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‘So it was that day after day, the bush questioned me….the veil of time seemed drawn aside, and eternity gaped in the sun’s glare, or in the cracking of a seed pod.’

—But to What Purpose (1946)

In 1910 Elliot Lovegood Grant Watson, a twenty-four-year-old Cambridge biology student steeped in the Darwinism, atheism and socialism fashionable among his contemporaries, joined Daisy Bates and the controversial young anthropologist A. R. Brown on an ethnological expedition into the Western Australian desert. From Perth his travels took him inland to the Kalgoorlie and Murchison river regions, and then back to the coast and the Aboriginal island lock hospitals of Shark Bay. The experience changed his life. Twice now in little more than a year he had fallen in love, once with a woman and once with the Australian landscape. Both would remain intangible and ineluctable, and both obsessions would stay with him for the rest of his life. On his return to England he decided to become a writer.

Back in Europe, moving restlessly between the English countryside and the expatriate colonies of pre-war Florence and Paris; from Bohemian London and prohibition New York to Palestine and the Arctic Circle, E. L. Grant Watson navigated friendships with Joseph Conrad, Rupert Brooke, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Gertrude Stein, Havelock Ellis, D. H. Lawrence and—later—Carl Gustav Jung. Through two World Wars and the writing of his six ‘Australian’ novels, he continued to bring the cultural preoccupations of his generation to bear on the subject of the numinous Australian inland, trying to reconcile his Darwinian scientific training with a yearning for spiritual meaning. Running thorough all his novels was the subtext of his secret, lifelong love for a woman, extraordinary in herself, whom he could not marry.

~~~

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Read more at JASAL

“’It Was to Have Been my Best Book’ : Dorothy Green and E. L. Grant Watson”
JASAL  10, 2010

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ABC Book Show with Ramona Koval
‘Elliot Lovegood Grant Watson and his Australian novels’

Interview with Suzanne Falkiner
16 March 2011

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]]> http://suzannefalkiner.com/book/the-imago-e-l-grant-watson-australia/feed/ 0 http://suzannefalkiner.com/news/indian-edition-of-joan-in-india/ http://suzannefalkiner.com/news/indian-edition-of-joan-in-india/#comments Sun, 19 Jul 2009 03:19:56 +0000 editor http://suzannefalkiner.com/?p=556 NOW AVAILABLE  from

Yoda Press, New Delhi

yoda@yodapress.com

Price:  Rs 495

Distributor

: 

FOUNDATION BOOKS

a division of Cambridge 
University Press India Pvt Ltd 
www.cambridgeindia.org

‘While writing about her cousin, Falkiner makes the last few years of the Raj come alive and reverberate. Joan in India is one of those rare books you chance upon that make you glad someone wrote them.’

—Swati Daftuar, THE HINDU TIMES, 3 December 2011

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‘..a brave account…’

—Kishore Singh, BUSINESS STANDARD, New Delhi, 28 December 2011

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‘This one time, go ahead, judge a book by its cover.’

—Anindita Ghose, Livemint.com & THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

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ABC Bookshow with Ramona Koval

‘Elliot Lovegood Grant Watson and his Australian novels’
16 March 2011

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‘A Vast Interrogation Mark’
Review of The Imago by James Ley, The Australian, 19-20 March 2011
also published on
The Medusa vs. The Odalisque

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“‘It was to have been my best book’: Dorothy Green and  E. L. Grant Watson”
Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, 10, 2010
http://www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/
jasal/issue/view/132/showToc

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Inland: The Work of Tim Storrier
http://storrier.com/html/?page_id=158

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Book Review: Dark Star Safari by Paul Theroux,
Swahili for the Broken-Hearted by Peter Moore,
Sahara by Michael Palin
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/

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JOAN IN INDIA: Interview with Philip Adams,
ABC Late Night Live,
25 November 2008
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/latenightlive/stories/

]]> http://suzannefalkiner.com/news/miscellaneous-links/feed/ 0 http://suzannefalkiner.com/book/room-to-move/ http://suzannefalkiner.com/book/room-to-move/#comments Fri, 20 Feb 2009 07:27:50 +0000 editor http://suzannefalkiner.com/?p=235 THE REDRESS PRESS BOOK OF AUSTRALIAN WOMEN’S SHORT STORIES

Edited by Suzanne Falkiner

Stories by Glenda Adams, Helen W. Asher, Thea Astley, Inez Baranay, Carmel Bird, Margaret Coombs, Freda Galloway, Nene Gare, Helen Garner, Amanda Given, Kate Grenville, Gwen Kelly, Jeri Kroll, Betty Johnston, Elizabeth Jolley, Rosemary Jones, Vasso Kalamaras, Nancy Keesing, Penelope Layland, Kate Llewellyn, Olga Masters, Finola Moorhead, Penelope Nelson, Jennifer Paynter, Robin Sheiner, Leone Sperling, Kathryn Stone, Bronwyn Sweeney, Kylie Tennant, Vicki Viidikas, Nadia Wheatley, Fay Zwicky.

‘…Suzanne’s book is one of the most intriguing and satisfying I have read in a long while, not least because it defies classification. Its stories lie somewhere between the very best travel writing and short fiction. They stretch the reader’s perceptions and imagination. Perhaps—if Suzanne will excuse me—they can be called traction.

In a relatively short time, Suzanne Falkiner has become one of the most complete writers in Australia, covering more literary territory than anyone else currently writing here. She has written a novel, Rain in the Distance, compiled an anthology of women’s fiction, Room to Move, written a non-fiction book Eugenia, A Man, and three other non-fiction books.

I’ve been reading her work in manuscript and published form since 1980. From the beginning, it made a strong impression on me, particularly the calm, searching, ironic style seen perhaps at its best when her character, Stork, describes the behaviour of predatory men, here and abroad.

In After the Great Novelist I think all her previous work and intentions have reached fulfilment. The stories here glance off the landscape, the towns, the people, like vivid dreams. Unlike other contemporary travel writers —Theroux, Morris, Newby, Raban—Suzanne Falkiner doesn’t confront her new experiences so much as absorb them and use them to understand the smaller picture, the single lived life, as well as the broad canvas. Perhaps Bruce Chatwin is her nearest contemporary, but even he shied from the personal and self-revelatory in his work.

The title story ‘After the Great Novelist’ (the great novelist in question being Graham Greene, and the country, Haiti), will probably get the most critical applause of the stories in this book, but my favourite is one titled ‘Signs’ (the semiologists will approve) which begins with a sign tacked to the wall of a gringo restaurant in Guatamala, and ends with a sign on the wall of the cemetery at Guayaquil, the city of thieves, in Ecuador.

The first sign said:

LOST!
By mistake I lost my Babie!
You know how these partying nights are. Whoever has her please return, I miss her.
Her name is Sunrise. Return to Angel staying at the house 200 yards behind Mama Ramere’s.

The sign on the cemetery wall said:

PAY ATTENTION.

There you have the whole picture.

—Robert Drewe Sydney Morning Herald
22 April 1989.

—TRUMAN CAPOTE Answered Prayers

Born in Italy in 1875, EUGENIA FALLENI migrated to New Zealand with her family at the age of two. Settling in Wellington, in the south of the North Island, the family were hardworking, law-abiding and respectable-except for Eugenia, who grew up restless, wilful and undisciplined. She wore boys’ clothes when she could and repeatedly ran away from home. Dressed as boy, on one occasion she got a job in a brickyard, at another time in a laundry. Small, wiry, strong, and unable or unwilling to learn to read and write, she was considered ‘simple’, but her tomboyish eccentricities were initially regarded as harmless enough. In her teens, and again dressed as a boy, she ran away to sea.

Some years later when she turned up in Newcastle, a seaport on the south eastern coast of Australia, having apparently worked in the intervening time as a cabin boy. Soon after she gave birth to a child. Although she herself would tell varying stories as to the identity of the father, the truth was that she probably had been raped on board ship and, once pregnant, put ashore when the ship docked in New South Wales.

Eugenia fostered the baby to an Italian family, and from then on, for nearly twenty years, she continued to live as a man. It was this same Eugenia, who as Harry Crawford, called by the newspapers ‘The Man-Woman Murderer’, was later tried for murdering the woman living with him as his wife.

Photographs by WILDLIGHT

‘It is so inexpressibly lovely that it makes a man ask himself whether it would not be worth his while to move his household goods to the eastern coast of Australia, in order than he might look at it as long as he can look at anything.’ 

—Anthony Trollope, 1871 [Australia and New Zealand 1873]

‘But the dweller in the wilderness …becomes familiar with the beauty of loneliness…learns the language of the barren and the uncouth…and the Poet of our desolation begins to comprehend why free Esau loved his heritage of desert sand, better than all the bountiful richness of Egypt.’

—Marcus Clarke, 1867 [Preface to Adam Lindsay Gordon's
Sea Spray and Smoke Drift]

93 kilometres northeast of Cooktown lies one of Australia’s most beautiful and secluded resorts—Lizard Island. Mary Watson was 21 years old and had been married less than two years when, in early October 1881, after mainland Aborigines had attacked two workmen at her absent husband’s beche-de-mer station, she set herself adrift in a cut-down ship’s water tank with her baby, Ferrier, and a wounded Chinese servant, Ah Sam. They died of thirst on an island over 60 kilometres away, some eight days after their departure.

At Cooktown it was assumed that Mary Watson had been kidnapped and killed, and when the bodies were found some time later they were returned for a funeral which became Cooktown’s biggest public event, uniting the town in appreciation of her undaunted spirit. Mary Watson, whose diary describing their last days was found with the remains, became an emblem of pioneer heroism for many Queenslanders.

In the meantime, however, a terrible retribution had been visited on the local indigenous people, whom the police were quick to assume had been responsible for the deaths.

Lizard Island was shortlisted for the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards 2001, Best History Book; and the New South Wales Premier’s History Awards 2002, the Premier’s Community and Regional History Prize.

≈

Prominent Australian painter and teacher
ALAN OLDFIELD was born in Sydney in 1943. After studying at the National Art School in Sydney and travelling in Europe and the USA, from 1974 he lived and worked in Rome for eighteen months on an Australia Council grant. For a year from mid-1988 he was Artist-in-Residence at Linacre College, Oxford. In 1999 he held the same appointment at the Faculty of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, Cairns. With 23 solo exhibitions and numerous art prizes to his name, including the Sulman Prize and (twice) the Blake Prize for religious art, he also designed sets for the Sydney Dance Company and The Australian Ballet. Until shortly before his death ­in October 2004 he was an Associate Professor at the College of Fine Arts, the University of New South Wales. Alan Oldfield is represented in the National Gallery of Australia and most state, regional and university collections, as well as in college collections at Oxford and Cambridge and private collections in Australia, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy and the United States.