Longneck
June 2013
Miles, Stella, Franklin, White
For a small country, albeit one squeezed into the crevices of a wide brown land, Australia is blessed with – and burdened by – a proliferation of writing prizes. The newest is the Stella Prize, which celebrates fine women writers while aiming a jab or two at the male-centric Miles Franklin Literary Award.
But wait: in 2013 the Miles Franklin Award has an all-female shortlist – including Carrie Tiffany’s Mateship With Birds, winner of the Stella Prize. And wait: a woman, Anna Funder, won in 2012. And wait: J.K. Rowling is a woman. And wait: Miles Franklin herself – Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin – was a feminist. And wait: Julia Gillard is the Prime Minister. And wait: Beyoncé is famous. And wait: just the other day, I saw a woman wearing pants and drinking beer. STRAIGHT FROM THE BOTTLE!
There’s nothing like a woman excelling to provoke mutterings about imagined discrimination (usually accompanied by claims that middle-class men are the new wretched of the earth). But history is not a single handclap, and the Miles Franklin Award boasts a proud legacy of cheering for the fellas. I don’t know whether a women-only prize is the ideal riposte, but it beats saying ‘she’ll be right’, which, when translated, really means ‘he’ll be right’. And it beats claiming that art is pure: creating it might be – maybe, sometimes – but judging it sure isn’t.
Still, there’s one bloke who I wish had made this year’s Miles Franklin shortlist: the late Patrick White, winner of the 1973 Nobel Prize for Literature (thanks, Sweden, for giving Australia permission to venerate ‘our Paddy’). In 1957, White won the very first Miles Franklin Literary Award, for Voss. ‘Personally I felt as though a slow tin of treacle was being poured over me,’ he wrote. ‘But on the whole, it was all very pleasant, and gratifying, and strange, and tiring’. He got the treacle treatment again for Riders in the Chariot. But when he heard that he’d won for The Solid Mandala, he declined – forcefully – and, from then on, barred his novels from the Miles Franklin Award.
Last year, more than twenty years after his death, new fiction appeared. The publication of The Hanging Garden, one third of an unfinished novel, was marked with reverence, with nostalgia and with regret (at least from the tiny percentage of people who care about such things) that more people don’t read White’s novels. Unedited fragment or not, hard work or not, it’s amongst the best Australian fiction of 2012: deep, unforced, aching and – best of all, since White started it in 1981 – fresh.
I’m no expert at guessing the wishes of absent heroes, but White would surely have disapproved of The Hanging Garden’s publication. After all, he wanted the manuscript destroyed (with fire his favoured method). He would have applauded his publisher for not entering The Hanging Garden in the Miles Franklin Award – and the judges for not calling it in. But what a missed opportunity. I would have loved to see him rubbing shoulders with twenty-first century peers like Carrie Tiffany, whose Mateship With Birds scratches out an odd, luminous world on the fringes of a town, or Romy Ash, whose Floundering follows two boys and their wayward mother to the continent’s edge.
In 2013, White stands as a sort of monument to Australian creative achievement. But there’s limited value in luxuriating in his genius, as if he’s a hot shower for tired limbs. While White was busy creating his imaginary Australia, he roared abuse at the real place: ‘How sick I am of the bloody word AUSTRALIA. What a pity, I am part of it; if I were not, I would get out to-morrow. As it is, they will have me with them till my bitter end, and there are about six more of my un-Australian Australian novels to fling in their faces’. Late in life White turned political activist, showing what a magnificent servant to the nation a serial whinger can be.
People – including judges – should read whatever the hell they want. But I’m all for flinging Patrick White’s stories into unsuspecting faces. And his life too. Because it takes the combo – a shelf of great novels and a portrait of a dedicated grump – to glimpse his full achievement in all its wide-brown-land glory.
Other Articles You May Like
Longneck
Election gastro
…
Longneck
Post-physical: AFL’s whole new world
…
Longneck
The Fat Man in History
…Galleries
Weather
20°Latest Edition
