On the Right Tram at Christmas

Some of us like to give ourselves a Christmas present ... so I was thrilled when one of my fellow family history writers, Bill Barlow, chose my book Margaret Flockton: A Fragrant Memory as  his own gift to himself last Christmas. We both belong to the GSV Writers Circle in Melbourne (Genealogical Society of Victoria) and around this time last year Bill shared with our members an amusing story.

Busy and distracted by other events in 2017, I forgot to finalise it as a post for my blog (editing, pictures, etc). A tad belatedly, here it is now, before Christmas 2017 also becomes a distant memory. It comes with my best wishes to everyone for a safe and happy festive season and the very best of everything in the year to come.

The tale starts with Bill's comment to our GSV Writers' Facebook group a year ago ...

Spent the last part of today chasing down a copy of Louise's latest book - literally!

Having picked up a copy in Readings at State Library of Victoria, I made my way home on the train and tram with it in a nice brown paper carry bag - too big to fit in my normal bag. Walked home from the tram terminus in East Malvern and realised I had left it on the tram!

Ran back only to find the tram had already turned around and headed back to the city. So ran back home, jumped in the car and chased down the tram a few stops after Caulfield. Got on - but wrong tram, no book the driver said.

Off the tram, walked back to the car and then continued to chase the tram in front - all the way along Balaclava Rd and up St Kilda Rd till I spotted a no. 3 and managed to park and board that tram- crowded with city commuters. Driver said that he did notice his changeover driver carrying a brown paper bag off the tram, so probably it is back at Depot Lost Property by now.

Good news! After a long peak hour drive to the Glenhuntly depot, there it was sitting on a shelf. Now it is safely home and I will next see it on Christmas Day. I am sure it will be worth it!

No 3 Tram, St Kilda Rd, December 2017

Me: OMG, Bill. You'll never forget this book, will you? Unbelievable. I had to laugh though. It would have made a great skit for someone with a camera. Now I'm hoping and praying that, post Christmas Day, you'll think all this effort was worth it.

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Me: I heard nothing for months. Was it so bad that Bill hoped I’d forgotten his story? Just after Easter I heard from him again on this matter, and we had this exchange of comments and responses via email. It was very valuable for me to obtain feedback from someone else struggling with the difficulties of writing family history. It often gets a bad rap as a genre!

Bill: Congratulations on the Flockton book! I held it over till Easter to read when I knew I would have a few days in a row to read it as a whole - rather than my half page in bed intermittently over a long period.

Me: I know exactly what you mean by the problems of reading a page here & there before your heavy eyes won’t stay open any longer. So thank you for saving your reading until you had time to properly evaluate the book.

Bill: I think it is a very complete and thorough biography that manages to deal with a lot of potentially boring technical quotes and source material but in a way that is interesting and readable.

Me: I had to laugh when I read the words you chose to describe the book: ‘interesting and readable’. That’s what everyone says about all of my books! It’s why I decided to describe myself as a ‘nerdy’ writer!

Bill: I wouldn’t describe you that way – your writing is too mainstream, readable and not wacky enough. Maybe ‘nerdy' if that means any writer investigating history and the truth.

Me: What did you think of the book overall? 

Bill: I enjoyed the book. It is very good and I am amazed at how you pulled it all together so successfully.

Me: I’m glad you think it did come together. I tried hard to generate a readable ‘text book’, to help art historians, art auctioneers, botanists etc have accurate information to work from. At the same time I wanted to create a ‘story’, showing readers who Margaret was as a person, although that was difficult given the scarcity of her private correspondence.

Bill: After our discussions about the value in having a strong opening I was mildly surprised by your ‘cool’, non-gripping, opening sentence and paragraph.

Me: I did run this introduction past the Writers Group back in 2011 and they liked it, but that was then! We've all progressed as writers since!

A Meeting of the GSV Writers Circle, Melbourne, 2014

And I seriously considered Prof Tim Entwisle’s suggestion several years ago that I start the book with Margaret’s life in the 1890s and her successes in Sydney (the ‘works of genius’ stuff) and then backtrack but, since I personally don’t like that kind of story ‘flow’, I didn’t rearrange the book. Call me stubborn! Also, I didn’t think you could understand Mog’s life and the choices she made without knowing where she came from.

Bill: I had the same response, and thought of suggesting this, but you have already published. I certainly agree with you that it is hard to understand Mog's life without knowing where she came from. (Which is why we all do family history.)

Me: So I should have tried to make her seem like a 'star' at the start of the book?

Bill: I did take a while to get into the story, as the early England years are not particularly special if the reader doesn’t already know about Flockton in her prime and thus want to know about her formative years.

Me: Don’t think you’re alone in thinking that the first part of the book was ‘slow’. That has been the reaction of almost every male reader to date, whereas women have generally loved all the family stuff. Interesting!

Bill: The core of the book was very interesting and carried me along (and I found myself getting out my Stan Kelly and gumnut books on the eucalypts to check things).

Me: By ‘core of the book’, did you mean the entire story concept, or just the central, middle part of the book, the career section of her life? I’m keen to know where the story flagged.

Bill: I did mean the ‘career section of her life’, not the ‘entire story concept’.

I did think the concepts listed in the Introduction were a bit romantic. Lots of those subjects perhaps get a mention in the book, as you say, they 'underlie the story', but I didn’t see this as enough to make it a book about those things, e.g. ‘becoming an Australian’.

Me: Point taken –the word 'underlie' would probably have been better than 'about' in the Introduction! But the various themes flagged in the Introduction are definitely drawn together at the end of the book.

Bill: I think your summary of her life is excellent.

Me: Thank you.

Bill: I also had some queries about whether anything in her life qualified her as a feminist, that is, one who advocates for women’s rights. I guess that is why she is a ‘quiet feminist’ - one who, if asked, would agree with women’s rights.

Me: You don’t have to be an 'advocate' to be a feminist. You just have to live a life where you decline to be subservient to men and, I think, remain financially independent of them. Don’t forget she was involved in the struggle to grant her equal pay with her male public-servant peers.

Bill: Her life was, as you say a ‘quiet’, non-squeaky-wheel one.

Me: Today’s readers seem to like dramatic, over-the-top stuff, with everything spelled out in a quick read. The subtleties of quiet personalities like Margaret’s leave them cold. Some readers of this book, clearly not attuned to nuance, have said ‘But who was she? As a person?’ I never quite know how to answer such a question from people who’ve read this book yet clearly didn’t ‘get’ Margaret. Others have understood the limitations of depicting an introvert when available source material is limited.

Bill: I think you have done a great job integrating all the letters, etc in the saga of her painting and scientific illustrator careers. 

It is great having so many pictures and they are well-placed, within a page of the relevant text. It is amazing how the WW1 gave us so many fine portrait shots of the men but of course there are only a couple of Margaret in later life. Maybe Picture 176 (pulled out of the office staff shot) is the only clear one of her face at the height of her career years. You used this on the dust jacket I now see, but I would have liked it perhaps enlarged in the book up-front, alongside the Introduction instead of the maps.

Margaret Flockton, 1912 (Pic 176 in the book)

Me: The publisher Wakefield Press prides itself on the quality of images in its books and the few pictures I had of Margaret were all less than satisfactory - often blurry and of low res. So they wouldn’t use her picture on the front cover or blown up from the original and they compromised by placing a small version of the office shot on the inside of the dust jacket. I was happy with that, as I think it depicts her character pretty well, right from the time you pick up the book.

Bill: I’m not sure why there is some feeling (at the end of the Introduction) of her being hard done by, in not becoming a professional botanist. I felt she probably could have been if she had wanted to or if she was in the right time and place. After all Sarah Hynes was not a male and also wasn’t born after 1861.

Me: There was no intention on my part to convey a ‘hard done by’ impression. Blame my choice of words. I’m sure it never occurred to Margaret to become a botanist, before she reached her mid-40s anyway, when she was working full-time at the Royal Botanic Garden. There are lots of reasons (not spelled out in the book) as to why her age-peer Sarah Hynes was able to become a botanist. Sarah did not need to work to help support her parents, for one, and by the time Sarah decided to go to University, in the late 1880s, she was living in Australia, where the class structure impeded much less on educational opportunities for women.

Bill: I was left wondering about the housekeepers and companions (p. 222). They must have shared her life quite a bit, especially if they were companions, but I can’t recall hearing anything much about them.

Me: I thought about them a lot too but, despite my best efforts, I couldn’t find any information about them and I didn’t think it was fair to speculate. Many young women became spinsters because of WW1 and Mog may just have been doing ‘good works’ by employing a housekeeper and providing a roof over her head. The Flockton family had a tradition of employing servants.

Bill: I didn’t know what an INTJ personality type is (note 4, last chapter) - even though I was Myers-Briggsed years ago.

Me: Here’s a link summarising the INTJ personality profile. They are generally driven by a rational, big-picture view of the world outside themselves.

Bill: As you know, I'm in the process of writing a family history book myself. I wondered why the chapters did not get numbers?

 Me: Possibly that was a ‘style thing’ with the publisher. It didn’t strike me as a problem. The chapters have meaningful titles

Bill: The categories of the bibliography, especially your groupings of the genealogical sources, make a lot of sense.

Me: When you look at the bibliography, it’s amazing just how many sources I did have to consult in order to piece her life story together over so many years!

Bill: A chronological list of her known fine art paintings and whereabouts would have been good.

Me: Not possible, I’m afraid, but that’s why I included all the works entered to the Art Society exhibitions each year, despite the unhelpful nature of their titles. That’s the nearest I could get to a catalogue of her fine art. The Art Society hasn’t kept any sales records so I don’t know who bought most of the paintings, or where they are today. Maybe this book will flush out some art lovers. Most of the owners who I have located wish to remain anonymous.

Bill: It’s interesting how one’s view about life colours how we see the lives we write about.

Me: Pure objectivity is impossible!! And, if it could be achieved, I think it would detract from the appeal of family history books.

Bill: Thanks for sharing this opportunity for an exchange of views, via the communication channel your book has offered between the writer and a reader.

Me: Thank you, Bill, for taking the time to provide this valuable feedback ... an easy kind of Christmas gift to give an author. I think all authors crave the evidence that their book has provoked reader reaction. We need reassurance that, after all the effort involved in the writing of a book, it didn’t just drop into the void, that someone thought about what it meant! 

POSTSCRIPT: For your information, Margaret Flockton: A Fragrant Memory sold out during 2017 but Wakefield Press has been collecting orders and looks likely to reprint it soon as a paperback. 

The Signature of All Things - a Review

Last Wednesday at noon I picked up a copy of ‘The Signature of All Things’, the book for discussion at my book club meeting last Thursday at noon. Imagine my horror when I discovered two things - a) it contained 580 pages and b) it was by the same author as ‘Eat, Pray, Love’, which I'd regarded as rather self-indulgent and not particularly enjoyable. ‘Oh, no’, I thought. ‘I’d better send my apologies and stay at home.’ 

Then I read the opening line. Alma Whitaker, born with the century, slid into our world on the fifth of January, 1800. I was hooked by the end of the first page. 

Alma is a child of the New World, born in Philadelphia, USA. Four pages on, we step back to 1760 when Alma’s father Henry was born at Richmond in England. Henry was the son of an orchard man at Kew gardens. Later the imagined Henry meets Sir Joseph Banks, sails with Captain Cook and marries the Dutch woman Beatrix van Devender, daughter of a custodian of the Hortus botanical garden in Amsterdam. The scene is set for a novel embracing the grand themes of an exhilarating period of intellectual discovery about the natural world, culminating in the work of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. 

It’s lucky I’m a fast reader. Despite other commitments, I’d read the entire book by 11am next day and was ready for our discussion group at noon. 

It spoke to me on many levels. I could not believe all the parallels in the imagined life of Alma Whitaker and the real life of Margaret Flockton, a scientific botanical artist. Margaret is the focus of my next yet-to-be-published (non-fiction) book 'A Fragrant Memory'. Alma struggled to assert herself as a female, against both a domineering father and a world unfriendly to women of scientific bent. So did Margaret Flockton, born much later, in 1861. Alma was astounded by the botanical drawings of Ambrose Pike. Likewise, Margaret Flockton’s work at the Royal Botanic Garden in Sydney is superlative. Alma had strange links to Tahiti. So did Margaret Flockton. Romance was lacking for both Alma and Margaret. Alma had close connections to two women in her life – her adopted sister Prudence and the troubled friend Retta. Margaret had close connections to her two sisters. Late in life Alma found herself a dream job in a botanical garden. So did Margaret Flockton. Alma had 'a thing' about mosses, Margaret was fascinated by algae and lichen. The list goes on and on. 

Visionary historical novels like this, peopled with memorable characters, are a joy to read. An imaginative concept, backed by research, has generated a fascinating story which flowed effortlessly and is a wonderful example of good writing. At both the macro and micro level, even down to the little Tahitian dog Roger, this book is about the survival of the fittest, the need to struggle, adapt, overcome, and survive - the signature of all things. Congratulations, Elizabeth Gilbert.

Note - Contact Louise Wilson via her website or leave a comment below if you'd like to join the waiting list for 'A Fragrant Memory'.

'Eucalyptus', by Murray Bail

Eucalyptus, the book which won Murray Bail the 1999 Miles Franklin Award and Commonwealth Writers Prize, is one of the Athenaeum Book Club selections for 2013. The basic ‘plot’ of this book, as described to me when I collected my copy from the library desk, did not spark my interest: a father decides that any suitor seeking the hand of his only daughter, Ellen, must correctly name all the eucalyptus trees on the father’s land.

Nor did the book itself grab my undivided attention when I began to read - it lulled me off to sleep for four or five nights in row. Losing track of the characters and the story line proved easy, but my enjoyment of Bail's imagery and use of language did not flag:

Silver light slanted into the motionless trunks, as if coming from narrow windows. The cathedral has taken its cue from the forest. The vaulted roof soaring to the heavens, pillars in smooth imitation of trees, even the obligatory echo, are calculated to make a person feel small, and so trigger feelings of obscure wonder. In cathedral and forest, making even a scraping noise would trample soft feelings. For this reason, Ellen unconsciously continued on tiptoe.

Not a bad way to describe walking through the Australian bush (p 100).

Of course, as I read further, I marvelled that an author would think of eucalypts as a premise for such a highly original novel, blending fiction and non-fiction. I loved the mentions of eucalypts in far-flung corners of the globe, and the drawing of various clever analogies, but the randomness of the story-telling in the book tried my patience.

Afterwards I looked for the online commentary on this book - analysis, reviews – and found these more interesting, in a way, than the book itself. Ah - why hadn’t I seen instantly that it was a fairy story, a deliberately Australian fairy story, requiring the reader to suspend belief? Now I understood my incredulity that a female covered in small brown-black moles and described as speckled could be so irresistible to men; and that two men standing side-by-side and pissing against the trunk of any eucalypt less than 10 years old could somehow miss seeing Ellen standing on the other side of that same slender tree trunk.

This magical tree was E. maidenii, Ellen’s favourite tree, the one with the nail where she later hung her wet dress. My brain snapped to attention with the word maidenii – was Bail about to introduce the reader to Joseph Henry Maiden, Sydney’s famous botanist? Sadly, no. Maiden wasn’t mentioned and his magnum opus A Critical Revision of the Genus Eucalyptus, published in eight volumes from 1903 to 1933 and still used as a basic text, received absolutely no credit for its massive contribution to Bail’s text and story-line. (Maiden was following in the footsteps of another famous botanist, Ferdinand von Mueller, who published Eucalyptographia in 1883.) Neither botanist was mentioned in an SMH article on 5 Feb 2005 taking Bail to task for almost verbatim 'lifts’ of text (one describing E. maidenii) from an out-of-print book, Eucalypts Vols One & Two by Stan Kelly, George Chippendale and Robert Johnston, published in 1969 and 1978. I haven't checked the nominated 'lifts' against the Maiden or Mueller versions of the text, but I wouldn't be surprised to find that the exact matches come from these earlier books.

Bail’s focus on E. merrickiae (p 95) while he completely ignored E. flocktoniae offended me too. Miss Mary Merrick was a librarian at the Royal Botanic Garden in Sydney, where her colleague Miss Margaret Flockton (the subject of my next book) was Maiden’s famous scientific botanical artist. Maiden claimed that Margaret was practically his joint author, but Bail’s only indication that she even existed came with his passing acknowledgement of ‘a few watercolour artists’.

So these are my personal criticisms of a book entitled Eucalyptus, but what other reviewers disliked, I quite enjoyed – especially the analogy on pp 32-4 between a paragraph and a paddock.

Now that I better understand the book, and its unusual love story, I realise I should have paid more attention by reading it more slowly, savouring it in solid blocks of time. Margaret Flockton would have loved its focus on her beloved eucalypts and the central role played by E. Maidenii. I think I’ll re-read it.