Imagination running hot
Remarkable writers and captivating storytelling … Tasmanian authors continue to set the bar high in tales from our state
AUSTRALIANS spent 19 per cent more money on grog last week than they did over the same period last year, Commonwealth Bank data shows. It’s not just me, then.
Thousands more noirish booklovers in Hobart must also be sipping more Tassie pinot by the fire by night.
Truly, though, I do most of my reading before first light while drinking pots of tea (it’s not just to urgently rehydrate — I don’t drink that much).
I love the clarity of the dawn, in my mind and out my windows, and the occasional appearance of its misty morning sister over the River Derwent. Today, I caught the Jerry at first light, backlit by a peachy band of sky.
Now, at 8.30am, I’m watching it disperse, softening the silhouettes of some of the city’s most charmless office blocks.
Here, by the fire, a young cat is curled asleep. A small dog too. The only child awake has left the room with my phone after spending half an hour reading by the hearth.
She dared to ask for the device so early only after softening me up with book time.
She was confident enough in her screen-time strategy to point out my apparent likeness to both the ugly Duchess and her even uglier cook, stirring a cauldron licked by flames, in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Young Hobart novelist Robbie Arnott’s first novel is Flames. Published two years ago, it is a fantastical tale set in Tasmania that begins with a young man watching his mother return transmuted from the dead after cremation, and deciding he must save his sister from a similar fate.
Back in 2018, Robbie told me the book was born during an all-nighter. He was about to do a reading when he panicked that his novel in progress was boring, staying up all night to write something else.
“I was just following my instincts, trying to write something a bit strange, something that was a bit different but also felt true,” he said. “I ended up writing what is basically the first chapter of this book.”
Now, Robbie is back with his second novel, The Rain Heron (Text Publishing), which is being described as another allegorical feat of imagination.
Its protagonist is reclusive mountain-dweller Ren, who is confronted by soldiers from a new regime demanding she reveal the whereabouts of a bird said to have rainmaking powers. I love the premise, and the book is on my reading list, along with Burnie writer Kyle Perry’s debut thriller, The Bluffs (Penguin), which came out last week.
It’s a good year for Tasmanian fiction. Erin Hortle, of Koonya, is a remarkable young writer whose first novel, The Octopus and I (Allen & Unwin), came out in March.
I am a third of the way in, and it is stunningly good so far. I’m told it gets even better. Set at Eaglehawk Neck, the story is told from the points of view of a young breast cancer survivor, Lucy, and a pregnant octopus.
Hortle’s post-grad thesis supervisor at the University of Tasmania was Danielle Wood, the novelist, creative writing academic and former Mercury journalist who won the nation’s most prestigious prize for authors aged 35 years and under, The Australian/Vogel Literary Award, in 2002 for her first novel, The Alphabet of Light and Dark.
The prolific author continues to publish to acclaim across genres, having released her second Minnie Darke romcom, The Lost Love Song (Michael Joseph), also in March.
Another Tasmanian woman won the Vogel this year. Cygnet writer Kate Kruimink told the Mercury she embarked on her historical quest novel, A Treacherous Country (Allen & Unwin), in a state of exhaustion, because it would give structure to her exhausting days as a new mum. Kruimink teaches English at the University of Tasmania.
A third Tasmanian winner, Rohan Wilson, won the Vogel in 2011, with his incendiary Black War novel The Roving Party (Allen & Unwin).
He did his Bachelor of Arts degree at UTAS, majoring in philosophy and history.
Are you seeing a pattern here? Are you linking it to the existential threat facing creative writers and Tasmanian stories if ideologically driven decisions, such as the federal government’s to dramatically hike the price of humanities courses, take hold?
In better news, University of Tasmania academic and writer Greg Lehman and co-author Tim Bonyhady have won the $25,000 Dick and Joan Green Family Award for Tasmanian History.
The National Picture: The Art of Tasmania’s Black War (The National Gallery of Australia) was published to accompany an exhibition of the same name at the NGA and TMAG.
Word is out, too, that Tasmania’s only Booker Prizewinning author, Richard Flanagan, will release a new novel in October. The Living Sea of Waking Dreams (Penguin) is set in a world aflame.