The Taste of River Water

I have just savoured the most moving book of poems, The Taste of River Water, by Cate Kennedy. Kennedy writes with gentle and accessible voice about the most mundane events: a joyride, a locust plague, a country woman coming second in a photography competition. Each poem feels like a story, a glimpse of another life seen through kind eyes.

Kennedy has a remarkable ability to notice the small things: the humility of a mother listening to her adult children talk, the largely invisible acts of grace which dot family life, the effect of a painting on a young girl. She uses no poetic mumbo-jumbo, no fancy frills, just clear plain words telling the story, usually in blank verse.

The risk of blank verse is that it can, at times, read like little more than a thoughtful paragraph broken up into a poem shape; and one or two of her poems do seem to fall into that trap. Usually, however, she manages more than that, much more, so that words and rhythm work together to great effect. I particularly loved 'Binaries', which highlights the resonances between binary notation and a knitting pattern – and a mother who shakes her head at her clever kids who understand the former.

Kennedy occasionally uses a more formal structure. In her poem 'Love and work', which addresses the inevitability of grief, the words are complemented by the structure of the poem. The metre and rhyme scheme work together to convey a sense of inevitability and inescapability even as the words remind us just how unavoidable the work of grief is. It is a masterful use of form.

I usually flick back and forth through books of poetry, reading here and there, then filling in the gaps; but Section II of this book deserves reading in order. Although each poem may be read alone, together the poems tell the story of a journey – from the loss of a baby, the desolation of grief, the difficulty of conception, and the experience of birth. Kennedy's plain language keeps this story unsentimental as she charts the ravages of grief, brittleness between marriage partners, and the stillness of joy. Small phrases are echoed between the poems, weaving the section into a quietly magnificent whole.

What really makes Kennedy's poems luminescent, however, more than her observance of small things or her careful crafting of language, is her recognition of the sacred in the everyday. A lost ring becomes a blessing; an apparently empty room holds an unexpected gift; laying a brick path becomes an exercise in daily forgiveness, and the reader is reminded that thankfulness, forgiveness and grace are woven into the smallest of things. I read a poem a day, to draw out the pleasure of this slender book, and found myself moved, stirred, and ultimately restored. The Taste of River Water is a gift to all who read it; and this reader, for one, is filled with gratitude.

Dead Man’s Chest

The kids are asleep, and my husband's out at a work function. In the supreme effort of getting three tired kids, two who have been sick, into bed on time by myself for the second night in a row I skipped the enforced clean up, and now dozens of tiny slips of cut up paper litter the back room rug; the lounge room floor is dotted with pieces of a marble run, a dolly pram and a heap of blocks. Books are stacked in a teetering pile next to the Big Green Chair, and the kitchen table – my writing desk – has a jungle jigsaw and a kid's code book at the other end. As for the mysterious fever which affected my daughters last night and today, well, it broke; but now I ain't feeling too hot. So I'm sitting here in trackie dacks and singlet, mysterious viral aches in my elbows and backbone, fingers pruny from the washing up: not exactly the height of glamour.

It could be depressing. Actually, it is a little depressing. Fortunately, there are means of escape. Tonight I am playing old jazz, sipping a glass of port and reflecting on Kerry Greenwood's most recent offering, Dead Man's Chest. It's the latest in a series of novels set in the roaring twenties in and around Melbourne. Her heroine is the racy Phryne (rhymes with shiny) Fisher: ferociously intelligent, terribly glamorous, deliciously sensual, fabulously wealthy, and drop dead gorgeous.

Phryne is a Lady Detective with a pearl handled gun and a penchant for danger. This time, the story begins as Phryne, her maid Dot and her adoptive daughters Jane and Ruth decamp to the seaside town of Queenscliff for a holiday. They arrive at their accommodation to find the housekeepers missing and the house mysteriously empty. Meanwhile a pigtail snipper is terrorizing the young women of the town; a fisher boy needs a household and a purpose; and three spoiled toffs must be sorted out. Phryne gets to the heart of everything, unravelling mystery upon mystery, with her usual aplomb.

The book is packed with interesting characters: Irish fisherfolk, surrealists, nasty crooks, a film crew and a delightfully awful genteel neighbour, Mrs Mason. Phryne observes all with her insouciant eye.

As we can expect from Greenwood, Dead Man's Chest is a deliciously light confection, packed with loyal servants, good cooking, designer dresses, dangerous episodes, terrific metaphors and even, this time, buried treasure. It's escape, pure and simple... hallelujah!

You can read more about the Phryne Fisher novels here.

Wifework

A few years ago, I was dining with a group which included a clearly exhausted woman; she was nodding off at the table. I asked her why she was so tired. 'Oh,' she said, 'by the time I got home from work yesterday, cooked dinner, fed everyone, put the kids to bed, did the dishes, vacuumed, tidied, did a load of washing, put it through the dryer and ironed my husband's shirts, it was 3am.' Needless to say, while she was ironing his shirts, he was sound asleep, recharging for the next day at his busy job - her frantic juggle of paid employment, childcare and housework notwithstanding.

His excuse – and hers – was that his job was very demanding. It was. It was also possible for him to slip out and grab a coffee in the morning, eat lunch in a cafe, share a joke with adults in the staffroom while fixing himself a cup of tea, and go pee anytime without a child tugging at his leg. His work began and ended at fixed times, and he could read the paper on the train on the way home. Such freedom is unimaginable to those caring for young children.

It would be easy to make fun of this woman ironing at 3am – how could she let herself be such a doormat? – but her story is common. I have certainly heard it enough times from all sorts of women. The woman whose husband looks after the kids so she can go out occasionally; she returns to water in the bath, nappies on the floor, dishes in the sink and a total pigsty because he doesn't perceive cleaning up to be part of the care. The women who tell me their husbands are great at looking after the baby – after they run the bath and set out the towel and the clean clothes and go fetch him, he'll bathe the baby; then the women clean up. The many women who have reeled in shock when they realised my husband was changing a nappy off his own bat; I hadn't even asked him.

I recently thought of this state of affairs as I read Susan Maushart's Wifework: What Marriage Really Means for Women. Maushart's observations, drawing from great swathes of sociological data, are simple: despite the gender revolutions that have taken place over the last few decades, most men still do vastly less around the home – physically and emotionally – than their wives, even when their wives work full-time. Women still do the bulk of cleaning, cooking and housework; the bulk of planning household tasks and social activities; and the bulk of the emotional work which glues the family together and makes men feel good about themselves. Worse, men defend their lack of participation by trivialising the work of the household; and women defend their men by infantilizing their husbands and living in denial.

Maushart argues that unless men and woman find ways to share the load more evenly, there is little incentive for many women to enter into marriage or to remain married. This certainly rings true in our society, where the divorce rate is high and the majority of divorces are initiated by women. In the words of one exasperated friend, 'I have three kids at home. One of them is in his late forties and he won't cook, clean or even chuck his damn socks into the washing basket. I don't know why I bother!'.

Yet despite our acceptance as a culture of no-fault divorce, Maushart reminds us that it is not so straightforward. Her survey of decades of research shows that, except in cases of abuse, divorce is rotten for kids. Like it or not, sociologists have found that an emotionally arid father is better than no father at all; a brittle empty marriage better than no marriage at all – for kids, at least. In what is a radical statement from a divorced feminist socially liberal researcher, she reminds us that marriage is primarily about children, not adults; and she calls for a renegotiation of marriage which recognises the priorities of children, equips men to become co-caretakers of the household, and encourages women to allow their husbands more room in the house, so to speak.

This work will be hard, yet she points out that marriage is hard: research shows that the rewards of marriage tend to be experienced in the first couple of years, then after fifteen or so years. In between, it's a slog. She suggest that if we can get our heads around this, then we will have a better chance of staying married – shocking stuff in an age of instant gratification.

Women might be able to manage this by demanding both less and more from our husbands. That is, Maushart suggests it is unreasonable for us to expect our marriage partner to fulfil every need (lover, parent of our children, breadwinner, best friend, confidante – the latter roles should be served by our friends, and breadwinning may be better shared); yet we might demand more physical contributions to the household.

For their part, she suggests men should take responsibility for some of the business of running a home: not just cooking, but shopping beforehand and cleaning up afterwards; not just putting clothes in the machine, but hanging them out, bringing them in, folding them up and putting them away; in other words, not just helping, but taking ownership of the jobs. Research across the English-speaking world shows that the average husband adds five hours' extra housework each week which is picked up by their wives; Maushart rather warmly suggests that men could instead become net contributors to the labour of running a household and raising children, rather than net beneficiaries.

As I have come to expect from her, Maushart is passionately engaged and engaging. While not every observation she makes about marriage and male-female relationships rings true for me personally, she is certainly making acute observations about the general state of affairs. Time and again I found myself nodding in agreement, recognising elements of my own marriage or that of friends.

One small observation – that the time men spend with their children tends to be fun while the time women spend with their children tends to be functional or disciplinary – brought me to tears; this is certainly the case in our household, where my partner, a very present, responsible and proactive member of the household (he washes children's hair, buys milk and changes nappies and never has to be asked or praised), is always the one who gets to have fun with the kids. I'm too busy peeling vegetables or loading the washing machine.

Wifework is full of such insights, uncomfortable but true. Maushart articulates many of these rough spots in marriage, and it's helpful to have them named. The book is a terrific conversation starter; I would recommend it for every couple with children. It provides a starting point for a couple to critique their relationship, and encourages a thoughtful examination of gender roles. It may even lead to a new form of marriage, where running a household and caring for children are understood to be the work of all householders, male and female; and where men take seriously the emotional and sexual needs of their wives.

And if, in the renegotiation, men find themselves with a more important role in their children's lives and living with much happier wives – then what more could they want? Change might involve a difficult and somewhat painful process of trial and error, but the long-term rewards will be abundant, indeed.

Baby’s Own Adventure

I could tell you all about A Lion in the Night by Pamela Allen. But let my daughter, who is almost two, do it instead:

***

"Baby crying. Baby in cot."

"Wake up!" to the queen, "Oook! Lion taking baby!"

"Puppy! Helmet! Hat! Crown! Bikle! [bicycle]" as the great chase, featuring queen, king, admiral, captain, general, sergeant and little dog begins.

"Moon!" as they race through the forest.

"Boat!" as they chase over the sea.

"Where bikle?" as it's squashed against the sergeant on the boat. "Where puppy?"

The Lion stops. Her face is quiet, bursting with expectation as Mummy and the Lion say GrrrrrrRRRAAAAAAH... [chuckle chuckle] then "GraaaaaahHhhhh!"

"king castle dirr rascal" as the Lion taunts the chasers, then invites them in for...

"befast" [breakfast], then "nana, toast, bottle, egg, strawbees"...

"Bye-bye Lion! Lion in cot! My cot!" and she closes the book and toddles off to her bedroom to take a look.

***

Now if that isn't a recommendation for a book for a two year old, I don't know what is.

And thanks to Nuradin, who read it to her first.

The contradictions of colonialism

Finally, finally I have read The Secret River – one of those 'must read' books on the bookshelf. It's the tale of one William Thornhill, a waterman on the Thames, who is caught stealing and sent to New South Wales for the term of his natural life. After gaining his pardon, Thornhill moves out of Sydney and appropriates a stretch of land along the Hawksburn River, where turns his hand to farming.

What makes the story so interesting is its focus on the encounters between Thornhill and traditional owners of the land, a story not often told in Australian literature. From the outset, it is clear that violence is in the offing, and reading the book is like watching a train wreck in slow motion.

The Secret River is beautifully written, dreamy even, especially in the passages about the river and the landscape. And yet, recalling the recent spat between Peter Carey and Bryce Courtenay on the nature of a good book, the characters are not immediate, even the story is not immediate in the way a good story, a Dickens perhaps, would be. For all its beauty, I felt as if I were reading through a veil and the book, once finished, made little impression on me. The characters have already departed.

Overall, I found it a somewhat frustrating book. The book focuses on Thornhill's thoughts and feelings; we are told constantly what is going on in his head. I wanted to shout the elementary writer's mandate: Show, don't tell! – don't tell me what he thinks, show me the actions that result from his thinking. Yet for all this thought, Thornhill's actions are largely unaffected, even contradicted, by his thoughts.

In the most striking example, Thornhill's household is woken one night by the sounds of a corroborree. Thornhill sneaks over to the indigenous camp to see what is happening. As he watches, he believes he is seeing a war dance, but as the night wears on he realises it is liturgy, and an old man dancing is a 'book'. Thornhill realises too that everyone, except himself, can read the story being told. Yet despite these revelations, which one would expect to assuage his overwhelming fears of imminent attack, he leaves to protect his household.

I would find the scene more plausible had he perceived only a war-dance (and so his defensive preparations would have made sense); or, if he indeed had the insight that he was observing liturgy, that his fears dissipated. I find it hard to swallow that a character has such profound insight, yet is not affected by it.

In another example, Thornhill observes that in the way the indigenous live, all are 'gentry'. All have time to spare every day for socializing, playing, and meaning-making activities. Despite this realisation, this word 'gentry' coming to his mind, he continues to refer to them as savages and treats them accordingly.

I have not read enough history to know whether Thornhill's observations truly reflect those found in old diaries and other records; but I experienced a strong sense of anachronism. An uneducated Thames waterman, living in a strange and hostile terrain, suffocating on fear and feeling threatened every time he heard a branch break saw a corroborree and thought of the Anglican Christmas service? Oh please. In other places, despite his deliberate choice to remain apart from the local tribe, he has insights into the way they claim and farm the land, and have a spiritual connection with it. These insights seem extraordinary, if not completely implausible, for the average Englishman of the time.

Oddly enough, despite the suspension of belief required to read this book, I would still recommend it. My family is Cornish, and left Cornwall in the hungry forties, as they called it. They came to mine, stretch out and breathe, and I can't pretend that the land they worked was empty. I am sure there is blood on our hands, just as there is on so many hands, and it is through books like this that we gain insights into our ancestors and begin to accept responsibility for our history.

As the great-great-great-grandchild of colonists, I can absolutely understand Thornhill's desperate desire for land at any cost – this is his one chance out of grim poverty, his one chance to have children grow straight and tall. It doesn't make his violent actions acceptable, and I don't condone them; but I can't infinitely condemn him either. Like my ancestors, he was born into hunger and a precarious existence; he was sent to Australia; and the philosophers of the time disputed and largely denied the full humanity of indigenous people. Not only that, but the English government ordered the settlers to take all necessary steps to subdue the native population and appropriate the land.

For Thornhill or my ancestors to question the philosophers and the clergymen, for them to perceive indigenous people as fully human and having powerful claims on the land, would be radically farsighted; for them to disobey the King and relinquish appropriated land back to the original inhabitants, unthinkable. Even two hundred years later, many Australians still deny that indigenous Australians have a special claim on the land and bitterly resent any suggestions that sacred sites, at the least, might be returned to the traditional owners.

Perhaps the contradictions between Thornhill's observations and actions are deliberate on the part of the writer. However, they seem to say more about the contradictions we might feel now as the descendents of colonists. From our position of power, we have the emotional space to acknowledge that a corroboree may be a form of liturgy, or that an indigenous person may have a different way of belonging to land – after all, these acknowledgements cost us nothing. But the violence has been done; we have the land; and, at least in Victoria, there is no one much left to take it back. Even more, we are so removed from the violence that we can almost pretend it never happened. Thus, like Thornhill, we can simultaneously make our interesting anthropological observations even as we reap the rich rewards of colonialism.

> Kate Grenville The Secret River (Melbourne: Text, 2005).

Chocolate, no, make that pistachio

Even now, I still have no idea what I really want; I even struggle to pick a flavour of gelato. There are days when I love being married, and days when I long for solitude; days when I enjoy being home with my children, and days when it feels like a prison sentence; days when I know what to do, and days when I haven't a clue. Most weeks, I just do what needs to be done, and aim for a little reflection and gratitude. After all, by virtue of birth, education and marriage I have power, money and choices that would make most women in the world ecstatic; I suspect most of the frustrations I have about my life result from too much choice. The grass is always greener.

From this little muddle, I looked forward to reading Susan Maushart's book What Women Want Next. If I don't know what I want, does she?

Of course, Maushart's answer is not, and cannot be, straightforward. Despite the myriad opportunities available to them, Maushart points out that many women do not feel fulfilled – in fact, they tend to feel more guilty than anything. She goes on to draw from a wealth of sociological studies to investigate why, looking at work, parenting, homemaking, partnership and old age.

Maushart starts from the assumption that, post the revolution, life is what we make of it. For example, she argues, we can work if we so choose; any absence of women in the professional fields says more about how women make choices than about the options open to them. Maushart notes studies that show that many high-achieving women drop out, either to have children or to pursue more holistic lives; and as women have less of a tendency to grant work an all-encompassing role in their lives, their career paths are not limited by external factors, but are self-limiting.

In theory and in law, Maushart's initial assumption may be correct. In practice, however, many workplaces play out differently. More than one of my friends has been sidelined at work, explicitly told that they will probably have kids so the firm won't invest in their future. This is illegal, but it is difficult to prove or prosecute – and who wants to take on one's employer on such an issue? It just leaves one working in a hostile workplace, vulnerable to the next wave of redundancies. More subtly, the lack of job sharing or permanent part time positions at management levels means many women with children never advance far beyond entry level roles as they are committed to collecting their children from school and meeting other family responsibilities. I'm not convinced that our options are as open as Maushart states; many workplaces are structurally hostile to primary caregivers (and they're usually women) whether in overt or more subtle ways.

So I disagree with her initial assumption. Despite this, I do concede that we have significantly more choices than women of two generations ago, and I accept her claim that much of the responsibility for our happiness now rests on our choices.

This revolutionary freedom of choice is wonderful; yet Maushart suggests that it is perhaps an impediment to a sense of fulfilment. Like me, at home with kids for years now and wondering if I should instead be working, while many of my working friends no doubt wonder if they should spend more time at home with their kids, many of us find decision making difficult. With this in mind, Maushart suggests that one thing we want may be the wisdom to make our decisions well and the courage to live them out fully.

Maushart's investigation into what women want focuses on happiness. This raises a deeper question for me: is happiness so important? There are times at the gym when a great sense of wellbeing descends and I feel intensely happy, even although I am bored out of my skull. At other times, I may write something difficult and good, something that makes me weep or rage or both, that leaves me feel empty, fragile and vulnerable. I can't say writing it makes me happy, but it invests my life with meaning in a way that dumbbell flies never will. Of course, I keep going to the gym to get the endorphin kick – but I can get along without it. I'm not sure I could live without putting words on a page. I even wonder, feeling terribly subversive, if it's possible that happiness is just a teensy-weensy little bit er... boring?

Maushart doesn't investigate this, and although she does touch on our desire to infuse our lives with meaning, it's in light of its contribution to happiness. Yet I'm not convinced that a sense of meaning always contributes to a sense of happiness. Many people make meaningful life choices knowing they will be painful and difficult. Ministers of religion and artists are often cases in point; people holding fast to difficult relationships, another. I find myself wondering how important happiness really is, and whether other, deeper, values drive our lives.

However, I am a reasonably happy person (even if bored at the gym, driven crazy by my children, and forever consumed by doubt about my choices) so perhaps I underestimate the pall of an unhappy life, or the effect on overall wellbeing that meaning-making gives me. Then again, Maushart writes that dancing, exercise, volunteer work and religious participation are major indicators of happiness for a woman; I do three of them, so perhaps that accounts for my mostly even keel.

While I certainly don't agree with all of Maushart's conclusions, or even her premises, What Women Want Next is funny, feisty, informative, confessional and engaging. Maushart intersperses questions of women's liberation with stories of her daughter, age six, dressed in a bridal gown vacuuming the front hallway, and discussions about sex with jokes about blow jobs and notes on her own sex life; and she is never averse to a wry one-liner (a section on how to negotiate housework and relationships ends with, "Of course, I am single."). As I have come to expect from Maushart, What Women Want Next is a pleasure to read, and provides much food for thought, not least the revelation that sociology can be sexy!

> Susan Maushart What Women Want Next (Melbourne: Text, 2005).

Buddha bless Father Government!

When I think of the early eighties, I think of Cambodians. I was a child when the first wave of refugees moved into my suburb, and my parents cared passionately about their plight. So during the week we trailed my mother as she mediated at the old DSS, negotiating their pensions; kicked our feet as she lobbied the local member of parliament for better treatment of refugees; fooled around with kids in strange smelling dimly lit houses; and played hide and seek among old clothes and furniture at The Store, where my mother and her friends collected second hand goods to set up households for families fresh out of the hostel. On weekends, we got underfoot as my father moved people from hostels to housing commission flats, carrying battered sofas and wardrobes up narrow stinking concrete stairs.

I never thought too much about what these mostly quiet, gentle and loving people had gone through. Once, after I'd been particularly ratty, bored out of my brain while my mother painstakingly worked through some forms with a family, she told me that the family included an informally adopted orphan girl, my age, who had witnessed the murder of her entire biological family. And once, when I was idly admiring a Mambo t-shirt with skulls and crossbones (I was going through a pirate phase), she asked me how I could want to wear that when we knew so many people who had been to the Killing Fields, or who had been robbed or raped by pirates on their way to Australia. Unanswerable, really.

Mum was good at making me feel terrible, although she genuinely thought she was trying to educate me. I still resent that a bit! But I don't resent the people she worked with. The families I knew were extraordinarily gentle and generous despite their terrible experiences and poverty. They would visit with boxes of Cadbury's chocolates (some women worked in the chocolate factory), or with an exquisite jacket sewn especially for my mother by outworkers. One man gave my sister and me our first, thrilling, digital watches; he also turned up one Christmas Day with a black tarry ointment especially brewed for my sick father. ('Just put it on where it hurts, then rip it off,' we were instructed. My father, prostrate in bed, went white. He had the mumps.) For no reason other than that we were our parents' children, my sister and I were loved and treated as part of a big extended family.

So it was with great interest that I turned to Alice Pung's Unpolished Gem. Pung's parents were Chinese-Cambodian refugees; the book is a memoir of her childhood. Pung was born in Footscray and grew up in the Western suburbs of Melbourne. The story charts from before her birth through to university.

It is a funny little book. On the one hand, it is full of well-told stories from both before and after she was born. The reader is entertained by the loud exclamations of the women in Pung's family as they encounter the marvels of the West ('Wah!' at pedestrian crossings, 'Wah!' at escalators, 'Wah!' at the abundance of food at the supermarket, not to mention the fortnightly blessings of Father Government, which deposits money into the accounts of useless old people). We are drawn into the world of her elders: her mother's isolation in a new country; her grandmother's grief as children died or were taken away in Cambodia; her father's musings at the Footscray Market as her mother is giving birth. Pung writes compellingly about the rift between her and her mother, exacerbated as Pung's language and thinking shift further and further into English and they are no longer able to communicate freely. Her mother is virtually silenced at the family dinner table as most conversations move into English; she compensates for this by becoming louder and more abrasive everywhere else. And Pung can write. She crafts beautiful sentences, beautiful paragraphs which are vivid, illuminating and intelligent, a sheer joy to read.

On the other hand, at times it feels like we are being invited to laugh at, not with, these funny little refugees who think purple polyester is the ant's pants. While it is clear that Pung loves her family, and includes herself in the jokes, at times the writing makes me uncomfortable. It goes beyond irreverent to a place where I wonder how relaxed Pung really is about her heritage; how much can you laugh at your family before it looks like you are embarrassed by them? There is, at times, a slight lack of respect in the writing; some of the stories make me cringe. Pung's mother, desperately unhappy, looks for a spiritual cause, and I don't feel like laughing when she realises that it's because the family shrine is situated in a room below the ensuite toilet. Yes, it's funny; but what untold losses have refugees experienced? Of course grief will assail them at every turn, disturbing them by day and waking them in the night; laughing at Pung's mother's struggles to understand is not my first response.

The stories also shift uneasily between amusing anecdotes and devastating sadness. I am not sure which way the book is intended; a story about removing headlice jostles against a story about being an outworker, which runs into a story about the sudden death of a beloved young child. Which impression are we to be left with? The small annoyances of childhood: headlice and toilet accidents? Or the terrible grief suffered by those who have lost children? They are weighted equally. Perhaps this is deliberate on the part of the author, who was conceived in a refugee camp but born in Australia; as a child they may have felt equally important to her. Yet it rests uneasily with me.

The book moves from vivid stories about Pung's family and her childhood to her depression in late high school, and here the writing loses some of its strength. The shift feels abrupt, like something has been left out - perhaps the transition was a bit of a mystery to the writer too. But the contrast between the strong, clear writing in the first half of the book with the vague passages and long internal monologues of the second half is disappointing.

While one review describes Unpolished Gem as "virtuoso storytelling", I suggest it's more of a debut. Good stories told with vivacity are weakened by long meandering patches; the second half of the book needs a good edit. It reads like what it is: a book written by a young woman learning her craft in a country with a small editing budget. Yet Pung does have talent, and it will be interesting to see how it develops as she matures. I look forward to reading a more polished gem in a couple of decades.

> Alice Pung Unpolished Gem (Melbourne: Black Inc, 2006).

Pretend the long grass is the sea

I'm nuts about gardens. I love to wander through them; I think about them all the time. When I can't sleep at night, I take myself for an imaginary ramble through a large garden. Awake, I walk everywhere, and find hidden pockets of glory, or even single trees, around my suburb. I cannot get enough of gingko leaves, or lime green euphorbias, or even homely rapa or chicory growing in lieu of a lawn. Just knowing that lots of people are out there Growing Things thrills me.

And I love garden things. Not glossy garden shop accessories, but the old laundry sinks that have become pots; the rusted out bike entwined by a creeper; the faded hammock shivering in the breeze. In one of my favourite short stories, a couple drink beer at the bottom of the garden in an old rowboat surrounded by long grass.

Pity about my own garden. It's dry and dusty, weedy and tired. I make noble vows about working in it for ten minutes a day, and plant out seedlings bought in optimistic moments, but some days it feels like a complete no-hoper.

That's why I need garden books. They are my ticket to dream. But the dreaming becomes ridiculous when I look at gorgeous books of French gardens set on hillsides. Too much beauty makes me despondent. Too much misty rain and photos of mud and I am gripped with envy. I need encouragement and enthusiasm fit for a small dry inner urban block, not the dreams of Northern Hemisphere princes.

Michael Mccoy's Garden, by a Victorian garden writer, is perfect. McCoy writes about developing his own garden on a suburban block over the course of a year. He writes about the labour of digging up lawn and shovelling compost; his backaches and failures; and his delight when things go right. He is an enthusiastic plantsman, detailing the virtues of this plant or that; and he charts the development of the garden with stunning photographs that I return to again and again. These photographs celebrate both the individual plant and the striking combination. They are photos to wander through, an invitation to dream, and yet the concepts are simple enough to influence the way I plant. In my garden, thanks to this book, feathery cosmos flowers pink against rigid grey euphorbias, and I get a thrill every time I see the combination.

Influential too is an older book, Surviving in the Eighties. The first part of the book is about small animal husbandry, and is full of fascinating if, to me, utterly useless information such as how to raise a herd of goats or incubate chickens. But Part Two of the book, Surviving in the City, profiles half a dozen gardens crammed with plants. The focus is on growing one's own food, although many non-food plants are mentioned; and it is startling how much a gardener can squeeze into a city block, whether it's just tomatoes and herbs, or espaliered trees. There are vigorous discussions on how to deal with gardens soured by generations of cats' piss or heavy pollution, or the pests that develop in areas with very few trees. The writing is enthusiastic and opinionated; it makes me feel that I, too, can grow tomatoes and green leaves and have great fun doing so. In fact, this book is responsible not only for my garden full of rocket and rainbow chard, but for the seven espaliered fruit tree saplings I planted last year. I dream of apples yet.

Even if I don't have a prince's budget or a garden on a French hillside, I still treasure whimsy. I love hammocks and outdoor showers, hidden garden rooms and rowboats sunk into grass. Gardens for Pleasure answers this need. It suggests themes such as Night, Butterflies, Reading, Resting, and Tea, then suggests ways to develop a garden around each theme in small, medium or large gardens. Many ideas are do-able, and its plant lists are useful, but it is really a book for meditating on. While few of us will go to the effort of building a small one-person sized island in a pond (in the Resting Garden), the book evokes questions about what we enjoy in a garden; how we might like to rest, or read, or sip tea there; and how we might develop a garden, or even a nook of our garden, in a way that matches our taste and budget. Gardens for Pleasure contains no glossy photographs. Instead, it is so beautifully illustrated that even my five year old curls up with it to scheme and dream of the garden she would like us to have.

Speaking of which, does anyone have an old rowboat?

> Blog title quotes Lisa Merrifield 'What I did with what I knew' in Splash (Ringwood, Vic: Viking, 1998); Michael McCoy Michael Mccoy's Garden (Glebe, NSW: Florilegium, 2000); Michael Boddy & Richard Beckett Surviving in the Eighties (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1980); Brodee Myers-Cooke Gardens for Pleasure (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1996).

It may prove amusing, after all

When I think of places, I think of detectives. Venice: Brunetti. Paris: Maigret. Sicily: Montalbano. Boston: Homer Kelly. Hong Kong: CF Wong. Moscow: Fandorin. Botswana: Precious Ramotswe. Italy: Zen. And each of these characters, these collections of stories, sound so much more interesting than the people I know in the place I live: Melbourne, a pimple at the ass-end of the world. What's to love about Melbourne, a city choked by traffic and smog, a people gripped with passion for nothing more than the latest plasma television or footy score?

So it was with real gratitude that I discovered Kerry Greenwood's love song to this city. She is the author of a series of mysteries set in the Jazz Age featuring the elegant and opulent Phryne Fisher. Phryne, who is slender of ankle, careless of opinion and quick of wit, has a passion for slinky dresses, fast cars and interesting young men. When she is not indulging these passions, she solves mysteries. On the way she collects eclectic people: a stouthearted maid, Dot; some raving Communist taxi drivers, Bert and Cec; a hearty female doctor, Dr MacMillan; and her exotic lover, Lin Chung.

With her cool head, her allies and her pearl handled gun, she is more than a match for the most vicious of crims walking the city streets - or drinking tea in the leafier suburbs.

Her first novel, Cocaine Blues, sees Phryne returning to Melbourne after years in England. Suffering from ennui, she decides to try being a Lady Detective. 'It may prove amusing, after all,' she reflects. She moves into the Windsor Hotel, and from there begins to investigate whether a young English woman is being poisoned by her Australian husband. In so doing, she also unravels an abortion racket and a cocaine ring, and becomes erotically involved with an aristocratic Russian dancer. This novel is based in the CBD, and as Phryne strolls down Collins Street, shops in the Block Arcade, and steals through the very seedy Lonsdale Street, I fall in love with Melbourne all over again.

The Phryne novels are written with a deft hand by an author who clearly relishes gorgeous dresses and fine dining - and Melbourne - and wants us to relish them too. And she uses some lovely imagery. A cab driver says that a formidable hostess is 'as mean as a dunny rat'. Phryne muses to herself, 'One cannot take much except intelligence and religious convictions into a Turkish bath'. Her lounging robe is an oriental gold and green pattern, 'not to be sprung suddenly on invalids or those of nervous tendencies'. And Phryne drives like a demon. 'She set the car at Spencer Street as she would set a hunting hack at a hedge, and roared out, scattering pedestrians.'

Never pedestrian, always glamorous, these books are a delight.

> Kerry Greenwood Cocaine Blues (first in a series) (Melbourne: Allen & Unwin, 2005) (originally published by McPhee Gribble, 1989).

The Divided Review

What do you do when a book has a great concept, but a lousy execution? I don't know whether to recommend, excoriate or plain old ignore The Divided Heart: Art and Motherhood by Rachel Power. It's one of those books I saved until a special day (yes, I hoard my treats), only to find it bitterly disappointing. And yet it's necessary and wonderful, too.

The book is a collection of interviews with women who combine art and motherhood. I am deeply moved by the stories and insights these women offer, whether it's about the physical demands of breastfeeding or more abstract observations about the gifts and struggles of family life. As someone who is a sometime writer and mother, I recognise myself in these stories. And, to some extent, all mothers will recognise themselves here. Juggling children, partners, work and an interior life is not a province exclusive to artists by any means.

But even more than recounting the great juggling act, many of the stories tell honestly of the contradictions in our hearts. We may desperately miss our children when we are working, and desperately want to work when we are hanging out with the kids. We may be happiest playing games and cooking with our children, but for that niggling voice that will not go away asking us to write, draw, work, sing. Having children can ground us and give us a deep foundation, and provide a rich well of experience to draw from, yet make it incredibly difficult to take the time to produce anything. So many of the stories touch on these contradictions, these divisions in our hearts, and it is a privilege to share the insights.

And yet the book is so disappointing. It is written in a breathless journalistic style. Each story retains an interview format, and we get tabloid details such as where the interview took place and what the subject looks like. People use floral cups and drink capuccinos.

Just as bad, these strong powerful women, all masters of expression through story, theatre or song, apparently sigh, laugh and exclaim their comments. I feel like I'm reading an Enid Blyton novel. I am just waiting for something to be utterly ghastly, or people to converse over lashings of ginger beer.

Worse, the author is clearly awed by her subjects, yet paradoxically doesn't have the grace to get out of the way. She intrudes her own, often inappropriate, voice into their accounts, sometimes for two or three pages before we even get to the interviewee. Names are dropped left right and centre, and it's as if she thinks everyone else's greatness might rub off if only we knew that she had spent time with them.

Personally, I don't care whether the author travelled in a taxi, a palanquin or a hot air balloon to meet someone, or if the interviews were performed on the telephone while the interviewee was sitting on the toilet. All that matters to me is that these important stories are recorded and shared, and that the interviewer get the hell out of the way so that we can hear her subjects' voices clearly.

It is a testament to the power of good stories that, despite the writing style, the breathlessness in the face of celebrity, and the authorial intrusion, they shine through. For although I am so frustrated by the writing that I want to throw the book against the wall, I also find myself lying awake at night thinking about this insight or that, all the richer for having read it.

This book may have been better had it been a collection of stories written by the women themselves, rather than a series of fawning interviews. Or perhaps these women's voices already speak to us through their work, and we could look there for any glimpses into the world of art and motherhood that they may wish to grant us.

> Rachel Power The Divided Heart: Art and Motherhood (Fitzroy: Red Dog, 2008).