia yesterday if he didn’t like the cold so much.

I have listened to the first album and, to a lesser extent, the self-titled second album, on and off ever since. Sometimes I listen with concentration, sometimes with abandon. Always it sweeps me away from the present – sometimes right away from the music, taking my thoughts elsewhere entirely, but more often the music is there beside me, sending me on a journey and coming along with me. These journeys are always into the imagination, and sometimes into the future.

To see the nine-piece band play and to hear Vernon hit the high notes in person was something else altogether. From “Perth” they slid smoothly into “Minnesota, WI” – just as these two tracks meld together on bon iver, bon iver. Vernon’s voice dropped for the second song, an indication of his vocal range that would emerge throughout the show.

The music veered from delicate melodies to thicker vocal sections. Lyrics that are barely understandable on CD suddenly became much more clear. The songs that I had heard over and over again took on new depth of sound and feeling out there under the vaulted ceiling of the clouded Melbourne sky.

It was not just the sound and atmosphere that was brilliant. The footage broadcast on two big screens either side of the stage for those of us on the lawn seating was well shot – close-ups of Vernon’s hands on guitar strings or keyboard, of the horn and saxophone and violin, of the drummer striking cymbals with wire brushes.

The backdrop to the stage hung like torn strips of bark in three V-shapes, leaving black spaces the shape of two mountains. Across this torn backdrop, images and lights played and changed: colours danced, or a blood-red river flowed against gravity; later surf rolled in. It was never distracting but it was always interesting, combining the elements that make a good music video with the live music experience.

It’s a while since I’ve been to a big concert, and there was a focus in the crowd that you don’t always get. You could sense the restless elements starting to fidget during some of the instrumental sections, particularly during the long saxophone solo at the end of “Holocene”.

Largely this was a crowd that was joyful to be there and keen to let the band know this between songs, but falling into silence during the quieter and more gentle songs. I think it’s a brave thing, to slow down and sing softly in front of a crowd that size, but Bon Iver handled it on a number of occasions before bringing back the strong beats and sending the crowd’s energy skywards again.

I’d forgotten the power of a good concert, and of hearing music that you love played live. It’s not just about the enjoyment of the moment; for me it’s also about where the music takes my imagination. It’s about the sense of calm, the cheerfulness, that you carry with you afterwards.

It’s about looking back, the next day or the next week or the next year, and remembering how it felt at the moment of the opening chords, or how it felt in the middle of the song that was the first of theirs you ever heard. There is something special, undefinable and ungraspable about just being there, with however many other people, at that moment in time when music makes the world seem bigger, fuller and happier.

Weather, essays and the first day of autumn

First of March, and the world outside is swirling – the wind, the bursts of rain, the windows rattling in their frames. It’s swirling because I am inside, looking inwards, so that the weather outside seems to revolve. It’s not going anywhere, not travelling past, but is instead centred on this house. It is a curtain over the outside world: shutting it out, shutting me away.

Inside, I’m trying to write an essay. It’s a politics essay on global environmental governance. I started from scratch in a manner that is quite unlike any essay I’ve done before. For this one, the thought processes have been different: it required more research than usual just to get a grasp of what I was dealing with, before I could begin to form an argument. I’ve never studied international politics before this unit, and with the unit itself having finished a little while ago, my grasp on the content seemed to have slipped. But today inside the swirling weather and the cosy house walls it seems to be coming back.

Much has been written about place, and the importance of place and your own space when you’re writing. This space at the desk is not always all mine and is often cluttered. It’s not normally a place where I can focus – I’m usually better off in the little bungalow in the backyard – it’s sparse and there are big windows full of greenery. Today, there is something about the weather and the possible onset of autumn that makes it okay to be studying here. It’s a good feeling!

On inclusion and exclusion: Melbourne (2011)

I was a bit shy about reading Sophie Cunningham’s Melbourne while on the tram – which is where I get most of my reading done – I was afraid that people might think I was a tourist. I mean, how often do you see a local getting around reading a book with their city’s name emblazoned on the cover?

But read it I did, nonetheless – in cafés, on the tram, while dawdling at the Parkville campus of Melbourne Uni or eating lunch at La Trobe. I was easily hooked, as it moved through a year in the life of the city, from the Black Saturday bush fires of 2009 to the following summer’s hailstorm, telling stories of the drains under Hawthorn, the Westgate Bridge Collapse, and the changed meanderings of the Yarra.

It is a brave enterprise, this mission of a series of books about our capital cities (Brisbane, Adelaide, Hobart and Sydney all have versions) – books that are neither history nor memoir; that are definitely non-fiction but which are difficult to categorise beyond this. Melbourne is closest to being a tribute: it is a story and a history in the service of one city, the author’s home city.

The book’s personal element is both its redeeming feature and its ultimate downfall. It is inevitable that a book like this will reflect the author’s own story and experience, and in this there is a beautiful honesty. A pure history of Melbourne would have its own biases; parts would have to be left out while others are told in more depth. Cunningham’s tribute to the city of her birth is, in its form, honestly and openly a biased and personal piece of work without being purely a personal story.

For me, the disappointment of Melbourne lies in that it is a story that made me feel excluded from the city. It is a very different city to that of The Slap, for example, in which the characters inhabit their own narrow version of the city yet the reader does not feel excluded. Perhaps the difference here lies in the novel’s ability to portray so many points of view; Melbourne, on the other hand, can portray only one.

I called myself a local in the first paragraph, but I’m not really – I have only been living here since 2009. In this time, and in all the years prior to that when I visited my grandmother, Melbourne is a city that has made me feel both included and excluded by turns. (I could generalise and, seeking a more poetic sentence, say, Melbourne is a city that makes you feel both included and excluded… but I do not wish to say ‘you’, here, for the experience is different for everyone.)

I began to feel included by this city when, after a short time of living here, I established a few regular haunts: sites of familiarity and comfort that allowed me to spring joyfully into the strange ‘rest’ of Melbourne, knowing that there were parts of town that would welcome me back, as though I belonged, with their familiar layout of streets and buildings, cafés and faces.

Yet she is a fickle lover, Melbourne, and when I did not give her – especially her inner-city heart – enough attention, she soon forgot me. So there are times when I swing the other way, to feeling that there is no place for me in this big and bustling city.

Perversely, Melbourne only increases this sense of dislocation. It reinforces elements of the city that one feels one should know or be a part of. But not everyone cycles down St Kilda Road; not everyone has Paul Kelly and Sian Prior in their circle of friends. Of course, Cunningham has been prominent in Melbourne’s literary scene for some time, so it is only natural that her friends would also be part of this scene. I cannot blame her for the choices she has made in writing this book, and there was much that I learnt and enjoyed in reading it. But nonetheless I can wish that between Cunningham’s story of a city in which I live, and my own experience and interpretation of it, there was something that brought me deeper instead of shutting me out.

Originally written 14 October 2011.

Theatre review: Summer of the Seventeenth Doll

It’s hard for me to imagine the change that Ray Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll brought to theatre in Australia at its first season in 1955, but it’s not hard to see why it resonated, both here and overseas. I saw Neil Armfield’s production at the Playhouse last Thursday night, and felt that it is both a uniquely Australian experience and a story that touches a universal chord.

I studied this play in English Literature in my final years of high school; I may even have written about it for my Tertiary Entrance Exams, though I can’t be sure. Years later I remembered the kewpie dolls and sense of people at odds with each other, but little else, except that this play is important. I knew this even as a sixteen-year old, with no theatre experience, having only read the text on a page, and never having seen it performed.

Reviewers like to say that Summer of the Seventeenth Doll is important / seminal / timeless / a turning point in Australian theatre… so I risk being repetitive with my comments above.  What I can say that is unique to me is the way that seeing this play performed made me feel.

It made me sad for Olive (Alison Whyte), first of all. Sad for all of us, me included, who want to break out of the roles that society has defined for us: this is, after all, what has held her in the relationship with Roo (Steve Le Marquand) for sixteen summers already. But in breaking out of one role, she has created another for herself, one which is equally defining. She, perhaps more than any of the characters, is the one who is unable to grow in this role.

And so she clings to the five months of the year that she, Roo, Barney (Travis McMahon) and Nancy have spent together for the last sixteen summers. She tries to repeat it for the seventeenth, but with Pearl (Helen Thomson) in Nancy’s place. Predictably, it doesn’t work – the audience can see this tension from the very first scene. Pearl is not Nancy, and in Nancy’s departure everything has changed.

It’s not just because she is gone and Barney is bereft, but because Nancy’s marriage and walking away from this life signals something else: the end of this life for the rest of them, too. It’s something that was always going to come, and Nancy saw it before any of them. Nancy’s absence is one of the loudest parts of this play. She is a central character and in her way she is a catalyst for what has changed, yet she never appears on stage.

There is a sense that the characters have been living on borrowed, or perhaps suspended, time. In sixteen years little has changed and so some of them have not grown as individuals in this time, either. Roo and Emma (Olive’s mother, played by Robyn Nevin) both refer to Olive as no more than a child – unchanged from the young woman who met Roo many years ago.

Roo, too, has been trapped in the qualities and experiences of his youth that he thought would last forever – being the best at what he did, with a body that wouldn’t give up on him. At least he is able to think about a new way of life; Olive cannot, and falls apart along with the collapse of the seventeenth summer.

Summer of the Seventeenth Doll is, of course, well written. The actors inhabit and embody their characters fully: Steve Le Marquand as Roo is a standout, moving from rage at Barney to gentle love for Olive, authentic at both extremes. In some ways I can’t say I enjoyed this play, because it left me with tears in my eyes and too many thoughts about regret and nostalgia. But I thoroughly appreciated the experience of watching such strong theatre; it is a reminder of what can be said and experienced through theatre that neither books nor movies can achieve.

Film review: Buck

The film Buck, winner of the Audience Award for Documentary at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival and now making its way to Australian cinemas, is the story of a real ‘horse whisperer’ – Buck Brannaman.

Brannaman was a key inspiration for the character of Tom Booker in Nicholas Evans’s 1995 novel, The Horse Whisperer. He is part of a lineage of natural horsemanship practitioners in the United States, including Tom and Bill Dorrance and Ray Hunt.

But while the film adaptation of The Horse Whisperer might have brought the concept of natural horsemanship to a wide audience, the notion of a whisperer is not quite the right metaphor. Horsemanship, for the likes of Brannaman and other practitioners (such as Sascha and Sam Watson, who taught my horse and I in Western Australia, and figures such as Monty Roberts), is indeed about communicating softly with a horse. But it isn’t usually about verbal communication, and most importantly it requires careful groundwork on behalf of both rider and horse in order to open the channels of communication in the first place.

Buck follows Brannaman as he criss-crosses the United States, running four-day clinics and teaching riders and handlers how to establish communication with their horses. He is driven by his empathy with the animals he works with – and here the story comes back, as it so often does in this film, to the relationships between people.

Brannaman and his older brother grew up as a child trick-roping stars, on a ranch with a father who regularly drank and beat them. The figure of his father looms large over the film, for Brannaman says that his ability to empathise with frightened horses developed out of the abuse he suffered as a child – out of knowing what it’s like to fear for your life.

Brannaman has chosen a path very different to that of his father – a conscious decision that he talks about in the film. His path is one that eschews violence, force, negativity or even blame. He reminds his students regularly not to feel contempt or anger towards the horse, because the way the horse behaves is a reflection of its handler.

For a horse person, one of the most moving parts of the film is Brannaman’s insistence that your horse is a mirror to your soul. This is brought home most strongly by an intractable palomino that comes to one of Brannaman’s clinics towards the end of the film.

At first spoilt and then neglected by his owner, the horse is now aggressive and dangerous to all who come near him. I could not help but think of my own horse, remembering the graceful curve of his ears and the bob of his head from the hours and hours spent on his back, and wondering what his behaviour (hard to catch, sometimes naughty, usually full of beans) says about me.

There’s little doubt that this film will resonate with people who ride horses, and who understand what it feels like to achieve – or even to long for – synchronicity with your horse. At times like this, you need only to think and feel your intention, and the horse will pick it up instantly. As Brannaman reminds us in Buck, horses are sensitive enough to feel a mosquito on their rump in the middle of a windstorm, and so only the subtlest of signals are required from a rider once the channels of communication are open between horse and human.

Brannaman talks about how the horse’s body and the rider’s should be one – so that as a rider, the horse’s feet are your feet. This indeed is how he and his horses function together – there is no need for a visible sign from him for his horse to change direction or speed, or even to sidepass gracefully across a pasture: horse and rider seem to move and think as one body.

In spite of the specific subject of this film, it has much to appreciate even for those who aren’t ‘horsey’. Buck is beautifully shot, and Brannaman as a subject is both funny and humble. The lessons about respect and communication apply not only to horses, but to relationships between humans too.

Brannaman’s journey is pieced together in a manner that makes sense of the man and his motivations, brought together smoothly by director Cindy Meehl. It’s also a window into America that we rarely see – into a subculture held together by love for horses, and by a desire to build relationships between horses and humans that are based on respect, not fear.

An unfamiliar landscape – Skins (2002)

Skins, by Western Australian author Sarah Hay, was an unexpected find – I picked it up by chance from my local bookshop in December, and put it aside because I was afraid that it would be a confronting read; not something I was ready for at the time. But I began reading it a day or two ago and have just finished it; I was immediately hooked by the tension and suspense that pervades the novel from the very beginning.

Skins is primarily the story of Dorothea Newell, an English immigrant who, with her parents and six siblings, settled in the burgeoning town of Albany on King George Sound. In 1835, she leaves Albany and sails with her sister and her sister’s new husband for Tasmania, but they are wrecked a few hundred miles along the coast and end up instead on Middle Island, at a sealer’s camp. Middle Island is not far from the present town of Esperance, but at the time there was no settlement along the coast east of the Sound.

This is not a novel about shipwreck or survival off the land. Rather it is about the tense relationships between rough men and the few women, both Aboriginal and English, in their midst. There is very little happiness in the relationships on the island. Nobody really wants to be there, and the men are violent and possessive, fighting over women, money and loyalties. From the beginning I felt a sense of foreboding, as Dorothea and her sister navigate the treacherous tensions on the island.

I was surprised, though, with where the story led me: those characters whom I had expected to be honest and loyal turn out otherwise, while the sealer Black Jack Anderson, a figure of fear and violence, strikes up a relationship with Dorothea that is unexpectedly tender. The story is partly told by one of the sealers, young James Manning. I at first exepected him to be on Dorothea’s side by virtue of being given his point of view alongside hers. It does not turn out this way, however; he is distrustful of women and angry at his situation. He befriends Dorothea’s brother Jem, and this alliance is part of what eventually leaves Dorothea estranged from her siblings and relying instead on Anderson.

The novel is interspersed with Dorothea’s thoughts and memories as an old woman fifty years later. I found this plot device awkward and by the end of the book I was beginning to wonder what purpose it served. These sections seemed to add nothing to the key narrative of the novel, that of Dorothea’s experience on Middle Island and her longed-for return to King George Sound. But this is because I did not realise until I reached the end of the novel that Skins is based on historical records and that Dorothea was a real person. Thus the fragments from fifty years later are relevant in giving the reader some idea of what happened to Dorothea later in life, even though the narrative would have remained strong without them.

I was struck throughout Skins by the evocation of a landscape that is not wholly unfamiliar to me, but yet which takes on entirely new meanings when seen through very different eyes. These days, traversed by bitumen roads, interspersed by farming communities and criss-crossed by hiking tracks, the land around Albany and Esperance is beautiful; it is not a landscape that frightens me. For the early settlers in Skins, the land is something else entirely: the bush is dense, with the few settlements along the coast reachable only by sea. The bush is by turns bleak and endless, or intensely brilliant in the southern light. It is nothing like the land that Dorothea’s family knew in England, and nothing like what they expected to find in Australia.

I found myself rushing through this novel in my eagerness to know what would happen, and the awkwardness of shifts in time in the narrative – from the 1830s to the 1880s – seemed to be a hindrance as I read. But Skins tells a powerful story and does not hold back in imagining the brutality that women, men and animals were subjected to in the lawless, isolated environment of Western Australia’s southern coast.