It’s Sunday morning in Sorrento and I am hastily journalling yesterday’s events before we depart our accommodation for breakfast somewhere. Sorrento Lodge is a strange setup… very modern, very clean, comfy beds, but a-hem very cosy, and minimalist. No hair dryer. No shampoo. (But two TVs. How does that work?) No kettle in the room, or cups for a pre-breakfast cuppa. Kitchen facilities at the end of the corridor are shared and not a pretty sight in the morning. And though they have a curfew of 10pm for the comfort of other guests, it is most certainly not observed or enforced, not even after midnight.
Which is why I was so tired yesterday that I abandoned my third session to come back and sleep the afternoon away.
Update, at home later on Sunday: I looked up reviews of Sorrento Lodge, and discovered that our discomforts, which were admittedly minimal, were entirely our fault. In error, we had booked a place that is meant for employees, i.e. inexpensive, self-catering, bring most of your own gear. It’s for the army of hospo staff who turn up for the holiday season and weekends, and it actually says in its FAQs that it’s not meant for holidaymakers or weekend stays. #meaCulpa…
Edited 29/4/24 to add information about panellists and links to my review of their books.
My first session was terrific. It was called Unpacking Australian Literature, and though it didn’t do that because the moderator’s questions went elsewhere, it was very interesting.
The panel consisted of Tony Birch, Jock Serong and Charlotte Wood, with Sarah L’Estrange as panel chair.
- Tony Birch was the first Dr Bruce McGuiness Indigenous Research Fellowship in 2015, and is the award-winning author of five novels, five short fiction collections and two poetry books. I profiled him in Meet an Aussie Author: TonyBirch way back in 2012, and I’ve read and reviewedBlood (2011), Ghost River (2015), Common People (2017), and (my favourite) The White Girl (2019). (I have Dark as Last Night (2021); Father’s Day (2009) and Women and Children (2023) on the TBR, and I will soon have a copy of his monograph on Kim Scott from Black Inc’s Writers on Writers series).
- Jock Serongis the award-winning author of six novels. He came to world attention with his third novelOn the Java Ridge (2017), because it won the (alas, short-lived) Staunch Award for a thriller without violence against women. The second of his Furneaux Islands trilogy won the Historical Novel Prize: Preservation #1 (2018);The Burning Island #2, 2020), andThe Settlement #3, 2022), and I have his backlist on the TBR, i.e. The Rules of Backyard Cricket (2017), and Quota (2015).
- 2017
- 2018
- 2020
- 2022
- Charlotte Wood is the award winning author ofseven novels – Pieces of a Girl (1999, see Kim’s review at Reading Matters), The Submerged Cathedral(2004),The Children(2007),Animal People(2011),The Natural Way of Things (2015); The Weekend (2019) and Stone Yard Devotional (2023). Her list of awards is too long to list here, (see Wikipedia instead) suffice to say that every book she writes is An Event, and she is one of our most thoughtful thinkers whose books interrogate the zeitgeist in sophisticated ways.
Tony Birch talked about his childhood in inner city Melbourne. He told a lovely story about the first time he saw the sea, and it reminded me of the late Peter Cundall of Gardening Australia fame talking about the first time he went into a library, got sent home to wash his hands, and then came back to enter what he thought was heaven. Birch reminded us that inner city housing doesn’t have backyards big enough to play ball games, so the street was where the kids played cricket and footy.
Asked why he was drawn to writing about children in his fiction, Birch said that childhood is formative for everyone and is often related to the places we love, especially in a childhood like his where the kids got away from their parents and were allowed to do their own thing.
Charlotte Wood grew up on the Monaro (and told us how to pronounce it,notlike the car). South of Canberra, it’s a bare landscape but she had a childhood full of freedom, roaming around on bikes, free to do whatever she wanted. There were bigger families then, so she always had someone to play with. And children had privacy, and a private world.
Food for thought, eh?
Jock Serong talked about writing. When we read, (in English, that is) he said, we read L to R, up to down. But when writing, it happens in a spiral, bringing parts together and moving them apart. So what is the role of Australian literature in questioning the narratives we tell ourselves?
Birch talked about his recent book which is about Kim Scott, in the Black Inc Writers on Writers series. He talked about challenging existing narratives but in an open and inclusive way. Kim Scott asks us to understand Australian history in a different way, and to open up the discussion. His writing is provocative, but it’s a gentle challenge.
Birch’s prize winning book The White Girl is about the Stolen Generations made accessible to readers who are inevitably going to be mostly white. The White Girl is a love story and it’s about the universal love within families. (See my review).
The book, he said, has had a good after life, it’s taught at Year 11 to engage young people. Birch says he doesn’t want to write alienating stories, and he wants to write about Aboriginal women who have agency. There is domestic violence but it’s off stage, and the reader sees an act of love instead: Ruby washing her auntie’s wounds after an assault.
I caught a glimpse of Jock Serong’s latest book but it’s not in the shops yet so he talked about his trilogy. (See my reviews of the Furneaux Islands trilogy). He recapped the activities of George Augustus Robinson, and says that fiction can pay respect to indigenous people when history (i.e. Robinson’s diary) doesn’t. And fiction has staying power. We know what we know of the Elizabethan era from Shakespeare not from history books!
The topic moved on to ‘writing from a sense of rage’ which brought up Charlotte Wood’s The Natural Way of Things, but though she said rage was a fuel for the book, she didn’t want to stay there. It was quite interesting the way that the moderator Sarah L’Estrange wanted to explore rage (by which I think she meant women’s rage) and the writers didn’t. Birch, who by any estimation had a rough childhood, said he wasn’t traumatised by it, and though he doesn’t want his grandchildren to witness what he did, his demeanour — and his books that I’ve read — are testament to that. He wants to write about men who are ok.
This was a most enjoyable session, but there were questions I wanted these writers to explore. Why do Australian authors write so much about old wars, crime and selective bits of history? Why don’t they write about class, for example?
My next session was Gail Jones in conversation with Fiona Gruber. Jones is an academic and the author of ten novels. I regret that I did not get on with her earlier works, but I kept on buying her books one after the other because I knew I would want to read them one day. I began with Our Shadows (2020); then I read and loved the award-winningSalonika Burning (2022), thenThe Death of Noah Glass (2018), and now her most recent novelOne Another (2024). Others waiting patiently on the TBR areA Guide to Berlin (2015), Combined Reviews and Five Bells (2011).
Fiona was brilliant at asking an open-ended question and just letting Gail talk. She talked about the circuitous way that One Another (see my review) was sparked by seeing the wreck of Joseph Conrad’s boat, the invasion of Ukraine and her memories of feeling dissonance when in the UK where everyone was obsessed with Princess Di and Thatcher but in Australia there was Mabo which was momentous.
*chuckle* And she wanted her story to have characters who didn’t have Google and mobile phones!
There was an interesting diversion into talking about literary criticism. I was so interested, I took only scrappy notes, but the gist of it was, that criticism now focusses on identity and emoting and placing the self into the text.
#NoteToSelf: Don’t do it!!
The conversation moved on to journeys, and the characters in One Another floundering and feeling out of place. Joseph Conrad’s life was endlessly journeying, from his childhood through to his voyages, so it was a life where he was always ‘out of place’ even when he finally settled in the UK because his thick accent placed him always as an outsider.
Jones’ novel is structured in these waves of events, it’s not chronological because she wanted to write about why we become so interested in the people whose books we read. She picks up on moments of intensification, and symbolic moments. So no, she’s not a planner. She has an image, and a sort of concept, and she writes intuitively.
She’s interested in words — what they can and can’t do, and images likewise — what they can and can’t do.
There was an audible intake of breath when she told us how quickly she writes her books, but that writing comes after a very long time of thinking and composing mentally.
Oh, and just at the end, she said a very interesting thing: she thinks that though we talk about postmodernism, most of us are modernists. We believe in deep time, and in symbols, and we read to complicate ourselves.
I wanted to know more about that, but it was time to move on.
My next session was The Life and Legacy of Miles Franklin, featuring Kgshak Akec, Amy Brown, Monique di Mattina, Clare Wright and Fiona Sweet. It was lovely to hear Kgshak Akec in the flesh, and she had a brief moment to talk about how being nominated for the MF for her 2022 debut novel Hopeless Kingdom (see my review) had changed her life, but the chair was head honcho of the Stella Prize and it was more of a Stella Prize love-in than I was interested in. I was so very, very tired that I shot through and spent the afternoon asleep in bed. Sorrento Lodge is quiet as the grave in mid-afternoon. It’s only at night that you can’t get any sleep…
So that’s it, for the 2024 Sorrento Writers Festival. Congratulations to everyone involved, especially the volunteers without whom it would not happen. The hospo folks were marvellous too, they were run off their feet with the festival coinciding with a long weekend, but the service was always friendly and professional and if things went awry they were quick to apologise.
PS The Spouse went to lots of interesting NF sessions and I will try to pick his brains on the journey home so that I can add in some of his thoughts too.
Time to pack up now, will chat in comments when I get home!
