Deborah Biancotti has written a gorgeous essay about how creepy, horrific, threatening and generally unfriendly she finds the Australian landscape. It’s a brilliant piece of writing, undercutting and at the same time contributing to a couple of centuries of problematic attempts by writers and artists to describe, capture and define something that is pretty damn alien.

I remember hearing a story of a “genius” English painter who came out to Australia to capture the landscape, only to discover that we had the wrong kind of green. Not in paint, you understand. The trees were the wrong kind of green. Traditionally, most 19th century Australian painters approached our landscape as if it was – well, England, only without the hedgehogs.

I’m sure every country and culture has an idealised literary tradition to rail against. (Have you read a Beatrix Potter lately? Jemima Puddleduck, for example, rivals Tess of the D’Urbervilles for a place on the list of “books that make you want to kill yourself.”) But there’s something about Australia – the combination of fear and dread and danger and shame… the fact that even someone my age was so swamped with British culture that I have struggled to understand or appreciate any of the Great Australian Authors.

I live in Tasmania, which is completely unlike most of the rest of Australia. The thing, though, about Australia, is that just about everywhere is unlike most of the rest of Australia. The idea of some kind of collective identity seems strange. I remember when I and the other ROR writers were putting our series bible and pitch for the Lost Shimmaron series – we all lived in different parts of Australia, but we needed a town to base all the stories in. For the sake of appealing to as wide a range of Australian kids as possible, we needed somewhere generic, but you know, there is no generic Australian town, or generic Australian experience. There’s a big difference between living in Queensland, or New South Wales, or Tasmania, and that’s even before you get to the great divide between the eastern and western states.

Everything about living in and with the Australian landscape is a struggle. Just about every English or imported plant is now classified as a weed. Something like the blackberry, which is innocuous in its home country (cold winters kill plants. our winters just don’t get cold enough, even in Tasmania) can be a deadly, choking hazard in Australia.

(I really like blackberry jam.)

It’s become fashionable and I’m sure, environmentally necessary, to hack out and get rid of many plantations of ‘introduced’ species. But the thing about English plants, for example, is that they make great fire breaks. Eucalypts burn.

(I’d rather sit under a willow tree than a gum tree any day of the week)

When I first started writing imaginary landscapes, I felt very much as if the English landscape was the default for fantasy. I’d read far more Arthur Ransome, CS Lewis and E. Nesbit novels in my childhood than Ethel Turner.

(I’ve still never read a novel by Ethel Turner. Would you pick up a novel called “Seven Little Australians”? Sounds vile. I quite like Nan Chauncy, though.)

It was a big deal for me to introduce Australian (or at least, Tasmanian) elements into my fantasy. I got more and more comfortable with it, through stories like “Delta Void and the Unicorn Soup,” or “The Bluebell Vengeance.” It was particularly hard, I think, because I was mostly writing comedy, and the Australian landscape has always been better at grim, dangerous, angry and lost than, you know, funny. Finally, with “Siren Beat,” I threw myself wholeheartedly into it, constructing an urban fantasy world that felt to me as familiar as it did weird. Not coincidentally, it’s also one of the darker pieces I’ve ever written. Meanwhile, I’m working on my “writing actual non-fantasy set in Tasmania” fear, with a novel set in an imaginary North West Coast town that feels more real to me than Penguin or Boat Harbour. I wrote it in collaboration with Kaia, who has never set foot in Australia.

(Yes, we really have a town called Penguin)

Like Deb, I feel pretty estranged from the Australian landscape, for many reasons. I’m still pretty sure I don’t want to live anywhere else, though. And writing about it is, however problematic, never boring. Endless possibilities, right here in this one country. The weather is changing. We’re running out of water. It’s getting a bit scary over here. And yet, there’s a comfort in that Australia was never really a comfortable place to live.

Deb said it better. Go read her essay. And while you’re at it, buy her book. If you’re at all interested in the very problematic question of what an Australian writer is, this is a very good place to start.

The question that GJ seemed to chew over most often – and it was a question I had about my own story, back when I was writing it – was “is it suburban enough?” The idea of an Australian genre anthology that focuses on suburbia rather than the more often-seen country/bush/outback and even urban settings of Australian spec fic was an important one, worthy of being embraced rather than skirted around as a theme. We ended up having many conversations about Australian identity, and suburbia, as well as the kind of fantasy people are writing in Australia and internationally. The most interesting thing is that there is no single universal experience about suburbia – some are more urban, some more rural, some are stories about drugs and sharehouses, some are stories about families and maternity. Suburban fantasy, in other words, is not something that can be summed up in a single story, but the anthology is the perfect medium for it – building the idea through many stories, many characters, and many settings.

Australia is just so damned big – and so different, from place to place. There may be common themes in stories told about Brisbane suburbs, or Perth suburbs, or Hobart suburbs, but there’s a lot different too. It seems to me that one of the best ways to talk about cultural identity in a wider sense than just an individual’s experience is to gather a variety of stories and hope that the whole is more than the sum of its parts.

It’s a long time since I’ve been this close to an anthology in progress, and it’s been fascinating to watch it unfurl! The rest of you will have to wait until later in the year, of course, to read the book for yourselves. But in the mean time, here is the (possibly not yet complete) Table of Contents:

Liz Argall – Seed Dreams (comic)
Peter Ball – One Saturday Night, With Angel
Deborah Biancotti – Never Going Home
Simon Brown – Sweep
Stephanie Campisi – How to Select a Durian at Footscray Market
Thoraiya Dyer – Yowie
Dirk Flinthart – Walker
L L Hannett – Weightless
Pete Kempshall – Signature Walk
Ben Peek – White Crocodile Jazz
Tansy Rayner Roberts – Relentless Adaptations
Barbara Robson – Neighbourhood Watch
Angela Slatter – Brisneyland by Night
Cat Sparks – All The Love in the World
Anna Tambour – Gnawer of the Moon Seeks Summit of Paradise
Kaaron Warren – Loss
Sean Williams – Parched (poem)

Wives isn’t just a great piece of fiction, it’s an important piece of fiction.

Here is what I said about it in Last Short Story last year:

For me, the brilliance of Paul Haines is that he writes stories I hate, about people I hate (and I don’t mean mild revulsion, I mean actual HATE), and yet I can’t pull my eyes away. “Wives” is his best work to date, an utterly hideous vision of the near future, exploring issues that are already very relevant to many people – the lack of women sticking around in country Australia, the sociological effect of preferring male children to female and, oh yes, the ingrained misogyny that hovers just out of sight in our culture. Haines exposes the ugliest sides of human nature in this epic story of “Bridal Services,” rape and slavery, told through the eyes of a narrator so utterly screwed up by his circumstances that it’s hard to blame him for the despicable, thoughtless way that he speaks, lives and acts. This is post-apocalyptic fiction at its best and worse, because there is no apocalypse. There’s just us.

(in discussion with my fellow LSSers about “Wives,” I said “I don’t know whether I want to nominate it for the Tiptree or BURN IT TO THE GROUND.” Yeah, that. Just that.)

I’d love to see Australian representation in all the categories of the Hugos – Peter M Ball’s Horn alongside “Wives” in the novella category, Kaaron Warren’s Slights as novel, Jonathan Strahan and Alisa Krasnostein as Best Editor (short form), Robert Hood as best fan writer for Undead Backbrain… Peter M Ball for the John W Campbell (Robert Hoge suggested Lezli Robyn for this category too, great idea)… My favourite Margo Lanagan story of the year was “Ferryman” in Firebirds Soaring, though her novella “Sea-Hearts” (in X6, the same antho as the Haines novella) was also excellent. I also loved “Seventeen,” by Cat Sparks, which won the Aurealis for YA short story.

If you’re Australian and want to see some Aussie works on the ballot, or if you’re from overseas and are coming out here for Aussiecon or otherwise eligible to vote for the Hugos (or just you know, interested in what the best Australian spec fic is right now), it would definitely be worth your while to check out some of the above people/works. But, you know. Start with Wives.

I haven’t decided all the novels, short stories and novelettes I want to nominate myself, but there will certainly be some Australian names alongside some internationally brilliant pieces like Kij Johnson’s “Spar,” Holly Black’s “The Coldest Girl in Coldtown,” (available free online), Karen Joy Fowler’s “The Pelican Bar” and Sara Genge’s “As Women Fight.”

For ‘best related book’ I will be nominating: On Joanna Russ by Farah Mendelsohn, The Secret Feminist Cabal by Helen Merrick and The Wiscon Chronicles 3 by Liz Henry.

(meanwhile my honey has recommended both Logicomix and Pluto in the graphic novel section, and I plan to catch up with both of these before the time comes to nominate)

About Aussiecon 4 and nominating: www.aussiecon4.org.au
About the Hugo Awards: www.thehugoawards.org

Oh yes, I have my biases. When it comes to literature with a capital L, I can be positively bigoted, and I keep telling myself that, whatever my past experiences, however much that Carmel Bird novel that was apparently “just like a fantasy novel” was in fact, not in any way like a fantasy novel, I should challenge myself on occasion, and get over it.

To this end, I bought a subscription to Overland Magazine in their last subscription drive, and my first issue arrived a few weeks ago. I’d heard vaguely about this particular publication over the years, because of its tangential relationship to the SF scene – they’ve published  benpeek, and Rjurik Davidson is one of their associate editors. Apparently they are also planning to review some specfic works this year…

So yes, I subscribe in a random act of small press kindness, and today (having run out of Doctor Who Magazine to read) I went through it, cover to cover. I was far more impressed with the articles than the literary content – I am almost entirely incapable of reading poetry for pleasure, and I found all three of the stories revolved around fairly unlikeable, unchanging characters. In particular, I found Virginia Peters’ “The Fat Man” to be a quite repulsive story about a woman’s disgust at sight of the man who comes to fix her computer. The fat man of the story’s title was dehumanised and ridiculed, both in the protagonist’s head and in the narrative of the story itself, without any apparent point.

The non fiction was a treat, though. The standout essay was a critical analysis of the way that Nick Cave has been reinvented as a harmless, middle-of-the-road aging rock relic when his success has largely revolved around music about the murder and debasement of women. The essay presents its case from a personal angle (the author, Anwyn Crawford, is a former Nick Cave fan who admits to her own biases and talks about the problems inherent in being a female lover of rock music) but also has a lot to say in the way that the media (and Cave himself) have constructed his image. I was particularly interested in Crawford’s debunking of the “myth” that it was their famous duet that saved Kylie Minogue’s career and helped to relaunch her as a credible music figure; rather, Crawford argues, it was Nick Cave who benefited from the collaboration, which was the beginning of his own mainstream acceptance. If you have any interest in feminism and its uncomfortable relationship with the music industry, it’s worth reading this article.

I also really appreciated Francesca Rendle-Short’s bittersweet article about her changing relationship with her obsessively religious father as he descends into Alzheimers, and Darshana Jayemanne’s article about the question of whether computer games can be considered art, and why so many people think the question isn’t even worth asking. Liz Thompson and Ben Rosenzweig also tackle the politics of international students in Australia, and the way that they are being exploited in the workplace. Considering that I was just watching Julia Gillard discussing this very issue on the 7:30 report earlier today, you can’t fault Overland when it comes to being up to date on current issues.

I consider the first issue of Overland a success as far as this year’s experiment goes. I’d love to see some fiction that I enjoy more, but I’m not exactly lacking for quality short fiction to read. My dislike of poetry isn’t a problem, as the number of poems published in this particular issue is restrained enough for me to ignore without feeling ripped off. The mix of writers and general high quality of content means that I am definitely reading this magazine for the articles.