Wayne Macauley’s
Other Stories is a
much-awaited collection. Here at last Macauley’s peculiar take on the
world is gathered together in short stories, satires, fables and
anecdotes. Many are set in the hinterland of the outer suburbs where
big cars, big driveways, big houses and big skies make small people
feel lost and strange. This familiar world seems eerie, like a Jeffrey
Smart painting. His yarns of the margins are at the centre of our
culture.
Macauley’s short fiction has appeared for over a decade in our most
prestigious literary magazines, including
Meanjin,
Overland,
Westerly,
Island and
Griffith Review. As
novelist and playwright he is one of our most original and challenging
writers and a winner of The Age Short Story Competition. His two
corrosive novels,
Blueprints for a Barbed-Wire
Canoe and
Caravan Story,
won critical acclaim.
For anyone who thrills to a
hypnotic prose style and incisive social satire, I would urge you to
discover his work!
Martin Shaw, Readings Monthly
ISBN 9781876044664
Published 2010
172 pgs
$26.95
Other Stories book sample
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One Night
Bohemians
Wilson’s Friends
A Short Report From Happy Valley
The Man Who Invented Television
Simpson And His Donkey Go Looking For The Inland Sea
A Hair Of The Dog
Jack The Dancer Dies
Man And Tree
The Bridge
The Streets Are Too Wide
This Bus Is Not A Tram
So Who’s The Wrecker Then?
Decency’s Grave
Reply To A Letter
The Affair In M—
The Farmer’s New Machine
The Dividing Spring
Gordon’s Leap
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Reviews
Kaleidoscopic fictionLaurie Steed
Australian Book Review, February 2011, No. 328
How
to review a book that includes, as major characters, Simpson and his
donkey, the Dig Tree, and a bus that may or may not be a tram? In the
case of Wayne Macauley’s
Other Stories,it is best to read story by story, pausing only to chart connecting themes in the cultural landscape.
MacAuley’s
short fiction draws inspiration from a surprisingly broad range of
influences. Adam Lindsay Gordon, Simpson, and the inland sea are all
featured in his kaleidoscopic rendition of Australian history. The
author also revisits suburbia, seeing the potential for both connection
and disconnection in widening roads and disjointed communities.
What
sets Macauley apart from his contemporaries is his willingness to
experiment with form and theme. His shortest stories, such as ‘The
Streets Are Too Wide’ and the excellent ‘One Night’, are lingering
images that veer closer to narrative poetry than to prose. His longer
pieces weave tales about elaborate themes: his 1995 Age Short Story
Competition winner, ‘Reply to a Letter’,explores the implicit bonds
between a husband, a wife, and their performing bear. High concept, for
the most part, takes precedent over character. In some of the shorter
pieces, characters are barely developed at all. Even in the longer
ones, it is difficult for the reader fully to connect with the
emotional core of any of the players.
Regardless,
Other Stories
is an excellent collection. There is much to admire here: lyrical,
rhythmic prose melds effortlessly with Macauley’s uncanny ability to
create an indelible image, and the author plays raconteur with great
ease. The result is a thinking man’s compendium of quality literature,
while the heart gets slightly short shrift.
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Elizabeth Bryer on Wayne Macauley’s Other Stories
Guest reviewer: Elizabeth Bryer, Angela Meyer’s
Literary Minded2 December 2010,
CrikeyOther Stories
brings together Melbourne-based Wayne Macauley’s output over the past
decade and counting. The collection is filled with ‘other’ stories
- tales that are other, or outside the mainstream, in a double
sense. They are other in subject, given that they are stories that
trace the lives of characters who exist on the margins, or characters
who would be otherwise unlikely contenders for centre stage in
Australian literature; and they are other in an industry sense, since
the collection is published not by a multinational - or even large
independent - publisher, but by small outfit Black Pepper. Many are
also other-worldly stories, stories about ordinary people who find
themselves contending with surreal experiences.
Some of the
collection’s tales read as allegories. Yet this age-old form is given
new life in Macauley’s hands, and most of the allegories are firmly
placed in recognisable, contemporary Australian territory: the stories
are populated with trams, inner-city ex-bohemian suburbs, one-street
towns and places where ‘houses have crept up the valley... the
skeleton bones of the new houses marching’.
Other tales
develop in less familiar, though still recognisable, worlds, both in
setting and content: ‘Jack the Dancer Dies’ has a personified death as
protagonist in a poetic take on the fable ‘The Red Shoes’, while in
‘Man and Tree’ a woman’s brother transforms into a tree.
Throughout,
there is wry commentary on modern society, which makes the collection
seem almost prophetic. For example, no sooner has a man turned into a
tree than: ‘They came in their hundreds, bumping up the fire track and
crashing through the bush. The local shire sealed the road, cleared a
square of land for a car park, and began charging five dollars to see
him’. In another story, the narrator recounts how he hires out
bohemians to real-estate agents in order that ex-bohemian inner suburbs
- which the bohemians were pushed out of - exude a measure of
‘character’ and ‘ambience’. Elsewhere, schoolboys who ride trams are
set to work re-stumping houses in an informal labour market, until
various regulations ensue and ‘records could then be matched against
the previously agreed quotas and notices might then be placed in trams
informing the public whether or not these targets had been reached’.
In
some of these stories-as-commentary, there is a Kafkaesque sense of the
oppressive and ominous presence of authority and systems, such as in
‘This Bus Is Not a Tram’, in which buses are plastered with signs
declaring that they are trams and all passengers are expected to take
on this belief; or in ‘The Bridge’, where the protagonist dutifully
carries out his superiors’ orders to guard a bridge, and throughout
there is a mounting sense that the orders and subsequent occurrences
are some kind of cruel psychological experiment. In another sharply
critical tale, the excesses of political leaders - and their general
tendency to wreak havoc - are detailed; then, in a single moment, the
blame for their behaviour is squarely placed on the public’s shoulders,
for our condoning their symbolic gestures and our apathy when it comes
to considered, responsible voting. Meanwhile, ‘The Farmer’s New
Machine’ is chilling in its portrayal of the lengths gone to in the
name of progress, and in the name of supporting a lifestyle of excess
on this driest of continents.
The language that Macauley
employs is usually simple, but is often used to great effect to create
rhythmic structures. Many stories take the form of kinds of
first-person testimonials, which facilitate this rhythmic style.
Occasionally a metaphor is so arresting for its clarity of vision that
it takes your breath away - for example, after a magical night,
‘something still lingered, some ineffable thing, like a porchlight left
on all day’. At times the language is image-rich, such as in the
phrase, ‘In the dog days of summer, when the earth rolls and sighs and
a heat shimmer wobbles and distorts everything in the middle distance
and beyond...’
The only (small) reservation I had about the
collection was its occasional use of place names as short cuts for
establishing setting: while ‘Keilor Downs’ may evoke some connotations
for a Melburnian, would it do the same for a reader from elsewhere?
Yet, all in all, this is an accomplished collection from an as-yet
underappreciated Australian writer who is, nevertheless, slowly, surely
achieving a significant output, both in quantity of titles and
importance and relevance of the same not only to Australian literature
but also to each reader. We could do much worse than learn from these
tales.
Back to top
Shorts are back inJames Ley (critic, member of the University of Western Sydney Writing and Society Research Group)
The Weekend Australian, 13 November 2010
The Australian short story has been undergoing something of a renaissance in recent years. Collections such as Cate Kennedy’s
Dark Roots, Steven Amsterdam’s
Things We Didn’t See Coming, Nam Le’s
The Boat, Paddy O’Reilly’s
The End of the World, Bob Franklin’s
Under Stones and Tom Cho’s
Look Who’s Morphing (to name only a handful) is indicative of a renewal of interest in the form and the breadth of local talent.
A
notable feature of tins resurgence is its spirit of playfulness. These
are writers unbounded by conventional notions of realism or literary
respectability, willing to experiment with genre and incorporate
fanciful or offbeat concepts into their fiction.
The short story
has seemingly provided a more amenable way for many contemporary
authors to exploit the essential contingency of storytelling. For
O’Reilly, Franklin and Cho, a robust sense of humour is an intrinsic
part of this conceptual freedom.
Wayne Macauley’s
Other Stories can also be placed in this category. Macauley is a seasoned writer who has published two novels,
Blueprints for a Barbed-Wire Canoe and
Caravan Story, and has written for the theatre.
Other Stories
brings together short fiction written over the course of nearly two
decades, most of which has appeared in a number of Australia’s literary
journals.
One of the most substantial inclusions, ‘The Bridge’,
is a poised and darkly ironic excursion into Coetzeean allegory, but
the dominant mode, and Macauley’s true métier, is a form of slyly
satirical comedy.
Each of the pieces in
Other Stories
is based on a quirky conceit of some kind. These are by turns strange,
unreal or merely funny. Sometimes, as in the standout story, ‘The Man
who Invented Television’, the concept is gleefully anachronistic. But
each tale is crafted into a small, self-contained world.
The
stories roam widely, but many prowl the suburbs of Melbourne, where
Macauley finds plenty to whet his satirical blade. ‘Bohemians’ is a
sardonic comment on the process of inner-city gentrification; ‘Wilson’s
Friends’ spins the idea of a man offering to buy a schoolboy with a
price tag accidentally stuck to his sleeve into an amusing fable about
the economics of workplace relations; ‘So Who’s the Wrecker Then?’, in
which a politician runs amok with a bulldozer, would seem to be a
not-so-veiled dig at former Victorian Premier Jeff Kennett.
But there is a balancing warmth to Macauley’s fiction. His barbs can be pointed but his humour is generally forgiving.
Other Stories
begins with a tale in which the residents of a suburban street emerge
on a mild evening to sleep under the stars and end up engaged in a
love-in; it ends with a fine story based on the life and suicide of
poet Adam Lindsay Gordon. In between, there are frequent intimations of
the great distances that can come to exist between people: ‘The Streets
are Too Wide’, which is more prose poem than story, literalises the
figurative distance; while Macauley’s silent protester, slowly absorbed
into the tree he is trying to save, presents an image of terrible
loneliness.
Yet it is the persistent and welcome note of
affirmation that makes this a likable collection. In one story, a
homeless man embarks on a cross-town odyssey, setting out on a quest
(more Dorothean than Homeric) to find a place called Garden City so
that he might ‘gather flowers for Decency’s grave’. He never gets
there. He is eventually arrested while brushing his teeth with someone
else’s toothbrush, having wandered into their house. The man is
deluded, but by the end you are on his side. After all, going to such
trouble to find flowers to put on Decency’s grave is a thoroughly
decent thing to do.
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Other Stories
Owen Richardson,
The Sunday Age, 24 October 2010 (
The Age Review of the Week)
“He is one of Australia’s deadpan visionaries.”
Melboume writer Wayne Macauley’s first novel
Blueprints for a Barbed-Wire Canoe was published in 2004, and his second,
Caravan Story,
in 2007. His fiction deals in parables and allegories, satirical
fantasies of the bureaucratised, neo-liberal world, and yarns that read
like the dreams of some collective suburban unconscious; he is a writer
of great purity, combining social critique, fertile imagination and the
highest aesthetic scruples. His work is some of the best fiction
Australia has to offer.
This new book collects the stories he
has been publishing since the early 1990s. There are 19 in all, though
the book is not long: many are hardly more than a couple of pages and
at 21 pages, ‘The Bridge’ is the collection’s epic.
Figures from
the Australian past appear, such as Simpson and his donkey, and Adam
Lindsay Gordon; television is invented in 19th century Melbourne; a
woman’s brother turns into a tree; Death himself loiters behind the
changing rooms at a suburban football ground, calling people to his
dance. And just as
Blueprints for a Barbed Wire Canoe was a fable about an outer suburban development, and
Caravan Story
about the co-optation of artists by the government, in this book, too,
the fate of the city and of the artists who try to live in it are among
Macauley’s preoccupations.
Macauley is a moralist: there are
parables of greed and corruption such as ‘Decency’s Grave’, and ‘The
Dividing Spring’, in which a natural spring causes the dishonest people
who drink from it to become sick. As the 1990s arrive, more and more
are exposed: “the filed reports of the St John Ambulance team now
stationed there permanently showed them treating up to a hundred
serious cases a day.”
And the spirits both of Swift’s
A Modest Proposal and of Kafka’s
In the Penal Colony
lurk behind ‘The Farmer’s New Machine’, a story that pivots on the
single line “This continent is 60 per cent arid. The human body is 60
per cent water: work it out for yourself.”
One of the stories
reminds you sharply of its age: in ‘So Who’s the Wrecker Then?’, from
1999, the unnamed larrikin premier is visiting a building site. Rather
than throw sand at journalists, as Jeff Kennett did, he gets into a
bulldozer, with which he then runs amok: first he chases after the
media and then demolishes a school, a childcare centre, a hospital and
a church.
We all know, of course, that preachy is a bad thing
for fiction to be, but the sardonic exaggerations of these stories have
such clarity of outline, and the writing is so controlled, that they
have the graphic power of the very best cartoons.
Whether or not
Macauley is arguing against the way we live now, the writing is
unfailingly exact in its effects: towards the end of the first story in
the book - about the night all the inhabitants of Boxstead Court,
Keilor Downs, dragged their mattresses out into the street and slept
under the stars - Macauley tells us that afterwards “something still
lingered, some ineffable thing, like a porchlight left on all day.” The
image is so right that Macauley’s discovery of it is also an ineffable
thing.
His opening lines pull surprises on us; they lead us down
the path from our world into his alternative universes. Here he pulls
the trick twice: first on the word “television”, announced with a
little flourish of neo-Victorian pedantry; and then at the end:
Over
the course of one glorious summer, in the year 1855, in a house in a
burgeoning city soon to become known as Marvellous Melbourne, the
amateur inventor and professional copy clerk Henry Welter finally
brought to a practical realisation the invention he had been working on
assiduously for the previous 10 years, videlicet the television set,
and that evening, his wife Elizabeth having retired to her bed, Henry
removed himself to his study with a jug of beer and some Stilton cheese
to watch re-runs of I Dream of Jeannie
and later, with a hot chocolate and a biscuit, the CNN News Overnight
.Then
there is this, starting with mousily pompous sociological observation
and ending as if in the world of some ancient myth, or of Shakespearean
comedy gone terribly wrong:
Given
the strange and often troubled world of familial relations, and
particularly those that take place in an isolated outer suburb such as
M—, it is perhaps not very surprising that Ellana McLeod, the
newsagent’s daughter, should end up marrying her brother.Macauley’s
work is dark and more than tinged with melancholy; it is also often
wildly funny. Like Bail and Murnane, he is one of Australia’s deadpan
visionaries, a teller of tall and cerebral tales.
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Other Stories
Cameron Woodhead,
The Age, 23 October 2010 (
The Age Pick of the Week)
Author of the acclaimed novels
Blueprints for a Barbed-Wire Canoe and
Caravan Story, Wayne Macauley is a compelling voice in contemporary Australian Literature.
Other Stories,
a collection of his short fiction, showcases his willingness to see -
and interrogate - aspects of Australian culture that normally pass
under the radar. Macauley is an excellent short-fiction writer; this
volume a miscellany that grabs and gnaws on absurd threads of an
experimental suburban dreaming. In ‘Bohemians,’ a real-estate agent
employs decorative street artists to stand around, altering the
atmosphere of a suburb in which they can no longer afford to live.
‘Wilson’s Friends’ is a parable that satirises the exploitation of
young labour. ‘One Night’ sees a cul-de-sac in Keilor Heights invaded
by people who decide to sleep outside on the road. Macauley is a spry
and compassionate humorist of the postmodern soul. In lamenting the
marginalisation of art from politics, he writes it back into the
picture.
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Other Stories
Emmett Stinson
From 3RRR Breakfasters Show, 7 September 2010 (and Emmett Stinson’s blog
Known Unknowns, 7 September 2010)
[From
Known Unknowns 2 September 2010: This week I picked up two books that
I’m very excited about. The first is Wayne Macauley’s
Other Stories, which I’ll be reviewing next week. I loved his first two novels (
Blueprints for a Barbed-Wire Canoe and
Caravan Story),
and this collection is even better (so far). He deserves a much wider
readership, and I think he’s one of the finest writers in Australia
right now. So buy it now! Yes, right now!]
Wayne Macauley’s
Other Stories
collects a variety of short fiction that he has published in literary
magazines over the last eighteen (!!!) years. Despite the work’s
lengthy gestation, these stories demonstrate an impressive unity of
vision, as well as an extraordinary—if uniquely Australian—voice.
Macauley is also the author of two excellent novels,
Blueprints for a Barbed-Wire Canoe and
Caravan Story, but, as good as his novels are,
Other Stories reveals that he is an even better short story writer.
Macauley’s
prose is absolutely beautiful, as the very first sentence of his
collection proves: ‘In the dog days of summer, when the earth rolls and
sighs and a heat shimmer wobbles and distorts everything in the middle
distance and beyond, who has not wanted, as evening falls, to take
their mattress and pillow outside and sleep like a well-heeled vagabond
under an open sky?’ Here readers can already see Macauley’s humour, and
how his stories twist everyday situations into strange, otherworldly
experiences.
In this sense,
Other Stories
is an appropriate title for this eclectic, often experimental
collection, but Macauley’s rigorous innovation is always inflected with
mordant satire, resulting in work that is both affecting and
hysterically funny. Consider the story ‘Bohemians’: here, a real-estate
agent in a once-hip inner-Melbourne suburb faces a problem; local
housing prices have skyrocketed to the point where artists and
intellectuals can no longer afford to live there. The solution, of
course, is to rent bohemians from a dealer; the entire story consists
of a letter written by this bohemian-dealer in response to the
real-estate agent. Many of his stories have similarly absurdist
conceits; in ‘The Man Who Invented Television’, a man named Henry
Walter invents the television set in Melbourne in 1855, and, in an even
more unlikely turn of events, his TV broadcasts current programs, such
as The Oprah Winfrey Show. In my favourite story, ‘The Bridge’, a
soldier is stranded in a remote outpost and his claustrophobic
circumstances recall Samuel Beckett’s
Waiting for Godot.
And
this is what is interesting about Macauley’s work: although his formal
experimentation might bear the influence of international writers like
Beckett and Kafka, his work also suggests the local inheritance of
Henry Lawson and Peter Carey’s early short stories. And
Other Stories
ultimately is a book that is uniquely and particularly Australian. Not
only does the book possess a wry, laconic tone, but also figures from
Australia’s cultural history are a signal fixation in Macauley’s work:
Adam Lindsay Gordon, the dig tree, the inland sea and Melbourne’s trams
all play a key role in these stories. In this sense,
Other Stories
presents an excellent model for a truly Australian literature. While
its aesthetics are influenced by the great traditions of world
literature, the content remains recognizably Australian.
Wayne
Macauley should be recognized as one of Australia’s best living writers
– that he isn’t is an indictment of Australian literary culture. This
is one of the best books by an Australian I’ve read all year. Do
yourself a favour and go buy it now.
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The Possibilities of Wayne Macauley
Wayne Macauley interviewed by Alec Patric (author and poet)
25 October 2010
Alec Patric: I picked up your new collection,
Other Stories,
published recently by Black Pepper. In a word, superb. ‘Reply to a
Letter’ might just be the great Australian novel boiled down to an
essence. This kind of piece often leads to a backward looking
perspective but there’s an open hearted dream of multiculturalism in
the equally brilliant ‘One Night’ that drives us forward. In that
second story you play with a powerful sense of nostalgia for a yet to
be realised future. In both, there are subtle notes of surrealism, and
though there are degrees of playfulness, your work pushes; it has
urgency and relevance. And then I turned to your Acknowledgments page,
and was stunned. You’ve won
The Age short story competition for ‘Reply to a Letter’ and ‘One Night’ was published in
Meanjin,
which you’ve done a few times. In fact, the nineteen stories have been
published in all of the very best literary journals in the country. So
this seems a kind of greatest hits collection, not only of your work,
but an anthology of the best writing in Australian literature over the
last decade or more. Yet before picking up this superb collection, let
me confess, I’d barely heard of you. This might suggest a degree of
ignorance on my part but with the kind of continuous success you’ve
had, I’d expect you to be at least as well known as writers like Cate
Kennedy or Nam Le. I was hoping you might talk a little about writing
for Australian literary journals for over a decade and why it has not
brought you wider recognition.
Wayne Macauley:
Thanks for your kind comments. As to the question of why I have not
gained wider recognition for my work, this is on the one hand a very
complicated and on the other a very easy question to answer. The easy
answer is: I don’t know. You make the work, you put it out there, and
hope it lights a spark. If it doesn’t, what can you do? The complicated
answer is that every writer is unfortunately a victim of forces outside
their control: the shifting moods and tastes of the public, the
changing personnel and philosophies of big publishing houses, a
contrary zeitgeist, blind luck, and so on. In my case I think I did
have the misfortune to begin submitting my work at a time when big
changes were happening in the Australian publishing industry. In fact,
I would call that time, looking back on it, a very dark chapter in the
history of Australian literary publishing. It was the time when
economic rationalism began to rule, the big houses here became
subsidiaries of head offices elsewhere, publishing was ‘rationalised’,
lists cut, risks reduced. Poetry disappeared, as did (with some very
rare exceptions) collections of short stories. (You still often hear
the mantra from the big publishing houses now—‘Short story collections
don’t sell’—proving again how received wisdom becomes a truth. Of
course they won’t sell if you don’t want to sell ’em…) Throughout
the 90s and well into 00s it was solely the literary magazines, plus a
few small and dedicated alternative presses, that allowed a place for
an alternative, fringe, experimental and/or political voice. That is, a
different kind of Australian literature. My first novel, which ticks a
few of the above boxes, did the rounds of and was rejected by all the
main publishing houses during that time before it was picked up by
Black Pepper and published in 2004. Of course the magazines were
absolutely critical during this period in allowing me to explore and
push my prose in the direction I wanted, free of any commercial
constraints, and for that I am very grateful to them. But it has to be
said this didn’t necessarily do anything for my ‘career’. It’s a cold
hard truth, and one we might not like to acknowledge, but the fiction
editors of big publishing houses probably don’t read
Meanjin,
Overland,
Westerly,
Island, much less
Going Down Swinging,
Harvest,
Page Seventeen,
Kill Your Darlings or
Wet Ink. The literary magazines are a training ground, a testing place—but a path to literary recognition? I’m not sure.
As
for the main game, book publishing, thankfully these days things are
changing and changing for the good. The lunatics are taking over the
asylum. Like the massive changes wrought on the contemporary music
industry over the past decade, a seismic shift is happening in
publishing. The mainstream publishing industry has begun to devolve. A
new generation is asserting itself, small presses and journals have
begun to proliferate, and new modes of delivery are challenging the old
ways. In every respect big publishing houses are going to have to
re-invent themselves - big, lumbering publishing houses with big
lumbering structures - while meanwhile those on the fringe have
already done the reinventing. I think one of the great consequences of
all this is that there will be a lot less of a rift between the new
journals and literary blogs and book publishing as such. A serious,
alternative publisher of literary fiction will now also read
GDS and
Verity La. And this has got to be a good thing. It was time for the old paradigm to be challenged.
Finally,
at the end of it all, what is ‘recognition’? I am happiest when I am
sitting in my study, writing. All the other stuff just becomes an
annoyance in the end. I might have been recognised ‘earlier’, and as a
human being my ego would have been stoked, but as a writer would it
have done me any good?
Alec Patric:
There’s a brand of satire you use in your writing that I find incisive
and rewarding. There are elements of surrealism, which with most
writers comes off as merely fanciful and often just kills a story for
me. That’s not the case with your writing. The surrealism in your work
has a political dimension that imbues it with gravity. But that brings
us to the question of why there’s so little political or experimental
fiction in Australian culture. I’m not suggesting we need a Dadaist
style smashing of convention but there’s very little that even squirms
in the envelope, let alone pushes the edges. Is there a conservative
quality to Australian culture that cannot be opened up? You’ve
mentioned retreating to your study but I wonder what you think about
the roll writers play in other parts of the world as leading cultural
agents and why this is not possible in Australia.
Wayne Macauley:
Your question is a very broad one and I’m not sure I can answer it all.
But I’ll give it a go. I think at the heart of it (I may be wrong) you
are asking me about an element of my work that, as you suggest, ‘pushes
the envelope’. So let me talk about that first.
In his essay ‘On
Authorship and Style’, Schopenhauer said: ‘the first rule of a good
style is that an author should have something to say’. I spent a lot of
years (my twenties and early thirties), before writing the works that
would eventually become the pieces collected in
Other Stories,
doing little else but reading and thinking. I kept a writer’s journal
throughout this time (I still do, though not quite so assiduously), in
which I wrote down my thoughts on what I’d read, quotes worth keeping
and sometimes the beginnings of prose pieces inspired by an idea in one
of these quotes. I say idea, and this is important. I wasn’t observing
the world and writing down what I saw, I was observing the world
through the prism of the ideas I’d got from my reading. I guess in some
ways I was looking for evidence of these grand (generally European)
ideas in my own backyard, or, more precisely, in the streets of
suburban Melbourne. Sometimes I found the evidence I was looking for:
Heraclitus’ ‘all is flux’, Søren Kierkegaard’s ‘despair of
possibility’, Plato’s ‘becoming and never being’, Schopenhauer’s
‘human existence must be some kind of error’. After a couple of pots on
a Saturday night in a pub in Glen Waverly it was very easy to
understand what Nietzsche meant when he said ‘man is absolutely not the
crown of creation’.
As you can probably guess, most of my
reading throughout this time was philosophy (my fiction diet was almost
exclusively second-hand Penguin classics). This wasn’t because of any
formal course of study I was doing (I don’t have a tertiary degree) but
because I wanted to understand why I was here and, now that I was, what
exactly I should be doing. The world already looked strange to me; I
wanted to understand why. I believe there are two layers of reality:
the one we see, which realist fiction describes, and the one we find
when we look, which I guess is what ‘other’ fiction covers. A couple of
weeks ago I read something that relates to this in a book of essays by
Kundera: ‘The more attentively, fixedly, one observes a reality, the
better one sees that it does not correspond to people’s idea of it…’. I
agree with this sentiment, which perhaps explains why my surrealism, as
you call it, doesn’t, as you suggest, seem forced. (I don’t see it as
surrealism, a realism ‘above’ or beyond a common reality, to me it is
the realism inside it.)
Now to the difficult part of your
question which asks (to paraphrase): Yes, but what does all this mean
to one living in Lotus Land drinking cold beer and swatting the flies
off the meat?
When Socrates drank his hemlock he died for an
idea. I can’t yet see an Australian writer dying for an idea, but
perhaps that’s only because we’ve had no occasion to, yet. You have to
remember this culture we’re talking about (white, European-derived
culture) is only two hundred years old. Our relationship to most other
(read European) cultures is still that of a small child: looking up in
awe for approval, smiling when we get it, bawling when we don’t. When
you talk about a ‘conservatism’ in Australian culture, though, I
presume you are talking about literary culture. The contemporary visual
arts scene for example is anything but conservative, the contemporary
music scene likewise, the architecture scene is as alive as a scene can
get, the contemporary theatre scene, which I myself have been involved
in, takes way more risks than I ever see in contemporary literature.
No, we have a very conservative literature, protected by very
conservative gatekeepers. Somewhere along the line (the early 90s) a
white surrender flag was put up about what ‘Australian literature’ is.
Carey had done his ‘Fat Man…’, Bail his ‘Contemporary Portraits…’
- and that’s quite enough experimentation for us now thankyou very
much. Since then I think the main object of Australian literary
publishing has been to shore up what 80s-defined Australian literature
was. Why change the tyres when the car’s running fine?
There is
no such thing as a definitive ‘Australian film’, a definitive
‘Australian theatre’, a definitive ‘Australian sound’, God forbid a
definitive ‘Australian literature’. We’re a baby. Nothing’s defined.
We’re still making it up. And we’ll be making it up for centuries yet.
This, for me, is what is exciting (as opposed to frustrating) about
being an Australian artist—and I hope one day it will be seen that way
for the gatekeepers too. There are no rules, other than the ones we
write. Everything is possibility.
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Launch
Speech
The Genius of Wayne Macauley
This book isn’t just a good collection of short stories; it’s an exceptional work of Australian literature
Emmett Stinson
Emmett Stinson (short story writer, academic and publisher)
also available on the Known Unknowns literary blog26 October 2010, North Fitzroy Arms
Tonight
I have the enviable honour of launching Wayne Macauley’s new book,
Other
Stories. I’m excited to speak about that, but, before doing so, I’m going
to begin with a brief anecdote, as launchers of books are so often wont to do.
Several
years ago I was up very late one evening trying to finish reading submissions
for
Wet Ink: The Magazine of New Writing in order to meet an impending
deadline
. For those of you who’ve never had the pleasure of reading
unsolicited fiction manuscripts, this might sound like not such a bad gig.
Those of you who have, though, know it’s quite a different story: we get
several hundred submissions for each one of our four yearly issues, and if I
had to identify any quality that would characterise most unsolicited
submissions for literary magazines, it would certainly be that they are almost
uniformly not very good.
I’m
not saying this to attack those kind enough to send their work to
Wet Ink or
anywhere else—I’m certainly grateful to have the opportunity to read these
writers’ work—but given that the vast majority of those sending in their
writing are emerging authors still honing their craft, as well as my own
peculiar editorial sensibilities, reading through cold submissions can often
feel more like an endurance test than an aesthetic experience, especially at
around three in the morning.
My
reading that night wasn’t going particularly well: I’d just had a run of about
ten stories in which authors had included the words ‘The End’ at the end of
their stories (a note to would-be authors, I can tell when your story ends by
the fact that there aren’t any more words). Then there were another five where
the writers listed their name at the bottom of each page followed by the
copyright symbol and the year (another note to neophyte authors: even if anyone
did want to steal your story—which, by the way, no-one does—that little
copyright symbol won’t stop them). After wading through many more
run-of-the-mill submissions, I then read a story that inexplicably detailed a
very sincere and passionate sexual relationship between a human being and a
wallaby. At this point, I could feel despair setting in.
And
no doubt it would have, had I not read the next story, called ‘The Loaded Pig’,
a brilliant, brutal satire based on Henry Lawson’s ‘The Loaded Dog’ about some
despicable men engaging in a despicable occupation which the opening lines
described: ‘We were digging way out there in the middle of nowhere looking for
blackfella bones that we’d heard were somewhere around there and which we knew
we could get good money for—you can get good money for blackfella bones so long
as you know where to look.’ The story itself went on to offer an acerbically
funny and surreal vision of the slow death of rural Australia and the brutality
of our colonial past.
After
finishing this story, I knew that I was in the presence of a phenomenal
authorial voice and of, I believe, a great author, who was, of course, Wayne
Macauley. Of all the many great stories
Wet Ink has been lucky enough to
print—and there are many—Wayne’s remains the one that I’m most personally
proud
of publishing. I’ll also note this: shortly after its publication I sent
Wayne a brief email telling him how much I liked it, and he responded with the
following: ‘“The Loaded Pig” was rejected seven times before it landed on your
desk. This says either (a) the story is bad and you’re a fool or (b) the
traditional literary magazine circuit in Australia is suffering from a serious
failure of nerve. I wonder which one it is?’
There’s
one slight problem in opening my talk with this anecdote, however. ‘The Loaded
Pig’ isn’t actually in Wayne’s new collection,
Other Stories;
nonetheless, it’s good to know that Wayne has other stories beyond those in
Other
Stories. But there’s even more good news here: you won’t miss it, because
this is a book filled with wonderful short fiction, and reading it produced the
exact same feeling I got on that night many years ago.
Consider
the story ‘Bohemians’: here, a real-estate agent in a once-hip inner-Melbourne
suburb faces a problem; local housing prices have skyrocketed to the point
where artists and intellectuals can no longer afford to live there. The
solution, of course, is to rent bohemians from a dealer; the entire story
consists of a letter written by this bohemian-dealer in response to the
real-estate agent, and opens by saying, ‘Do I have bohemians? Of course I have
bohemians, Matt, but probably not in the quantities you require.’ (If you haven’t
worked it out by now, Macauley arguably writes better first lines to short
stories than almost any other writer in Australia).
The
book is filled with other stories like this, all of which are funny and
wonderfully odd: in ‘The Man Who Invented Television’, a Melbourne man named
Henry Walter invents the television in 1855, which, of course, plays
contemporary American TV programs. In ‘Simpson and His Donkey Go Looking for
the Inland Sea’, we hear about—who else—but Simpson and His Donkey, who have
been looking for the inland sea for 94 years. These stories view the world
through a satirical and often surreal lens that attempts to present what we
accept as ‘reality’ as something very different indeed; in this sense they are
truly
Other Stories.But
this is a book that isn’t just quirky or inventive; in my opinion, it’s a
serious contribution to Australian literature. In September, I reviewed
Other
Stories on Triple R, and part of my review sums up my feelings about the
book pretty well, so I will be lazy and simply read out what I wrote then: ‘although
[Macauley’s] formal experimentation might bear the influence of international
writers like Beckett and Kafka, his work also suggests the local inheritance of
Henry Lawson and Peter Carey’s early short stories... figures from Australia’s
cultural history are a signal fixation in Macauley’s work, [including] Adam
Lindsay Gordon, the dig tree, the inland sea and Melbourne’s trams... While
[Macauley’s] aesthetics are influenced by the great traditions of world
literature, the content remains recognizably Australian.’
And
this is a particularly important point in the contemporary landscape, I think.
If you just went by the broadsheets, you’d be forgiven for thinking that there
are only two short story writers in contemporary Australia. And while I have
nothing against those authors and think their writing is of a high quality, I
do think that the contemporary Australian idea of what a short story is
suggests a pretty limited cultural imaginary. Thankfully, though there are
always
Other Stories—and this, obviously, is part of the point of Wayne’s
title. This is brave and powerful writing that seeks to do something more than
simply reinforce what we already believe or serve as just another bourgeois
entertainment. These stories present an alternative—an otherness—that
Australian literature desperately
needs.The
other day, an interview with Wayne was posted by the online journal
Verity
La in which its editor, Alec Patrick, lead off with what I think is a most
unusual question: in a roundabout way, after noting all of the awards that
Wayne has won and all the places where his fiction has been published, Alec
basically asked Wayne why he isn’t better known. It’s a sort of wonderfully
naïve question; Alec may as well have asked Wayne why he isn’t taller or why he
doesn’t have six arms. Wayne, of course, has already indirectly addressed the
odd workings of literary recognition himself in
Other Stories’ final
tale about Adam Lindsay Gordon and his suicide in the face of both poverty and
obscurity. But I don’t think Alec’s question is so absurd, and in fact I would
challenge anyone in this room to read
Other Stories and not find
themselves asking the same question.
Let
me offer you some proof in the form of the very first sentence of
Other
Stories, which begins like this: ‘In the dog days of summer, when the earth
rolls and sighs and a heat shimmer wobbles and distorts everything in the
middle distance and beyond, who has not wanted, as evening falls, to take their
mattress and pillow outside and sleep like a well-heeled vagabond under an open
sky?’ To ask a question of my own, who wouldn’t want to read a book that opens
like this? This book isn’t just a good collection of short stories; it’s an
exceptional work of Australian literature. Those already familiar with Wayne’s
first two books,
Blueprints for a Barbed-Wire Canoe and
Caravan
Story, know what an exceptional writer he is; if anything
Other Stories—which
presents stories that Wayne has published over the last two decades—is even
better.
In
my Triple R review, I ultimately made what is possibly a pretty big claim about
both Wayne and his work. Here’s what I said: ‘Wayne Macauley should be
recognized as one of Australia’s best living writers – that he isn’t is an
indictment of Australian literary culture.’ I stand by that statement, and I
believe that anyone who reads Wayne’s three books will come to the same
conclusions that I have: even though I’ve been up here talking about it for
some time now, I think Wayne’s work speaks for itself. It’s my hope that, by
hook or by crook,
Other Stories gets the recognition that it deserves.
And, for those of you who are bored by the kind of short stories that currently
get passed off as ‘serious contemporary literature’, I have a quick fix for
you: it’s time to put those books down and read some
Other Stories instead.
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Macauley
biography