‘The Well’ by Elizabeth Jolley

Obsession, jealousy, growing old and loneliness are explored in Elizabeth Jolley’s Miles Franklin-winning novel as an ageing spinster and her teenage ward struggle to live their lives in a rural farming environment.

Lonely after the death of her elderly father, Hester Harper shares her home with a teenage orphan girl, Katherine. Set on a remote sheep and wheat farm in rural Western Australia, the Harper family were treated like royalty in the town living as they did on the sprawling property. But, with just Katherine to indulge, and Hester’s wants limited, she succumbs to the suggestion by the family financial advisor, Mr Bird, to sell the too-big property and move to a cottage on the furthest edge of the farm.

Hester adores the dynamic teenager, indulging her every whim. But with its opening pages, we are already only too well aware that something dramatic has happened. A body – animal or human – has been pushed down the well, hit by Katherine whilst the two were driving home from the local dance. Instead of stopping to explore the accident or even make judgement, Jolley whisks us back to the first arrival of Katherine in the homestead, partly out of pity and partly from fancy.

To say their relationship is unconventional is an understatement. Hester immerses herself in the training of the adolescent (whiffs of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion with the older women as Professor Higgins readily springs to mind) and completely indulges her. Katherine herself is seemingly naive (although as the book is told only from the older woman’s perspective, any feelings or emotions are not forthcoming), coming across as an Anne of Green Gables with boundless enthusiasm and love of everything proposed by Hester. Selling the homestead makes sense but a normally careful Miss Harper ignores Bird’s advice and prefers to keep most of the cash sale in the house rather than tying it into investments.

And so the night of the accident looms and their relationship becomes strained after the incident. Money is found to be missing – with the assumption that it went into the well with the intruder. Their plans go awry, more so when Katherine begins to hear the voice of the man unceremoniously disposed of a few nights earlier.

An eccentric psychosexual love story (on the older woman’s part) evolves as Hester reminisces about her own childhood and feelings for the German governess, Hilde – or possibly something less overt, an understated commentary on women’s lives and friendship. It’s never clarified (in spite of intimations from the locals on Hester’s rare foray into town). But The Well remains something of an oddity – a rambling imbalanced narrative of an unclear relationship that changes when Hester’s carefully contrived world unravels.

Winner of the 1986 Miles Franklin Award (the last year where only the winner with no shortlist was announced).

‘Iris’ by Fiona Kelly McGregor

Born marginalised, Iris is twice married, twice charged with murder in a vividly imagined 1930s Sydney, based (loosely) as she is on real-lfe Iris Webber, busker, sex worker, thief. Iris is mayhem of time and place in the underbelly of the city, threatening, violent, nonconformist. But the margins are also a place of friendship, love, loyalty and fun.

Iris survives. She has navigated the violence of life, defied police and the challenge of the street. But she is now trapped in a prison cell, forced to tread carefully with what she says to her lawyer. Being charged with murder Iris is hoping that her story matches with the evidence already provided.

Arriving in depression-hit Sydney in 1932 from the country town of Glen Innes in northern New South Wales, Iris has already had her share of imprisonment, marriage and domestic violence. Hay Women’s Prison was Iris’ most recent abode, having been arrested for shooting her husband as revenge for leaving her and for owing her mother money. She soon settles into the rough and ready King’s Cross and Darlinghurst neighbourhoods of East Sydney. She falls in love with fellow sex worker Maisie Matthews, struggling to understand this attraction but, Iris being Iris, she goes with the flow.

It’s a tough, humdrum world – a chaotic, corrupt one of brutal cops, sex workers, petty criminals, alcohol pedlars and gangsters. Allegiances are critical – particularly for the women, whether it be the madams such as Tilly Devine or Kate Leigh through to the men who protect them. Whilst in Iris the women take centre stage, it’s the men who determine the development of the narrative, with the women reliant upon those that are little more than thugs or on the take. Iris works to some degree outside that system – tough, independent, a lover of women (even though she does not feel a close affinity other than Maisie). There’s generally no avoiding men as protectors or bullies (gangsters or cops) in trying to keep a roof over her head (other than a short period when Iris escapes it all and lives for a while with a church-going aunt in Glebe), but as a rule Iris tries to follow her own determined path.

The narrative of Iris is hardly original – an underbelly of a city is well visited. As a result, the novel verges on repetition and predictability. But what sets McGregor’s novel apart is her extraordinary use of the vernacular of 1930s Sydney – a mindfuck of words, phrases and descriptors like no other, a veritable smorgasbord. Banana benders, bronza on full display, Jews ’avin a shivoo, bidgee angie, drabbest, oscar, cove, dagos, Rock Choppers, going yarra, rozzers, Celestials, Micks and Chinks. And so much more.

Shortlisted for the 2023 Miles Franklin Award, but lost out to Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens by Shankari Chandran.

‘Hopeless Kingdom’ by Kgshak Akec

A wealth of migrant experience within a Sudanese family is the basis of Kgshak Akec’s insightful debut novel, based as it is on her own experiences as the family adjust to cross cultural differences not only in-country, but city to city. From Cairo to Sydney to Geelong, a young Akira and her mother Taresai share the alternating narration and focus of Hopeless Kingdom, with many of the same moments seen from two different perspectives.

Struggling in a high-rise apartment in Giza on the outskirts of Cairo, the family await news of their application to leave for Australia – with a good command of English, husband and father Santino has secured a position in an NGO. As outsiders, Akira and her older brother Santo are confronted daily with racism and violence at the Egyptian primary school – a situation that, whilst easing having left for the other side of the world, stays with them. Hopeless Kingdom is no fairytale as Akira and Taresai in particular look to find their place, with the older woman struggling as lack of English further isolates.

The sense of family is overriding in Akec’s narrative – but not always to positive effect. Santino is increasingly distant following the move to Sydney with the unexpected decision of returning to Sudan, leaving Taresai with little English and four children. In spite of a level of settled life with Akira blooming at school and, for the first time, friends, a decision is made to move to Geelong where family members can support Taresai. But she knows family is a challenge – a judgemental younger sister, a domineering and demanding mother. The decision is further compounded by Santo’s increasingly uncontrollable adolescent behaviour.

As the years pass, sadly Hopeless Kingdom settles into an everyday Australian suburban migrant tale. The vivid days of Giza and young children threading through the throngs of people and dust told with energy and verve is supplanted by the mean and threatening streets of northern Geelong. Akira is an A grade student, Santo a drug addict with behavioural problems. The two younger sisters barely feature whilst Taresai struggles through, eventually training as a nurse.

It’s an insightful narrative of racism and prejudice along with family struggles and expectation but the depth and nuance of Egypt and Sydney settles into something a little more mundane. Yet, what started out as a private project paying homage to her mother has received the Dorothy Hewitt Award for an unpublished manuscript and now shortlisted for the 2023 Miles Franklin Award.

‘Reaching Tin River’ by Thea Astley

Strong-willed Belle, a product of 1950s outback Australian upbringing, narrates her tale of a childhood and young adulthood in parochial Queensland prior to her obsession with a long-dead disgraced businessman and minor politician, Gaden Lockyer.

With youth centred around a middle-of-nowhere town called Jericho Flats, an absent (American) father and a mother, Bonnie, breaking all the rules as a drummer performing with her pianist sister, Marie, at barn dances, bars and weddings throughout the local territory, Belle struggles with stability.

She’s a complex character. A feeling of abandonment from an early age, a stoical embarassment of her freethinking mother results in Belle looking towards teaching and archive research, eventually settling in Brisbane, where she meets future husband Seb. He turns out to be a misogynist schmuck and that particular partnership does not last long – highlighted by Belle at one point disappearing without a word and travelling to LA to find her father. She tracks him down in New York and returns to Brisbane. All within a few days and where Belle only admits to such a journey sometime later at dinner with friends.

The failed marriage sees Belle becoming more and more internalised and increasingly obsessed with the life of Lockyer. So much so she takes time out to retrace his steps, checking out former homes from one isolated spot to another, reimagining the Lockyer family in residence.

It’s a difficult book not readily penetrated. Some talk of Astley’s satire, wit and occasional cruelty but, in Belle’s finding of herself through her obsession, Reaching Tin River is a fractured narrative that explores in a roundabout way gender and sexual politics. And, speaking personally, it fails to hit its target.

Shortlisted for the 1991 Miles Franklin Award but lost out to David Malouf and The Great World.

‘Cold Enough For Snow’ by Jessica Au

A deceptively simple novella, the second from Melbourne writer Jessica Au, Cold Enough For Snow sees a mother and (unnamed) daughter visit Japan, with the younger woman looking for a lost connection with her parent.

As the organiser, the daughter feels pressure to ensure her mother takes pleasure in the trip but not overtaxed. The days they have together merge into limited sight seeing, food and travelling to off-the-beaten track museums and galleries. As it is the onset of winter, Japan is cold and wet – an overnight trek, taken alone by the daughter whilst her mother stays at a traditional inn, is not quite the pleasurable experience hoped for.

It’s calm and zen-like, rarely raising above ‘quiet’ on the volume control in its telling. Now living in different countries, memories and recollections of shared experience unwind – but there’s little in terms of direct conversation between the two women. The daughter searches to know someone and to have them know me beyond the intimate detachment that exists.

Cold Enough For Snow looks to the carefully observed and is full of meditations of the minutiae of that shared experience. But in its quietness and lack of connection, Au’s novel is distant and, like the time of year they choose to visit Japan, cold. Calm control replaces emotion – not helped by the indirect communication that exists throughout its 70 or so pages.

Shortlisted for the 2023 Miles Franklin Award.

‘Amnesty’ by Aravind Adiga

Danny (Dhananjaya Rajaratnam) is illegal. Having arrived in Australia from Sri Lanka on an education visa, he’s ducked out, gone underground and now hiding in plain sight in Sydney as a freelance cleaner. Life looks good with his regular clients paying him cash, he spends time with Sonja, his Vietnamese vegan girlfriend – and he’s even splashed out for blonde highlights. But, in the course of just 24 hours everything crashes around him when he recognises a murder victim as one of his clients.

Faced with a moral conundrum, Danny wrestles with inaction as he recalls time spent with Radha, the murder victim, and Prakash, her lover and ensconced in an apartment owned by her husband. Danny cleans both apartments. Both are gambling addicts and the two adopt Danny as a kind of non-participating companion on their Pokie-playing trips. But then Radha’s dead body is discovered – with Danny recognising the jacket in which the body is wrapped as belonging to Prakash. So now Danny must decide: come forward and risk being discovered as an illegal and deported – or keep quiet and risk Prakash getting away with it.

But even if the police believed you, and phoned [Prakash], he would guess at once you were the one who dobbed him in,
and in return, he would dob you in as an illegal. He would call the immigration dob-in number bout the Legendary Cleaner who was illegal, give his name, and what he looked like, and where he lived, because the dead woman had told him everything

Over the course of this single day, Danny’s routine is shot as he assesses and evaluates his life past, present and future: his dreams, his feelings for Sonja, the discombobulation of undocumented illegality of life in inner-suburban Sydney. But, most of all, he reflects on Radha and Prakash, whose very apartment is scheduled to be cleaned. As a non-resident does he, Dhananjaya Rajaratnam, a person without rights, still have responsibilities? It’s this dilemma that provides the scaffolding of Aravind Adiga’s third novel.

The strength of Amnesty is not the storyline which evolves into melodrama with text messages from Prakash himself adding to Danny’s fears and confusion. What separates Adiga’s novel from the spate of contemporary inner-city Sydney angst novels is his explorations of legal and illegal immigration and the fundamentals of Australian racism in spite of its proud boast of cultural diversity and heritage.

Easiest thing in the world, becoming invisible to white people, who don’t see you anyway; but the hardest thing is becoming invisible to brown people, who will see you no matter what – an archipelago of illegals, each isolated from each other and kept weak, and fearful, by this isolation.

‘The Inland Sea’ by Madeleine Watts

A disquieting Sydney-set tale as the unnamed narrator spends her last year in the city dealing (or not) with her self-destructive obsessions against a backdrop of ecological crisis.

Two centuries earlier, British explorer John Oxley, her great-great-great-great grandfather, travelled into the centre of Australia convinced the unmapped area would reveal a vast, inland sea. He may never found it, but he never ceased to believe that it was out there. The unobtained and the unobtainable drove him ever onwards.

Our narrator also appears to be driven by the inexplicable and the elusive. She works part-time as an emergency dispatch operator and finds it difficult at times to distance herself from desperate calls of fires ravaging homes, threats of domestic violence. She drinks heavily and involves herself with excessive casual consensual sex. Adrift, she works the graveyard shift, wandering the threatening streets of the city late at night or in the early hours of the morning. And then there’s wannabe writer Lachlan, her ex who, a few days after she had an abortion, left her for Cate, a fellow student on their literature honours seminar. But they remain sexually attracted to each other. All this with bushfires surrounding the city raging out of control and other ecological disasters ever threatening.

Madeleine Watts debut novel attempts to take on more than she ultimately delivers as the mundane of inner-city living is interspersed with recollections of a younger self fleeing with her mother from an abusive father along with the occasional thought thrown to Oxley searching in vain for the elusive target. It all feels somewhat diluted, lacking in the frisson Watts’ subject demands. There are some great turns of restrained phrase and lyrical beauty – but the sum of its parts fail to live up to expectations. The result in a sufficiently engaging but hardly memorable first novel.

‘Leap’ by Myfanwy Jones

Two lives grieving, two lives struggling to move on from events three years earlier. Joe, broken, is stuck in dead-end but enjoyable hospitality jobs: Elise, unable to voice her innermost thoughts, has seen her husband walk out the door. Two lives grieving.

Yet in spite of its central premise, Mfanwy Jones’ novel is one of hope. Life goes on around the two – and slowly the outside world forces itself into the lives of Elise and Joe. A nurse, working nightshifts, takes on the spare bedroom in Joe’s shared house and with it a sexual attraction evolves. And there’s also workmate Lena. Graphic designer Elise becomes obsessed with the tigers at Melbourne Zoo.

For Joe, life is about marking time. He’s given up on the idea of teaching sports (although he spends time perfecting parkour moves) but mentors a surly teenager. With flatmates Sanjay and Jack, Joe contemplates lives, loves and ambitions. And remembers Jen.

In her forties, Elise’s life seems to be crumbling – husband Adam has left, her work is little more than filling time. But it’s the tigers that draw her – every Tuesday rain or shine she is to be found at Melbourne Zoo in front of the enclosure. Drawing, sketching, painting, it becomes a ritual. And, slowly, it helps in her grief of losing daughter, Jen.

In her second novel, Myfanwy Jones teases out the character of her two leads both of whom are fairly ordinary Melbournians, united in principle in ther grief for the loss of Jen – although, in Leap, their paths never cross. It’s an engaging enough dual narrative as the two come to terms with their grief but it lacks grit. Events wash over with a sense of distance that never draws the reader into the unfolding storylines.

Shortlisted for the 2016 Miles Franklin Award, Leap lost out to Black Rock White City by A.S.Patric.

‘Maestro’ by Peter Goldsworthy

The ordinariness of 1960s Australian suburban life searching for something extraordinary is Peter Goldsworthy’s deceptively simple tale.

Transferred to the distant tropical Darwin from Adelaide, the close knit Crabbe family look to establish a life worth living, removed as they are from their passion of music. Dad (a work promotion resulting in his transfer to the Darwin hospital) is the piano player, mom is the font of knowledge as they look to teenage son Paul to make the grade. So much so Paul finds himself the reluctant student of Eduard Keller, a hard-drinking Austrian with a boozers incandescent glow and of whom little in known.

Narrated from the perspective of an adult Paul, more than a tinge of remorse and regret underpins Maestro as the now underachieving recital pianist reflects on the opportunities once offered by Keller. Whilst his parents trade music-related witticisms and help establish the likes of the local Gilbert and Sullivan Society, Paul suffers for his art. A hard-task master, the exercising of fingers forming weeks of lessons before any piano key is touched, Keller demands focus and commitment. Blunt and devoid of any social skills, the man’s history is, in part, slowly revealed. But to a teenage boy in the early 1960s, much to the regret of an older Paul, recent European history is a distant fug. The respect deserved for a musician of the Vienna Opera House, widowed Holocaust survivor and renowned teacher was neither forthcoming nor understood.

Maestro is a gentle, compassionate coming-of-age where childhood and Paul’s teenage years are one of looking to be accepted with Keller and piano lessons a chore. It’s only as a less-than-successful adult can he reflect on missed opportunities and the reality of a lonely, ageing old man a long way from his former sophisticated world.

An Australian Society of Authors Top 40 Australian Books of All Time, Maestro was shortlisted for the 1990 Miles Franklin Award but lost out to Tom Flood and Oceana Fine.

‘100 Days’ by Alice Pung

A story of mothers and daughters, rebellious sixteen year-old Karuna falls pregnant to a nineteen year-old she barely knows. It wasn’t planned – but then there was little attempt to prevent it. It’s all about her mother as Karuna battles for some kind of independence. Beloved dad walked out years ago, leaving Karuna’s Filipino mother to fend for herself and daughter, forced to move into a two bedroomed housing-commission flat.

At times fierce and intense but full of humour, 100 Days walks the thin line between love and control as mom dismisses virtually all contemporary medical care in favour of traditional ways and superstitions passed down through the matriarchal bloodlines. Only those legally required are reluctantly agreed to as Karuna is locked away in the flat to keep her safe – and prevent her getting into more trouble.

It’s a battle of wills as the over-protective mother takes on two jobs to help pay their way – a once self-employed beautician must now work for another in a local hair salon before seeing the nights out as a waitress in the near-by Chinese restaurant. A sense of control over her own life (and that of her future child) becomes the battleground when Karuna realises mother intends to raise the baby as her child so that the young mother can go back to school and get on with her own life.

It’s a rollercoaster ride of emotions as the two women lock horns with only the occasional interjection from the outside as Karuna’s pregnancy inches towards completion. One hundred days. It’s no time at all, she tells me. But she’s not the one waiting states Karuna, the part-time narrator as she writes for her child.

Warm yet incisive, 100 Days is brimming with love and rebellion as the mother supports her daughter in the only way she knows, even if neither Karuna nor the authorities always appreciate or agree.

Shortlisted for the 2022 Miles Franklin Award, Alice Pung and her 100 Days lost out to Bodies of Light by Jennifer Downs.