Beryl Fletcher

Sydney Dreaming

Blog Number 16: 16 June 2009

Last week I flew to Sydney from Auckland to visit my son Hamish, his wife Cathy Brennan and their two boys Cameron and Angus.

They live in a beautiful old house known in Sydney as a Federation Villa. It has been extensively renovated but has retained its early twentieth century features. Sometimes I look at my son and I can’t believe that I gave birth to him. He is strong and resilient and he moves through the world with a calm demeanour that belies his true nature; that of an innovative risk-taker.

Sydney. It is always a place of ambivalent feelings for me, a place where I spent the most difficult years of my life in my twenties and early thirties, a place where I discovered what a tough city it can be. And yet, it has a certain cruel beauty that perhaps relates to the violent history of this stolen land now in the grip of land degradation and water wars.

The birds are huge and noisy. Once, during a long drought, I saw dead currawongs fall like hot black rocks from a burning sky. Once, I saw a man lying face down on the stairs leading into the underground railway. People rushing to catch a train walked right over him. One woman stabbed his back with her red stilettos. I tried to help him but was roundly abused by a man in a suit who said don’t be a bloody hero leave the derro alone. As a migrant Fresh off the Boat, I didn’t know what a derro was. Soon learned though when I ended up in a Darlinghurst flop house with bed bugs and roaches and other horrid predators of the desperately poor, aka derelicts…  

Sydney. Where there is a sense of excitement and energy on the streets similar to the feeling one gets in New York. We went for a ride on the Manly ferry. It was a gala day in Manly, a food and wine festival.  People wore their half-full wine glasses round their necks on a paper chain. The beach was crowded, what was left of it. A massive storm had swept down the coast a week before and taken most of the white sand with it. Sea lettuce formed great drifts of green at the high tide mark. 

Like many New Zealander’s I have family connections with Australia. My paternal grandfather Joseph Fletcher was born at Dead Dog Gulley near Bendigo in 1860.  His parents were participants in the gold rush of the 1850s. His mother Eliza was born in England and came to New Zealand as a girl in 1846. His father James Fletcher was a convict who arrived in Sydney in 1820.

I love this country; I love the wildness of it; I love the brash people who know how to cut down authority figures with some of the most colourful expressions known in the English language. Australia has always seemed eerily familiar to me, far more than my real homeland, New Zealand/Aotearoa.

I have a fanciful belief that if an ancestor revelled in a particular landscape, found solace there, ate of the fruits and plants and wild meats, then something I call, for want of a better word, genetic memory can remain as an echo passed down to a living breathing descendant. Memory is stretched beyond the limit of one lifetime. I know that scientifically this is a nonsense, but I want to believe it.   

And so I do. Passionately.

Total Bliss: the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize 2009

Blog Number 15: 1 June 2009

I have been sitting in my writing room for two whole weeks unable to write. I am in that state described in New Zealand English as stunned mullet, a type of complete amazement or stupefaction. (For those who do not believe that New Zealand has developed its own unique language, have a look at the Oxford Dictionary of New Zealand English published in 1997).

The luxury, the privilege, of meeting like-minded writers and academics for a short period of intense interrogation of eight superb works of fiction, left me intellectually energised and burnt out at one and the same time: hence the descent into stunned mullethood.

My brain is still recovering but it was worth it, every second.  

These eight books won regional prizes from all corners of the world in the annual Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, 2009. Over the years, this prize has gained prestige and is now highly sought after by writers and publishers.

My task, along with the other five judges, was to choose one book from the four winning books entered for the Best Book and one out of four books that won regional prizes for Best First Book.

Before I met up with the other five judges, I read the eight regional prize-winning books in two weeks. I made copious notes. The standard of writing was superb. This made it easier in a way.

Reading novels is my favourite pastime but to read for the purpose of judgment is a different way of reading.  It is impossible to read fiction without bias and personal preference coming into play and in my view, it perpetuates a falsehood to even attempt to do so. There ain’t no such thing as an objective voice in story telling. There is, however, a requirement to look at the techniques employed by a particular writer; the dialogue, the way that character is developed, the sense of place etc.

In case you missed it, the two winners are: Best First Book, A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammed Hanif and Best Book, The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas.

One of the terrific things about the Commonwealth Prize is that the judges and writers get to know each other before the final prize is announced and mix together for drinks and meals and public readings. By the end of the week, I had made some new friends.

I have read the blogs of some of the people who were involved with the prize and they are fun to read. I particularly enjoyed Andrew Firmin’s blog. (He is the Programme Manager (Culture) at the Commonwealth Foundation.) Before I met him I pictured him as a rather stuffy personage with a posh accent and buffed fingernails. Nothing could be further from the truth. He is scruffy and clever and likes to have a laugh. I am proud that he described me in his blog as a ‘robust defender of the swear word’.

It’s a hard job Andrew but bloody hell, someone has to do it.