Scintilla meaning a small amount. It's a snotty, superior, clever word often followed sentence wise by ‘doubt’, used by Craig Sherborne as the name of the small town in The Amateur Science of Love, modelled on St Arnaud, where he lived briefly in the 1990s and I live now. Scintilla might lead us to the small details you’d think, to a Jane Austen type study of the village up close, uncomfortably close, or to the shabby, fallen gentility Dickens would have seen in its streetscape, banks and parks. This town is out of focus, dereliction nothing but a stage backdrop for sexual obsession gone terribly wrong. City exiles. A young, self-involved male would-be writer and his older artist lover. Do tell.
‘Who’d live in a country town?’ asks poet Elizabeth Riddell.
‘A deluded fool,’ answers Sherborne.
Even Astley (who should know better) has a crack in Drylands, a character asking 'why do people come to places like this? Is it the loneliness in themselves seeking outer evidence?' Probs although perversity in my case a factor. Whenever I’m with someone ‘on a stare, looking down’ as Les Murray calls it, saying lovely with a shudder driving through a small town, Wake in Fright before their eyes, adding BUT what on earth would you do here, I think perfect. Doing nothing being my Nirvana. Although, when they think of Wake in Fright, or its endless spin offs, it’s not homosexual rape, insane drinking, mateship as fascist order that’s on their mind. As Cook says again and again in his novella, it’s the coffee ‘which tasted and looked like milk, diluted with water, discoloured with some brown substance'.
My new addiction these days is going to Council meetings, where everyone stands for the King and the Mayor blesses the chamber. It feels like walking backwards into olde white Australia, but then you realise it’s a trick. This is theatre, the Mayor doing a fine imitation of Chips Rafferty playing the cop in another cardboard outback town. A copy of a copy, our settler culture third-hand, not second-hand as poet AD Hope coining the Cultural Cringe with fabulous rage claimed in ‘Australia’. Oh don’t come the raw prawn with me on the Cringe. Think of your attitude towards coffee and country towns.
The other day they named a dirt track that runs through Dja Dja Wurrung land with a Scottish name, after a family had lived in the district for 150 years, announced with such proud distinction as if that sad stretch of time means anything at all. I get closer to the action, leaning so far forward in my chair that I’m nearly knocked off by Alexis Wright and Les Murray playing Two Up in my head. Best of all I hear the Scottish family after whom this road is named once owned the cordial factory.
The great Frank Moorhouse (RIP) knew a thing or two about small towns and their beloved cordial factories, producers of a sickly syrup Australians guzzled by the bucket before Cocoa Cola. His finest work (I think) is The Electrical Experience, another self-styled ‘discontinuous narrative' of interlocking vignettes that build the tragicomedy of small-town industrialist T. George McDowell, self-made man, Rotarian, manufacturer of cordials, soft drinks, and advocate for modernisation. Mainly set in the 1930s, it’s talking to the Balmain hipsters, father to son, his ‘South Coast Dada’ a brilliant satire on the embarrassing intersections between modernism and capitalism: art, advertising, commerce.
Kylie Tennant’s Tiburon is another novel that captures the timbre and the tropes of a country town without the sneers. It’s based on Canowindra in NSW, where she was living with her school teacher husband in a tiny pub room, writing her document of the shanty towns in the Great Depression, Tiburon winning the SH Prior Memorial Prize in 1935. One thread is set perfectly around a repertory theatre production, once a ritual in small towns, disappeared along with the cordial and bra factories and the shearers union. An interesting life, an interesting writer Tennant, unfairly ignored I thought for being popular. Arriving in Canowindra full of swagger, imagining myself an American professor in Dublin questing the precious last detail of the great writer’s life I sidle into the Canowindra Hotel puzzled to see no Kylie Tennant plaque.
‘I need to see the room where Tennant wrote Tiburon,’ I declare, my nose bumping level with the counter.
‘Yeah, nah,’ replies the Keep, smearing the bar with a damp rag, ‘is sock u pied.’
I have more luck with wizened ‘Old Jack’, who claims to have known Tennant. I don’t challenge him. I’m no good at maths. A country gentleman, he shows me round the traps, rattling across vast empty paddocks in his antique Holden ute, me opening and closing gates, until finally he pulls up at a blighted spot. ‘There!’ he cries, pointing at a depressed flock of sheep huddling beneath the lone tree, ‘that’s where Kylie’s school house was.’ I glance sideways at him, noting his left eye is covered by a thin white film, unsure in what sense I’m being taken for a ride. Tennant wasn’t a school teacher. He’s confusing the author with the character Jessica Daunt in Tiburon I think with irritation as Hope whispers ‘The learned doubt, the chatter of cultured apes’ in my ear. ‘Old Jack’ then turns to face me and I see that he is blind. This Tiresias, this seer, leading me into Hope’s ‘Arabian desert of the human mind’ a stripped, dry, literary landscape where ‘still from the deserts the prophets come’.
Festive greeting from St Arnaud Books to all, but most especially to our writers, the living and the dead.
– JG