Gillian Polack's Blog, page 65

How to Avoid Gillian at Continuum - the more reliable version

The final programme (save for last minute panics) is out for the Aussie NatCon. As I said a little while ago, anyone intending to be in Melbourne in June may want to start planning now to get the best out of their trip, and the very best trip avoids anything that has even the least possibility of me singing or making bad jokes. Here, for your Melbourne pleasure, are the times and places to avoid (and the subjects and speakers you will be sacrificing):

We Do This Stuff So You Can Write About It Friday 17:00-18:00 in The Big Top with Amanda Elliott, Alex Matti, Fran La Fontaine, Dan Rabarts - you can attend this one safely, actually, for it's not a panel. Just avoid my corner.

Solo Presentation: Seventeenth Century Borderlands Friday 19:00-19:30 in Sideshow Alley - this is the first time I'll talk about the results I've been getting from the 17th century stuff. I'm giving a presentation about that hinterland between magic and science and how the people of the late seventeenth century handled living there. And I've always liked Sideshow Alley...

Medieval Diversity Friday Friday 20:00-21:00 in Sideshow Alley with Brendan Carson, Jane Routley - Brendan and Jane are both very nice people. It's a shame they're stuck on a panel with me. I'm not sure that Brendan knows about my historian-self. You might want to come to cheer him on and to support him during moments of woe.

Twenty Years in the Making: A Conversation with Jack Dann Saturday 11:00-11:30 with Jack Dann, and Jason Nahrung - this is the 20th anniversary of Jack living in Australia. I get to interview him with Jason Nahrung. I'm happy to consider any questions people have been dying to ask him. When I run out of questions, there may be chocolate.

Signings Saturday 13:00-13:30 in The Midway (Foyer) with Ambelin Kwaymullina, Trudi Canavan, Leonie Rogers, Alan Baxter, Sue Bursztynski, Michael Pryor. If anyone actually brings anything for me to sign I'll be surprised. I'll also give them chocolate, since they will have earned it! It's also a good place to catch up with me, since I will be sitting still for a half hour. Or to avoid me, since I will be sitting still for a half hour.

Fans and Faith 2 Saturday 17:00-18:00 in The Haunted House with: Kathryn Andersen, Alex Pierce, Gillian Polack, Brendan Carson, Ian Mond - Poor Brendan. Twice in two days.

Perceptions of Witches - the Crone, the Babe and the Supreme Sunday 16:00-17:00 in The Haunted House with: Jason Nahrung, Julia Svaganovic, Tracy Joyce, Stacey Larner - this panel brings out one of my not-terribly-deep secrets. I studied witchcraft at university. Mum hid the belladonna when she heard what my third year history subjects would be. She only worked out years later that it wasn't witchcraft I was studying, but the history of witches in Europe. I've maintained the interest, and the Continuum programme people knew about it (it strikes me from this list that they know a bit about me). You won't get views of modern witches from me - I'm the history component of this panel.

Solo Presentation: Writers and History Monday 14:00-15:00 in The Big Top - this is where the results of my recent research will be unleashed onto fandom. This is the stuff that follows the stuff that was in the PhD, and it's all about genre writers. SF writers are, it seems, very different to historical fiction writers in a number of ways, and history is a key to unravelling the differences. There will be a book on this sooner or later, but the fun stuff will appear, magically in the presentation that you will not attend for you have been warned that I shall be there!

Researching Other Cultures Monday 15:00-16:00 in The Big Top with Cat Sparks, Ambelin Kwaymullina, Jack Dann, Tracy Joyce - This is totally the panel to not avoid, simply because of Ambelin. Sorry I'm on it, but maybe you can wear special glasses with attached ear plugs and put them on when I speak.

Good luck to everyone in their valiant attempts at Gillian-avoidance!

gillpolack @ 2014-05-25T12:15:00

This morning was time out. We went to two markets, watched Orphan Black and saw two episodes of DS 9. My marketing included some old bottles, a replacement for my larger ibrik (I've been using an unsatisfactory modern pot that's really a milk saucepan for some years, but the trash and treasure market had a pot that the stall holder said was 1880s but that I think is more likely to be 1930s or 40s and it's big enough for a dinner party of those tiny cups, or two mugs and it was well-tinned and only $15), lots of persimmons, some chestnuts and all the vegies I need for the week. I even remained in budget, despite buying old bottles and coffee pots. (The old bottles are probably for teaching, but if I have any extra, they could be for other things. It all depends on how they date. I wanted 3-4 regional older bottles as samples of mass manufacturer for local markets, for teaching world-building (for the Martin course later this year - it was a missing step in my explanations of the impact of machines on daily life and why backtracking from rural Australia 50 years ago to a Westeros-style universe needs careful thought), and a woman was selling her late father's collection for not-much-money, so I took my pick and she threw an extra in.

The rest of the day will be a bit long, because I didn't get through everything yesterday. We had not one, but two weather shifts and I'm still a bit headachey from it. I now have crunchy persimmons to get myself through my work, which has to be a good thing. And I did some from each branch of the things-that-had-to-be-done before I slept, so today is going to be long, but not impossible.

PS My pot looks very like this (only minor differences, plus the work is not as fine and I suspect that the spout has been reaffixed) but I can't read Arabic so have no idea who signed it. http://www.beauxartsgalleria.com/Brass_Arabic_Coffee_Pot-1028.html

PPS My first tentative assay into dating the bottles proved surprising fruitful. I have one bottle that dates to before 1919 (how much before depends on when the firm opened a Sydney branch, which made it), one that dates to 1961, one that is somewhere between 1940 and 1959 (an Imperial quart beer bottle, which is wonderful), a Vinegar Co bottle (either Skipping Girl or Cornwell's) that's from before the 1950s (possibly considerably before, possibly not) and two little bottles that haven't got enough information on for a quick dating. One is from medicine, though, and has some residue. It can't be more recent than the 1960s, and could be considerably earlier. The other is a small screwtop jar of the sort I associate with cosmetics, and is by "The RT Co" and has a number (2052) so if I ever get time to look these things up properly, I should be able to date the style, at least. All this for $5!

Today is worthy, but possibly a little dull

My fun reading for today is Frances Hardinge's Cuckoo Song and Mira Grant's Parasite. My work reading is sweeping up the remnants of all last week's reading: two books and two articles. That leaves one book to check when I go to the library on Monday, and then I'm done with the reading for that project. The final scraps of writing will happen on Monday, after I've checked that single chapter in that last book. My work writing for today is making sure I have accounted for those two books and two articles in my writing.

My reading for fiction is nothing, for I was downloading books this morning for the 17th century novel rather than reading them and I was contemplating what makes up a street. I think I"m almost at an end of the downloads, for I think I have almost enough material to create me my own 1682. Almost. I'm not entirely happy with the French side of things or with the daily life side of things, but for them I need to read a few more secondary sources before I delve into primary. I'm not even nearly close to working out what makes a street, but I've begun to factor in tradies. I need to revive the knowledge I gleaned when I worked at the ACT Housing Trust, I think, and put it to literary use. This means that my next trick is to see if I can find a particular kind of map online. If I can't, I shall improvise. That's the only fiction work outstanding for the day.

Most of today is academic. Not just the one article, but sorting out other stuff. I've given myself til the end of June to be caught up with myself. My reward for that will be more time for my fiction in June and July. It will also be Aurealis reading, for that will start the moment I'm back from Continuum.

When I say that today is worthy but dull, my work is on fun things and Hardinge's novel is good and Grant's also good (though not as finely done, I feel - I'm 100 pages into both and Hardinge's narrator is through-and-through convincing) - it's just that the several week virus (the one that overtook me after the chest inflection was cleared) is very annoying. This is why, in fact, I have so much reading-for-fun. The need to get well suddenly overcame me...

Question time!

I want a lazy end-of-week excuse for a post*, so I'm going to be a copy cat**. Do any of you want to ask me questions? Not about your work, but about my work*** or about me.



* mild weather changes add to my interesting sense of self today. I wonder if people who don't get variegated aches are different in nature to people who do?

**I may regret this, when the answers turn out to be work, or when everyone decides they know quite enough already.

*** My weekly report-in: my students looked at Maureen McHugh's Wicked, Fredric Brown's Earthmen Bearing Gifts, Robert Browning's My Last Duchess, and Dylan Thomas' Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night. They made a very effective combination, and I've been requested to provide something from David Unaipon and something by Elizabeth Barret Browning in the near future.

Noise Concerning Silent Planets

houseboatonstyx was curious about my reaction to Out of the Silent Planet. I love the conceit of it, that our planet, teeming with noise, is the silent one in the solar system. I love that Lewis takes a quasi-allegorical teaching form (somewhere between Bunyan and the Pearl author, or maybe bits from both - I felt his form wasn't entirely controlled) and develops a very 1930s vision of world-building to go with it. It's appropriate that it's alongside Edgar Rice Burroughs' Carson of Venus for the retro Hugos: the two make a lovely pairing.

When I was a kid, I read Ransom's epilogue, explaining that the author didn't communicate what it was like to live on that planet. I felt cheated, for, as a child of the 60s and 70s I was reading speculative fiction that felt more like living in a place, and Lewis himself achieved this in his use of fine detail in his Narnia books and in some of his less fictional work (Screwtape!). The trouble, however, was not that Lewis wasn't capable of it, and the trouble was not that the techniques weren't around for SF (for HG Wells used them, earlier) the trouble was that Ransom drew attention to the deficit. Instead of highlighting the narrator's limited capacity, it made me realise that I couldn't see the world fully. That I was not a participant.

I suspect Lewis did this on purpose. It was to highlight the tone of what came earlier. Or maybe the special status of Ransom. It may also have been to leave doubt in the reader's mind: is this an allegory? Lewis would have known what he had done with his borrowings, for he was writing scholarly analysis of such things. Of all the Hugo finalists (retro or modern) Lewis was the one with the deepest understanding of literary form. This means that any deficit is intentional or due to lack of commitment: it's not due to him being in the 30s when things were different, or from him not being educated, or from him lacking the writing capacity. I choose to think, at this moment in time (and my mind may change, for it's one of those things) that it was lack of commitment. He didn't commit to a full allegory. He didn't choose the literal approach of Bunyan or the rhetorical other-worldliness of the Pearl poet. He chose a bit of each, and he married them into the then standard SF form. By not committing to one approach fully, he undermined his tale-telling.

It's this lack of commitment that makes me like White's work better. That and the sense of humour. White's world is all about teaching and about learning and about the betterment of humankind. But White's Wart lives in a way that Ransom fails to, for me. The 'for me' is terribly important, for, although Lewis isn't writing a full allegory, his religion is definitely a component in his writing, and I am not from his branch of Christianity nor, in fact, from any branch of Christianity. This means that my heart doesn't leap into the holes left to be filled by reader empathy. Lewis' works suffers, therefore, from me being a reader who thinks alongside him rather than feels with him.

He comes off rather well, given this. Imagine a Twilight fan who lost that sense of it being a thing of love. All the flaws are visible, for there would be no personal sense of association to carry one past them. Sparkly vampires become risible. Out of the Silent Planet is not risible, and it has a lot more depth than I remember. It also has some anticolonial sentiment and a bunch of self-criticism.

It's not as sophisticated as I had thought, either: when I was ten I had read nothing by the Pearl poet and my only reaction to Bunyan was "Why?". I'm bringing more sophistication to my reading, because I'm considerably older. Still, though, I haven't developed the emotions he needs to achieve that perfect rapport. I see the sparkles in his vampires and I am entertained by them, but think that White is the better writer. White draws me in even though I'm from a completely different background, and that, to me is a bigger achievement.

When I was a child, to be honest, I wanted to be Ransom. I had that sense of wonder at the sight of all the new things. Now, I'd rather be Wart, and experience strangeness rather than observe it clinically.

gillpolack @ 2014-05-21T22:05:00

I'm pretty much done with the Hugo reading I promised myself today. Two short works. The first was a CS Lewis re-read, for the Retro Hugos. It is no better and no worse a book than I remember, as a child, but I understand what he was doing a lot better than I did back then. The reason I re-read it was because I was tempted to simply vote for TH White out of pure love, but I thought I might be under-rating Lewis because he was using a bunch of allegory that I certainly didn't understand when I was ten. Now I understand the allegory better I still think White was the best writer in that short list. I might re-read the whole lot for fun, if I have time, but I have enough on my plate right now and I've settled the one outstanding question.

The other work was by Vox Day. What the complaining by all and sundry hadn't managed to communicate to me is that the novella managed to be both dull and derivative. It was very calming. Just what I needed tonight, in fact.

For my next trick, I shall do some work.

gillpolack @ 2014-05-21T17:09:00

My days continue interesting. Today's interestingness was ameliorated by everyone being equally vague and scatty. I think we might be into the full change of seasons. The only grounded person was my BCS boss, who bought me an extra large coffee to get me through our early meeting. My writing class asked for extra morning tea time (there's a first time for everything, so I took a vote and there was a narrow majority) and I used it to start reading for the Retro Hugos. My work experience student was equally tired. Neither she nor I did much real work, but we had a good time, as did I with my class this morning. She has finally admitted that the reason she brings me books and DVDs to borrow each week is because she's educating me - I have 7 more this fortnight. This means right now my recreational reading is all YA. I'm not going to complain about that!

My Aurealis reading this year is not YA. One can't judge in the same category every year, so this year I've been transferred to fantasy novels. I shall miss the short stories, but the fantasy novel Aurealis is the meatiest in terms of sheer numbers of books, so I shall enjoy the reading. Just as in previous years, I'm part of a great panel. Reading doesn't start til June, though, which gives me a few weeks to catch up before things get busy.

Word of the day today (we're back to talking about my class) was 'steampunk', by request. Books of the day were (from me) The Rebel and Counting Coup by Jack Dann (I said I was on a reading binge of Jack's work!) and (from my students) Oscar Wilde's fairytales (again) and my Cellophane novel. A student bringing the book into class was entirely unexpected - this is not the same group that was interested in my writing the other day. The two groups are part of the same larger programme, though, so it's quite possible that the Friday group talked to the Wednesday group socially and they are making up their minds about my writing, one by one. You'll be pleased to know that Cellophane got a good review.

Today's content concerned finding emotions and communicating them so they felt real to the reader. Too many of my students are better at high level thought or at skipping emotions entirely. We did several exercises, and also looked at how one can develop a work that's authentic through deep personal connections. My students produced some nice stuff as a result and I'm rather hoping this will continue.

And my rest-of-day is completing most of an article. I may have to check something at the NLA tomorrow, but apart from that, I expect to be totally finished it. Then I have the last bit of the other one to do by the weekend, and then they can wend their way. Then I move onto the next thing... That's what this six months is all about: completing academic writing so that projects can be wound up, so that I clear the decks for fiction, so I have something to show for this quiet time.

I'm back!

Sorry about the absence. I went marketing on Sunday, saw Godzilla (I know, me seeing a film!) and came back to no phone or internet. Thank goodness for one friend and the mobile she gave and for another and the everything-else rescue. It was a strange 51 hours.

The moment I came back online, of course, stuff happened, so I've spent the afternoon chatting on the phone to nice people. One person has solved one issue, and one another. I've had totally interesting bods at the end of every phone call, including the one to the insurance company and the one to Capetown about my internet speed. One of them is going into one of my novels - I promised him. Watch for Antonio one day...

In terms of all the piles of work I was going to do, obviously I wasn't able to check any online library holdings and even more obviously I was confined to the house all day for all these calls and one visit (Telstra, finding out that my phoneline hadn't actually dropped out at my end, but at the exchange) but I've made progress in any case. If I can get my last few references online, then I shall have a first draft done of the longer article done by tonight, ready for checking through tomorrow. If not, then it's libraries for me all Thursday, and I'll have the draft done Thursday night. I don't have a timeline for the other article yet, but I'm only 500 words short on it, so maybe the weekend? And some of my lost time has been regained, for a project is with someone for consideration for longer than we thought it would be, so I don't have to work on it right now. When I *do* have to work on it, of course, there will be making-up-of-time, but this week it's a real relief that I have one less thing to do.

Today was techday. Yesterday was just generally not good, so I caught up on a bit of reading and stuff, which means I can return things to the library and etc tomorrow. This is not such a bad way to spend a day, for it means I don't have nearly as much material in my vicinity that needs to be dealt with. And when I'm finished these two pieces, then more books can go away and more papers be thoughtfully disposed of. There will be visible flat surfaces again! In order to achieve this, I ought to read some more articles, oughtn't I? Or maybe a book.

gillpolack @ 2014-05-17T11:59:00

I'm sneaking in a quick Jack Dann retrospective before Conflux. I've had to give myself rules. No reading before writing, for instance, and all paid work first. The rules are because I rather like immersing myself in a writer and because my deadlines really have to come first. It's sad, but true, that I can't read more than a certain amount in a week without work suffering. A book a day is it, at the moment, which means I'm rather busy right now, which is a good thing, I think.

Yesterday I gave my students a story by me (at their request) and it was their first that uses (or abuses, given the story I chose) straight SF. It was this: http://subterraneanpress.com/store/product_detail/Issue4 (and I believe it's possible to download that issue free, but I couldn't find the right link - sorry!). A couple of members of the class were really unhappy with the amount of information that has to be sorted for an info-rich SF story to work, and I was parodying an info-rich story, but using Medievalism instead of science, for Scalzi wanted stories that turned tropes on their head and I had been wondering what would happen if the theoretical science was replaced by theoretical history, so it was inevitable that there would be dissatisfaction. My own story wasn't actually my first choice for that sub-genre (in fact, it wasn't even my tenth choice) - but the students really wanted something by me.

It was lovely to see the giant smile on the face of the student who really didn't enjoy the tale when she said so and found that I still liked her as a human being. The result was a really interesting discussion about the reader's right to like and dislike and how important it was that readers own their reading. I pointed out that the story I wrote wasn't the same as the story she read because stories are not neutral to readers. Another student giggled at all the jokes the whole way through, and totally ignored the deeper meanings. This was also fine. What was particularly fine is that all my students took ownership of their reading and admitted to their personal views.

I have to admit, I was very nervous taking my story in. It felt wrong, for one, giving students one's own work when there are much better writers out there. I wasn't nervous about their reactions, though, for the obvious reason that I already know that not everyone adores my prose. I can never work out why... Seriously, I know why, because I know my writing. It's why, when people tell me "You write characters well - have you thought about writing for a romance line?" I politely say "I don't think I'm flexible enough." I write like Gillian, always, and it's a peculiar and faintly intellectual and occasionally very funny style and it only works for certain types of story and for certain types of readers.

The poem that accompanied "Horrible Historians" was Yeats (The Wild Swans at Coole) and we talked about history and true love and Irish identity and a bunch of interesting things. We didn't quite finish on time, but we made a valiant effort.

The cherry on the cake of yesterday's teaching happened on the way out of the library. I handed the classroom key back and the librarian and I chatted about teaching in the library. He looked up my stuff on the system (even though I warned him that the library doesn't have that particular story) and we discovered that my cookbook has been stolen! It was in the heritage section (ie not for loan) so someone must really have wanted it. This makes the fifth incident I know of, which means I officially have a book worth stealing. Until a few weeks ago, I always kept a couple of copies handy for people to buy to replace the ones their friends refused to return. If one allows for the not-returning-by-friends then I know of eight copies that have strayed. I now have a manuscript with a curse and a book that gets stolen...

Imagined Geography

Imagined Geography – first published by BiblioBuffet on 11 November 2012, Gillian Polack

My July was spent Abroad in 2011. I discussed Abroad with a British friend and we couldn't work out where it was. He was pretty positive it didn't include the United Kingdom and I was pretty positive it did. It was pretty obvious to both of us where Home was, however, even when we didn't agree on Abroad. This made me wonder what is the difference between “home” and “Home?” And how does this relate to the two review books I have before me this fortnight? Felicity Barnes illustrates one definition of home in New Zealand's London and Rosemary Ashton illustrates quite another in Victorian Bloomsbury. Barnes does this with intent, talking about New Zealand as “London's hinterland” while Ashton's illustration is quite by accident.

When I was a child, we were acculturated into accepting British culture as Home. Some rather influential books we read actually called Britain Home: Mary Grant Bruce's Norah of Billabong series is the one I remember most as doing that. The country we lived in everyday was alien, and Christmas cards had snow on them even though most of us knew not what snow felt like and even though some of us didn't even have Christmas.

This was such an important element of 1960s Australia that every time I visit the United Kingdom, it really does feel like coming home. I understand what Mary Grant Bruce was saying when she wrote an undeniably Australian (with all its prejudices) culture that nevertheless felt comfortable in the United Kingdom. It’s a very special kind of nostalgia. A lack of exoticism.

It struck me one day in London last year. I was jetlagged and had mislaid myself. I looked around and realised that I was lost on the Monopoly Board. We used the London streets on our Monopoly boards when I was a child. Mayfair and bits of Bloomsbury, diagrammed and gambled with. This was another kind of cultural home. I think of it as “Home”—a cultural heartland—instead of “home,” which was and will always be both Melbourne and the place I've made for myself.

Right now, then, I have three homes. There's Home (largely London), and there's the home of my character-forming years (Melbourne), and there’s the place I live and where I'm happy (currently Canberra). Two are fixed stars and one moves.

The first star is created by our culture. Felicity Barnes gives us a good introduction to how this creation can happen in New Zealand's London. A Colony and its Metropolis. New Zealand's London is my London. The same places that have been drummed into us, the same created nostalgia that results in us visiting over and over, the same sense of shared place. The same (if I'm being honest) false understanding of what London actually is. Barnes discusses New Zealand's London. She's not looking at the city, but at New Zealand's dreams and the marketing of New Zealand products and the way New Zealand uses a place to handle its sense of self. This study helped me to understand why I had “Home” — it wasn't a simple case of false nostalgia, it was a part of Anglo-Australia's very complex and very hierarchical sorting of the globe. It's how we make our lives tolerable and find a place for ourselves in the world.

What it also implies (although doesn't discuss) was that the distinction between Home and Abroad was fudged in the case of London. When I was a child, home was almost Abroad. Not as far Abroad as exotic countries such as Italy and Mexico, but nevertheless, not Home. This affected the way we read books. In fact, it affected the way we were taught books in primary school.

I Can Jump Puddles is a classic Australian children's book by Alan Marshall. It's the autobiographical account of a child who had to learn to deal with the crippling effects of polio. We read it in primary school. None of us had polio—by the time it reached us, so had the polio vaccine. It was a very moving book that talked about home as if it were foreign. It added to our sense of Home being another country. The real country where people were like us was England. Not Britain. Not even Scotland or Wales or Ireland: England. Polio was not an issue in the school books set in England or with English children. It wasn't Australia, but it was the place that a number of us found a cultural familiarity.

These days, that familiarity still resonates. I spent time with various groups of writerly friends when I was in the United Kingdom this time round and we shared the same vocabulary. They had not read Norah of Billabong and had no notion that Home was 10,000 miles away. They shared those school stories: the Chalet Girls, and the Abbey Girl books and Lorna Hill's nostalgic dance novels. We exchanged pop references from years ago without a second thought. Until someone talked about going Abroad. That's when I realised yet again—we shared our books, our childhood and our knowledge of England. They were English and I was Australian. Our understanding of what constituted Home had overlap, which gave us a very special cultural bonding.

There are many negatives to colonialism and a lot of talk about it. It's not always a negative, though. One side product of colonialism is this familiar and half-hidden popular culture. Much-loved books and shared pasts. Creating that overlap in that vision of Home.

My shared vision of Home, however, is flawed. It's the pretty view of a picture postcard. England is not the country described in New Zealand's London. London is a place quite separate from those nostalgic perceptions of it. It has its own complex life and its own history, quite different to the dreams of it. For those who see it as Home, it seldom is home.

Those of us who are outsiders, however, can see into what makes it home for so many over the centuries. The book that's helping me achieve this right now is Rosemary Ashton's Victorian Bloomsbury. Ashton's monograph is a solid piece of work. A great deal of meticulous research has gone into her presentation of one small part of London over a mere hundred years (or thereabouts). This book microscopes in very close indeed, looking at the people that created the suburb, but also looking at the streets and businesses and education and how these things combined and spun threads that drew in people a long way away from Bloomsbury itself. Combine Victorian Bloomsbury, in fact, with New Zealand's London, and you have an almost perfectly balanced see-saw: home vs. Home. At the pivot point live those who define their hometown as Home.

For those who live in Bloomsbury (which I have, but not for long enough to count), stories such as how the Disraeli family moved logically from being non-religious intellectual Jews to producing a Christian Prime Minister are the stories of where they come from. Ashton's discussion of the rise of steam-powered printing and how printed matter could reach tens of thousands isn't so much to do with wider history, than to do with one's neighbours of a century and a half ago. This is the complex and messy reality of life in a small part of a big city.

Perspective changes everything. This is why we need books as far removed in style and topic as Barnes' and Ashton's. Technically, they both examine quite narrow areas. The reality of each book, however, is that they feed into our self-knowledge. Understanding Victorian Bloomsbury helps us understand the Victorian era and London and social movements and a whole lot of related matters, but it also helps us understand where we come from and how we view the world: why Home and home can be quite different.

It's a complex thing, this post-colonialism. We need to face racism and shattered pasts and unhappiness and forced culture. It helps though, to sometimes remember that we have a language with which we can face the negatives and that this language is often built up from the very culture that contains the negatives. Of the books I have mentioned, there is more racism in Norah of Billabong than in the others—cultures are complex and worrying creatures. Yet it is that same book that defined Home as England and informed my childhood structure of the shape of the world.

When I deconstruct Norah through solid histories such as Ashton's and Barnes’ I can understand who I am and where I come from. I can understand Australia's peculiar relationship with Britain and my peculiar relationship with the concept of Home. I can deconstruct the colonialism and discover the differences between nostalgia and reality.

Books are terrifyingly important. Who we are can be derived from them and influenced by them. Even as we love them, we ought to question the values they present and create ourselves from them, anew. This is where the other end of the book spectrum—those books that question and those books that think—help us sort out ourselves and our concepts and where we come from.

I can accept that love for an ancestral culture that I received in the books from my childhood, but if I don’t question them, then I also accept the assumptions: the assumption that England is the Little England of the books of my childhood, that racism is something I ought to accept, that Australia is but a shadow of its colonial founders. Books are wonderful: they’re a crucial part of our iterative and dynamic and very living cultures. They help us question and explain and to move on from idiot assumptions. They help us, in short, to understand.