The Patrick White literary award was created in 1972 to recognise writers ‘who have made a substantial contribution to Australian literature but...may not have received due recognition for their work’.
The award is a financial one, to encourage and support further writing, and in 2009 the Victorian novelist, essayist and poet, Beverley Farmer, is its worthy recipient. Farmer’s work has not always drawn popular attention but has consistently engendered respect from the Australian literary community since the late 1960s when her lyrical, closely-observed short stories depicted domestic and generational tensions and charted contemporary shifts in Australian culture. Her first novel, Alone, attracted notice for its sexual politics rather than as a carefully orchestrated reply to T. S. Eliot in its portrayal of the artist as young woman. It innovatively demonstrated a potential to engage in experimentation with narrative methodology that became a feature of subsequent writing. In the 1990s A Body of Water crossed generic lines between journal, essay and short story to win awards for non-fiction. Farmer’s book of essays, The Bone House, explored further horizons. The cover of the Giramondo Press publication describes this as ‘an extended meditation on the life of the body and the life of the mind, each based on a single theme and woven out of the same few elemental symbols of earth, and water, fire and blood, light and darkness’. Patrick White well understood that writers of high calibre might not be fêted in best-seller lists but that a great deal of scholarship and fine writing nevertheless added to the nation’s literary wealth. In today’s world where the writer is marketed along with the text a modest or reclusive artist is further disadvantaged.
The award places Farmer among peers like Christina Stead (White’s initial recipient), Elizabeth Harrower, Thea Astley, Janette Turner-Hospital, Fay Zwicky, John Romeril and Gerard Murnane. On hearing the news, Beverley Farmer acknowledged her pleasure in being granted a place in this prestigious company, particularly citing Rosemary Dobson, Randolph Stow and Marjorie Barnard as ‘guiding lights’. Farmer’s preferences are telling: a meditative poet who celebrates the wonder, fragility and tenacity of human existence, a writer of fiction whose exploration of the metaphysics of being and spiritual journeying was influential and a pioneering writer of short fiction whose insightful, non-romantic portraits of relationships and women’s lives became an exemplar for women writers in this country. These are some of the central preoccupations in Farmers’ work.
In the prize-winning novels, The Seal Woman (1992) and The House in the Light (1995) Farmer used montage-like sequences to investigate a broad spectrum of diverse cultural myths and realities. In the former, the protagonist confronts the hard truths of imminent world environmental damage while accumulating stories that, if attended to, offer wisdom to further generations. In the latter there is an intricate interplay between two women constrained by personality, family and conflicting needs and ideologies. The House in the Light is set in an Easter week in a village in Greece where ritual sustains and affection ameliorates terrible stasis. In both novels myths and orthodoxies are challenged and individual lives re-defined by self-discovery as well as world-changing events.
Farmer’s mature writing embraces sophisticated explorations of the nature of translation, beyond the early focus on linguistic tensions in migrancy, where artistic media (film, photography and painting) and the roles of viewer and scriptor are interrogated. Farmer’s black and white photography illustrates recent publications and this meeting of forms has fueled engagement with the theoretical premises of image and meaning-production and the nature of vision. ‘Seeing in The Dark’ from The Bone House traces the ‘new alchemy’ of photography, using language like a lens that opens onto sequential fields of vision, changing in focus, expanding between temporality and timelessness and contracting to frame transparencies of light.
The stream of consciousness that sustains A Body of Water gives rise to five stories, the process of their creation is enacted in a synthesis of garnered autobiographical, fictional and factual material. These stories are re-contextualised in Collected Stories: Beverley Farmer published in 1996 as is earlier writing from Milk and Home Time. In recent years Farmer’s stories, occasional poems, and reviews of other’s work, have appeared in Australian journals and collections. The representative work cited in the recent Macquarie Pen Anthology is the fine short story ‘Ismini’ which first appeared in Milk in 1983. For an experimental writer I suspect this might function like Gwen Harwood’s constantly anthologised poem ‘In The Park’ which haunted her reputation despite a body of work transcending that fixed position. As if to demonstrate something of the dilemma of being other than a popular writer, local headlines announced that ‘Farmer wins Literary Award’ (which this winner wryly noted sounds like ‘compensation for watching your sheep die and your wheat turn to dust’). There followed a brief resume of early personal experience (family shifts between Australia and Greece) and news of Farmer’s impending writing residency in Rome. The nature of her intricate writing escaped notice. Thank heavens for the judges of the Patrick White Award who praised the work of ‘an intense, meditative and gifted stylist...whose writing has continued to surprise with its increasing diversity, and its exploration of the relationships between life and art, reality and representation, self, myth and memory’. Even with University of Queensland Press’ imprimatur, the problem of published work being ‘out of print’ far too soon remains a frustration for Australian readers. Despite this, Beverley Farmer’s highly crafted explorations of life and art continue to delight.
Dr. Lyn Jacobs, Flinders University
