You’ve got to admire Dorothy Porter. She’s dragged Australian poetry out of the mannered and self-indulgent murky backrooms of inner-city pubs, and hauled it from the rollicking rhyming outback sheds to make it robust, a vehicle for suspense and stark realism. And she’s an out lesbian.
Her earlier detective novel in verse, The Monkey’s Mask, was hugely admired, made into a gorgeous film (with Susie Porter) is about to be released as a radio play by the BBC and is still making money for Dorothy Porter.
But somehow it doesn’t work for me.
The main theme of El Dorado is friendship, expressed through the unlikely relationship between a boofhead unreconstructed straight male copper (though a single parent) and a lesbian whose work involves creating Hollywood imaginary worlds. I never found this relationship convincing enough – what would have held them together all those years? Why has Cath come back to Melbourne? And while they are searching for the killer, who they dub El Dorado, how is she supporting herself, for goodness sake?
El Dorado is a serial child murderer who smears his victims’ faces with gold, a detail that remains unexplained.
Now, I know that sparseness is the beauty of poetry. It’s as much about what isn’t said as what’s on the page. But my pedestrian mind strays all the time to these pragmatic unanswered questions – and that intrusion spoils it for me.
The most interesting idea in the book is the connection Porter makes between the killer as a homophobic moralistic saviour of the innocence of children, and the contemporary rise of the religious right. I laughed aloud at this section:
If only El Dorado would abstain
from murdering their children
the sex-mad sex-scared
punters
would probably elect him
As a side story, Cath falls in love with Lily, a snake charmer and former sex worker. Cath’s insecurity about the problems of their comparative age and their different histories is well drawn and enjoyable for its ordinariness.
Covers of books are very important to me in setting the tone. This one is very uninspiring, being a photograph of trees and water by Christian Carollo, who, according to the website, works mostly for American organisations on projects called Handbook for Campus Crusade for Christ and Brand my Church. A strange choice. Very likely Dorothy Porter had no influence at all over the cover design.
El Dorado has been on the market for several weeks, and while Dorothy Porter has been extensively interviewed about it (on the ABC Arts show, at Gleebooks) and there are a myriad of published descriptive pieces, there are no critical reviews. Why?
Perhaps because we all admire the project. We all admire the writer. But is that enough?
Sunday, May 20, 2007
Friday, May 4, 2007
Ida Leeson: a life; not a blue-stocking lady by Sylvia Martin
Librarians get bad press everywhere. No matter how much we re-invent ourselves as information architects, or cybrarians, we still get lumbered with the cardigans and sensible shoes. It’s always been of interest to me that the stereotype of a librarian is very close to the stereotype of a lesbian.
Any biographer of Ida Leeson would be vulnerable to promoting the stereotypes of a librarian who was also a lesbian. But this is a truly inspiring, engaging and admirable book, written in a most sensitive and respectful way.
For the past ten years or so, Sylvia Martin has been writing and researching about women in Australian history who, today, we would describe as lesbians. It’s a project which has brought back into focus women who have been neglected in the construction of Australia’s literary and cultural history.
Ida Leeson is a worthy subject. She was born and grew up in working-class Leichhardt, blessed with a fine intellect and the capacity to work very hard, and became the first female Mitchell Librarian for New South Wales. On the way she overcame blatant discrimination against her as a woman, and a great deal of wheeling and dealing in the acquisition of material for the impressive library. Her relationship with Florence Birch, another very accomplished woman, was known by everyone. But, as Martin points out; “…a person’s sexuality was not considered to be the core aspect of their identity in the 1920s and 1930s in the way it is today.”
Nevertheless, while Sylvia Martin has avoided typecasting, the reviews of her book haven’t. Bruce Elder’s review in the Sydney Morning Herald is titled “Is it possible to make the life and work of a librarian interesting?” Even the Gleebooks review begins with the notion that; “Ida Leeson was no ordinary librarian,” suggesting that, thankfully, she wasn’t a conservative crashing bookish bore like all the rest of them (us).
Ida Leeson’s examined life throws up challenges. I particularly enjoyed Sylvia Martin’s exploration of Ida’s mannish dress and manners, and her relationship with men; “Androgynous women like Ida are unsettling and create unconscious gender anxiety, particularly among heterosexual men…”
Ida’s heroic sense of herself as a librarian is nothing short of thrilling for those of us who clack away all day online in a contemporary atmosphere where library users are constructed as customers and all contact is noted, measured, collected and somehow valued in a set of numerical KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). Ida catalogued meticulously, building her own knowledge by reading copiously. She followed obscure leads and tracked down material to build the collection. She edited research papers. And she found time to promote other women librarians.
Sylvia Martin is open about the problems of biographical research. Much of the evidence of Ida’s personal life has been lost, but where a writer reveals their personal interests in a subject’s life, does it matter? What matters is the re-instatement of Ida Leeson as central to the preservation of the history of Sydney, New South Wales and Australia, and its continued accessibility. The book’s almost incidental history of Sydney in the twenties and thirties just adds to the pleasure.
Shortlisted for the Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction 2007, I’m hoping it will be pronounced the winner on 31st May.
Available from the Feminist Bookshop, who tell me it’s a best-seller!
Sylvia Martin’s next project is a biography of the left-wing Melbourne literary figure, Aileen Palmer (1915-1988) All power to her.
Any biographer of Ida Leeson would be vulnerable to promoting the stereotypes of a librarian who was also a lesbian. But this is a truly inspiring, engaging and admirable book, written in a most sensitive and respectful way.
For the past ten years or so, Sylvia Martin has been writing and researching about women in Australian history who, today, we would describe as lesbians. It’s a project which has brought back into focus women who have been neglected in the construction of Australia’s literary and cultural history.
Ida Leeson is a worthy subject. She was born and grew up in working-class Leichhardt, blessed with a fine intellect and the capacity to work very hard, and became the first female Mitchell Librarian for New South Wales. On the way she overcame blatant discrimination against her as a woman, and a great deal of wheeling and dealing in the acquisition of material for the impressive library. Her relationship with Florence Birch, another very accomplished woman, was known by everyone. But, as Martin points out; “…a person’s sexuality was not considered to be the core aspect of their identity in the 1920s and 1930s in the way it is today.”
Nevertheless, while Sylvia Martin has avoided typecasting, the reviews of her book haven’t. Bruce Elder’s review in the Sydney Morning Herald is titled “Is it possible to make the life and work of a librarian interesting?” Even the Gleebooks review begins with the notion that; “Ida Leeson was no ordinary librarian,” suggesting that, thankfully, she wasn’t a conservative crashing bookish bore like all the rest of them (us).
Ida Leeson’s examined life throws up challenges. I particularly enjoyed Sylvia Martin’s exploration of Ida’s mannish dress and manners, and her relationship with men; “Androgynous women like Ida are unsettling and create unconscious gender anxiety, particularly among heterosexual men…”
Ida’s heroic sense of herself as a librarian is nothing short of thrilling for those of us who clack away all day online in a contemporary atmosphere where library users are constructed as customers and all contact is noted, measured, collected and somehow valued in a set of numerical KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). Ida catalogued meticulously, building her own knowledge by reading copiously. She followed obscure leads and tracked down material to build the collection. She edited research papers. And she found time to promote other women librarians.
Sylvia Martin is open about the problems of biographical research. Much of the evidence of Ida’s personal life has been lost, but where a writer reveals their personal interests in a subject’s life, does it matter? What matters is the re-instatement of Ida Leeson as central to the preservation of the history of Sydney, New South Wales and Australia, and its continued accessibility. The book’s almost incidental history of Sydney in the twenties and thirties just adds to the pleasure.
Shortlisted for the Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction 2007, I’m hoping it will be pronounced the winner on 31st May.
Available from the Feminist Bookshop, who tell me it’s a best-seller!
Sylvia Martin’s next project is a biography of the left-wing Melbourne literary figure, Aileen Palmer (1915-1988) All power to her.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
