Imago

Francesca Rendle-Short. Imago. Spinifex, 1996, ISBN: 1875559361

Molly Rose and Jimmy are ten pound poms, settling in the still-lakeless 1960s Australian capital to further Jimmy’s career as a soil scientist. Strange, awkward, terribly English Jimmy is never likely to fit in, though. Much later, Molly reflects that Jimmy had

never been in Australia, truly a part of the landscape, even though he’d tried. Jimmy had loved Australia as an armchair adventurer would, fairly trembling from want, from afar, as an idea…

Molly, though, is both discovering herself and making herself anew, in the image of this new land she finds herself in, and in that of her neighbour, Marj. Molly is virtually a child bride. She celebrates her 19th birthday on the ship voyage to Australia. While she is open-eyed about her life and her relationship with Jimmy, Australia, and Canberra, is her chance to move beyond the strictures of life with her mother, and of life in England.

The men in Marj and Molly’s lives are largely absent. Molly never knew her father, killed in the war before she was born. Strange, stuttering Jimmy is absent from the marital bed, and absent also from the house for long stretches, away on scientific expeditions ‘up north’. Marj’s husband Kevin is also away much of the time, on work gangs building roads and other infrastructure around the growing capital.

Molly’s experience of Canberra and of Marj are almost the same thing. The woman and the landscape overlap, merge, coalesce. The surrounding Brindabellas and the loud bulk of fat Marj are equally constant, protective marks in the landscape. What Molly wants most is to belong, to make a place for herself, both in Australia and in Marj’s life.

Their two houses are side by side on the slopes of Mount Ainslie, and the two women from time to time climb the hill to look out on the city.

Marj pointed out all the landmarks of the town, her fat arm swaying, digging holes in the air. Parliament House, bleached white, St John’s steeple, the War Memorial… The flood plain and meandering willow trees of the Molonglo River over which the planned lake would wash… She threw in the dome of the Science Academy, thinking Molly would be interested for Jimmy’s sake. Everything was detached and separated by grassy expanses and paddocks and rows and circles and trees, so that from where Molly and Marj were perched, it looked as if you could pick up the pieces and rearrange the monuments and avenues, like a child’s set of blocks.

For Molly, the land is feminine. One that afternoon when Marj shows her Canberra from Mount Ainslie, the Brindabellas

lay quite still, like lounging naked women pleased with their shapes, their legs and arms and torsos and behinds all knotted in an early evening haze…. It gave her goose pimples, similar to when she first met Marj.

Marj is for Molly inseparable from the landscape. She has always been there “pioneers really – when it wasn’t much more than a thought on paper”. And Molly seems also not to always know quite where she ends and Marj begins. The borders between Marj, Molly and the mountains are indistinct.

Later, when Molly has made another life for herself on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, she realises that, just like in Canberra, Marj has been looking over her, in the form of Mudjimba Island, also known as the Old Woman. The Brindabellas also are bush women, are protectors and friends. To love Marj is to love Canberra, because they are the same thing – round, protective, unashamed, confident women.

Awards:

ACT Book of the Year: Winner, 1997

Caphs Count:

8%

Venom

Dorothy Horsfield. Venom. Pandanus Books, 2005. ISBN: 1740761790

We tend to think of Canberra and the Australian Capital Territory synonymously, but in reality the city of Canberra takes up only a small part of the land mass of the ACT. Even setting aside the sliver of coast at Jervis Bay which remains part of the Territory (for now, anyway), about 46 per cent of the ACT is taken up by the Namadgi National Park. The Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve is significantly smaller, but also contributes another goodly chunk. Then there’s Brindabella National Park and the Bimberi Nature Reserve.

We aint called the Bush Capital for nothing. The other night driving home from the theatre I had to dodge a fox on Adelaide Avenue and a kangaroo on Streeton Drive. Neither of these are particularly uncommon occurrences. One creature that I haven’t encountered, indeed, which I thought I had left behind forever in Sydney, is the funnel-web spider. Turns out they are here too, although apparently they aren’t so easy to find, if Dr Paddy Jones’ research is anything to go by.

Paddy has taken a diversion from the usual work of the CSIRO Forestry division at Yarralumla to concentrate on identifying and describing the species of funnel-web in the Canberra region. He hires single mum Madeleine as his research assistant, and the pair spend Saturdays combing the bush for those elusive specimens.

Their relationship is hesitant and self-conscious at first, dotted with misunderstandings and embarrassments, as each of them tries to work out what the nature of their attraction might mean and where their friendship might head. It’s not very surprising, then, that Madeleine’s ex, Doug, misconstrues the rapport between them, and plots revenge.

Venom is really about relationships. Tentative, awkward ones like Madeleine and Paddy’s. Twisted, poisonous ones. The instant and eternal relationship between mother and child. Unlikely but solid ones. But these relationships happen in a landscape, and many of the relationships in Venom happen in the bushland of the ACT.

It was weeks before Paddy again raised the issue of an overnight camp-out. The next half-dozen Saturdays were spent in fruitless hikes through Namadgi and the Tidbinbilla Reserve and the next couple along overgrown trails beside the Murrumbidgee River. Their expeditions involved an unvarying routine — a walk to a designated spot, an hour or so’s meticulous search through an area of bush, then a cuppa over a camp fire. As the weeks wore on and they achieved nothing, Madeleine’s confidence waned. It wasn’t simply that, despite her dutiful reading of Paddy’s research file, she had no idea how to find the fabulous funnel-web. She also suspected that the good doctor might be a rank amateur like herself.

But already they were friends of a kind and she looked forward to their afternoons together.

While Madeleine and Paddy are sweeping the bush for spiders, Madeleine’s ex-partner inhabits the poisonous atmosphere of the parliamentary triangle, the landscape much more often associated with Canberra. When he and Madeleine first arrive in Canberra they find a home in Yarralumla,

close to the high-rises that passed as the capital’s city centre and close as well to the lake’s foreshore with its forests and the sparse sheep paddocks that people referred as parkland. And, in a city of manicured lawns and hedges, the house’s big back garden was wildly overgrown and various.

This is a middle ground. Madeleine finds herself here, somewhere between Doug’s muckraking at the Press Club and Paddy’s denial of economic and political reality on the bike paths crossing the Molonglo at Scrivener Dam. She is looking for a model that works for her of what a marriage, a long-term relationship might be, and she’s not finding it. It’s not in her parents’ marriage, and not in her own short-lived relationship with Doug. She’s also looking for answers to her relationship with her father, and with Doug. What did each of them recognise in the other that she has missed? Perhaps the spiders have the answer.

Awards:

Nil

Caphs Count:

11%

Full House

Penelope Hanley. Full House. Simon & Shuster, 1993. ISBN: 0731802667.

I could escape Pavel and Sara’s crowded house by cycling into the serene silence around the lake. If I didn’t hurry I could have a whole hour’s solitude while gliding effortlessly past the yacht club, the field of fat cypress trees and sweet-scented pines of Westbourne Woods, …through the kissing gates at Government House. Pedalling up the gentle incline of the pine-thick hill, I’d reach a paddock of grazing horses and a panoramic view of the Brindabella Ranges. After flying down the hill I had the choice of veering off towards the woolshed, riding beside the Molonglo River… or heading back to the north for more pine forests and the shady grove of cork oaks before going home.

Holly is a flame-haired artists’ model and film reviewer who is, as the cover blurb tells us, running from her problems and running from the past. She dashes from Canberra to Sydney and back again, escaping her mad ex-boyfriend, her unbearable housemates and her going nowhere job. For Holly, Canberra is familiar and warm, whereas in Sydney

people are like the frogs in the experiment that don’t notice they’re gradually boiling to death… To people like me who visit Sydney after a lengthy absence, the increase in violence, traffic, noise and pollution is… unbearable. I thought: the poor people! … how can they bear it? …Bear it? They can’t even see it!

The contrast is set up for us, and, again, the cover blub for Full House instructs us to think about “the essential differences between Sydney and Canberra.”

I feel a bit failed by that Simon & Shuster cover blurb. It promises “zany” and “hilarious”, and “a tale of love, lust and food”. I’m afraid I didn’t find Full House zany or hilarious, but it is funny and quirky. Granted, there is quite a bit of love, lust and food throughout the story. While Holly spends time contemplating the differences between Sydney and Canberra and what they might offer her, I think Full House is less about the “essential differences” between the two cities and more about how Holly’s expectations shape her attitudes.

It is certainly rare to hear Sydney disparaged in favour of the delights of Canberra, and it is interesting to think through a little bit what the contrasts are. Holly loves Canberra for its fresh air, its great outdoors, fresh air, picnics at Casuarina sands by the Murrumbidgee. She hates Sydney for being the reverse, even though, as her young friend Demetrius points out, Sydney should be much more exciting for Holly, with her love of art and film. And despite her prejudices (and we know this from the prologue, so no spoilers here) Holly’s life, when we leave her, seems to be destined to be in Sydney.

The cover blurb does hit the mark when it refers to Holly as being on the run. “Had I really believed”, she asks herself towards the end of the novel “that a change of geography would solve my problems? That a change of place would change my life?” Full House sets up for us the contrasts between Sydney and Canberra, young lovers and older, work that is cerebral and work that is emotional. In the end, though, the contrasts are inside us. Home is where you choose to make it. Relationships are what you allow them to be. And, while wishing may not make it so, sitting on the lounge waiting for opportunities to arrive is rarely a recipe for success or happiness.

Caphs Count:

12%

Awards:

Nil