Review: The Woman on the Mountain

Sharyn Munro • Exisle Publishing • ISBN 9780908988770-9

It’s easy just to take this book at face value and see it as the slightly unusual autobiography of a decidedly odd woman who turned her back on civilisation to live alone in a frightening wilderness, battling unruly weather, the vicissitudes of love and family, wildfire, recalcitrant machinery and the aches and pains of advancing age to achieve an ascetic solitude with only quolls and wallabies for company.

Australians display a marked ambivalence about the bush. The huge majority of the people, tightly huddled on the coastal fringes of this empty continent, rarely think about it despite the bush paintings adorning so many loungeroom walls. The bush is a vast and threatening place which only intrudes into the urban consciousness as alarming reports of huge bushfires, droughts, floods and helicopters winching hapless stray walkers to safety. Only a ratbag would want to live there. She wrote this book to tell us why.

Most reviewers so far have looked no deeper, but books like this one are so rare they can hardly be blamed for that.

Its underlying context is a long tradition of radical dissent that extends past Thoreau, Tom Paine and David Hume, all the way back to Diogenes – but we need go no further back than Thoreau to show that this book carries on that tradition and does so magnificently. Sharyn Munro’s life has been one long act of dissent and being a full-time dissenter is far from easy; if you are looking for the path of least resistance, you would be ill-advised to follow her.

Henry David Thoreau spent a couple of pleasantly active years in the woods near the New England town of Concord building a cosy little cabin and dabbling in agriculture and nature studies. Out of this sojourn came Walden, which is partly an account of his charming bucolic activities and partly an effusion of long-headed Yankee cracker-barrel wisdom.

After Walden, by the way, he ignored his own advice about not conforming to the expectations of society and lost all his money in an ill-starred investment in a pencil factory.

Compared with Sharyn Munro, Thoreau did it easy. He was just a short stroll from Concord, where he could easily pick up a bag of nails or borrow an axe. Even the celebrated Walden Pond was artificial — it was dug and dammed as a source of supply for the ice trade.

Walden’s durability rests partly on the difficulty of classifying it. Is it political, philosophical, autobiographical or what? Classification is a form of dismissal and once Americans found out they couldn’t dismiss Thoreau by classifying him, they elevated him to the status of admirable ratbag so they could get on with the serious business of ripping each other off. That’s why today Thoreau’s haunts are a theme park complete with a replica cabin, souvenir shops, fast food outlets and huge areas where you can park your SUV while you and the kids commune with the remaining smidgeons of nature.

Perhaps the closest we can come to a definition of books like Walden and The Woman on the Mountain is didactic pastoral — a version William Empson should have noticed if he hadn’t spent so much time trying to force Alice in Wonderland into the genre.

To Sharyn Munro’s credit, unlike Thoreau, she doesn’t indulge in preaching, prescription or po-faced philosophising. She can’t be dismissed, either; she’s not a time-warped hippie or a New Age airhead. She is a practitioner of a way of life guaranteed to send a thrill of terror surging through advertising agencies, marketing departments, shopping malls and banks – the voluntary austerity advocated by Ivan Illich as the only equitable way to abate society’s ills before this over-exploited planet collides with statistical inevitability.

On the way to achieving that austerity, she’s endured a lot of the involuntary kind. She just didn’t give up, which is a principal mark of the authentic ratbag, a precious species severely threatened by the narrow conformity expected by those we choose to govern us. We used to cherish our ratbags because they provided stimulating bursts of dissent that nourished our almost-vanished national trait of scepticism; we have allowed vacuous celebrities to take their place, and one day we’ll be sorry.

Where Thoreau is pointedly didactic (indeed, even his best friends thought he was a bit of a plonker that way), Sharyn Munro teaches so gently about her environmental and conservation concerns that we hardly realise how much we’re learning from her – although, and this is another signal ratbag trait, she occasionally lets fly with a full-blown rave about the greed and folly that’s damaging everything in the sacred name of profit. Well, rave on, Munro!

The book is blessedly free of the gush, twitter and pseudo-spiritual baggage of a lot of writing about the natural world, despite the deep love for nature that motivates it. The prose is economical and largely unadorned; it doesn’t get in the way of her keen talent for observation, nor does it clog or slow the narrative of a difficult and often turbulent life. As George Orwell said, prose should be like a window pane. Truth and clarity like this is rare these days; aspiring writers could benefit from using her as a model as they work towards discovering their own voice.

But she will sneak up and surprise you with a sudden sparky word or a biting phrase, and then she’s got you. You just have to keep reading — the reason, apart from the plainly told tale of an extraordinary and in many ways exemplary life, why this book will endure. And, come the looming disasters of climate change, wars over water and all the other perils we will bequeath to our children, we’ll be faced with the question of whether she really was a ratbag after all.

Visit her website for regular updates about goings-on at her mountain wildlife refuge.

The Museum
by Julian Halls
ISBN 978 0 9805482 0 4

This is a most unfashionable book: it’s funny, it’s well written and constructed — and it has a happy ending.

It’s that rarest of things in an increasingly sad and troubled world: a comic novel, a genre which has almost disappeared under the weight of political correctness, post-modernist claptrap and the self-regarding seriousness of far too many authors.

Julian Halls has created an unlikely assortment of oddball characters — and they’re all people we’ve met or close to it — and placed them in and around a mouldering, half-forgotten regional museum in Tasmania.

The complex main plot concerns the relationships between two same-sex couples, one male, one female, and the whole thing is set in motion by a blowfly; it gets even more bizarre after that, although it’s never incredible—just like real life. Several curious sub-plots emerge and they are skillfully woven into a surprising conclusion.

The story is replete with intrigue, passion and downright skulduggery, as well as the finely observed petty tyrannies and bureaucratic absurdities of life in a museum.

A central theme is that things are never what they seem to be; questions of forgery and authenticity are the mainsprings of the novel, and they apply as much to the people as to the exhibits in the museum.

Halls, author of a well-received collection of short stories, Death of a Drag Queen, has a good ear for dialogue and bitchy banter, as well as the ability to drive an elaborate story along at a cheerful pace.

The Museum will appeal to the general reader as well as to those interested in another of the book’s themes, the need for same-sex marriage to be recognised as being as valid a way of life as any.

Available from bookshops in Tasmania and from The Bookshop in Darlinghurst, Sydney.

The tranquillity of the writers’ wing at Knocklofty Towers was disturbed the other day by what we later discovered to be the emanation of an overwrought spirit.

A loud crash of breaking glass was followed by the sound of a rather large wireless set landing on the cobbled courtyard below. The apparatus was over fifty years old and was acquired before the transistor was little more than a wriggle in Shockley’s trousers, and the bursting of all those vacuum tubes made a noise that our resident composer described as worthy of Stockhausen at his most dissonant apogee.

Our security and medical staff responded quickly and discovered one of our older writers about to light a bonfire of old Hansards in his room, from which the wireless set had been hurled.

Putting him under mild sedation, they learned from him that he had been working on an analysis of parliamentary language when he decided to pause for a cup of Knocklofty’s Bodhisatva’s Own Extra Fragrant Lapsang Souchong tea (an exclusive blend the firm has imported from a very remote part of Asia for more than two centuries) and switched on the wireless hoping to hear some news of a game of cricket.

His timing was poor. Instead of the murmur of the crowd and the well-worn wit of the commentators, what he heard was a statement by one of the more bulbous and aggressively voluble members of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition in the Parliament of Australia.

He asserted — and our use of modern technical means verifies it — that this was what he heard:

‘At the end of the day, when the rubber hits the road, the bottom line is that working families…’

It was the fourth in this concatenation of cliché that proved too much and that was why the wireless went through the window. The Board, at an extraordinary meeting to consider what action might be taken, agreed that they would all have done the same.

Knocklofty’s technical staff are now hard at work on systems designed to detect and eliminate that sort of political talk from the airwaves and the web, and they predict that when they succeed there will be more bandwidth for everyone.

The author of The Devil’s Dictionary always got it right. This quotation should be flashing in forty-foot high red neon letters over Wall Street, the City of London and other panic-stricken bourses around the globe which seem to have been less well managed than the average Saturday night poker school:

“The form of gambling known as business looks with austere disfavour on the form of business known as gambling.”

Everyone knows what a cliché is: a tired old phrase or expression dropped in thoughtlessly by speakers or writers who are either too lazy to express themselves properly or, much worse because it is intentional, so cynical that they know exactly what button it will push in their ignorant audience.

Take, for example, just elected or re-elected politicians who claim to be ‘humbled’ by their success. They have been selling their almost always aggressively ordinary personalities with a bag of catch-phrases, denigrating the opposition and generally bamboozling the electorate into polishing their hypertrophied egos with their votes.

This requires a more than usual degree of arrogance, hypocrisy and bumptiousness. The prize of power for which they have connived, plotted and overspent finally falls into their slavering jaws — and they’re humble? Always suspect anyone who makes a public virtue of humility.

Politics and journalism are the factories of cliché – Fox News is only the most egregious — and the history of the word itself is telling. In nineteenth-century France, when newspapers were even more astonishingly venal than they are today (hard to believe, we admit), the compositors who set the type by hand, letter by letter, would save time by reaching for a phrase or expression which, because of its familiarity, they had caused to be set against inevitable need in a single slug: a cliché, from the verb clicher, to cast, in this case appropriately in lead.

Technology has done little to battle the cliché, as a cursory glance at most blogs will show. But there is some hope. Editors of the Tasmanian Hansard, the reports of parliamentary debates, have developed a set of macros which will eliminate such expressions as ‘at the end of the day’ (voted most annoying cliché of 2006) with very few keystrokes.

Knocklofty intends to keep an eye on fashions in cliché. Many Australians will recall a period in which politicians, prominent usurers and other dubious public figures would regularly ‘refuse to resile’ from whatever position they had felt it expedient or profitable to adopt for the nonce. The expression fell out of fashion round about the end of the day.

“You take the trouble to construct a civilization…to build a society…you make government and art, and realize that they are, must be, both the same…you bring things to the saddest of all points…to the point where there is something to lose…then all at once, through all the music, through all the sensible sounds of men building, attempting, comes the Dies Irae. And what is it? What does the trumpet sound? Up yours.” — Edward Albee, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

At Knocklofty we are well aware of the immense diversity and excitement of the web. Ideas and information, both dazzling and brilliant, as well as stupid and meretricious, flow freely. It is a wonderful resource and will become a true mirror of humanity.

It is in the process of developing a new language and it is one of the largest contributors to our stock of words; some are the embodiment of wit, expressing complexity with brevity, and remain. Others arrive and fade away as slang fashions continue their inevitable change.

But there is one depressing feature of language on the web that seems to endure, and that is the use of a couple of dozen common offensive words. We all know what they are — sexual, anatomical or excretory, used as nouns, adjectives, intensifiers or just as plain expletives — so there is no need to list them here.

Their too-frequent use, especially in otherwise well-conducted weblogs, robs them of any impact they may have had in the bad old days of taboo and prudery. Those who do use them are demonstrating not only poverty of thought and imagination but also contempt for their readers; in effect, they are saying ‘I can’t be bothered to find a word to explain what I mean, so I’ll just drop in a dirty word to show how cool and smart I am.’

In doing that, however original their thoughts might be, they have the effect of signalling that here is yet another dreary, foul-mouthed, semi-articulate ranter and that it is probably not worth the effort to read further. These over-used, worn-out and essentially stupid words will drive readers away even more effectively than cliché, muddled grammar and slipshod punctuation.

If you are stuck for a word, there are plenty of resources at hand without leaving the keyboard; find a thesaurus, a dictionary or an apt quotation on the web. If you show a little respect for your readers, more of them will come back.

Few nations can do the storm in a teacup style of controversy better than the English. The loathly Giles Coren, long a restaurant reviewer for The Sunday Times in London, recently threw a tantrum over the removal by a sub-editor of an indefinite article in one of his reviews.

As we eschew coprolalia at Knocklofty, we aren’t going to quote from such an intemperate vomit of bile and arrogance, but you can read it here and follow a number of links and comments through this silly and delightfully trivial spat.

Our Department of Literary Taxonomy classifies restaurant reviewers as a parasitic form of life very low down on the food chain of journalism; the most complimentary description it could come up with is ‘a salaried glutton employed to write thinly disguised puffery, usually as part of a commercial conspiracy with the advertising sales department.’

The point missed by nearly everyone who jumped into the tiff sparked by Coren’s outburst is that most newspapers these days are full of the sort of highly mannered tosh he writes; it is often hard to distinguish where journalism leaves off and advertising takes over in the welter of so-called ‘lifestyle’ sections, which occupy far more space than serious news and opinion.

If the print media are serious about reducing their carbon footprint they might contemplate giving narcissistic trendoids like Coren the bum’s rush and save readers the chore of having to dispose of three quarters of the great slabs of newsprint that newspapers have become.

There are three kinds of men. The one that learns by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves.
Will Rogers

At Knocklofty we have long been aware of the intimate connection between books and booze. Few good books, and no amusing books at all, have been written by ascetics or teetotalers.

That is why our writers’ suites at Knocklofty Towers all have a small adjoining room with seldom-used equipment for making tea and coffee and a rather large refrigerator which is kept stocked by the management with the writer’s preferred beer.

In some cases the room may be a small bar with a favourite keg beer on tap and there are eccentrics who use the space to make their own often highly potent and occasionally explosive brews.

Others have wine cellars stocked gratis from the firm’s vineyards; Knocklofty Fourpenny Dark, renowned for its minimal delay between cause and effect, is popular with the more robust novelists and the staff philosophers, while effete poetic types favour the Knocklofty White Infuriator, a deceptively delicate wine credited with mild hallucinatory properties.

The relationship between literature and liquor is so ancient that our scholars believe that the two probably came into existence virtually simultaneously. The arts of writing — writing, that is, for the purposes of story-telling rather than for cuneiform accountancy — and brewing are both a little more than five thousand years old but we have been unable to determine which led to which.

We maintain this regime because, while we deplore many of the consequences of taking Nietzsche too literally, experience has shown this dictum of his to be more sensible than many of the more familiar ravings of this syphilitic sage:

“For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.”

The connection was well understood in ancient times. Plato observed “He was a wise man who invented beer” while Sophocles prescribed beer as an essential component in his formula for a moderate diet. The silenus of Socrates from which he gained his wisdom, according to the formidable literary boozer Rabelais, was a bottle.

Even that lunatic Bronze Age farrago, the Bible, urges us to take a little wine for our stomach’s sake and records Jesus’ first miracle as turning water into wine.

Shakespeare held that a quart of ale is a dish for a king — and had a character in Henry V say “I would give all my fame for a pot of ale and safety.”

Benjamin Franklin saw beer as proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. And Edgar Allan Poe, the inventor of at least two literary genres, wrote:

Filled with mingled cream and amber
I will drain that glass again.
Such hilarious visions clamber
Through the chambers of my brain
Quaintest thoughts — queerest fancies
Come to life and fade away;
Who cares how time advances?
I am drinking ale today.

Charles Dickens wrote in times far more prim than ours, yet he was a notable toper; his works are full of cheerful references to liquid refreshments with peculiar Victorian names: cold with, hot without, heavy wet and rum shrub, as well as the Genuine Stunning Ale ordered by the youthful David Copperfield.

In more modern days, Hilaire Belloc and G K Chesterton used to go on long rural hikes punctuated by every pub they came to, when they would bang on the counter and bellow for beer. It is said that that was how they broke writer’s block.

George Orwell, too, was fond of his pint and created his own ideal pub in a famous essay, The Moon Under Water. The pub did not exist when he wrote it, but so evocative was the essay that London now has at least one pub of that name.

This article quotes unpublished data culled from a project presently under way in Knocklofty’s Socioliterary Research Department. The research has very recently revealed a new and hitherto unconsidered trend in literary drinking in the United States, where readers are experimenting to find which beer goes best with which book. More information here.

As far as Knocklofty’s investigations have gone, we have found that the Tasmanian Cascade Pale Ale goes with just about everything except self-help books and that the works of Flann O’Brien are much improved by — obviously — draught Guinness.

Since we stopped using quills, fountain pens and manual typewriters, the act of writing has become more abstract—symbols on a screen whose existence is mainly virtual.

It’s a blessing. Henry James handwrote himself into carpal tunnel syndrome and had to resort to an amanuensis. George Orwell complained of the exhausting physical work of writing: drafting, editing, re-typing, rearranging, the frustration of having to abandon large lumps of painfully constructed text when a work takes a wrong direction and, finally, the huge task of producing a clean final copy of a manuscript.

Some lucky individuals loved the process of writing: Arnold Bennett took pride in the beauty of his finished handwritten manuscripts: obviously he was robust enough to resist writer’s cramp and he achieved a prodigious output.

But separation from the physical act of writing can have its disadvantages. However much the computer has eased the writer’s task, it’s not much help when the flow of creativity comes to a stop, as it inevitably will for all but the most compulsively prolific. Often, too, wandering about the web in search of inspiration can be little more than a mildly guilty displacement activity.

One way out of this is to learn or to regain the pleasures of the act of writing. Ballpoint pens and cheap scratchpads won’t do: buy yourself a fountain pen (yes, they’re still being made) and make it the best you can afford. Then look for an old-fashioned notebook, one with smooth creamy paper and faint grey lines, preferably leather-bound with a ribbon to keep your place. They come in various sizes and you might want a small one for pocket or purse and a bigger one for your desk.

You might choose to distract yourself with a little calligraphy but the quality of your penmanship isn’t important. A good pen and good paper do a lot to improve anyone’s writing. Use only black ink and enjoy the sensuality of a nib gliding over the paper.

What you write doesn’t matter much, either—but you’ll find that after you’ve tired of flourishes and favourite phrases, the words will start to flow on their own.

Then take it further. Start drawing, even if you can’t draw. For this, visit an art store and get a big blank cartridge paper notebook. If you favour pencil, buy at the top of the range; otherwise, the store will have a big range of fibre-tip pens in various widths and colours.

Drawing helps writing in all sorts of subtle ways. You can picture scenes, characters and places and annotate the images with the ideas that come to you as you draw. It can help you to recover that elusive idea you can’t quite remember or to stop it being lost in the first place. The quality of the drawings themselves doesn’t matter much; nobody but you needs to see them.

Before typewriters and cameras, almost every literate person learned a little drawing. Letters to home or to friends often contained little sketches, either in the text or as enclosures, to amplify and explain things seen and done.

Many notable writers—John Updike and Kurt Vonnegut, to name just two—used drawing as an aid to their writing and became skillful artists in their own right. You don’t have to become hung up on the quality of your drawings, but if you do want to express ideas in a more finished fashion there are plenty of good manuals to help you: perhaps the best is still Betty Edwards’ Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.

With both drawing and penmanship, make sure you have fun—by taking them less seriously you can have some really serious fun when you’re doing ‘real’ writing.