Caldera: Narrative Excursions

By Heather Wearne And Adele Wessell Eds, Byron Bay: Caldera Press, 2003, 108 pages, paperback, $15.00. Reviewed by Deborah Jordan in the September 2004 issue.

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Caldera: narrative excursions is a finely produced selection of writings, theoretical and creative, and as the editors hope, with an 'excursive' approach to their subjects, digressing from the paths, ranging widely, inclined to stray and going beyond. Similar to the format of a little magazines and subtitled art culture literary theory fiction history memoir politics, the collection, we can hope, is the first of many such occasional publications.

Caldera narrative excursions contains some real gems, intimate, vivid and finely crafted; most include some self-reflective notion of the writer and the act of creating interrogative writing. The opening essay by Peter Corris, well known for his crime fiction, is a generous account of his methods of work. He writes for three reasons -- and the first reason is particularly interesting -- to comfort and occupy himself; to make a living and to entertain. Writers, in short, are mad people needing the therapeutic escape valve that writing provides. Peter Corris fans should seize upon this essay for in it he clarifies the differences between Cliff Hardy, his famous detective character, and himself. Such comments about the relationship of author and character are hard to find.

The relationships of creator to creation is developed theoretically in 'The art of Critical Practice: an exhibition of ideas -- a leap out of faith' by Kate Ravenswood and Heather Wearne in writing of the teaching practice and their visual art students. They argue that when students are denied (as they are by contemporary art/critical theory) a stable, knowable subject position, the students must undergo a process of unlearning. Only then do they come to discover the potential for a faith in the unknown, the elusive, the not-yet-discovered. The creative is understood as a critical practice.

In Wearne's excursion into unreliable biography, she too writes about relationship, shifting the focus to the relationship between biographer and subject, between mother and daughter -- and in this instance between mother who reads and daughter who writes, a literary relationship. The biography 'happens in the stories, the music, those unrecorded voices, the dark and light spaces which only exist in the spaces of my body's imagination: life as an imagined thing'. (p 77). An important contribution to the genre of the mother and daughter writing emerging in Australia, this essay is rich with resonances of other mother/daughter stories.

Andrew Jones on 'Intoxicating identity: Fiesta and the cultural politics of incorporation' is the longest theoretical piece in the collection. It is a challenging piece, about the underbelly of the impact of colonisation. Slicing through many stereotyped understandings of the power relations in colonial contexts, we are feasted in the ways the indigenous peoples of the Americas, through mimicry and incorporation, have neutralised the colonisers' intent. These people have found a way, and Jones has participated in it, to provide a stage for the representation and recalling of their stories and desires.

Adele Wessell's focus, in another piece on colonisation, this time in the Australian colonies, is on late nineteenth century white women caught out of time and place, unable to reconcile themselves to their present. In their nostalgia for the past, they use their letter writing to create narratives of loss. Wessel has some interesting insights into the connections between time and place; there is no one monolithic 'Australian tradition'. Historians are taken to task for not addressing the concept of nostalgia in history -- and indeed Wessell is on firm ground when she argues that representations which are considered romantic and feminine are rarely interrogated with depth. Yet one is tempted to suggest that the historians might ask different questions: these women were steeped in the false consciousness of their class, rigidly aware of the trappings of status and of the differences between women, let alone of different races This essay makes us want to know of those women who did more fully embrace their 'new' life -- such as Ada Cambridge for instance. What about those people, then and now, more trully present, more open to their place and time and culture?

There are other nuggets -- Maria Simms' beautifully crafted fiction 'Heartstones', of homely wisdoms and four generations of women deep centred in the kitchen, with the motif of cake making. She writes of the choices women make in their journeys and relationships. Dove Rengger-Thorpe's piece is more experimental and fragmented but nonetheless powerful with some memorable description. Jan McKemmish's 'Don't Personalise the Body' is more of a talk than analysis, refreshingly based in her experience of her investigation of art and crime. Les Murray, internationally recognised for his poetry, contributes a gem on nudity and the gaze, one of his fine poems, yet the only poem in the booklet.

The promise of the strong title and the preface with its call for a place for writing within the caldera, within the Northern Rivers region, to cut across the divide of metropolitan and rural, however, is not yet met. Most of these pieces are unashamedly academic and the caldera could be anywhere, from Cape York to Africa. So, too, the essays could have been written anywhere. There are hints all through the book that some of these writers believe in the importance of the land as spirit country, yet none address this. The editors ask 'where will these narratives take us?' We hope they will bring us closer, not further away, from the power of landscape, meaning and community.

Citation

• Deborah Jordan. 'Review: Caldera: Narrative Excursions by Heather Wearne and Adele Wessell eds' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), September 2004. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 10 September 2010].

Back Cover Blurb

• Caldera is a collection of 'narrative excursions' which the editors suggest are intentions of writing that assume relationships to other writings that will take them beyond their own limits. [...] Starting from the position that narrative is all we have left, we must ask the question 'where will it take us?'
  
  As the title suggests, the narratives in this collection take an 'excursive' approach to their subjects, digressing from the paths of their disciplines, ranging widely, inclined to stray. The writers share a common interest in establishing a type of critical practice which refuses to confine creative writing and theory, separate fact from story. The collegiality that fostered this collection was made possible through our life in regional Australia. Moreover we have all written for this collection within the caldera that defines the region of the Northern Rivers, a fertile ground which sustains agri/culture and cultural life. We move without qualification from personal experience, creative writing, art practice and historical accounts, and across the divide often set up between the rural and the metropolitan. By insisting on a place for such writing within the caldera, the ground on which our conversations have been worked, we hope that our collaboration reflects the fruitful exchange possible for a scholarly life elsewhere and anywhere else.
  
  Caldera features writing by Peter Corris, Andrew Jones, Les Murray, Jan McKemmish, Maria Simms, Kate Ravenswood, Heather Wearne, Adele Wessell and Dove Rengger-Thorpe.