Another literary scandal – another author with a fabulous advance turns out to be so brilliant she unconsciously memorises whole passages from books she read years ago and accidentally rewrites them into her own astoundingly successful novel.
Timely, too – just around the tenth anniversary of my personal favourite, The Helen “I Only Pretended to be Anti-Semitic” Demidenko Scandal.
Radio National’s Lynne Malcolm caught up with her recently (now a lawyer in Queensland who goes by the name of Helen Dale), and – surprise, surprise – she still can’t see what all the fuss was about.

Lynne Malcolm: I’d just like to go back to your awareness about what you did. How did you feel about the possibility that you deeply hurt some people that were involved in that era of history, that it was offensive to people—you mentioned to me before the reaction that partner had to reading your book. It’s not an easy book.
Helen Dale: It’s not a nice book. No. I didn’t set out to write a nice book, and I don’t believe you can, about that particular period in history. People do not have a right to be free of offence. It’s something that I’ve thought about very seriously over a long period of time. If a book offends you, don’t read it. If people were offended, they were probably offended, rather than by anything that I’d particularly written, by some extremely thoughtless and careless media reporting. The way the media constructs something like this is—you get this situation where a complex issue is reduced to a brawl where you get the two most extreme positions, and yes, sure, someone’s get offended. But people can’t go around saying you’ve offended me, therefore you need to be quiet. In a fight, in a knock-down, drag-out fight between freedom of speech and freedom from offence, for me, freedom of speech will win every single time. In that sense I’m Dworkinian. Freedom of speech is a right; rights are trumps. Rights trump everything else.
Lynne Malcolm: Is there any aspect, though, that you feel a sense of remorse about, or do you regret anything—do you feel you’ve made any mistakes?
Helen Dale: Oh, I regret writing the book.
Lynne Malcolm: Why?
Helen Dale: Oh, from the get-go, but that’s more an issue of economics, opportunity and opportunism on my part. The idea that you can make a living as a writer in Australia is completely nuts and I should never have done it …

I don’t know why I’m still astounded. My only hope is that I never get into trouble with the law in Queensland.

Sorry for the thundering silence – I’ve been ill and too stupid to think. Back soon.
K

From tomorrow I’ll be in Sydney, at the Children’s Book Council conference, Book Now.
I have no idea whether I can blog from there, but I’ll try to keep a few rational thoughts aside to post when I can.
Cheers.

“We are the lantern bearers, my friend; for us to keep something burning, to carry what light we can forward against the darkness and the wind”.
– Rosemary Sutcliff
This timeless line is from The Lantern Bearers, one of her novels for young readers about the centuries-long battle between Briton, Roman, and then Saxon civilisations.

I had thought Kate Grenville was backing off a little from her claims that novelists are somehow able to write more authentic history than historians. Or perhaps she didn’t mean it quite that forcefully.
Clearly that was not the case.
Shortlisted, along with several other writers of historical fiction, for the Miles Franklin Award (which I admit has never quite recovered its lustre after the Demidenko debacle), she had this to say:

“There’s a sense that a cupboard has been opened in the last 20 years that was always closed before in Australian history. We built a big, beautiful armoire and put the uncomfortable parts of our history in there.
“Bit by bit, door by door, the cupboard is being opened. Lawyers and historians have played their part and now the novelists are moving in.”

Them’s fightin’ words!
I wonder what Robert Hughes (Fatal Shore) or even Alan Moorehead (Fatal Impact) would think of being dismissed so lightly? Not to mention novelists from Marcus Clarke (For the Term of his Natural Life) or poets like Judith Wright (everything).

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old;
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them…
As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust,
Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain;
As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,
To the end, to the end they remain.

‘For the Fallen’, Laurence Binyon, The Times, 21 September 1914
(From The Winnowing Fan: Poems of the Great War in 1914)

It’s bucketing rain today. I woke up early, almost early enough to go to the Dawn Service, got up to check we weren’t being flooded, and was greeted by a shower of cold water on my still-sleepy head. It was raining inside the house.
That still wasn’t enough motivation to get me out into the weather for the first service. I might go later. Last year, for the first time, I wore my great-grandfather’s ribbon bar. Trooper Horsfield was a stretcher bearer and medical orderly in the South African War, and then in Palestine and Flanders. I never knew him, never even knew about his war service until recently, as he was gassed and died later of complications when Dad was still young.
When Dad heard I was writing about World War One ambulance drivers (a few years ago now) and had also started collecting medals, he gave me the ribbon bar and silver Wound Badge.
Anzac Day has always meant a lot to me, even though it was not supposed to if you were on the Left in Australia in the ’80s and ’90s. We’ve always been in two minds: the other side of Dad’s family were leading anti-conscription campaigners during the War To End All Wars. And on the other hand, I’m obsessed with military history. I find now that it all fits together perfectly easily in my head. How? I’ll explain another time.
But Anzac Day means a great deal more since I’ve been to Turkey and understood more deeply what the conflict meant to the Turkish people – and since I stood in the little graveyard near Anzac Cove and stared up at the impenetrable hills.
Nearby stands the monument on which is inscribed one of the most moving and generous statements on any war memorial. It’s from Ataturk’s 1934 speech – the words of the man who was by then the leader of the country but who in 1915 was a young commander in the defending forces.

Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives: You are now living in the soil of a friendly country therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side here in this country of ours.
You, the mothers, who sent their sons from faraway countries wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well.

Two thousand years before, across the blue Aegean from the Dardanelles, someone else who knew how to stir up the emotions, wrote something more abstract but equally fitting:

Each one, man for man, has won imperishable praise, each has gained a glorious grave – not that sepulchre of earth wherein they lie, but the living tomb of everlasting remembrance wherein their glory is enshrined.
For the whole earth is the sepulchre of heroes; monuments may rise and tablets be set up to them in their own land, but on the far-off shores there is an abiding memorial that no pen or chisel has traced; this is graven not on stone or brass, but on the living heart of humanity.
Take these men as your example. Like them, remember that prosperity can only be for the free; that freedom is the sure possession of those alone who have the courage to defend it.
– Pericles

The desire to build a boat … begins as a little cloud on a serene horizon. It ends by covering the whole sky so that you can think of nothing else.
– Arthur Ransome

This is the small but perfectly formed pirate ship my mate Amanda and I would love to build. Tomorrow we will have gone on to planning something else. A trek in Bhutan. Sailing to Fiji. Or something like that.
Instead we’ll probably have lunch and look at boating magazines.

The dreaming is half the fun. It’s much better than actually doing all that sanding and sawing, or hiking up a mountain, or anything too strenuous. (Well, she might do strenuous mountain climbing and undertake complicated building projects, but I prefer looking at the brochures.)

The ‘historic’ novel is, for me, condemned… to a total cheapness. [As an author] you have to think with your modern apparatus a man, a woman – or, rather, fifty – whose own thinking was intensely otherwise conditioned, you have to simplify back by an amazing tour de force – and even then it’s all humbug.
– Henry James

Devotees of realist fiction for young adults should take a look at this:
YA Kit – Create Your Own Young Adult Novel
Hilarious – or at least it would be if it wasn’t so apt.
By the way, you might have noticed a new widget down the right hand side of this blog: Library Thing is one of those brilliant, simple-yet-elegant ideas that make the web sing. Free online reading catalogue. You can see what I’ve read lately, and anyone can set up their own, even for private viewing.
It’s sensational. Also rather addictive.