Books Roundup

blackbirds don’t mate with starlings
Janaka Malwatta (UQP, available now)

blackbirds don’t mate with starlings is our First Book Club pick for October—Stay tuned for features on our website and podcast throughout the month!

In blackbirds don’t mate with starlings Janaka Malwatta brings his own migrant experiences to the page, as well as delving into instances of racism in history. This is a broad collection of poetry, and Malwatta often incorporates found or overheard phrases into his writing. But whether he is piecing together stories from the past or writing more personally, Malwatta is concerned with the experiences of those who have been othered. In the poem ‘passfail’, Malwatta lays out the unspoken rules of being accepted as Australian:

Speak with an Aussie accent: pass

Amusingly mispronounce words in a Spanish

lilt or a Gallic shrug: bare bass

Mispronounce words with a broad

Indian drawl or scissor-sharp Chinese vowels: fail

In this poem Malwatta gives insight into the stress and loneliness of this othering— the unbending refusal of Anglo people to learn a non-Anglo name, the stares that come with speaking non-European languages in public. This sentiment is repeated throughout the collection, in many different guises. 

A well-balanced collection that successfully spans very personal subject matter with broad cultural commentary.

The middle section of the book includes a long found-poem about African American boxer Jack Johnson, composed using newspaper headlines and quotes from the time of Johnson’s visit to Australia at the very beginning of the 20th century. This is an exciting way to read poetry, and read about history: Malwatta is gently shaping a historical narrative, leading his readers to see a well-publicised story from a new perspective, and at the same time is drawing comparisons between the racist sentiments of the past and those of today. Something striking about this book is the way that Malwatta uses the racist language of the aggressor. He does not dull the vileness of slurs for his audience, and some readers may feel confronted to see these words on the page—but that seems to be his intention. This is an honest portrayal of racism in the West. Whether he is recalling the prejudice of people he has personally interacted with, or quoting racist headlines in found poems, Malwatta is purposeful in his use of these words—he is displaying it in a context the white reader cannot explain away. 

In the titular poem of the collection, an unnamed white speaker warns against an interracial relationships: ‘I’m only telling you for your own good / Blackbirds don’t mate with starlings.’ His false concern and upholding of an arbitrary status quo is slimy and insidious. Malwatta shows these instances of brash racism and microaggressions in a full light, with a sense of melancholy weariness that people cannot find a way to change their behaviour.

blackbirds don’t mate with starlings is a well-balanced collection that successfully spans very personal subject matter with broad cultural commentary. This is a compelling and quick read, but is the kind of book that will embed ideas in the mind of the reader, leaving them with much to mull over. 

— Ellen Cregan

Nothing to Hide: Voices of Trans and Gender Diverse Australia
Ed. by Sam Elkin, Alex Gallagher, Yves Rees and Bobuq Sayed (Allen and Unwin, available now)

I must confess, Nothing to Hide tore me in half, but pieced me back to together with the most generous touch. It understands that our community—the trans and gender diverse community—is more than the sum of scars. But it does not owe this to the reader. It is not ‘brave’. It is not ‘inspiring’. It is formidable, a tenacious gathering of witnesses to the hidden.

This new collection whispers many things. Joy and rage, pain and healing, captivity and freedom, violence and—that most rare of treasures—kindness. These qualities may appear to be binary, but exist on a spectrum of infinity. It would be remiss of me to attempt to compress the immensity of this volume—these artists speak for themselves—and as Ellen van Neerven reminds us, in ‘Abject subjectivity’: ‘Your life is stronger than the page.’

Nothing to Hide is not ‘brave’. It is not ‘inspiring’. It is formidable.

Regardless, it is a true kaleidoscope of voices, experiences and urges. Unconcerned with the trappings of form, we are invited to traverse the possibilities of storytelling: exquisitely drawn artworks, quiet meditations on care and culture, enlightening transcripts on contested histories, anecdotes on hormones and medical hierarchies, worded rituals to honour kin and ancestors, a crucial discussion of abolition, abyssal poetry that sears with discomfort and sparkles with laughter, and, not to forget, a warmly offered recipe for a delicious-sounding soup.

The connective tissue here is not identity, but candour. Voices are bright and loud. It is often stark in its honesty, but never callous, as content in the earthly mundane as it is in the extreme and extraordinary. But at its heart, the book rises in defiance of the structures that limit self-expression and agency, unafraid to refuse the colonial notion of ‘truth’. That is, the ‘desire to provide a fixed container, not of our making,’ as described in ‘The colonial trappings of gender’ by Professor Sandy O’Sullivan, who instead reflects on championing ‘affirmation’ over ‘transition’. ‘The journey is complex, and will never be over, but I will persistently be affirmed… affirmation can be cascading and remain infinite,’ they explain. Each of these works affirms itself—a call to ancestors, a call to community, a call to the quiet action of existing. ‘My existence itself will be a monument,’ declares Shreya Tekumalla in ‘Language’. Indeed.

I must offer homage to Ruby Allegra’s cover design. Gorgeous, it’s a welcoming hug to hold these voices tight. I also appreciate the advocacy and solidarity of the editors in allowing the voices to speak on their own terms, in their own time and space: ‘[Mainstream media] captures only a narrow sliver of trans experiences. The reality is so much more beautiful and complex.’

Nothing to Hide is absolutely unforgettable. I’m unashamed to promote it as one of the most significant anthologies to be produced in recent memory. It is gentle, precise and bold. Resistance and resilience be damned. As the editors encourage in their introduction, inspired by the artistic explorer Bridget Flack, this anthology speaks of outright ‘refusal’—no longer hidden, no longer silenced, owing nothing.

— Daley Rangi

Gemini Falls
Sean Wilson (Affirm Press, available now)

Phar Lap has just won the cup. Polio is moving silently through communities. Economic woes stoke fear and division across Australia. Shanty camps are popping up on the fringes of towns and cities. This is the backdrop of Gemini Falls, the debut novel from playwright and short story writer Sean Wilson.

Against this setting, thirteen-year-old Morris looks to the stars through his father’s telescope. He’s comforted by the Roman-Greco mythologies his father tells him, and his late mother’s reassurance that ‘in the sky, the same lights have shone down on every person who’s ever lived.’ When Catherine Fletcher is murdered in the fictional mining town of Gemini in middle Victoria, Morris’ detective father, Jude, is called back to the hometown he once hastily left. He’s called to investigate the murder, and the family—Morris’ adolescent sister Lottie too—move in with Aunt Beth and Uncle Jimmy. Morris quickly falls in with his cousin Flo, a would-be Marple sleuth, and Sam, the son of the town’s Mayor and a wannabe actor whose populist father forbids him from acting. The three team up and begin following clues throughout Gemini.

The pay-off is deeply rewarding as no character escapes Wilson’s keen eye for story development.

Gemini Falls is contemporary Australian fiction that, as the story develops, begins to show Wilson’s acclaim as a storyteller. With restraint and precision, Wilson weaves social commentary about the disproportionate suffering doled out by the Great Depression, the social consequences of domestic violence and the difficulty of meeting the needs of the individual and the collective in times of hardship. He does this through a narrative structured in tight purposeful scenes that speak to Wilson’s shortlisting for the Patrick White Playwrights Award and decorated career in the performing arts. Ultimately what emerges is a treatise on gratitude and persistence in light of trauma. Innocence meets inevitable suffering as Morris slowly comes to learn about his mother’s untimely passing, the truth behind Catherine Fletchers murder and why his father and mother left Gemini all those years ago.

Although Gemini Falls shows some of the growing pains of a debut novelist and the first act is a little slow going, the pay-off is deeply rewarding as no character escapes Wilson’s keen eye for story development, and each is treated with humanity and the keen perception of an exciting literary eye. As Morris looks to the sky and his world seems to slowly fall apart under the stress of economic downturn, he and the reader alike are reminded what it is that holds communities together.

— Duncan Strachan

Limberlost
Robbie Arnott (Text Publishing, available now)

Limberlost reaches for grandeur, for the inarticulately majestic. Ned West, the protagonist, often glimpses the wonder of nature, transcending his humble provincial life. Though steeped in twentieth-century Tasmania, Robbie Arnott’s third novel follows other books that track one man’s changing trust in an agrarian life, like Yukio Mishima’s The Sound of Waves (1954) and Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams (2011).

We follow three threads of Ned’s life: at five years old, when he and his brothers have a mythic encounter with a whale; at fifteen, plotting and dreaming on Limberlost, his father’s orchard, with his brothers off-the-margins fighting in WWII; and in the twilight of his life, having farmed, fathered and become redundant. These arcs weave and unravel, rocking the reader through his story like the tributary waves against his quaint timber boat, the talisman of his teenage days. In every arc, Ned’s life brims with ‘a hugeness of feeling.’ The novel’s greatest achievement is how consistently this vastness is evoked, again and again; sharpest, for instance, in the breathtaking scene when his brother, Bill, speaks to a stranded ram, saving it from an icy death on the rocky peaks.

The novel simmers with a pastoral spirituality. We feel it from one word to the next.

The novel simmers with a pastoral spirituality. We feel it from one word to the next. Ned’s father, William, is a ‘quiet, strange man who remained out of reach and unknowable to his own sons.’ This sentence, like the strongest in Limberlost, pulses with energy; in reading these rising and falling syllables, we too may cross the unruliest gullies and cliffs. Though the horrors of WWII are hidden, we witness the violent demise of rams, quolls, Tasmanian Tigers, mares, cows, hawks, ravens, leatherjackets and rabbits; though the endless animal bloodshed sometimes belabours an obvious point, we’re reminded that Ned’s seeming-Eden actually teems with death and destruction.

At times, Arnott’s grand attention to Ned’s natural world diminishes the lives around his lead. He’s married in one sentence; he fathers his daughters in two. His wife, Callie, battles recurrent cancer, but the novel seems less interested in her pain as how the bush might manifest it. Where the opening sentences are polished, even mesmerising, the prose often clunks by the end, like when Ned’s distant father must ‘be restitched into himself’ or the nefarious boat-buyer ‘frowned at the rudder, but otherwise did not let emotion touch his features.’

But for its ambition and spirit, Limberlost deserves real praise, an earnest novel of considerable charm.

— Raeden Richardson