WesterlyMagazine

A Review of ‘Old Growth’ by John Kinsella

John Kinsella, Old Growth. Melbourne: Transit Lounge Publishing, 2017. RRP: $29.95, 256pp. ISBN: 978-0-9943957-8-8

Luke Thomas

Of the seven posts published in January 2017 by John Kinsella and his wife Tracy Ryan on their blog Mutually Said: Poets Vegan Anarchist Pacifist, three are protesting the extension of Roe 8 and the clearing of Coolbellup-Beeliar wetlands for the Perth Freight Link; two are protesting the felling of old-growth trees along the York-Merredin, or York-Quairading road; and one is about the intersectional environmentalism that informs this protest.

The posts are political, much like Kinsella’s fiction, but categorically of a different kind. They often obey a pattern of prose preface followed by poetic expression, and feature more particular criticisms than his fiction. This relationship between art and politics, particularly given the particular political persuasion, immediately invokes Percy Bysshe Shelley who propelled similar anarchist and vegan ideas in detailed notes after the poem ‘Queen Mab’ and before the poem ‘The Revolt of Islam’.

In one post Kinsella writes referring to state and federal Coalition governments that:

The right-wing governments of Australia have been making a concerted effort to delete ecologies as fast as they can … it is now reaching critical level. (Destruction of Old-Growth Trees on the York-Quairading Road, 2017)

This is the privilege of reading Kinsella from Perth. His interaction with our political landscape—pertinently given the upcoming March 11 Western Australian state election and the partisan battlelines over the Perth Freight Link—allows for a contextual understanding of his work and its dominating ideological framework. For instance, we see his aversion to aggression and systemic violence at a local level in his 2016 post and poem ‘In Marapikurrinya: for Ms Dhu’, commiserating the death of a woman in custody. This understanding projects across other works and offers insight into Kinsella’s representations of humanity and morality in fiction.

Kinsella’s latest book of short stories, Old Growth, is eponymous for its sixteenth story in which a man burns down a forest with the passing of his wife. This story demonstrates Kinsella’s brilliant control over narrative direction. Perhaps to be expected from a poet, Old Growth’s propensity to create tone and maintain atmosphere is extraordinary. This is noticeable in ‘The Introduction’, which features the consistency in tone and characterisation necessary to entertain a story about a boy, philately, and a Northbridge stamp dealer. Many of the stories throughout the anthology share themes, although each is written uniquely and holds its own in retrospection.

Occasionally, as in ‘The Boy who Read Marvel to the Sheep’, the plot seems to act independently of characters and with a dependency on chance. The stories, however, are self-aware of this: “The inquest showed it to be an accident, which it was” (133). The twists rarely make the earlier parts of the story superfluous, but do necessitate their reevaluation. Kinsella’s adept grasp over the characters and tone always leave keen sensitivities, when as in ‘The Hannaford Grader Man’, the moral motive of the story changes in a single clause. It is without a doubt the way that Kinsella uses chance to express behavioural fortitudes; threat and retreat; aggression and primitivism; resilience and anticipation; that turns the reliance on chance from simply a crutch for the plot, to a raw presentation of human response.

The strongest element of Kinsella’s work is the invocation of place and its demands on the performance of human behaviour. Kinsella uses place in stories such as ‘The Last Days of the Railroad Hotel’ and ‘The Shopping Trolley’ to challenge and naturalise the character of Australian culture. Through ‘The Shopping Trolley’, core Australian beliefs in multiculturalism, inclusion, and larrikinism coalesce in an act of outreach and a stand of solidarity against racism. Kinsella shows rough-and-tumble Australian youths supporting a young Muslim girl who had been verbally attacked as a “freeloader and a darkie and a terrorist” (54), and then shows the interaction between Muslim iconography and daily Australian life as the girl “[removes] her hijab and [wraps] it around Monica’s wounded head” (59).

Kinsella also dissects the conventional masculinity of mateship, and the aggression it feeds on. Inside the vivid scenes of Australian life in ‘Licence’, the final story, Kinsella requalifies Australian values: “Nothing wrong with being a poof, mate!” (254). His characters are manifestations of contradictions, inset to the Australian landscape. One gathers from ‘Licence’ that the arid Australian landscape demands a certain grit, but needn’t come with the homophobic and racist tropes texts often associate it with.

The Australian narrative of asbestos and the wider identities of asbestosis are explored in the story ‘See that Gully’. Epigraphed by the second line of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem, ‘To a Skylark’—‘Bird thou never wert’ (14)—Kinsella sculpts an effigy of outer-suburban Australia that is aesthetically inviting, but also vividly painful. Kinsella forces a simpatico relationship with the protagonist, Ghost—named so because of his inability to separate himself from the death-riddled legacy of asbestos and mesothelioma, “It’s all fibres dispersing, spreading, working their way in.” (15)—evoking empathy with intense paranoia. He summons an Australian childhood intertwined with the fibres, and an adulthood that cannot sever itself from them.

As an anarchist and environmentalist, Kinsella affirms that the asbestos-driven quality of life degradation is firmly on his side of the court. It is the legacy of ineffable suffering in unscrutinised markets, and a fair target. His blog activity indicates the certainty of his cross-hair:

And remember that smug capitalist
eating asbestos on his breakfast cereal?
(Asbestos at Coolbellup Bush Site, 2017)

This specific vignette makes another appearance in ‘See that Gully’ with a reference to “that mining entrepreneur who served himself asbestos on his Weeties to show how harmless it is” (23) (his italics). It is revealed that Ghost had a relative die of asbestosis and that he cannot imagine himself as free from the material, that his life and identity is inseparable from its legacy. Kinsella’s indictment of consumerist structures is transparent when Ghost shares that his neighbour “profited from [his] misery, from putting fibres in the air” (19). Kinsella is effective here by following Nabakov’s advice to “ignore allegories” (Strong Opinions, 1973). Asbestos avoids becoming only a symbol or analogy for oppressive capitalism, but is a rather textbook instance of it.

George Orwell wrote in his 1946 essay ‘Why I Write’ that “Every line of serious work that [he had] written since 1936 [had] been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism”. Likewise, Kinsella imbues his stories with political motive—against the conservative trends in society, against all forms of aggression, and for anarchism—and they cannot be read without that acknowledgement. Old Growth is foremost a dedication to acute emotion, at once an augury and ode to personal complexities. Kinsella invokes place and the role it has on individual and collective identities, and explores the ways in which chance affects behaviour. It is above all a book of interesting short fiction, written as only Kinsella could write.

Work cited:

Orwell, George. Why I Write. London: Gangrel, 1946.

Luke Thomas is a Western Australian writer who has interned with Westerly Magazine, worked for local politicians, and is currently studying full time. This review took him at least half a dozen cups of coffee and a new tea strainer.