2012 Australian Women Writers Challenge in summary

I have completed the 2012 Australian Women Writers Challenge!

This post is to record how I went compared to my challenge criteria, and to give a very short overview of each book.

First, the books. They were:

2012 Australian Women Writers Challenge Review: Unpolished Gem by Alice Pung

Unpolished Gem by Alice Pung
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Blurb from Goodreads

This is an original take on a classic story – how a child of immigrants moves between two cultures. In place of piety and predictability, however, Unpolished Gem offers a vivid and ironic sense of both worlds. It combines the story of Pung’s life growing up in suburban Footscray with the inherited stories of the women in her family – stories of madness, survival and heartbreak. Original and brave, this is a girl’s own story that introduces an unforgettable voice and captures the experience of Asian immigrants to Australia.

My review

First, a bit of background to my reading of this book. I grew up in a part of Sydney where there were many people of Asian descent. Those who were my age had often either been born in Australia to parents who were recent immigrants, or had come to Australia as children. Many of my friends were of Asian descent, from a variety of ethnic and cultural backgrounds. I tended to see the similarities between my friends and me – they were, after all, my friends – and I often did not understand why they reacted to certain things so differently, especially in relation to their interactions and relationships with their families.

In the years since high school, I have grown to understand much more. Unpolished Gem allowed me to take another leap in my understanding of some of my friends. At the very least, this means that if Ms Pung is writing for the wider Australian audience, to give them an insight into the life of a certain section of the Australian community, she has nailed it. (I am quite curious to know if she has nailed the audience within the section of the Australian community she is writing about.)

Ms Pung’s writing is impeccable.

2012 Australian Women Writers Challenge Review: We of the Never Never by Mrs Aeneas Gunn

We of the Never Never by Jeannie Gunn
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Blurb from Goodreads

An Australian classic. Depicts the enduring hardships of life in the Australian outback and the battles against sexist and racial prejudices.

My review

One of the things I tried to do for this challenge was to read a number of books I have been meaning to read for some time. We of the Never Never was one such book. Because it is an Australian classic from the early 20th century, I expected to find parts of it confronting, and in that, I was not disappointed.

A quick precis: the book is a memoir of the author’s first year on the Elsey, a station in the Northern Territory, several days’ journey (by the modes of transport then available) from Katherine. She is there because she has just married the Elsey’s manager, referred to in the book as “the Maluka” (this is later explained to be a name given to him by the Aboriginal people they have contact with and is, at least, so the author tells us, untranslateable). She is the only non-Aboriginal woman on the Elsey. She tells the story of her journey from Darwin to the Elsey early in the Wet season, and goes on to narrate other episodes, including staffing difficulties, the completion of the homestead and trips out on the station.

2012 Australian Women Writers Challenge Review: Cargo by Jessica Au

Cargo by Jessica Au
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Blurb from Goodreads (NB: edited for ableist language)

Gillian is fifteen, [disabled] by [an] accident but dreams of swimming across oceans.

Jacob is fourteen and yearns for his brother’s life.

Frankie is fifteen and in love with the new deckhand on her father’s boat.

As the story of these three desires intertwine over the course of one lazy summer in a small coastal town, Cargo is by turns heart-wrenching, beautiful and explosive.

In a simple time of truth and change, these are characters who do not know themselves, yet through their innocence we come to understand what it means to be young, and have all the troubles in the world.

My review

Cargo is a beautiful, moving book. Ms Au has captured the insecurities of adolescence brilliantly.

2012 Australian Women Writers Challenge Review: Carpentaria by Alexis Wright

Carpentaria by Alexis Wright
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Blurb from Goodreads

Carpentaria is Alexis Wright’s second novel, an epic set in the Gulf country of northwestern Queensland.

The novel’s portrait of life in the precariously settled coastal town of Desperance centres on the powerful Phantom family, leader of the Westend Pricklebush people, and its battles with old Joseph Midnight’s renegade Eastend mob on the one hand, and the white officials of Uptown and the neighbouring Gurfurrit mine on the other.

Wright’s storytelling is operatic and surreal: a blend of myth and scripture, politics and farce. The novel teems with extraordinary characters – the outcast saviour Elias Smith, the religious zealot Mozzie Fishman, the murderous mayor Bruiser, the moth-ridden Captain Nicoli Finn, the activist Will Phantom, and above all, the rulers of the family, the queen of the rubbish-dump and the fish-embalming king of time, Angel Day and Normal Phantom – figures of such an intense imagining, they stand like giants in this storm-swept world….

My review

I can see why Carpentaria won a Miles Franklin Award. It is a big book which tells an important story in a manner likely to be novel to many readers.

On its face, Carpentaria is the story of a town, Desperance, on the Gulf of Carpentaria, giving the reader an insight into tensions within the Aboriginal communities on the outskirts of the town and between them and the white people who live in the town itself. Underneath that, and far more importantly, it is a story about family, Country and Culture.

My books for the 2012 Australian Women Writers Challenge

As per my last post, I will be starting the 2012 Australian Women Writers Challenge tomorrow.

I have collected over 20 books by Australian women writers which I have not read before, and have selected 10 which, taken together, satisfy the extra criteria I set for myself.

Those 10 books are:

2012 Australian Women Writers Challenge

Thanks to lauredhel and Galactic Suburbia, I have been made aware of the 2012 Australian Women Writers Challenge.

In brief, a person can sign up to read a specified number of books within the year, and to write a (smaller) specified number of reviews. There are different levels of the challenge, and you can add other aspects to your own challenge to make it more personally challenging.

Given that I read quite a lot, and that my reading is skewed towards women writers (and often towards Australian women writers), and that my genre tastes are fairly catholic, it makes sense for me to go for the Franklin-fantastic Devoted Eclectic. This means I am committing to read at least 10 books, in as many different genres as possible, and to write at least 4 reviews, including at least one substantial one.

However, this will not be particularly challenging for me – I think I could get it done very comfortably by the end of January, even with the reviews (although these do add another dimension, not being something I would normally do).

So here is what I am doing to make it more challenging:

Elsewhere…

I’ve put up a couple of posts on Hoyden About Town recently, which I have not cross-posted here.

If you’re interested they are:

Quickhit: Malaria vaccine now a reality – the post title says it all.

Mortgagees vs tenants – about NAB’s attempt in Melbourne to have a tenant evicted immediately, rather than on 28 days’ notice, after the bank, as mortgagee, took possession of the property following default under the mortgage by the landlord/mortgagor (NB: the bank withdrew its application, probably because of the public outcry).

Rarely used laws? Depends who you ask – about the fact that charges for public order offences are only rarely used from the point of view of privileged groups; their overuse is a real problem for marginalised groups, especially Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.