It’s a funny thing, teaching writing in a country I didn’t grow up in: I’ve shucked off some identity markers (few in Boston can place the mid-sized-town-outside-of-Melbourne in my accent, for example), and I’m keenly aware of the culture that raised me. Much of what I read as a child was British: The Magic Faraway Tree and The Tale of Peter Rabbit (the foliage in those illustrations was so green). At university I read some Australian classics and many more British and American books. I still own a cinder-brick sized copy of The American Tradition in Literature, though until relatively recently I’d managed to avoid Huck Finn and The Great Gatsby. Don’t judge.
You all missed out on some gems, though. In high school, I loved Ruth Park’s Playing Beatie Bow, about a Sydney teen who travels back in time; and at university and through adulthood, I read the work of writers like Elizabeth Jolley, Hazel Rowley, Christina Stead, and Helen Garner (now well known outside of Australia).
These voices helped me develop my own. Now, to mark the publication of my debut novel, Any Kind of Known Tomorrow, I have the great good fortune to be telling you about seven contemporary Australian writers, women whose work is part of the tradition that raised me. Each in their way—in the language, the attitude of the characters, the shape of the landscape—these books feel like home.
Theory and Practice by Michelle de Kretser
“I was discovering that I no longer wanted to write novels that read like novels,” Michelle de Krester’s narrator declares early in this slender, beautifully written, essayistic novel. “Instead of shapeliness and disguise, I wanted a form that allowed for formlessness and mess. It occurred to me that one way to find that form might be to tell the truth.” The story traces a graduate student in Melbourne in the 1980s navigating friendship, romantic love, and how to “think back through” her intellectual mother (Virginia Woolf) and her biological mother (who appears mostly as transcriptions of one-sided conversations). A brilliant book.
This is not a book one can skim. I tried—figured I’d take a quick look for the purposes of this list. These essays pulled me right back in with their crystalline intelligence and persistent, gently ferocious questioning. Each section is built around an axiom: for example, Time heals all wounds, History repeats itself. The essays examine youth suicide, generational trauma, the justice system, and people, always people—in their various awe-inspiring, complicated, flawed, heroic incarnations. Read this if you want to spend time considering what it means to be human. Tumarkin won’t answer your question, but you’ll be so glad you asked it with her.
Foreign Soil: And Other Stories by Maxine Beneba Clarke
This story collection, which won the Victorian Premier’s Unpublished Manuscript Award in 2013, is one I press into people’s hands when they ask about Australian short story writers. These stories take readers to suburban Melbourne, rural Jamaica, New Orleans, the United Kingdom, and an Australian immigration detention center, to name a few locations. The voice shifts masterfully to meet the needs of each piece, but the throughline is clear—steady, clear-eyed wisdom that sees how racism and other forms of intolerance can divide, and how love, in its many forms, might help us find one another again.
Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood
A pandemic era novel that examines the desire to retreat from a world that feels increasingly noisy and broken. Wood’s first-person narrator leaves behind her urban life as an activist to join a group of nuns near where she grew up. The quiet is disturbing at first, but over time, the noise of the world finds its way in. Vicarious peace and unease pulled me through this book, as did the narrator’s bafflement over her own choices. “I had a need,” Wood writes, “an animal need, to find a place I had never been but which was still, in some undefinable way, my home.”
Exploded View by Carrie Tiffany
The title of this moving, emotionally precise novel comes from car-manual terminology: an “exploded view” shows an engine in a kind of levitating state. All the parts are labelled and suspended, apart from each other but arranged such that their relationship is clear to the viewer. It’s a perfect metaphor for a novel about how a teenager metabolizes muted domestic terror (muted due to the pressures that require silence). As the unnamed protagonist moves through her days, the weight of her situation emerges—as does the quiet insistence of her selfhood. A masterclass in writing about childhood trauma.
Peripheral Vision: Stories by Paddy O’Reilly
I want to say O’Reilly comes at stories side-wise, but that’s not quite right: more like the world is on a slant, and O’Reilly always finds north. The opening story—an homage to Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People”—alternates between the perspective of a young woman with a prosthetic leg and a beautiful traveling salesman, unraveling the dissonance between interior life and external presentation. Wisdom and humor characterize these stories. For example, from “The City Circle”: “Lobbied—such a strange word. I thought of being hallwayed or verandaed. Porched … porticoed. Entranced.”
This joyful, propulsive coming-of-age story takes me back to life in a 1990s coastal town in Australia. The bitter winter wind, the refuge in a serve of hot chips, the way that music seems to make sense of everything. In Bloom is told in the collective “we” by three young women who believe they’ve been abandoned by a friend who threatens their dream of competing in the Battle of the Bands competition in another state. The book tackles difficult subjects—poverty and predatory behavior, to name two—but its focus on the value of friendship persistently invites the light in.
Leah De Forest was born in Geelong, Australia, and lives in Boston. Her debut novel, Any Kind of Known Tomorrow, is out now from Betty, an imprint of WTAW Press. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Griffith Review, CRAFT Literary, Ohio University’s Quarter After Eight, Fiction Writers Review and Kill Your Darlings, among other venues. She is a senior editor at Bloom, a literary website featuring authors who debut at 40 or older, and publishes The Point of View Playbook, a craft resource for writers. Leah teaches writing at the Harvard Extension School.