Northern Aranda Traditions (Ted Strehlow)

Inspired by Will Self’s The Butt, I went in search of the controversial anthropologist Ted Strehlow. Melbourne Uni library had his major work, Songs of Central Australia, but you had to go in and read it on site, so I settled for Northern Aranda Traditions, published in 1947.

It seems to be quite fashionable to bash Strehlow. It does seem from various online biographies I have read that he went a little weird in his final years, but this book was written at the height of his abilities. He did the research in the 1930s but held off until his informants had all died before the book was published.

One of the difficulties about being a white Australian who is sympathetic to indigneous causes is the lack of information about what, exactly, Aboriginal culture consists of. It isn’t really surprising, given that so much of these cultures involves access rights to certain bits of knowledge or parts of stories, but you can feel a little in the dark about exactly what you are sympathising with.

A great struggle I have personally is the traditional owners’ requests not to visit certain places. As someone who feels intensely about the landscape it is hard to be told that there is only one way of interacting with a particular place - especially when that one way utterly excludes you. I can’t help feeling, secular person that I am, that it is crazy to expect everyone to interact with a particular place in exactly the same way. It is a bit like expecting everyone who visits the Sistine Chapel to be a devout Catholic, or everyone who sees the Taj Mahal to be an observant Muslim. Maybe they should be!

This book is obviously untouched by modern political considerations, for both good and bad. It is not so good if you’re interested in Northern Aranda women, for example, because they barely rate a mention except to point out that they are completely excluded from the religious life of the groups (although Strehlow was obviously writing without consulting any women, so it is perfectly possible they had their own initiations and special knowledge to pass on).. But as an explanation of exactly how things worked in a traditional Aboriginal society, among men who were older than contact with white settlers, it is very interesting.

It also underlined just how much has been lost. The complex initiation process is seen very much as a vetting process, to discover exactly who was worthy of access to the various secrets. If no one was deemed worthy, they weren’t passed on and died with their keepers.

Interestingly, according to this book, the traditionally inherited secret/sacred objects that represented totemic ancestors were seen as private property – the current ‘owner’ of these objects was apparently entitled to do as he pleased with them. This conflicts with a lot about what I had assumed about traditional Aboriginal culture – you do tend to assume everything must have been shared.

Strehlow also points out how unchanging the culture of the Northern Aranda was; how everything was so proscribed that there was really no room for technical or literary innovation whatsoever. He even referred to it as a ‘decadent’ culture, which surprised me a lot. We are so used to thinking of the unchanging nature of traditional indigenous culture as a strength - which it is - but of course an unchanging culture can also be an oppressive and hidebound and restrictive one.

The main feeling I got from the book, however, was just a sadness at the complexity and interestingness of what has been lost, all over Australia, over the last two centuries. Strehlow deserves all credit for insisting on the intricacy and significance of Aranda culture at a time when this was anything but fashionable.

The Butt (Will Self)

A lot of domestics are our place are caused by either Will Self or smoking.

My husband Will loves Will Self. I don’t love him so much as read him, which is a more intimate and long-term proposition. Reading an author means you end up in bed with him for hours, after all.

My husband Will also likes to smoke, which drives me insane. Our little chats titled Why Don’t You Just Give Up and Will Self isn’t a Novelist, He Just Writes Extended Conceits never end well. Usually they end with Will heading, affronted, out into the garden with a Will Self book in one hand and a cigarette in the other.

You can imagine my delight in finding a Will Self book on the topic of smoking…

The Butt is yet another extended conceit, but with some special features that intrigued me. The flimsy premise is that an American tourist, Tom Brodzinski, chucks the butt of his final cigarette over the balcony of his holiday apartment, where it hits another man on the head. In a series of Kafkaesque repercussions, this means he ends up facing tribal justice and a charge of attempted murder.

Intriguing special feature number one: the book is about Australia. Other reviewers have claimed it is about ‘the colonial experience’ or ‘a combination of Iraq and Australia’. Nonsense: it is about Australia. Will Self is the king of the thinly disguised real; this was blatantly inspired by, and perhaps written on, a holiday to FNQ or NT. He isn’t capable of a genuine synthesis. It is about the weirdness of the traditional Aboriginal laws that try to coexist with the laws of Australia.

Special feature number two: the book draws heavily on the story of Ted Strehlow, the anthropologist of the Arrernte people of Central Australia who was controversially made the final custodian of Arrernte traditional law by elders in the 1930s. Other reviewers (fools!) have imagined it is Kurtz from Heart of Darkness who is the mad anthropologist at the apex of the book. But that is just a reflex reference. The beating heart of the inspiration for this is blatantly TGH Strehlow. (You can read more about him here).

The nightmarish Australia of the book contains some insurance-derived badlands. ‘Tontine’ insurance is a policy under which the last living policyholder is entitled to a payout, causing the local tribes to indulge in an orgy of degenerate killings. This is how Strehlow came to ‘own’ the Arrernte traditions he wrote about: “In accordance with the Aranda rules of tjurunga inheritance, these traditions would be regarded as becoming my personal property after the deaths of their original owners.”

Will Self’s use of language is HOT. No one does flesh-crawling metaphors like Will Self. It is worth reading his books just for these gems – and I do.

His use of actual narrative and character, on the other hand, are RUBBISH. The only good novel he has written, in my opinion, is How the Dead Live. That one is good because, like all transcendent satire, it contains some humanity – it is about his relationship with his mother and other family members. A naff topic that makes for an awesome read.

The story of The Butt is stupidly long and exhausting. Many have remarked that The Butt’s description of a roadtrip through a hot featureless desert is similar to embarking on such a roadtrip oneself. Similarly, its description of a labyrinthine legal system is not unlike reading labyrinthine legalese for real. Neither are much fun. However, I was giving this book the benefit of the doubt until page 301, when it seems like Self just got bored and hastily scribbled the unsatisfactory – in fact downright irritating – ending.

My husband still smokes. We still argue about his smoking. We did manage to agree, however, that The Butt really lets itself down in the last 50 pages, coming to an incoherent and rather silly conclusion.

If this book was a person, it would be my husband Will, promising yet again to give up while sneaking up to the shop ‘to buy some milk’….In a nutshell: in a nightmare that looks a lot like Australia, a bumbling tourist chucks away the butt of his final cigarette and unwittingly becomes the butt of a series of hideous legal consequences.Planet 8 scores four chocolates with pretty wrappers that turn out to be slightk

The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (Doris Lessing)

Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
- But who is that on the other side of you?

I had always found this stanza from The Waste Land mysterious and evocative. In some ways it is only a more posh version of that cheap ‘Footprints’ poem that everyone’s aunt has on her refrigerator, but something about those lines just thrills me every time I read them. Who is the third who walks always beside you? Who is that on the other side of you? It made me think of the tales told by survivors of nature’s extremes: that when you are alone with death, you are not alone at all.

I went through a major ‘disasters in the cold’ phase a few years back. I read stories by people like Edmund Hillary and watched Touching the Void, about a rock climber who falls into an enormous crevice, just to see what it is like at the extremes of human experience, and for the thrill of wondering: What would I do? Could I shoot and eat my faithful husky dog? Could I eat my fellow plane passengers? In extremis, who would I be? I have never read The Worst Journey in the World, an account of Scott’s disastrous Antarctic expeditions, which in part inspired Planet 8, but I think it would fit right into that category.

Planet 8 is easily the best thing I’ve read so far this year. It is simple, devestating and brilliant and made me realise afresh why Doris Lessing deserved to win the Nobel Prize for literature. I finished it two days ago and still I think about it every time I close my eyes. The story is ringing in my ears like a thunderclap.

I think for your own good, I won’t tell you about how the narrative of this book unfolds. If I told you, you might not read it. It is like a news story you can’t bear to watch because it is too sad. But the story is ultimately one which asks the same question that Elliot asked in those lines from The Waste Land: Are we all there is? Is anyone watching over us? How can we transcend ourselves?

Unlike Elliot, however, Lessing is bold enough to provide an answer.


If this book was a person, it would be a hot actor playing Captain Oates, the man who famously – and selflessly - left Scott’s tent saying: “I’m just going out. I may be some time.”

In a nutshell: a once fertile planet is beleaguered by a surprise Ice Age. International space organisation Canopus assures the population they will soon be relocated – but how long can they hold out?

Planet 8 scores an entire box of your favourite chocolates, plus an empty house, six hours of babysitting and a rainy day.

City of Illusions (Ursula la Guin)

Now THIS is, for my money, the best of the le Guins I’ve read lately. What an awesome premise! A naked alien emerges from the forest. He has no memory of who he is. The local people – a simple-living bunch – take him in and teach him to speak and read. They call him Falk.

It turns out the local people are simple-living for good reason. The planet Earth is ruled by the Shing. The Shing are liars. They are not to be trusted. They let humankind live, but not do anything too technological. If humans start getting uppity, building vehicles and the like, the Shing come by on an airship and raze the place. So humans live in insular, disparate little communities and no one really knows who to trust.

Falk heads off on a quest to find out what is really going on. Now to explain any more would give away the fantastic plot of this book, so I won’t, but it’s great! Really fascinating. Because no one has ever seen a Shing. Maybe there ARE no Shing. But maybe the Shing WANT people to THINK there are no Shing because it makes it EASIER for the Shing…etc.


If this book was a person, it would be a cold-eyed alien who looked exactly like you, but who might not be an alien at all...

In a nutshell: an alien with no memory sets out to find his true identity – but to do so he must enter the City of Illusions.

City of Illusions scores nine chocolates out of a possible ten…or does it? Perhaps they are carob drops, perhaps they really are chocolates, but one thing is certain: they are delicious.

Planet of Exiles (Ursula le Guin)

I was on a le Guin bender for a few weeks there. But like last month’s pub crawl, now that I come to think about the details, I find it’s all a bit hazy. Which establishment’s toilets did I throw up in? The Retreat? The Napier? Which aliens were in this book? The barbarians? The weird dwarves? Weird barbarian dwarves?

Flicking through the book again is a bit like checking the gallery in my mobile phone for the photographic evidence. Ah yes, the barbarians, with their high-falutin’ speech. The settlers from another, more sophisticated, planet. The love between an alien and a local – forbidden, naturally.

So yes, a dwindling colony of aliens stuck on a barbarian world. They came, they saw, they settled, they got the phone cut off. Fifteen year seasons, a sixty year year. A very long winter ahead. Threats from the north (or was it the south?) from even MORE barbarian aliens. Loads and loads of fighting with sticks and swords.

If this book was a person, it would be dressed as Conan the Barbarian holding a ray gun with a big ghostbusters symbol around it.

In a nutshell: a shrinking group of alien colonists are forced to work alongside the local barbarians to defeat an attack from the even more barbarian locals.

Planet of Exiles scores five chocolates out of a possible ten, but I can’t remember which ones.

Rocannon’s World (Ursula le Guin)

Oh well, in for a penny, in for a pound. I might as well finish reading the sci-fi classics of le Guin now that I’ve started.

This one dates from the mid-sixties. Rocannon is another exiled alien, stuck this time on a low-gravity planet populated by a group of divergent humanoid species that end up kind of suspiciously like the inhabitants of Tolkien’s Middle Earth. There are the dwarf-like Claymen, the elf-like Gdemiar and a bunch of others who are a bit like leprechauns and goblins. This allows le Guin to tell what is essentially a tale of heroic odessey set in a fantasy world, but have a scientific basis for everything. Nice.

Rocannon himself is an anthropologist who has arrived to study the various intelligent life forms. The ship that holds his team is unexpectedly blown up and he realises the planet is the base for a hostile war with the League of worlds for which Rocannon works. He loses all his weapons and his communication devices. That leaves him, without any of his usual techologies or tools, to undertake a dangerous mission to find the aliens and steal their intergalactic fax machine in order to warn the League of what is going on before the danger spreads.

This book has quite a charming feel for colonisation from the aboriginal peoples’ point of view. The dismay and incomprehension of the feudal, elf-like Gdemiar as their castles and keeps are blown up must be something like the feelings of nineteenth century Afghan tribesmen as the colonial powers played their Great Game across the Panshijr valley.

The book is exciting and fairly short, although in places it strayed a bit too much into the ‘fantasy’ genre for my taste. It was a reasonably fast paced read though, and well worth the four or five hours I put into it.


If this book was a person, it would be Charles Darwin dressed in a wizard costume.

In a nutshell: An alien is trapped on a fantastic world of dwarf- and elf-like species – but a sinister presence from beyond the galaxy is invading.

Rocannon’s World scores seven chocolates out of a possible ten, mostly M & Ms which I gulped down all at once.

Psychogeography (Will Self)

jejune
brio
arete
palisade

These are some words you need to know if you’re going to read Will Self. Nothing wrong with that. When it comes to vocabulary, size does matter.

This collection of essays has a great premise. Self intends to do some serious cityside walking, setting off on insane treks (from his home in London all the way to Heathrow Airport, for example) to discover how humans and their landscapes intersect. And indeed things start off very well. Who would have thought you could even walk from central London to Heathrow? Fascinating.

But like the long, long trek from JFK to Manhattan he also undertakes, the journey palls somewhat toward the end. The first few essays are great, alive with Self’s unrivalled knowledge of London’s layout and history. Many others have their moments. But towards the end of the book the essays got shorter and more offhand, until like the hard shoulders or traffic islands with which Self is so fascinated, they started to seem a bit, well, slapdash. A little grey and alienating.

The form, too, moves from a promising city central grandeur like rows of stately Georgian terraces (impressive headings like Walk One and Walk Two suggest that the book is going to be entirely composed of walks), to the haphazard juxtaposition of industrial estate carparks with weedy stretches of wasteland and discount shopping hangars. By the end of the book he is tossing off inconsequential little morsels about taxi rides in Singapore and drinking tea in Turkey and it all gets a bit half arsed.

The Ralph Steadman illustrations are great, though. Their dystonpian visions kept me pleasantly horrified, and the bright colours kept my baby entertained, making this a great book to read while combining musings on the future of civilisation with breastfeeding.

If this book was a person, it would be a scrabble champion with a rucksack and mild Asperger’s.

In a nutshell: Will Self walks through cities (mostly London) while Ralph Steadman illustrates.

Psychogeography scores seven chocolates out of a possible ten, including some, like the hard toffee, that you really have to suck.

The Left Hand of Darkness (Ursula K le Guin)

Well, I am on an Ursual le Guin binge. Like my friend who was never allowed to watch TV as a child and now spends evenings staring slack-jowled at So You Think You Can Dance, I’m making up for lost time. I really should have read her sci-fi when I was about twelve, at the same time as I was charmed by the Wizard of Earthsea series, but better late than never.

Left Hand of Darkness is set on a world that has two chief weirdnesses. First, it’s freezing cold. That’s why the world is nicknamed ‘Winter’ by the aliens sent to persuade it to join the alien equivalent of the United Nations. Second, the people are neuters, neither male nor female, except for one week or so each month when they go into heat and mate with another neuter in a bizarre hermaphroditic frenzy.

Narrated from the perspective of Genly, a lone alien emissary sent to get the planet to join up with the intergalactic civilisation, there is a lot of snow and ice in this book. Which is great – only last year I had my obsessive ‘snow and ice challenge’ phase when I was gripped by any and all stories of survival on high mountains or down icy ravines (Touching the Void, Edmund Hillary’s autobiography View from the Summit, etc). And this book has a huge ice plain endurance test! Where the alien and a neuter local spend weeks battling across a blizzard swept glacier! Running low on alien food supplies! Occasionally having odd cross-species sexually charged ‘moments’! Awesome.

According to the introductory bios, le Guin’s parents were big on the 1950’s anthropological scene. And it shows, with delightfully subtle imaginings of alien ways and culture. Half of the book seems to be taken up with Genly’s cultural problems. His misunderstandings and confusion could be those of any alien anywhere in space-time – like my husband’s British inability to comprehend the Australian phrase ‘Ya right?’

I really enjoyed this book. The characters still have silly names that you suspect are anagrams, like Genly and Slose and Estraven. But this annoyed me less than before. Maybe, like Genly the alien on the weird ice-world, I am becoming acclimatised…

If this book was a person, it would be Gandalf the wizard, wearing a space suit. Actually, a space dress.

In a nutshell: An alien ambassador is trapped on an icy planet inhabited by stoic Scandanavian type hermaphrodites who wear a LOT of fur.

The Left Hand of Darkness scores eight and a half chocolates out of a possible ten, all of them slightly chilled chewy caramels, requiring a lot of chewing over and giving a corresponding amount of sweet satisfaction.

The Dispossessed (Ursula le Guin)

I don’t normally read sci-fi. It’s the names. In this novel everyone is called Shevek and Rulag and Bedap and god-knows-what...

These weird little non-words irritate me. Why can’t anyone conceive of a distant future full of space travel in which people are called Brayden and Maddison? That’s what primary school rolls tell us the near future, at least, has in store.

At least le Guin explains the funny names – in her utopian society, everyone gets assigned their names at birth by a computer, instead of an ID number.

At first the book seemed a bit ponderous. In a galaxy far far away, a planet and its moon circle one another. The planet is full of nations at war and nice shopping strips. The moon is full of thorny bushes and dust storms and a bunch of exiled idealists who went there 150 years before to build their utopian anarchist society. There’s been no official contact between the two societies ever since.

An alien physicist lives in the utopian society on the moon. He does a weird kind of alien physics that might lead to a sought-after instanteous interstellar vehicle. Everyone is keen for a piece of this action.

This is where things changed from ponderous to irritating – or even a bit spooky. Surely sci-fi’s main promise is a complete escape from real life? But instead I found the alien sitting around with his wife – his pregnant wife - whinging that some journal had rejected his paper. His pregnant wife made sympathetic noises but secretly just felt tired and hot. Yeah, yeah. Then the alien’s wife had the baby and the alien decided to leave the utopian society and go live in the capitalist society on the main planet. Leaving the alien’s wife at home, alone, with the baby.

Things were so exactly like my actual life at this point that I expected the alien to ring up the moon and announce he had lost his wallet and could his wife Western Union him some cash ASAP…which fortunately didn’t happen. For a start, there is no money on Annares, the moon. Utopians, like royalty, don’t carry cash.

Reading this book, I was charmed by the way the future dates so quickly, that in this distant solar system where you can scoot between planets on a big spaceship, you also can send a Telex or buy a postcard, using coins of course, because who’s ever heard of a credit card? And I was eventually seduced by the believableness of the relationship between the alien and his wife, the little personal tensions that impeded his life’s work. Despite the ever-so-seventies concerns of capitalism versus a kind of communism (except not, it is more like very organised anarchism), I got very into The Dispossessed.

Now that I’ve finished it, I miss it. I may dig out some more sci-fi – particularly if I can find any in which the protagonist is called Steven.

If this book was a person, it would be my husband, Will, wearing long alien robes and calling himself Willek.

In a nutshell: a brilliant physicist is forced to choose between his dusty, utopian home and the riches of a capitalist planet.

The Dispossessed scores six chocolates out of a possible ten.

Little Wilson & Big God/You’ve had your time (Anthony Burgess)

In Laos in a wet winter, as I sat planter-style in a wicker chair on the verandah of an ecotourism resort taking a holiday from my holiday, I fell vehemently in love with Anthony Burgess. I’d discovered a battered copy of his 70’s novel Earthly Powers among the limited selection in a Vientienne bookshop. It had everything: big words, gentle syntax. Catholicism. The end of empire. Planters sitting in wicker chairs on verandahs. Evil. The pope. The pope, evil.

I knew I loved him and needed to read more, but I never found anything in second hand shops other than A Clockwork Orange, which I’ve known only from the Kubrick film and which has always struck me as a rather adolescent work, the kind of thing you stick in your duffel coat pocket on your way to the first lecture of your Film Studies degree.

When I mentioned my love for Burgess over tea to some friends they pressed me to take the autobiography, the first portly volume (Little Wilson & Big God) and the second more emaciated one (You’ve Had Your Time).

I knew his life was grim, but wow! Holey jumpers and socks, Batman, this was emotional and financial poverty indeed – mother and sister dead of the flu when he was an infant, father spitefully washing his talent away in a torrent of booze, left after his father’s death with only the begrudging lodgings of a dutiful stepmother to see him through his Catholic education. The war brings more grimness as he is exiled on Gibraltar with only Barbary apes and their more Simian cousins in the British Army for company. After that he fails as a grammar school teacher and ends up in another kind of exile in colonial Malaya, boozing his way through hot evenings, slapping mosquitoes with one hand and the backsides of gap-toothed Malay prostitutes with the other.

The character of Burgess himself is strangely unsympathetic. He’s always winding people up and getting into fights. When late in the second book he realises that he and his second wife have no friends, you’re not surprised. The books are terribly clever-clever. He must have been an interesting dinner party guest, but you wouldn’t have wanted him lingering after coffee, ogling your boobs as he declined Latin verbs and bitched about how much more for real he was than Somerset Maughm.

He was more for real, learning Malay, Chinese and Arabic, teaching in grim schools out in postwar Malaya as the British Empire sighed into its final Singapore Sling. And his concern with making a buck is refreshing, showing how much of his art has its genesis in urgent rates payments and rental arrears; the boring things in life.

He harps on about being born to Catholicism, unlike Graham Greene who converted to it. But he himself was born to music, and converted to writing only when it became clear he wouldn’t be a composer. His passion for music, clearly central to his life, left me weirdly unmoved. It is a formal kind of passion, all quavers and symphonies in four movements.

I was relieved to discover that A Clockwork Orange has been falsely shoved into all those duffel coats all these years – there is a final, grown-up chapter, removed by the book’s American publisher, in which Alex becomes an adult, gets some perspective and renounces violence forever. Burgess bitches on about how annoyed he was that this was deleted.

There is something slightly disingenuous about Burgess’s account of himself. It sounds too much like a man trying to convince you a series of mistakes and accidents were all the result of some very grand and clever scheme that you were just too stupid to perceive. He definitely doth protest too much, perhaps trying to prove that all his best work was achieved without really trying, without really caring.

He’s the same about his wives – both formiddable characters who drive a lot of what happens in the narrative, although he doesn’t speak much about the emotional power they clearly wield over him. It’s unsatisfying - you know there must be more to the story, but he won’t – or can’t - tell you. You’ll have to turn to his novels to find out the truth about his emotional drivers.

But for all that, like Burgess himself, sticking by his alcoholic first wife as she descended into cyrrohis and death, I still love him.

If these books were people, they would be a workplace crush for whose email account you had found the password. As you obsessively hack into emails about budget reports and three o’clock meetings, you know you’re not really getting to the soul of the matter, but that doesn’t stop you.

In a nutshell: Poverty stricken would-be musician is forced by circumstance to become a best selling genius of a writer.

Little Wilson & Big God and You’ve Had Your Time score seven chocolates out of a possible ten, including the popular chewy caramel.