Library at Borroloola

BORROLOOLA LIBRARY
The Library at Borroloola is a place where the books and the building have long since been eaten by white ants. The story of the Borroloola Library is one of the most poignant and mythic of all library stories. If books and libraries are in crisis in 2011, and perhaps they are, imagine if you will, the tale of the library in Borroloola.
Borroloola is 1500 kilometres South East of Darwin, and 60 kilometres from the sea on the Gulf of Carpentaria. In the 1890s a mounted policeman, Cornelius Power, established the library. It is probable that he wrote to the governor of Victoria asking for donations of books. A thousand handsome books apparently came, by ship, and were kept in the jail as there was nowhere else for them to go. Later on there were three thousand books in total. This library became the centre of cultural life in the area, a handful of bushies and a large population of indigenous people borrowing and reading and holding regular open air public discussion on the things they read about. The collection contained the leather bound books that an educated Edwardian Englishman might have had in his house. Dickens, Bronte, Henry James, Kipling, Tennyson, Shakespeare, Aristotle, Plutarch, Homer, Virgil, the Bible – covered in canvas jackets. Ernestine Hill described it as ‘a kindly light of sanity to men half mad with loneliness’. By the late 1950s the library was in an almost total state of decay. Some of the books had been sent to Darwin. But many of them had been borrowed and never returned, and what remained would eventually be eaten by white ants, the pages of works of great literature ending up in the material of the ant hills. When David Attenborough made a documentary about it in the early sixties, he reported that the only remaining book was The Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis, and that although the title page was legible, most of the interior had been eaten.
Sic transit Gloria mundi.

Library Thoughts

Library Thoughts
Libraries are changing. Books are changing. There might be a crisis in libraries and books. Are they disappearing? Does it matter?
I was browsing through old copies of TLS and read a review (by Roderick Conway Morris) of a book ‘Venetian Navigators’ by Andrea di Robilant. The book’s about fourteenth century explorations of the far far northern regions of the planet. The reviewer suggests that as the Arctic ice-cap melts and North-West and North-East Passages open up to navigation, the areas explored by the Zen brothers in the fourteenth century will become central to world trade.
A section of the review caught my imagination, reminding me of the role and relevance of both books and libraries. It’s a lovely story about what can happen in a library when you are looking for one thing and your stumble upon something else.
QUOTE from TLS, June 3, 2011.
“Several years ago di Robilant, while researching an altogether different topic, happened upon a miniature volume in the Old and Rare Book Collection at the Marciana Library on Piazza San Marco in Venice. It measured about six by four inches, and glued to the back of it was a larger, crisply engraved wood-cut map. The author was the Venetian nobleman Nicolo Zen, and the title ‘On the Discovery of the Islands of Frislanda, Eslanda, Engroneland, Estotiland and Icaria made by the two Zen Brothers under the Artic Pole.’ The book was published in 1558.”
The accidental discovery of the little old book led to the writing of the book under review. I love stories like that. And I hope libraries and books don’t disappear.

Woodend Writing Workshop

ROTARY CLUB OF WOODEND


Short Story Workshop with Carmel Bird

The Macedon Ranges Writers Group is running a five-hour workshop for members and community members on November 26th 2011 at the Woodend Community Centre starting at 11:00am. The Victorian Writers Centre and the Woodend Rotary Club are sponsoring the event.

The workshop, writing for young people and adults is being conducted by Carmel Bird who is primarily a writer of fiction, covering both adult and children's writing. Her first collection of short stories was published in 1983, and since then she has published another four collections of short stories, and also novels, essays, anthologies, and books on how to write. She is a leading author of short stories and has published ten novels, three of which have been short listed for the Miles Franklin Award. Her most recent novel is CHILD OF THE TWILIGHT. She is a celebrated teacher of both fiction and memoir-writing, and has published the non-fiction guide WRITING THE STORY OF YOUR LIFE. Carmel is also an experienced editor of many journals and anthologies, including THE STOLEN CHILDREN - THEIR STORIES. Her website is www.carmelbird.com

To book your tickets please go to http://www.trybooking.com/XNS but spaces are limited. To purchase a ticket go into the shopping cart section on the website, just click on full price and select a ticket. The total cost is $40.30. You will not be able to pay on the day.

For further information about the Workshop please call Miranda 0431 114 539 or Christine on 5429 5452 or 0407 012 140. If you would like to hear more about the Writer’s Group call Christine or email Sue Yardley sjyardley@bigpond.com.

Where: Woodend Community Centre
When: Saturday, 26 November, 2011
Time: 11:00 am – 4:00 pm
Bring: Writing materials; lunch; your ticket
Cost: $40 plus 30¢ booking fee
Booking: http://www.trybooking.com/XNS
Inquiries: 5429 5452 or 0431 114 539

GETTING TO THE EBOOK

GETTING TO THE EBOOK
The brush-footed butterfly is any member of the Nymphalidae family, named for its reduced adult forelegs which are frequently hairy, resembling brushes. I know this because I flicked open a volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and there was the brush-foot, complete with pictures of typical members of the family such as mourning cloaks and anglewings. I had never really heard of the brush-foot before, and for more information I googled it and found 29,000 results. That shows you one of the differences between the Britannica and the Web. One other difference is that you can consult the Britannica by saying – tell me anything you like – whereas with the Web you have to have a starting point. Another thing is that on the open page of the Britannica the gaze strays over to the picture of Aleksey Alekseyevich Brusilov who was distinguished primarily for the 1916 Brusilov Breakthrough which contributed to the fall of the Tsar’s government in 1917. I didn’t know that before. He’s got 48,000 results on Google. But the big difference between the Britannica and the Web is that the Web collects only the dust that settles on a keyboard, whereas the Britannica, occupying quite a bit of space on a shelf, has to be dusted with a bunch of feathers quite often.

Writers collect a lot of books, and you sometimes hear them saying what a battle it is to house and control them. I am engaged in such a battle, and I happened to be looking at the Britannica because I was thinking about how much shelf space I could acquire if I threw the encyclopaedia out. Like having silly old grandpa put down. But I discovered that Old Grandpa Britannica is not so silly after all, and mostly I discovered that I love him very much. He is wise and wonderful.

So, I say to myself, is sentimentality going to win over common sense here?

When I was a child I spent endless hours browsing through several different kinds of encyclopaedias. In fact I can still visualize pages of them, words and pictures. The black and white photographs in the Richards’ in particular drift vividly through my memory – the Princes in the Tower, the Sword of Damocles, the Fighting Téméraire (53,000 Google results). So the experience of encyclopaedias is deeply nostalgic, browsing the Britannica takes me back to the pleasures of childhood, denies the passage of time. But it is also a present day pleasure to be found nowhere else. I am not just looking for specific information, I am going on a walk through a landscape I know and don’t know. I can keep walking here for many pleasurable hours. (When I am not dusting or out buying bookshelves.)

All those encyclopaedias I read as a child must have had an effect on me as a writer, but I realize that there were other books also that affected me in different ways. If I try to confine myself to five of those books I come up with: Treasures of English Verse; En Route; ‘The Fly’ by Katherine Mansfield; The Diary of Anne Frank; Barnaby Rudge.

For my sixth birthday my parents gave me Treasures of English Verse, first published by Oxford in 1925, last reprinted in 1942. They were treasures, and I learnt many of them by heart. Even though it was printed in wartime, it is a hardback bound in blue cloth and has a coloured picture as the frontispiece. The cover is faded now, the spine foxed. Etched into the front cover in black is an image of Pegasus flying above clouds and above a strip of stylized water where Art Nouveau images of what might be waves or birds or fish or leaves are flowing. The poems proceed from easy to difficult in three sections, each section signed off with a little woodcut – first an angel, then a Norse ship, then Queen Elizabeth the First. The coloured picture is of a shepherd boy with a flute, and underneath him are lines from Wordsworth’s ‘Written in March’, lines that were delicious then, but strike an ominous note in Eastern Australia today: ‘the rain is over and gone’. The poems begin with ‘The Raindrops’ Message’ by the beautifully named Lucy Diamond and end with George Herbert’s ‘Virtue’, praising the ‘sweet and virtuous soul’ that will live ‘though the whole world turn to coal’. Again I can now read into this a grim ecological message.

I read The Diary of Anne Frank when I was fifteen. I remember sitting in the apricot tree – the book was covered in the brown paper we used to protect books. It is commonplace now for teenagers to read the published diaries of other teenagers, but I had never seen anything like The Diary. It was emotionally freighted with the tragic knowledge that the teenage writer, who broke off the writing on the first of August 1944 was arrested by the Nazis on the fourth of August and died in Bergen-Belsen in 1945. She was fifteen when she died; I was fifteen as I was reading. She was so candid and alive and full of bright innocent hope. I realize now that the reading was a revelation to me, a revelation of how it was possible to write. But it was also a powerful message about the efficacy of writing under pressure, appalling and unimaginable pressure. And I remember experiencing a new feeling of guilt at the realization that when I was frolicking about the garden in Tasmania in the early forties, this girl was hidden in an attic in Amsterdam in fear of her life, able to write: ‘I am young and strong and am living a great adventure.’ Perhaps it was for me an epiphany. ‘The liberation is drawing nearer. Why then should I be in despair?’
Another revelation came about a year later when I read ‘The Fly’ by Katherine Mansfield. Before this I had no concept of the short story form. I woke up to the idea that you could deliver psychological truth via mood, structure, image and language – that the plotting could be stronger because it was subtle, that character would emerge through the other elements of the piece, that the metaphor and the meaning were one. I really was astonished by all that, and delighted, and inspired.
A key book in my development as a reader, and hence as a writer, was Barnaby Rudge. I was seven, and you couldn’t be a member of the children’s library until you were eight. This is now hard to imagine. My older sister was reading David Copperfield, and so I had a passing knowledge of the existence if not the importance of Charles Dickens. My father had pity on me and took me to the adult library saying I could use his card. So – bliss – there I was importantly holding my father’s hand, ascending a magical spiral staircase in a gracious old Georgian building, heading for the Dickens shelf. I selected a leather-bound volume of Barnaby Rudge for two reasons – I thought the title sounded wonderful, and I loved the illustrations, particularly those of Dolly Varden in her bonnet and crinoline. When I came to read the book at home, I found that although I could read a lot of the words, I could not make any sense of most of the sentences. So in an agony of disappointment and rage and wounded pride I sat in tears, slowly turning the pages, making my way through the book, dwelling with relief on the illustrations. This was reading as frozen horror. But I believe it speeded up my determination to read well, and soon enough I turned eight and was admitted to children’s with its fishtank and Enid Blytons.
Then there was the French text book En Route which I started when I was twelve. This was a little blue hardback with a dizzy pattern of dark red calligraphy all over the cover. It was by a genius called E.Saxelby M.A., and was illustrated by another genius called Blam. It, and the subsequent books in the series, followed the lives and adventures of a family named Lépine – Monsieur, Madame, Paul, Bobette and Toto. As with the Treasures of English Verse I still know slabs of these books by heart. I believe that because I moved slowly through the books, particularly the first one, I took in a great many small details of human relationship and psychology, of character and plot and the possibilities of story. The narratives were quite brilliantly constructed and paced. I believe I still draw on elements of the Lépines today as I write.
So from the beginning I truly loved to read, and was quickly led from the intricacies of the texts to a desire to write. It seemed natural.
Just for fun I googled Saxelby, but all I found was an invitation to let Catherine Saxelby guide me ‘through the mumbo-jumbo of how to adopt healthier eating habits.’ No, no, give me Paul and Bobette who eat slices of bread and butter covered in honey. The landscape of words is a beautiful place in which I will continue to wander in sentimentality, but also, I believe, common sense. Sometimes on www; sometimes on the bookshelves.
And then, of course, there’s eBooks. I have finally got there, and I do love them. But I still love Britannica between covers, and also www and so on and so forth.

women and men and books

I begin by accepting the recent figures etc about male/female divide in
literature, and my theory is supported by them.

It seems to me that the gender divide in novels themselves is only a symptom of
the prevailing power structure in western society.

A broad project of literature is to examine where things go
wrong in human affairs.

Human beings are generally inclined to blame somebody
(or fate - of which more later) for the their troubles.

And broadly speaking, I think men tend to blame women and women blame
men.

Western society is still, after all this time, predicated on the idea that men are in
charge of that society.

So at base men are keeping the gates.

When women write the story, the men are to blame for the trouble.
When men write the story it is the women who are to blame.

And men still have the power to see to it that their version of
events is the dominant one. Hence the predominance of male
reviewers and books by men getting reviewed over books by women.

Even when a man is writing, and a man is to blame for the trouble
in the story, the man - it seems to me - still comes out as perversely admirable.
(Humbert Humbert, say.)

The other element is fate. Even when fate is to blame, men and women
still have to respond to that, and so there is no avoiding the male or female
response of some kind.

So what I am saying, in very simple terms, is that when the woman writes the novel the man is the baddie, and vice versa.

I am saying that men are still in power, and so they are still able to push
their version of events which is that Eve was responsible for the fall, and
the woman's version is still being sidelined.

Wheeler Centre

Discussion of Feasts in Madame Bovary, The Leopard etc

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/bookshow/stories/2011/3238876.htm

Judge's Report

The following piece is the transcript of a speech I made at the Belgrave Library where I was invited to judge a competition in the writing of short stories long ago in 2000. I have recently been asked to post it here. It is also on my website: www.carmelbird.com JUDGE’S REPORT I invite you to listen to the voices of the opening sentences from the ten prizewinning stories. ‘I still have the dagger.’ ‘It was only at the urging of my son that I took the trip to England.’ ‘After his father died he stopped fishing.’ ‘The word on the street was that Cherie had lost her fix in someone’s car and he, fat hypocrite, had driven straight to the police and ordered them to get that filthy thing out of his vehicle.’ ‘He walks between the stars.’ ‘I read a book once. It was called Crosses and was about these two girls who cut themselves with glass because it eases their emotional pain.’ ‘Have you ever loved somebody so much you couldn’t eat or sleep?’ ‘It was the last week of the summer, but more importantly the end of the disastrous heatwave we had experienced through the scorching past few months.’ ‘Hello, I’m a retired racing Greyhound by the name of Rosie and I’d like to tell you about my life as a Greyhound.’ ‘Hi, I’m a twelve years old girl. I love my life.’ What you have heard are ten distinctive voices. You have heard confidence. You have probably felt invited in to listen to what might be going to happen. They have probably all got your attention straight away. You want, I imagine, to hear where these beginnings will lead you. I would like to dwell on the power and significance of the beginnings of stories for a while. I know nothing about any of the writers, and so I don’t know whether they are experienced writers or not. But I do know that quite often when inexperienced writers set out to write a story, they demonstrate, in their words, the fact that they find it difficult to make the shift from the world of everyday reality into the world of imagination. And what they often do, in order to facilitate this shift - they write a sentence or even a paragraph that in fact describes the shift. They say something like: ‘Moonlight fell on the path leading up to the door of the gloomy mansion.’ They take us on a little atmospheric journey as they make their own approach to the world of imaginary beings and events. Now there is no harm in writing such a sentence to begin with, to get yourself in place and to get going, but what every writer has to learn to do is to recognise the purpose of that sentence and then delete it. Nine times out of ten. Because there are really no hard and fast rules to writing fiction. But I promise you that more often than not the sentences of the type I just gave you (Moonlight fell on the path leading up to the door of the gloomy mansion.) are killer sentences. They do not invite the reader into a world; they warn the reader that the writer is in the process of shifting from reality to fiction, and they warn that the writer is feeling uncomfortable. The reader wants to feel safe with the confident voice of the writer. They want to hear something like: ‘Hello, I’m a retired racing Greyhound.’ Another very important element in the writing of a successful story is for the writer to have, as soon as possible, a clear idea of how the story is going to end. Too often stories will just tail off or will end on a false note, a note that doesn’t ring true as on outcome for that story. Student writers often have brilliant ideas for a story - a kind of shining concept that means they will approach the task of writing with great enthusiasm. But then the whole thing starts to fall apart as they go on. I promise you that if they had made a decision about how the story was going to end, they would probably not have had that problem. There is something deep within the make-up of human beings that makes us long to tell stories and to hear stories. We are story-telling creatures. Now I am often asked whether stories (in competitions, in magazines and so on) have to have a beginning, middle and end. And I happen to believe that the answer is yes, they do. There is such a thing as a piece of writing that is moving, interesting, beautiful, and that lacks those elements, but it is not really a story. It might be a description, or a word game. And that’s OK. But - let’s face it - we all know a story when we hear one. If I the man who mows my lawn or mends the roof says to me: What are you writing, and I say, I’m writing a story, then he says - and he invariably says this: so what is it about? And then he says: so how does it end? He knows, just as you know, that a story begins with a set of circumstances, and that these will change for better or worse, and that the outcome will be satisfying in some way, and will emerge from the workings of the story. Fairy stories are perfect examples of stories. They begin with an event: the king dies. They proceed with the events that follow from that. There is conflict and tension. And they end when the conflict and tension are resolved by certain discoveries, deaths and marriages. Please don’t think that I am advocating only the writing of fairy stories. I merely use them as a good example of the timeless human response to stories. Now what I have described so far might be called the impulse for the story. The writer is then face with how to construct the thing in order to best present the characters and the dilemmas. You might begin with the final event, for instance, and then fill the reader in on how things led up to that. You might tell everything from the point of view of the main character, or from the point of view of the policeman, or the elephant. These are decisions to be made by the writer when confronted with the material. Writers ask themselves which would be the best way to bring the story and the reader together. For don’t forget that writing fiction, telling stories, is a form of communication. There are at least three parts to the contract: the writer, the story and the reader. And it is the writer’s job to construct the story I such a beguiling way that there will be a reader. The writer has a responsibility to engage and even entertain - and certainly to move - the reader. Writing a story is job you give yourself - nobody really asks you to do it - so you have to be really strong and convincing. Which brings me back to the idea of confidence. Your voice must be confident. And such confidence is linked to urgency. Any story you tell should really be a story you feel you urgently need to tell. When that urgency is present, the decisions about how to begin, how to end, how to construct what happens in between - these will largely be made at an unconscious level. It is useful to recall the story of Scherezade - she had to interest the Sultan in her stories night after night so that he would not kill her, but would keep coming back for more (stories). Sometimes students ask me whether there are any subjects that are taboo as material for short stories. I don’t know of any. Of course there are fashions - and sometimes it is OK to follow fashion, and sometimes it isn’t. The range of subject matter in the ten winning stories is very wide. What I wanted was to feel engaged and moved by what I read. There are a couple of things to bear in mind - short stories have a limited number of characters, and the reader’s attention needs to be focused on a limited range of events - perhaps just one event or one aspect of life. I am asked about dialogue. Well, dialogue is a wonderful way to move the story along and to demonstrate the characters. But some people are better at writing dialogue than others. There is no rule that says there needs to be dialogue. If you are not so good at it, don’t do it. Go away and practise, maybe, and write dialogue another time. I spoke of urgency. The winning story in the adult category ‘Joey’ is a beautiful narrative which speaks with quiet, confident urgency. It is immaculately constructed, employs lively dialogue, and draws the reader through the events to a moving and deeply satisfying conclusion. There is the interplay of close friendship and enduring love, marred by tragedy, between the distinctive characters of the narrator and Joey. The winner of the teenage section is a story called ‘Distance’. This is a remarkably successful story which uses the element of dream in a very powerful way. It is dangerous and difficult to use dream in fiction. The writing is vivid and lyrical, and the characters are alive in the mind of the reader. The principal character is particularly firm and engaging. The junior section was won by a story of disaster. ‘Aftermath of the Quake.’ The description is economical and very convincing, told in the first person. There is tension, and then there is relief, and final resolution. A happy ending for the family who are safe, but a scene of devastation all around. This is an ambitious and sophisticated story. Then the winner of the residents’ category ‘That Gipsy Touch’ is a strong and well constructed story with a very successful sex scene. This story has several vivid characters and an atmosphere of violence, mystery and conflict. These stories and the runners-up will be bound and made available in the library. Please read them. You will be amazed and entertained. And if you are hoping to write stories of your own, you will find in these inspiration and even instruction. For people who want to write stories must, I believe, read stories. Reading gives you the rhythm of what a story is. You will learn far more about writing from reading good stories than you will from listening to me.