I avoided reading Gabrielle Lord, was put off by her flippant titles, Baby Did a Bad Thing, Jumbo, Tooth & Claw. Lord was a writer who didn’t take her genre seriously enough I thought fatuously, until one bored day in the shop I actually read her and saw my mistake. In those early years, before her disturbing shift to the right, Lord was fishing the progressive pond very seriously indeed.
Lord was working as a clerk in the Penrith Commonwealth Employment Service when her first two novels Fortress (1980) and Tooth & Claw (1983) were published. She was one of those disaffected public servants from the good old days kipping at her desk and ironically stamping “attitude problem” on files, although there was nothing typical about the character sketches of clients Lord was making.
Michael Mohammed Ahmad, Peter Polites and Max Easton are writing over Lord’s Western Suburbs now, but I see them as the grandchildren of the Mt Druitt kids in Jumbo (1986); making wise cracks at white middle class writers like Lord and Balmain resident Peter Carey, who apparently had never been to the outskirts of Liverpool where The Tax Inspector (1991) is set. About time, but we shouldn’t write Lord out of the story. We need to understand what the new writers are reacting against.
As a study of the ALP’s failure to address unemployment in that first forgotten recession of the 1980s, Jumbo is fascinating. There are connections too that could be made between Jumbo and an earlier representation of an inner city working class suburb in Tennant’s Foveaux, which shows intracity class migration of the post war city, while telling that same ALP sacrificial story. But that’s not the purpose of this short sketch. I think of Lord in that Penrith CES on a stinking hot day, dreaming of the Eastern beaches, unable to imagine anyone wanting to live in the West.
Jumbo sounded pitch perfect to Lord’s leftie inner city readers: “Appalling that the Australian Labor Party had disowned the West but good god I wouldn’t live there!” Lord, however, didn’t turn to the Western Suburbs as setting immediately. Her first novel Fortress, a huge bestseller, was based on the kidnapping of a Gippsland school teacher and her pupils.
Yet to drop her CES day job, Lord was also writing reviews for The Sydney Morning Herald, swapping “bon mots” with Frank Morehouse in the heyday of the literary lunch, and as surprisingly being coupled with the poet Nigel Roberts at a Harold Park Hotel reading in Glebe, our literary culture less ghettoised into art and popular than it is today, or so it seems.
It was a movie based on Fortress, starring pretty wooden Rachel Ward as the intrepid schoolteacher, that finally funded Lord’s escape from Penrith. Earning her a whopping $150,000 in 1980s coinage for combined sales and film rights, Lord bought a harbourside flat in Darling Point and, as dramatically, swapped home brew for Bollinger. Here in her Eastern Suburbs fortress Lord read about Anita Cobby’s barbaric murder in Mt Druitt that February of 1986, and reviewing her CES notes churned out Jumbo, published the same year.
Everyone read Lord. In a piece Helen Garner wrote for The Sydney Morning Herald in 1986, an early draft of the rural noir essay “Three Acres, More or Less”, a nervous Garner worries she might end up a victim in a Lord novel. Come to think of it, Lord might well have been an influence on Garner’s incendiary true crime; her best sellers stoking the barbeque flames with the controversies of the day: sexual harassment laws, retributive justice, the existence of evil and Dads that kill. Outrageous to place them together now, Garner being located at the art end of the spectrum and just a thought.
Garner was thinking about Lord’s second novel Tooth & Claw with its isolated bush setting and mounting paranoia. Tooth & Claw, written when Lord was still working at the Penrith CES, was a lot closer to suburbia than Gippsland. It’s set among the hippy fringe dwellers, around somewhere like St Albans north of Sydney, where Lord and some mates kept bees and grew organic vegetables on a small holding.
Lord’s flippancy is at its best in Tooth & Claw, that detailed knowledge of bee keeping and compost hilarious pivots. With magic mushrooms and moonshine as weapons, and hippies plunged into an Agatha Christie plot, Tooth & Claw turns a little zany. Still, it’s good fun.
The critics couldn’t agree. Astonishing to read the SMH reviewers of the day making critical judgments before the deals struck between mainstream media and publishers turned the reviewers into publicists. Academic Stephen Knight was an admirer, while poet Gary Catalano took exception to the imagery, his censorious point being that as Lord had sold the film rights for Fortress she was now writing for film. Catalano was well off track.
Tooth & Claw was obviously written for educated inner city readers who got the jokes, not film scouts. “There were shawls, dozens of them; they covered the windows; one was even tied around the old fashioned light shade so that it looked as if a dwarfish figure was hanging in the centre of the room”. A dwarf is murdered; a blind man is led around by a mad dog. Hey diddle diddle. Snow White grab a gun. We’re in the scary land of fairy tales, with occasional dashes of Jane Eyre poured into the feminist soup.
Agatha Christie, Snow White, Charlotte Bronte, yes, yes, but I can also hear Lord softly reciting a-well-known ruthless rhyme as she swigs down the home brew and types madly away:
When Mrs Gorm (Aunt Eloise)
Was stung to death by savage bees,
Her husband (Prebendary Gorm)
Put on his veil, and took the swarm.
He’s publishing a book, next May,
On “How to Make Bee-keeping Pay.”
- J.G.