Picking Up Post Threads 1: “Baggage”
We have been having a few conversations on the blog recently and so I thought it might be good to bounce a few of the threads out of “comments” and back into “posts.”
Last Saturday, I posted on the Australian short story collection Baggage, edited by Gillian Polack and published by Eneit Press. You can read the full post here, but the short version is that I very much enjoyed Baggage. Also, since it is both Australian and short fiction, reading it turned my mind back to another recent post, in which I ruminated on whether there is a form of speculative fiction that is distinctively New Zealand in character. (To ‘en-ruminate’, click here.) A key observation from last Saturday’s post, however, may have been:
” Recently I discussed … how the themes of environmental dystopia and to a lesser, but still noticeable, extent reproductive scifi, occurred within the [New Zealand] anthology A Foreign Country (Eds. K. Buchanan & A. Caro, Random Static.)”
While in terms of the Baggage I wrote:
” … I was intrigued to notice that a strong theme emerged through what were very different stories. Australia as landscape and environment was strongly present in all the stories (except the one about Franz Josef glacier, where environment/landscape was nonetheless a defining factor in the story.) The response of diverse cultures, whether positive or hostile, to that landscape, defined the anthology for me.”
Gillian’s initial reply—and I am delighted that she did reply—was (abridged—to read the full comments, click here):
” … Landscape and environment discussions didn’t actually come up that often … [in specific discussions with the authors] … but it was there from the very first drafts with all stories. Even Monica …[Carroll] … had landscape, albeit her landscape was paper.
I was thinking how dark the speculative visions of our two countries are. Not unredeemedly bleak, but not the lucky country/mateship/positive image that other media have given us. Baggage isn’t a horror anthology, but three of its stories are in Australia’s year’s best horror, for instance …”
My initial reply was, I confess, a little tongue-in-cheek although also a case of true words being spoken in jest (i.e. I do think we “don’t know how lucky we are” in this corner of the world):
“In terms of the darkness/bleakness of ANZAC speculative vision, I can’t help wondering if it isn’t because we have it so good—compared to the greater part of the world—that we have to get our suffering through fiction?”
But more seriously:
” … Another rationale may be dislocation: we are still only very recent arrivals in both a cultural and geographic sense and are still struggling with that transition, even intergenerationally: ie something of Frost’s “the land was ours before we were the lands”?”
Yesterday Gillian picked up on the dislocation observation (while—probably wisely—overlooking the one that preceded it 😉 ):
I always thought that the Australian vision had the potential for bleakness because we perceive our environment as tough and that means we get to create ourselves as tough even when we grow up in suburbia. Now I’m realising that this is only one component. The dislocation you talk about – that’s much bigger. We brought our baggage with us and don’t often address it, as well (which is why I wanted to do the anthology). We can’t belong until we understand who we are and have been, in essence.
Responding in this post, I find it difficult to conceive how the sheer harshness and difference, beauty and terror, of the Australian environment could not have overawed the early immigrants: it would simply have been so different to everything they had known before. And both the power of landscape and human awareness of it certainly came through very strongly for me in the Baggage stories.
New Zealand does not seem so harsh an environment by comparison, i.e. it’s temperate and without the extremes of vast deserts stretching to the tropics, but for both 19th and early 20th century immigrants the natural landscape would have been vastly different from those that newcomers from places as diverse as Europe (the majority) and China (a minority, but with a significant place in NZ’s settlement history) had been born to. And that their forbears for many generations, in most cases, would also have been born to—and how long does it take for a graft to become truly native stock, part of the terroir that is the interweaving of culture and environment?
Perhaps each new generation of settlers experiences terror instead—the shock of both dislocation from the old and alienation from the new. I often think, when I read both NZ’s (mainly environmental) dystopian speculative fiction (mind you— CK Stead’s Smith’s Dream) and works of contemporary realism that their “dark … visions”, to quote Gillian’s first comment, reflect an unease and discomfort with ourselves. But perhaps it is the juxtaposition of ourselves in this “world made strange”—which for NZ’s 19th century immigrants would have meant an isolated interior of dense bush country and travel that was almost always via water, whether coastal or inland, with attendant shipwrecks and deaths via drowning. There was also the perception of Maori as a threat—and although an historical perspective suggests that the perception was always far greater than the actual threat, there were violent incidents between immigrant and tangata whenua, as well as the Land Wars with the kingitangain the 1860s. And always, that sense of geographic and — again — cultural isolation, of being on the far side of the world …
There may be some readers who wonder what tangata whenua means. Interestingly, translated literally, it means ‘people land‘ and is usually interpreted as ‘the people of the land’—and is one of the names that Maori give themselves …
Which brings me to culture—how strongly it figured as a theme in Baggage, both in terms of originating culture and cultural journey to Australia, and what it subsequently means to be Australian. Yet—doing a quick (and no doubt fallible!) mental review of NZ literature, speculative or otherwise, particularly short fiction—culture is very rarely addressed in terms of the juxtaposiiton of origin and what it then means to be a New Zealander: not in the way that it is in Baggage. We sometimes address origin independently, for example in books such as Natasha Templeton’s Winter in the Summer Garden or Kapka Kassabova’s Love in the Land of Midas, but the works that most strongly address culture within the NZ context are—in my experience—those by Maori or Pacific Island writers such as Witi Ihimaera (e.g. Tangi; Whanau), Patricia Grace (e.g Mutuwhenua; Potiki; Tu) and Albert Wendt (e.g. Sons for the Return Home.) And more recently, Alison Wong’s As the Moon Turns Silver addressed the historical Chinese experience of immigration. None of these works are speculative fiction, but I think the disinterest in culture as a theme applies across all forms of contemporary NZ literature … or perhaps it isn’t disinterest, but once again that sense of dis-ease. But then again, if we were interested, wouldn’t culture pervade our work anyway, whether consciously or unconsciously?
And now I realise [laughing] that I have gotten carried away and no doubt made large claims that will not stand the too-close scrutiny of my peers … Then again on the other hand, I will admit to enjoying engaging in both speculation—the tossing about of thoughts and ideas—and a certain amount of ramble. And I must admit that for me, it is interesting ramble. So what do you think? Am I ‘warm’ in my speculation or ‘way off beam’? And would anyone like to pick up on Gillian’s observation about the: ” … baggage … [we brought] … can’t belong until we understand who we are and have been, in essence”?
I loved ‘Baggage’ for the same reasons you state. I think it takes a careful look at what it means to be Australian… and how that identity is so rich, multi-faceted, containing both dark and light. Most of all, the stories aren’t afraid to address some pretty disturbing issues that are part and parcel of the Australian psyche.
As to NZ landscapes, they were quite different in the 19th century from what they were today, of course… I always laugh at the names like ‘Mount Misery’ given to areas by the European explorers. One has the sense that some benighted explorer had just spent a month wandering up and down the West Coast forests, only to come upon YET ANOTHER MOUNTAIN… and had just. Had. Enough. 😉
Very different in the 19th century, Mary—all that dark, dense terrifying bush and the wild rivers that had to be forded; no nice safe bridges. And you may be right about the names, although Mt Misery always make me think of bad weather: cold, dank, hungry and a long way from “home.” Misery indeed.
Mary – we are a pretty disturbing country! Actually (and seriously), I was fascinated when I started to read the stories for Baggage and found that so many of them contained such darkness. It’s not an unhappy anthology, but it’s not a ray of twinkling sunlight, either. Almost all the writers chose difficult paths with more than a smidgeon of dark. I think that the whole says something about where Australia is.
In terms of dark, dense and terrifying bush, Helen, we still have it in spades. We can ignore it, but if you walk out the door in Canberra and you go in any of a half dozen directions, you can become lost and die of thirst (someone did just that a few years ago). We’re domesticated in spots only, like a cat. Those spots give us the Australia that ‘s visible to everyone else – our wonderful suburban culture (I wrote about it just the other day, as Shaun Tan’s Australia) and an exceptional degree of physical comfort, but the wilderness is always there, just outside our very suburban back door.
Gillian, I shall check out your live journal, but otherwise, do you have a link to the Shaun Tan article?
We still have the bush here, too, and it can catch people out (weather changes very quickly and rivers also rise quickly, too) but I don’t think it’s anywhere near as scary as our forbears found it. And there’s a lot less of it, probably around 80-90% less than in 1840. Scary, huh? Maybe that’s why environmental dystopia is in the forefront of our kiwi psyches?
The tan article is here: http://www.bibliobuffet.com/bookish-dreaming
I suspect that Australia is so big that it’s taking longer to domesticate. This is a good thing!
I was thinking about the fear our forbears found and how tough it was for them and I realised that this has only ever been true for a minority of Australians. Right from the beginning, we created European style towns and many of us stuck together. When I talk about my father being brought up in the country, he was really brought up in rural towns, with all the support that implies. There are large chunks of Australia that still haven’t been influenced by European-origin migrants.
In terms of the “large chunks of Australia that still haven’t been influenced by European-origin migrants” do you think that’s because it is just so big, but also because it’s also very tough, inhospitable terrain as well? I understand, for example, that well over 90% of Asutralia’s population live on the coastal fringe and that the centre is still basically “empty’ of people.
Thanks for the Tan link.:)
It’s partly because it’s tough terrain, but there are other factors. The thing that I keep noticing, time after time, is that Europeans have colonised the bits of Australia that are most like Europe or most like other European settlements. We have the densest population in the SE corner and the portion of the SW that has a Mediterranean climate, for instance. There have been people living in the ‘inhospitable’ interior for tens of thousands of years…but they didn’t come here from England and did not look for an English climate.
Another factor to consider may be that the interior, because of its toughness as an environment, can only support a relatively low population base, whereas the coastal fringes more readily support European-level densities, as well as offering European-style living in other ways? But whether Australia or New Zealand, the immigrant response to the landscape has been very much about terraforming the environment here to look more like “home”—which given the rate and pace of change has also been a form of “ecoterrorism.”