Michael
Wilding & David Myers, eds., Best Stories
Under the Sun, (Rockhampton:
Central Queensland University Press, 2004, AUD$25.95, 186
pages, ISBN 1-876780-58-4)—Susan Ballyn,
Universitat de Barcelona
The
last review I wrote was on Friendly Street: New Poets Ten and
the work of three new poets. Now I find myself pleasurably
engaged in reviewing Best Stories Under
the Sun edited by Michael Wilding and David
Myers. Although published in December 2004, this collection
of short stories has received practically no critical
attention. A further volume came out quite recently
and again has received little attention, as far as
I can tell. I wonder why and can find no reason other
than collections of short stories very often get overlooked
in the general glut of novels, biographies, autobiographies,
academic writing and other genres. Like poetry, anthologies
of short stories do not sell well, apart from single
collections by well-known authors. Yet I find the
lack of attention paid to this particular collection
intriguing and also disturbing. Here is an anthology
with work by some of the finest short story writers
and novelists in Australia, alongside that of lesser-known
names and debutants in the field. I find the publisher’s
blurb on the back cover quite disquieting and misplaced:
“Perfect reading for the beach, the bedside, the airport
and the Christmas Stocking.” Not, I would suggest,
the best way in which to publicise one’s publications.
It smacks of the light, the frivolous, the “read it
and put it away” sort of book. This is most certainly
not the case with this collection. There are stories
here by well-known writers such as Inez Baranay,
Carmel Bird, David Brooks, Laurie Clancy,
Marion
Halligan, Nigel Krauth,
and the list goes on. Many of the authors in this
collection have won prestigious awards such as the
Miles Franklin, Christina Stead, Steele Rudd, Australian-Vogel,
and Age Book of the Year. As if chaperoned, but not
overshadowed, by such notable names, the reader also
finds a fine collection of lesser-known writers, a
generation coming up to take their place in the great
tradition of the Australian short story. Among them;
Vivienne Wynter, Ros Love, Sally Breen, JMA
Stenning, Neelam
Maharaj, and again the list is long. The collection is made
all the more interesting by the testing of quality,
inevitable in a collection of this kind, of the old
experienced hands at short story writing and those
arriving on the scene. The result is more than encouraging.
Here are voices which are strong, individual, perceptive,
skilled and attractive. A very strong point of this
collection is that while the stories deal with a huge
range of subject matter and human experience, there
is a nexus of thematic union underlying the whole:
the state of the world in which we exist and how and
why we exist in it. It is impossible to give a comprehensive
analysis of each story in the collection and those
I have chosen to look at in some detail by no means
suggest that the others are of lesser quality. Indeed,
the striking factor of this collection is the evenness
in the standard of the writing in the volume.
Inez Baranay uses her Hungarian
heritage to replay the vampire figure in the visit
by Cousin Vlad to the Gold Coast in “My Transylvanian Cousin” [113-126].
Here the bright lights and garish touristy atmosphere
of the Gold Coast are intertwined with the myths and
ancientness of old Europe.
If the vampire requires his consumption of fresh blood
to survive, Baranay hints, by analogue, at the voraciousness of twenty-first
century materialism devoid of sustaining myths that
consolidate a clearly defined identity. It is the
people of the twenty-first century, at play on the
Gold Coast, who are seen as being far more at risk
from moral and spiritual demise than Vlad
on his necessary dose of blood. The true vampire emerges
as western consumerism devouring everything in its
path leaving no room for mythmaking, or spiritual
growth. As Sally Breen observes in “Ante Up” [83-90],
“The Gold Coast does not disguise the game of living.
Existence is not luck. Existence
is strategy” [86].
A classic Jack London story, “A Piece of Steak” [53-66],
reveals how life is neither luck nor strategy. This
story comes from the time London spent in Australia during 1908 – 1909. Tom
King, an ageing, if not beyond it, boxer from lower-class
Sydney prepares for what will turn out to be his last
fight—but how do you train and keep in form when you
cannot afford to put meat on the table for your family.
In that typically spare yet subtly descriptive London
style, the main part of the story revolves around
Tom
King’s fight against Sandel,
not for glory, but for the thirty pounds his family
so badly needs. The story reads like a classic black
and white film as the reader gets an almost blow by
blow account of the eleven rounds, until Tom is finally
beaten to his knees. If Baranay
explores the materialism and consumerism of society,
London explores the inexorable defeat of the
“older,” not necessarily the
old, by the young coming up behind. With the same
kind of voraciousness that we see in Baranay’s story, here we witness a world that idolises the
young, the strong, the winner, and discards those
who no longer serve a purpose nor stand to be admired.
If the voraciousness and consumerism of our world has
been one of the key motifs in the stories examined
so far, in “A Curious Story” [171-175] Marion
Halligan focuses on a different mouth-watering
voraciousness: the world of delicious cakes in Vienna,
“the city of cakes, of coffee houses baroquely gothic
and gothickly baroque, as
lavish with gilding as they are with cream” [172].
A chance meeting with pretty Francesca on the Ringstrasse
tram leads to the discovery of “Alexandres au sirop. Long cylindrical cakes, or rolls, oozing with juice. Tasting
of oranges and almonds” [173]. Oranges recalls a recipe
for Passover Cake sent to her by Carmel
Bird to which she has added some
of her own ingredients. No recipe, warns Halligan, is unique but has always derived from somewhere
and somebody else and in so doing changes slightly
just as language shifts over time; “a napron
is now “an apron.” “While children still ask if they
can have a norange” [175].
Marion Halligan’s work has ranged widely over the years but this story is
typical of her abiding interest in food, its history
and social role, as well as with the cause and effect
of change, here in a recipe, elsewhere in ways of
life and emotional responses. Halligan’s
piece is part of a book she was in the process of
writing and which was released almost simultaneously
at the end of 2004 as The
Taste of Memory, published by Allen and Unwin
and, like all of Halligan’s
work, well worth reading.
The reference to Carmel Bird’s recipe for Passover
Cake, turns the reader to
Bird’s own contribution to this volume. In 1990, Carmel Bird edited a most interesting collection of
short stories under the title Australian
Short Stories [Houghton Mifflin] aimed specifically
at the American market. The collection was admirable
in its range and an excellent introduction to the
Australian short story scene. Bird has long had a
name as an innovative writer and her work ranges across
fiction, critical essays and short stories. Bird’s
“What World is This? As revealed
in Jane’s journal and Margaret’s thoughts” [143-148]
revolves around two contrasting figures: that of Jane
Wordsworth, daughter of “Lady Charlotte Wordsworth
of Carrickvale Convenor
of the London Chapter Ladies’ Committee for the Promotion
of the Emigration of Single Women to Van Diemens’
Land 1832” [143], and of Margaret
Coffey, a workhouse girl chosen to emigrate to Van
Diemens’ Land. Their two
worlds could not be more different. Lady Jane’s journal
entry is written in a perfect imitation of the prose
of the mid nineteenth century and reeks of the young lady’s certain frivolity and the social
class in which she moves. However, her tone sobers
somewhat as she recounts having attended an interview
session with female inmates of a work house willing
to emigrate to the antipodes.
She writes in a detached form as if witnessing but
not really having engaged with the situation or the
women up for interview until she sees young Margaret
Coffey. Nonetheless, romantic superficiality from
books read takes over as she analyses Margaret’s future
in the antipodes. “I had a vision of a tiny stone
church in the avenue of apple trees, and Margaret
was the blushing bride in delicate lace and satin
ribbons with a posy of bright flowers picked from
the lanes on her way to church. Her
husband was a soldier in scarlet coat and feathered
cap” [146]. Margaret’s experience is couched
in her own simple but dramatically eloquent language.
She is raped by the surgeon then handed to the seamen
during the voyage only to arrive in Van Diemens’
Land to have the Ladies Committee turn her out onto
the streets “to beg and whore your way and find your
way and may God have mercy upon your soul and we are
most disappointed in this cargo of lewd and lopsided
women with the limping legs and the sloping backs
and the broken wings of crumpled crazy crack-pot moth-faced
butterfly wishbone sluts.” This recreation of the
emerging colony and the cynicism, lack of understanding
or comprehension of what actually happened during
voyages of emigration to women from English poorhouses
is skilfully crafted by Bird to leave the reader wondering,
“well, what sort of world was it” in both hemispheres
that could lead to such a lack of understanding of
the underprivileged Other.
Finally, I want to look at some of the lesser-known
writers in this volume. Vivienne Wynter's
“I Want Candy” [1-6] opens the collection. Her biographical
details reveal that she is a journalist, and it is
precisely the journalistic, down-to-earth style which
permeates her moving story about the absence of loving
parents in the life of the protagonist and the devastating
effects that this has on the individual. The journalistic
style comes through beautifully as the protagonist
and her sister fly to meet their mother:
