A new edition of Beverley Farmer’s classic 1980 debut, out of print for many years. Alone captures the emergence of one of Australia’s most powerful and distinctive writers.

Set in Melbourne in the late 1950s, and taking place over the course of two days and nights, Alone chronicles a young woman’s hopelessness and obsession provoked by the ending of a passionate relationship. A fledgling writer, estranged from her family and a dropout from university, she recalls her desire for her female lover, and contemplates ending her life. As she travels through a city fallen into cultural and economic malaise, shadowed by the constant threat of sexual violence, she reflects on the days and months that have brought her to despair.

Beverley Farmer’s debut novel, based partly on her own experiences, captures the romantic intensity and ironic reversals of youthful longing. Alone displays Farmer’s remarkable capacity for bringing different forms of writing together, prose and poetry, dialogue and dramatic monologue, and shows the formation of an unmistakable, lyrical literary voice.

Read an exert (PDF)

This is a new edition of Beverley Farmer’s out of print classic A Body of Water, which in its mixing of genres – essay, memoir, fiction, folk tale – opened up new frontiers for Australian literature.

The innovative qualities of A Body of Water were further developed in Farmer’s subsequent works The Bone House and This Water: Five Tales, both published by Giramondo.

A Body of Water was first published thirty years ago. The writing of the book takes place over a year, and portrays a complete cycle in the writer’s life. It begins on her forty-sixth birthday, in a period of emotional inhibition and loneliness – her marriage has broken down, and she is living on her own. By the end of the cycle the narrator has written short stories and poems, which are included in the book, alongside essays about the writing process, journal entries, excerpts from books she has been reading, spiritual meditations, and finely detailed observations of the life around her.

The title A Body of Water could be taken to refer to the book’s settings along the Bellarine Peninsula in southern Victoria, with its bays, the outer harbour, and the lighthouse, standing like a sentinel at the entrance to the ocean. It also suggests the diverse material which fills the book, like a body of water with all that it contains and nurtures. Throughout, one is aware of the writer’s own body, as an entity which shifts its identity like water, with its changes of mood, relationships and reflections.

Further literary analysis by Janet Shaw (PDF)

The three long essays that make up The Bone House are an extended meditation on the life of the body and the life of the mind.

Each essay is based on a single theme and woven out of the same few elemental symbols of earth, and water, fire and blood, light and darkness.

What does art know that we do not? How does the image have such a hold on us all? Alongside the urge to grasp the world, to abstract and delve, is the urge to make our visions known, somehow to fix the moment in time in its fullness of meaning. In the essays, this hoard of moments takes the form of a mosaic, composed of myth, poetry and fable, of relics of the past, of explorations and illuminations and surface impressions. Set out like a commonplace book, they can be read in any sequence, or savoured for their detail.

Unsure of her reception after a divorce and an absence of many years, she has come to mourn the old man and take part in the age-old traditions of Easter week.

Bell is still bound, by her son and by the past, to this family and its matriarch Kyria Sofia. The old warmth between the two women is quick to surface, but so too are old grievances and misunderstandings. Brimming with dreams and memories, the house reasserts its claim on Bell. As the family gathers for the Resurrection, she is fighting for her soul. Readers of Milk and Home Time will welcome the return of Bell to the fold of rural Greece with all its riches and austerities of culture and tradition.

A book that combines the best from two collections of Beverley Farmer's short stories: "Home Time" and "Milk".

Whether writing about being an Australian woman in love in Greece, or waiting at the airport for a small son, the author seems able to isolate moments of human experience with clarity.