1987. I am living in Eagleby, a scraggly bush-edged suburb held fast in a curve of the Logan River, 40 minutes south of Brisbane. Anybody with a job here goes to it in work boots and a Jackie Howe, thinking themselves lucky.
I’m nineteen, and by some small miracle am studying public policy and economics at university, among the very last dribble of the Whitlam beneficiaries who won’t have to pay hard cash for our degrees. I do the work and do it well, but have also discovered the tall stacks which beckon at the top of the library stairs. I pass two huge fat columns of literature — Australian, British, American — before I reach the dry journals of public administration. Looking back, I can’t believe I even once got past these stories — the plays, the essays, the poems — fascinating missives from other lives. A few weeks into first semester, reaching the political section feels like forcing my way past the breakers. I get hurled back to the top of the stairwell time and again by Waugh, by Mudrooroo, by Piercy.
One marvellous day I happen upon Monkey Grip, Helen Garner’s debut novel of bohemian life in inner Melbourne. I read it in a sitting, vacuuming up the story of Nora and her community of misfits. I read it a second time, a third, a fourth. I buy my own secondhand copy. I become a single mother in Melbourne, not a stepmum to three in Eagleby at all. I visit the Fitzroy Baths, cycle the flat city streets to parties. I am in despair, not just with my real occasionally violent alcoholic boyfriend, but with the junkie Javo, nodding and being useless on the page. Of the many many lines I soon have off by heart, one in particular strikes home. A stroppy woman friend of the protagonist, Nora, confronts her on wasting her life: ‘does this action meet your needs?’
The idea that women in crappy relationships might be conscious of their needs, and might even assert them, floors me. I take this revolutionary concept and hold it up to the light. As Lytton Strachey would have said, I find it sovereign and am, overnight, a feminist. It only remains to ditch the alcoholic, escape Eagleby and finish my degree. Who is Helen Garner … I wonder in odd moments. I have never met a fiction writer face-to-face. I would love to meet her — she’s the one with the answers, isn’t she?
Years later, I finally leave the alcoholic, meet someone else, fall pregnant. We call our daughter Grace, the name of the Monkey Grip daughter. But Garner’s next novel, Cosmo Cosmolino, moves me little. When the political cyclone of The First Stone breaks in the early 90s, I lack any shred of sympathy for men who harass and drift unfaithfully towards other writers. I travel downriver in a crystal church; go and live next door to the Lambs. Then, Peter Carey illywhacks me into thinking I might write a novel myself; Keri Hulme’s stunning The Bone People confirms it. Hulme is Maori, I’m Aboriginal, it really can happen. I launch, pregnant again, into Steam Pigs. It is published, reviewed, a success! I go to festivals, meet other writers, learn what it means to be read, to scrawl for a living. Garner’s sensibility remains an anchor beneath me as an Australian woman writer, just as Hulme is a rock of Indigenous thought that I rest against weekly.
Nursing my young son in 1998, I open Garner’s True Stories and fall instantly back in love, hook, line and sinker. Here is the crisp, tough, hilarious voice I marvelled at as a student. The no-bullshit compassion mixed with an unerringly steady eye for all our funny little ways. I take as my blueprint for essay writing the pieces in this collection, which I read again and again. And I buy Joe Cinque’s Consolation, too, and like the rest of the country I love it, and will remember his name forever, poor tragic Joe Cinque in Canberra, doomed because of the moral turpitude of one young woman and the failings of her evil friends.
My Hard Heart, The Feel of Steel, The Spare Room. Reading any of these astonishingly fine Garner books reminds me that being a writer is a privilege. That to be read is something we must never take for granted but always earn with excruciating hard and constant work at the keyboard. How rare it is to read somebody from cover to cover, recognising yourself on every page, and to not think, ‘Oh, I would have said this there, not that, put x and not y as the verb in that sentence.’ every writer (I assume) reads the work of others with this editing self hovering unwanted over her shoulder, metaphorical red pen in hand. With Garner’s work there is no red pen, and no need of one. I still haven’t met her, likely never will. She walked past me once at Griffith Uni a few years back. It was about 5.30 in the winter afternoon. Nobody else was around. By the time I’d worked out who the vaguely familiar face was, the moment was gone, and so was she, steadily treading the concrete path up into the heart of the institution. I sighed, went in the other direction, got in my car, and drove away. It was probably for the best, I told myself. They say you shouldn’t meet your heroes.
About the Writer
Melissa Lucashenko is an acclaimed Aboriginal writer of Goorie and European heritage. Since 1997 Melissa has been widely published as an award-winning novelist, essayist and short story writer. Her recent work has appeared in The Moth: Fifty True Stories, Meanjin, Griffith Review, and The Monthly.
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