Book Review - Contemporary Portraits by Murray Bail

Contemporary Portraits by Murray Bail

St. Lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 1975  ISBN 0702209783

I've now read quite a bit of Murray Bail, and I have to state I'm still not sure what to make of his writing. Self-consciously avant-garde in some respects, but in others very much a narrative storyteller, his novels have met with varying success, and he has also written a much-praised biography of the artist Ian Fairweather.

This collection of stories, published five years before his first novel, lean much more toward the avant-garde Bail. Some are absurd, some are surreal, not one is a mere "story". There is no real theme in the content of the stories, but there is an over-riding concern throughout the book with language - what it is, how it is constructed, and what meaning it conveys.

Several of the stories convey the sometimes absurd ways that language fails to convey meaning, and how familiar tropes can be turned inside out. When basic premises that we take for granted are turned on their head, all of a sudden one is without moorings and floating free in quite disturbing ways.

Bail is not afraid to do these things, which makes the stories always interesting if not always entertaining or understandable. It's no surprise that his most successful work (Eucalyptus) was much more mainstream in style and structure.

This one is for for Bail aficionados, but still worth reading. Brief descriptions on each story below -

Heubler

Heubler is a photographer who announces that he is determined to photograph everyone in the world, beginning with 23 specific types of people. The narrator claims he knows at least one of every type, listed in short biographies. Bail plays with meaning (the person that hears voices is a switchboard operator, the person who is beautiful and dumb can't speak, and so on). Everything about this story is absurd - Heubler's premise, and the narrator's responses.

Life of the Party

Owner of a house in a middle-class suburb, wife and kids at the beach house - he returns home and sets up a BBQ party, then climbs into a tree house to see what happens. Watches his invited friends get drunk, cook the BBQ and have a good time ("I've never been so drunk in all my life!"). As they leave he wonders if they would have had as much fun if he'd been there.

The Drover's Wife

The author recognises his wife as the subject of Drysdale's painting. She left him for reasons he can't fathom. He writes about her, what she looks like, her habits, and how her likes differed from his "she had a funny way about her". He describes when she killed a snake at a beach house they rented (homage to Lawson). He describes a trip beyond Port Augusta, where she had a cup of tea with a drover while he waited in the car.

Zoellner's Definition

Description of Leon Zoellner via dictionary definitions of physical attributes, compared to his attributes. Final sentence - "Words. Verbal expression; used in language to denote a thing, attribute or relation." Story shows how difficult it is to use words to actually describe those things.

Portrait of Electricity

Going through a museum dedicated to a great man, who is noticeably absent throughout (no pictures, no real sense of what he looked like). Everybody knows about him and his thoughts, but the museum (in his house?) has things like pieces of carpet he stood on etc. Final exhibits are a piece of his excreta and a telephone handset.

The Silence

Joe Tapp camps in the desert trapping rabbits. Every two weeks Norm Treloar comes in his truck to pick up the carcases. The story covers six weeks, and three visits. The first visit Norm turns up with his usual "how'd you be?" - Joe finds that Norm talks too much. The second visit Joe doesn't say anything to Norm, but Norm continues to talk. The third visit Joe hides in the sandhills until Norm leaves, and vows to do that every time the truck comes.

The Dog Show

Story of a long-running dog show where the people and dogs swap positions - the people become more dog-like in their habits and looks as the show goes on - eating dog biscuits while the dogs eat pies.

Paradise

Merv Hector is the bus driver on the route to Paradise. He is happy in life, slow but steady. He crashes the bus. He is next a lift man in an office building. He likes going up rather than down, takes his lunch on the roof. He crashes the lift, and after sleeping during a lunch break is fired. He then gets a job changing weather signs. He feels fine, so changes it to that even though it's raining...."The phone began to ring."

Ore

Wes Williams a stockbroker who falls ill while contemplating the oncoming copper boom, taste of copper in his mouth. Goes to the doctor, who tells him he has a fever. Then a section describing the doctor and some mining types (surveyors etc.) drilling into his skull for ore. He wakes up feeling better.

Cul-de-Sac (uncompleted)

Apart from the first, all paragraphs in this story are numbered, beginning at 78 through to 108. Roy Biv is a draughtsman who at first seems to be drawing a street plan for a cul-de-sac. He has blue hands and orange hair, and his watch strap is held together with rubber bands. The paragraphs seem to be a fever dream of him trying to walk to the cul-de-sac but never quite getting there, getting advice from people he meets, and observing strange things about the city (conveyor belts of rubbish running through it, live people taking shifts as statues). The final paragraph (108) seems to return to "reality" with Roy again drawing the plan.

The Partitions

Strange surreal story about a group of people walking and crawling along the top of partitions in what seems to be an endless office space. All sorts of things happen, they see all sorts of things happening. Nothing makes sense.

A,B,C,D,E,F,G,H,I,J,K,L,M,N,O,P,Q,R,S,T,U,V,W,X,Y,Z.

A story of Kathy Pridham, working at the British Council in Karachi as a Librarian. She falls in with an Indian painter, Syed Masood, and "goes native". Masood is a drunk, and drags her away from her expat friends and lifestyle. He abuses her, and in the end she loses her job and ends up back in London. The story is also about language, about words and the meanings we attach to them.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The Kelly Outbreak by John McQuilton

 The Kelly Outbreak 1878-1880: the Geographical Dimension of Social Banditry by John McQuilton

Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1979          ISBN 0522841805

After recently reading Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang I thought I would temper fiction with fact, and pulled out the book under review to get closer to the truth not only of Ned Kelly and his adventures, but also to the situation he found himself in, which led to many of the choices he made during his life.

As the title suggests, McQuilton has gone much further than a re-hash of Kellys life and crimes. He firstly sets the scene by discussing the history of settlement in North Eastern Victoria, describing the interaction between squatters, selectors and miners, particularly the failure of the laws around land selection to either provide the selectors with enough land for survival or enough freedom to create a prosperous life for them and their families. Meanwhile the squatters actively tried to discourage selection, and often gamed the rules for their own benefit.

This antagonism played out in various ways, from selectors duffing squatter's cattle for food and profit, and squatters (who were often also councillors and magistrates or justices of the peace) using the heavy hand of the law to get their way and intimidate any who opposed them. While McQuilton downplays ethnic and religious differences, these also fed into an "us against them" feeling from the selector class, with "them" including the police, who became very unpopular with many selector families.

The police themselves were a distinct group in the North East. Many were not from the area (due to a policy decision made in Melbourne), and most were not trained properly for the tasks they were required to do (McQuilton describes a lack of ability in the bush, and to use their firearms). Their strategies to control those they perceived to be behind much of the illegal activity in the area was one of continual harassment, which fell on some families more than others.

One family/clan that garnered particular attention from the police were the Quinn family, of which Kelly was a part (his mother was a Quinn). They were seen by the police as both cattle and horse thieves, and members of the family were constantly being hauled before the courts. In an appendix McQuilton lays out every instance where members of the Quinn clan were arrested between 1856 and 1880 for charges such as stealing, assault and abusive language. The thirteen people listed were arrested 73 times for various offences. Forty one times (56%) the arrested person was discharged. This fact goes not only to the incompetence of the police, but also to a definite perception, if not a reality, of persecution of the family.

The police were also not above framing the Quinns as well. It seems clear that Alexander Fitzpatrick created or at least massively exaggerated an incident at the home of the Kellys during which he was shot. What Fitzpatrick claimed was attempted murder Kelly always claimed was an act of self-defence on his part. It seems Kelly's version of events is probably closer to the truth than Fitzpatrick's.

This incident was the beginning of the two years when Ned and his brother Dan went bush to evade capture. Soon afterwards were the Stringybark Creek murders. That Ned shot and killed three police is not under any doubt. The full circumstances of the incident will never be known, but once done there was only ever going to be one ending for the members of the Kelly gang.

McQuilton well describes the shambolic police response to the Kelly outbreak - a mix of incompetence, petty jealousies between officers and heavy-handed actions that antagonized the public - the beginning of the divide between those who praised Kelly as some kind of Robin Hood, and those who demonized him as a psychopathic killer. He was neither.

The mystery surrounding why Kelly donned armour and faced the police at Glenrowan occupies McQuilton, because he subscribes to (and tries to fit the Kelly outbreak into) Eric Hobsbawm's theory of social banditry. It does seem that Kelly might have intended the Glenrowan affair to be the start of some sort of uprising in the region, given McQuilton's evidence of other armed men gathered around the Glenrowan Inn during the siege. It could also be that Kelly was staging this event to try and bargain for his mother's release from prison, which is a theory that has some support.

For a person and events that are so deeply ingrained into Australian culture, it can be surprising to a neophyte just how much of the Kelly story is unknown, or contested. I thought I knew a fair bit about the story, but I have certainly learned some new things reading this book. Some of the things I learnt from the excellent apparatus that comes with this book: the appendices have already been mentioned, one of which is a wonderful bibliographic essay which gives much insight into where Peter Carey gained a lot of his inspiration for his fiction - in fact fictional works have formed an integral part of the legend, and trying to separate the real from the imagined in this story is an ongoing effort.

There is no doubt that Ned Kelly is one of the more interesting figures of white Australian history. The Kelly Outbreak is a comprehensive look at not only Kelly's life and crimes, but an excellent piece of social history. Highly recommended.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell