Poor Fellow My Country

 I recently bought Xavier Herbert's Capricornia. This book, Poor Fellow My Country is out of print; I picked up this edition from the library yesterday. And according to GW, it is surely the least read of the major Australian novels, in no small part due to it being 1463pp long. That makes it a third longer again than War and Peace! Still, I've made a start. Sure, it's full of "grandiloquent editorials" but the description of place and person is worth the ear-bashing. And it does educate about this time in history. The British Lord Vestey of Paul Kelly's song about Vincent Lingiari (From Little Things, Big Things Grow) comes to life as Lord Alfred Vaisey in this book.

Listen to this description of the landscape: a "vast expanse of treelessness, cut into three or four paddocks, the fences of which ran so far they ended climbing into silvery uplands of mirage where a few trees grew upside down and cattle were grazing in the sky".

Magic. I want to spend some time in that landscape myself.

Also of note, we were in Buderim yesterday and I was trying to show K and DJ the deli that had grown out of the Ginger Shop. But it's now Buderim Rare Books. They stock quite a few intriguing Australian titles and I look forward to going back to find some treasures.

Re-ignited by The Burning Library

So I had been reading The Fortunes of Richard Mahony on the Kindle and quite enjoying it; I think I am up to the third book that is three books in one. But then I have been down a major side-track of reading Big History and that's also been a lot of fun, something I want to keep going with, too.

However, Geordie Williamson, who is a literary critic, has published this book which I simply had to have. And it has helped to sharpen the focus of the wide lens that is the FAN list. Williamson has written essays on 14 Australian novelists, authors whom Williamson admits are linked by the quality of eccentricity. "The Burning Library is an attempt to reconstitute a lost backstory of our literature. It is braided from the lives and works of authors who have been underestimated or discredited by ways of thinking about literature instituted in recent decades". Geordie Williamson is angered by the all but complete extinction (is complete redundant, there?) of OzLit in Australian Universities and the fact that many fine Australian novels are no longer in print.

And sure enough, many of the books in his essays are perhaps to be found in Leura Books, Trove, maybe fishpond or ebay as second hand, some of the mainstream ones are in the local library, but most seem a little tricky to find. (I have yet to check through the 3 discs worth of Kindle titles that I was given a while ago but I am not so hopeful there.) Text Publishing has some titles, maybe Melbourne University Press; Sydney Uni had one title referred to in an essay as 'print on demand'. Some I have read (Jessica Anderson, Christina Stead, Patrick White... but their ouevre is much larger than the list "allows" for and often the best books are not even mentioned).

Perhaps most excitingly, there are authors in The Burning Library who are totally new to me: Dal Stivens, Amy Witting and Olga Masters are the 3 I'd not heard of.