I do other things beside write fiction, but somehow fiction has become central to my life – a ritual balancing of personal vision with the Great Out There. As a teenager in Melbourne during the seventies, I thought of myself as a peculiar hybrid, isolated and inwardly different. Part of this was my mixed heritage, Greek Cypriot on my father’s side, Anglo-Australian on my mother’s. To all appearances I was a Greek boy clinging to the rim of the blond world. At the same time I had a contempt for ‘wog-stuff’, symbolized by phony wrestling and men carrying knives. Later, as I matured, I tried to develop the language-skills to turn the Hellenic lock, but the truth is I never felt Greek. Nor could I feel comfortably Australian. While it was a torment at the time, I now recognise that it was this sense of alienation that pushed me towards the arts, as a sort of transcendence or self-assertion.
My first creative interest was painting. I trained as an art teacher at Melbourne State College, but when I got out into secondary schools I didn’t find the work satisfying. Simultaneously, I studied literature at Melbourne University. While there, in the early eighties, I began a modest writing career with stories in various little magazines and newspapers.
However, in 1984 I went to teach in the small central Victorian town of Wedderburn, about 70 kilometers north of Bendigo. With my partner Evalyn I had romantic notions of what rural life could be. Like the character Bala in my novel ‘Furies’ I was besotted with the dream of creating a Permaculture; a new Eden in the sticks. I imagined a community of like-minded people. After tending our plants and animals we would all come together in a spirit of creative endeavour to write, paint and make music. I’m sure I’m not the only city-bred person to be so deluded.
Not surprisingly, my closest friends during those Wedderburn years came from urban backgrounds. By chance I met the poet and novelist Ian Irvine/Hobson, then unpublished and living in a relocatable box in the burning scrub. It was largely Ian’s wide-ranging conversation that buttressed me against the dissatisfactions of small town life. This isn’t to say the locals were unfriendly. It’s simply that their hot issues were sheep, football and debutante balls. Though baffled to begin with, I gradually became familiar, over thirteen years, with the submerged currents of intrigue, family history and personal rivalry that were the stuff of Wedderburn conversation. It was this knowledge that I drew on to write ‘Furies’.
‘FURIES’, University of Queensland Press, 2004
I conceived of ‘Furies’ as a portrait of two misplaced women, but inevitably it became a story about place and the sadness of decaying country towns.
Nicky Daniels is a Melbourne-born Greek - Daniels is the surname of her vanished husband. At forty-one, she has done her best to mesh into the life of her adopted rural town. Apart from her professional work as a teacher, she is a fundraising do-gooder and perpetual committee-woman. Even so, many people despise her, largely because she bucks against gender prejudices that would be laughable in the city but continue on in rural Rushburn.
The title is a reference to the ancient Greek concept of a chorus of vengeful figures who punish people who break with traditional usages. In Rushburn Nicky has worked hard to placate the Furies of conservative opinion, but essentially she’s an urban woman and her needs aren’t being met. Her boyfriend Pug is a one-dimensional opportunist who appears in her bed late at night when he’s drunk but won’t acknowledge her in the street. Her best girlfriend is a farmer’s daughter with an arts degree, sincere and kind, but whose platitudes have no real relevance for Nicky, and offer no solace in her loneliness.
The other major figure is 15-year-old Imogen, raised by Nicky after her birth-mother committed suicide. Rushburn-raised, Imogen is self-assured, generous-natured and apparently content within her closed world. She imagines she belongs. Like her peers, she’s absorbed by the coming pomp and glitter of her deb ball, though for her it’s a means of achieving equality with all those complete and conventional families she envies. Like most people she believes she’s admired and loved for her unique individual qualities. But her closest friend Melanie is too starved of human attention to offer Imogen anything emotionally sustaining. As for guys, their minds don’t range far beyond sex. For a while, following Nicky’s pragmatic example, she’s comfortable with this, but of course there’s a moment of revelation when she discovers how limiting and unsatisfying her life is.
In fact the book comes back again and again to unsatisfying evocations of community: to the town itself, to attempts by Nicky’s husband and friends to create a Permaculture in the unforgiving scrub, to Imogen’s elevation of old time dancing to a ritual of social harmony. But if their dreams are wild or plain silly, these women have a reliable anchorage in each other. It’s a fluid relationship, with many shifting roles: they are guardian and ward, mother and daughter, antagonists, allies, sisters, friends, despised wreckers of one another’s happiness.
I don’t think the touch-points of this central relationship are place-specific. People feel lonely and under-valued in all sorts of environments. Nicky feels it as a Greek girl growing up in Melbourne; but in a very small community the external forces are sharpened and intensified. In country towns the Furies have individual faces.
‘SILENT PARTS’, University of Queensland Press, 2006
Until his mother dies on a bleak night in 1917 Harry Lambert never doubts that he has a place in the world: he is a small-town baker, only son of Sammy and Sarah, respected pioneers of the district - not in himself anyone important or admirable, but a master of self-deprecation and therefore, he supposes, forgiven for being big, flabby and bookish. But the stress of the Great War has turned his neighbours harsh and critical. No one is exempt from duty - not even a middle-aged goose like Harry. As he buries his mother he’s told, ‘So, there’s nothing keeping you now.’ He could resist, if he valued himself more highly. Instead he becomes an unlikely soldier and embarks for France, never to return.
Fifty years later the fractious Lambert clan comes together to commemorate the Armistice. Every branch has its Uncle Harry story. It’s Julie Keely’s job to reconcile the differing Harrys. From the beginning she doubts he was a military hero, or even ‘a good bloke who did his bit’. She’s intrigued by a whisper that he was an unabashed coward who ran from the enemy. On the other hand, he’s assigned several brave and gory deaths. Despite his hung-dog expression in the old photos, he’s said to have been ‘a great one for the girls’. There’s also fantastic talk of a French wife, and children.
Somewhere behind all this, unable to object to the exaggerations and half-truths, is Harry himself. For eight weeks during the German offensive of 1918 he shares a house with an unknowable Frenchwoman. She understands no English. He has just a few words of French. Nevertheless, they come to relish their silent parts, creating a hidden monument of need that defies the interpretations of posterity.
The germ of this story came from an incident I read about in Brent C Dickerson’s ‘Old Rose Advisor’, Timber Press, 1992. An American soldier, on his way to the front in 1918, finds he has a spare hour between trains in the French town of Dijon. Mindful of the carnage he will face ahead – of the bleak inversion of the moral order, where a man’s purpose is not to do good but to kill – he seeks out a ramshackle plant nursery where his favourite family rose originated forty years before. For him the rose is the quintessential emblem of peace, a created object that, like all the arts, could not exist without human cooperation. With this visit, he affirms the values of his civilian life.
Adelaide Advertiser 25/9/2004 - Furies
Courier Mail 21/8/2004 - Furies
Wangaratta Chronicle 25/2/2005 - Furies
The Border Mail 9/10/2004 - Furies
Geelong Advertiser 11/12/2004 - Furies
Weekend Australian 2/10/2004 - Furies
The Age 16/9/2006 - Silent Parts
Canberra Times 5/8/2006 - Silent Parts
Courier Mail 12/8/2006 - Silent Parts
Sun Herald 3/9/2006 - Silent Parts
Wangaratta Chronicle 13/9/06 - Silent Parts
University of Queensland Press
author@johncharalambous.com