Everyone at Westerly was saddened to hear of the death of David Malouf, one of the giants of Australian letters. In remembering Malouf, we thought that sharing some of his work—a speech to the Australian Short Story Festival, published in Westerly 63.2—and some engagements with his writing by critics in the Magazine, would allow readers to enjoy the pleasure Malouf himself articulates: the way stories let us ‘step free of the bounds, the bonds, of chronology, and the ways in which we are bodily subject to it, into another version of chronology altogether, where the past is forever “once upon a time” and the future “ever after”.’ The works published below are ‘A Unique and Necessary Form’, by David Malouf, a review of Malouf’s Antipodes, by Brenda Walker, and a review of his final poetry collection, An Open Book, by Shevaun Cooley.

David George Joseph Malouf AO (1934–2026) was a multi-award-winning Australian poet, novelist, short story writer, playwright and librettist. Born in Brisbane, Malouf lectured at both the University of Queensland and the University of Sydney. He was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia in 1987 for his services to literature, with a published bibliography of seven novels, a novella, numerous short story and poetry collections, and many non-fiction works. Malouf lived in England, Tuscany and Sydney before returning to Queensland in his later years. A defining literary voice in Australia, Malouf will be remembered as a generous mentor and guiding presence for generations of emerging writers.

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A Unique and Necessary Form

The opening address of the Australian Short Story Festival, 2018

David Malouf

This speech was delivered as the Opening Address of the 2018 Australian Short Story Festival. The event was supported by the Institute of Advanced Studies, The University of Western Australia; Gallery Central, North Metropolitan TAFE; and Silverstream Wines. David Malouf was an invited guest and speaker at the Festival, which took place at the Centre for Stories in Northbridge, WA.

Story-telling, the pleasure of sitting in close company and listening to a story, allowing oneself to float free in the moment and enter, both in the senses and in imagination, into the story’s events so that the story becomes our own, must be one of the oldest and earliest of our pleasures—a function of that uniquely human faculty in us, the capacity to step beyond the actual into the possible.
 To step out of our own skin and know what it is to experience the world as ‘another’. To step free of the bounds, the bonds, of chronology, and the ways in which we are bodily subject to it, into another version of chronology altogether, where the past is forever ‘once upon a time’ and the future ‘ever after’. This, surely, is not just one of our earliest pleasures but one of our earliest and most enduring forms of psychological healing: this stepping into a place where our deepest anxieties and fears can be embodied and faced, and what appears to be fate can suddenly be reversed. Where rescue and recovery, and even rebirth are possible, and the most elusive forces wrestled with in the form of giants, or genies, or goblins, or trolls, or wolves—even if we have never in fact encountered such creatures in the world around us. We see in the small children we tell stories to—and in the children we ourselves once were and recall—how powerfully, how easily but mysteriously this works. Children, without ever having been told of such a world, already know it, as the earliest humans did, from dreams, and from the archetypal images and events that belong, as Jung saw, to inherited memory and our collective consciousness.
 A long history of such story-telling, and of the stories told, comes down to us in what we know, here in Australia, of Indigenous story-making. In Greek myths and the animal fables of Aesop. In Scandinavian legends of Baldur the bright and beautiful. In stories from the Arabian Nights like Ali Baba and his ‘open sesame’, and the adventures of Aladdin and Sinbad the Sailor. In the fairy-tales gathered in the seventeenth century by Charles Perrault—‘Cinderella’, ‘Bluebeard’, ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, ‘Sleeping Beauty’, ‘Beauty and the Beast’ and ‘Puss in Boots’—and in the folk-tales gathered half a century later by the Grimm Brothers: ‘Hansel and Gretel’, ‘Rumpelstiltskin’, ‘Rapunzel’ and ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’.

These stories belong to our communal life. Long before they were gathered and written down, they were told and listened to in company, and their shared and endlessly repeatable events and formulae—‘once upon a time’ and ‘ever after’—create in us a shared response.
 As for the moment of communal story-telling itself, we get examples of that in such self-conscious literary works as The Decameron of Boccaccio and Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales in the fourteenth century, and a century later, The Heptaméron by Marguerite of Navarre: formal occasions of story-telling in which we come face-to-face, in each case, with the story-tellers and their fellow listeners themselves. All of which is a useful and perhaps even necessary place to begin.
 But the stories we have been considering are very different from short story as we know it today. There, the exchange of telling and response between writer and reader is an individual and private affair, that involves a more intimate engagement and tone, and has for the most part a quite different subject and range of interests. The world this modern form of short story deals with is the immediate world, or a close mirror of it. The events it presents us with are unique and actual rather than archetypal, though the story as it unfolds, I’d suggest, may uncover archetypal images that arouse, even in a modern reader, archetypal responses. Much of the reader’s pleasure, and why he or she is drawn back to it, may have the same liberating and healing quality as that older form of ‘listening’ we have already alluded to. Certainly, the same quality of imagination is at work in it.

So, what do we mean by the ‘modern’ short story, and how and when did it evolve as a unique art form?
 The immediate trigger was the emergence in the late 1820s, simultaneously in the United States, Great Britain, France and Russia, of a new form of publication, the monthly magazine, and the short story, in its first publication, has continued ever since to be associated with the literary magazine. Think of The New Yorker, and in this country, of the Bulletin in the early days, and later of Southerly, Westerly, Overland, Meanjin.
 In the late 1820s, Pushkin and Gogol, who till then had been on the one hand a poet and on the other a beginning novelist and playwright, wrote their first short fiction for such magazines, and so did Balzac in France and Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville and Edgar Allan Poe in the United States. But these early works were not called short stories. They were tales in the case of E. T. A. Hoffmann, or grotesqueries as in the title of one of Poe’s early volumes. This points both to their subjects, which were often the macabre or fantastic, and their appeal, but also to their form, which was a business of ‘effect’ as Poe put it: of sensational detail and a surprise or shock ending. This means that they were largely, like the tales of Boccaccio and Chaucer, a matter of event and anecdote. It was de Maupassant, under the influence of Flaubert, who purified and perfected the minutely observed and realistic elements of such anecdotes. His story ‘The Necklace’, along with the stories of Kipling, remain classic examples of a form that later became little more than an empty if popular formula. But it was Turgenev, in his Sketches from a Hunter’s Notebook in the 1840s, and Gogol in ‘The Overcoat’, followed thirty years later by Chekhov, who established the short story as we mostly know it today. Not as an anecdote—a series of events with an effective and memorable, but unrepeatable, twist at the end—but as a work of quiet and close observation of the ordinary. A work that through engagement and empathy—a process shared equally by writer and reader—produces a moment of revelation (an epiphany as James Joyce would call it) that takes the reader by surprise because it has surprised the writer, and is what the story has quietly and inevitably been working towards.
 Intimacy of tone, economy but intensity of detail, a pace that demands slow and attentive reading, is what characterises a form that is meant to be taken in at as single reading, then re-read: as opposed, I mean, to the novel, with its longer arc and more leisurely pace, and a looseness that leaves room for what Nabokov calls those ‘lovely irrelevancies’ in which, often enough, a novel’s deepest truths are to be found. The short story is closer to the poem in the sparseness and necessity of its detail and the intensity of its language; in its slower pace, and the depth of attention it demands, line by line, in the reading.
 In the one hundred and forty years of its existence, the modern short story as I have called it—in the shorter works of Henry James and Conrad; in Kipling, Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, V. S. Pritchett and William Trevor in Britain; in Stephen Crane, Hemingway, Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, John Cheever, Raymond Carver and Alice Munro in North America—has added to our reading-life some of the most moving experiences our language has to offer. The same is true here, of course, where the short story has been, and remains—from Henry Lawson, Barbara Baynton and Marjorie Barnard through to Frank Moorhouse, Beverley Farmer, Joan London, Tim Winton and Helen Garner to Fiona McFarlane and Cate Kennedy—one of the most generously appreciated of literary forms, and one of the richest and most rewarding insights into our local world and beyond. It is interesting to note that the short story in English has for the most part flourished in regional places: Ireland, the American Deep South and Middle West, and here in Australia.

 A few words about my own engagement with the short story and its place in what I see as my body of work.
 Most fiction writers, if they begin with the short story, soon move on (at their agent’s or publisher’s prompting) to the novel, which seems like a natural progression; and that, for the most part, is where they stay. Some writers, and they are rare—notably Chekhov, Katherine Mansfield, and in our own day Alice Munro—take the short story so seriously, or find in it so much of what fits their individual talent and interests, that they never, as it were, ‘move on’.
 My own case is peculiar. I had published two novels, Johnno (1975) and An Imaginary Life (1979), and four collections of poetry before I wrote a short story I felt happy with. One, that is, that seemed to me to have a necessary relationship to what I was discovering about myself in the novels I had written, and which belonged, I felt, to what I had come to think of as my body of work. The story was ‘Southern Skies’, which would be the opening story four years later to my first short story collection, Antipodes. I did with it what I generally did with poems. I put it, and the stories that followed, aside till I had enough of them to make a collection, and only when that was in course of publication sent two or three of the stories off to magazines. That was in 1985. In the meantime, I had published Child’s Play and Fly Away Peter—which had begun as one of the longer stories and only when I thought I had finished it, at 16,000 words, expanded into a novella—and Harland’s Half Acre.
 I say all this to suggest that the short story, as I conceive it, is the most demanding of all fictional forms, the subtlest, the most precariously balanced, which is why it took me, at least, so long to feel at home in it. What I find particularly challenging and attractive is the variety it offers, and, for all its shortness, the range: of material, of setting, but especially of voice, of narrative perspective and tone. I should also say, in my own case, that the final emergence of a story—that is, my finding a natural and inevitable conclusion for it—has remained as difficult, after twenty-five or thirty years of practice, as it was at the start.
 I know that for some writers the first draft of the story, like the first draft of a poem, is the matter of a single rush of creative energy, but that has seldom been my case. There is a single rush of creative energy when the idea for a story first takes me, and I am happy to go with it, but quite soon it comes to a stop. For the moment, I can’t see where the story is going, and if the moment lasts I simply put the story aside and wait till I can see, in a flash, I hope, how the thing must resolve itself. The assumption being that if the story, like a poem, is an organic whole, the end is already there and prepared for in what I have already written. All I have to do is tumble to it. In some cases that takes weeks, or months, or in one or two cases a year or more. Learning to be patient and wait for the writing itself to speak, rather than jumping in and speaking for it, is one of the best places to learn it.
 What all this makes clear, I hope, is that I do not think of short stories within my work—three collections published over as many decades, the last in 2005—as ‘occasional’, or in any way less significant or demanding of my full range as a writer than the novels, but as belonging to a form that makes its own demands, poses its own difficulties but also offers its own, very generous, rewards. In the precision and plain necessity of its details. In its controlled and intimate tone. In the subtlety of its effects. Most of all in its capacity, within a single occasion or a single situation or ‘slice of life’, to catch the fleeting presence of a larger world—and in spite of Chekhov’s suggestion of its having no beginning or end, in an organic wholeness that gives it a quality of completeness that allows, at the same time, for an ending that remains in some way suspended, so that it goes on haunting the reader, hovering in his or her consciousness, long after the reading is done. All this makes for a form of narrative quite different from the novel, or the novella or tale. Something more concentrated, more teasing, more demanding of writer and reader both. The quality of the writers, over close on two centuries now, from Hawthorne and Turgenev and Chekhov and Conrad and Kafka and Joyce, to Hemingway and Borges and Flannery O’Connor and Alice Munro, who have dedicated themselves to it and expanded its possibilities, suggests how completely it has established itself within the field of fiction as a unique and necessary form. As does an occasion such as this where so many of us have come together, over two whole days, to return a little of what, as writers or as readers—and many of us here are both—it has given us: pleasure, enlightenment, serious engagement and attention.

This speech was published in Westerly 63.2.

Review of Antipodes by David Malouf

Reviewed by Brenda Walker

Malouf, David. Antipodes, London: Chatto & Windus/The Hogarth Press, 1985.160pp, ISBN: 9780701128517.

In The Pleasure of the Text Roland Barthes asks why we read criticism—given its proximity to joyless discourses like the description of dreams or parties from which we were absent. Why read about the pleasurable reading of another? The question seems pertinent to readers of reviews, in particular. Part of Barthes’ answer has to do with the primary textuality of criticism itself, which, if we are to extend his metaphor, would identify the review not with the bleached or tedious description of party or dream but with a party within which another party is glimpsed, a dream through which another dream is discernible. This review is intended to celebrate David Malouf’s most recent work, Antipodes, and to describe the ultimately celebratory nature of Malouf’s writing, which denies sterility and annihilation in favour of change and transformation.

Antipodes is a collection of thirteen forceful and elegant short stories which will fulfill the expectations of those who are familiar with Malouf’s writing and which will commend his work to new readers. The stories are separate and contained, and there is considerable diversity in locations, characters and events, yet certain preoccupations emerge throughout. As we might expect from Malouf’s previous work, experience, transformation and knowingness are among the central subjects of Antipodes. Malouf does more than present the interaction between character and phenomenal world for the sake of sustaining the fictional illusion of authenticity, he depicts extremes of such interaction, suggesting the possibility of mysterious confrontations and breakthroughs. For example the narrator of ‘Southern Skies’, a narcissistic teenager negotiating cultural and sexual enigmas, finds a sense of self-perspective by looking through a telescope:

[…] constellations I had known since childhood as points of light to be joined up in the mind […] came together now, not as an imaginary panhandle or bull’s head or belt and sword, but at some depth of vision I hadn’t known I possessed, as blossoming abstractions, equations luminously exploding out of their own depths, brilliantly solving themselves and playing the results in my head as real and visible music. I felt a power in myself that might actually burst out at my ears, and at the same time saw myself. from out there, as just a figure with his eye to a lens.

Here sight is transformed into sound and the experience of placement in the natural world is so intense that the explicitly sexual caress of an adult, which accompanies the narrator’s vision, is barely consciously registered. Malouf’s characters are far from solipsistic: perception of the external world has the capacity to change and enlighten the individual. And it is not simply the physical world which influences the individual—characters experience beneficial hallucinations and premonitions. This is all essentially optimistic and Malouf’s fiction as a whole contains a valuable acknowledgement of the human capacity for growth and change. In ‘An Imaginary Life’ the dissolving of language, meaning and companionship is followed by fresh crystallisation, perception and identity are transformed and the protagonist accepts his changed state, his alien surroundings, and comes close to an unsentimental identification with the natural world.

A closer look at many of the stories in Antipodes reveals a variety of situations and characters, but it also reveals the centrality of affirmation. Malouf is particularly good at describing the point when adolescent consciousness begins to fan out into adult understanding. In ‘Sorrows and Secrets’ a boy from the world of commercial empires and golfing greens works with a gang of timber getters in the bush. His father has sent him, to qualify his privileged background and to teach him a lesson about common humanity, but the suicide of the foreman teaches him more than could have been anticipated. For the protagonist of ‘Out of the Stream’, a ritualistic self-disembowelment, interrupted by his grandfather, is echoed as he guts fish for their evening meal. The carefully arranged emptying out and dissemination of the self and the evisceration of the fish are separate but related incidents which seem to represent the expansion and consolidation of the adolescent identity.

Another group of stories is written from the perspective of adults who need to recover and accept past experiences which have been repressed or denied. In ‘The Empty Lunch-tin’ a housewife has a vision which encourages her to let go of her ossified grief for her dead son and experience a broader, yet unsentimental compassion for men who have been deprived of livelihood and life. ‘A Traveller’s Tale’ contains the recollection of an elderly and seemingly commonplace woman, whose confession revives an exotic past as the daughter of a Russian Grand Duke and an Australian opera singer. The reminiscence is a triumph over decades of fear. All of these stories are clearly affirmative, but even those tales which describe distance, loss and death are essentially positive. ‘That Antic Jezebel’ describes a temporary lapse in the defences, resources and contrivances of a woman who has an obsessively cultivated style (the Elizabeth Bay apartment, the one good black dress, the single striking piece of jewellery). Her capacity for self-scrutiny is ultimately admirable. In ‘The Only Speaker of his Tongue’ the foreshadowed death of a language is used to emphasise the imaginative power of all language. ‘A Change of Scene’ illustrates social upheaval through event and characterisation. A violent political coup has wide historical implications when considered from the point of view of a man who is investigating inscriptions on the ruins of a pre-Christian civilisation, and a woman who is the inheritor of a dislocated and partly forgotten European culture. Their survival, and that of their child, emphasises change, yet continuity in human life and socialization. We are like the cicadas among the ruins, ‘whose generations beyond counting might go back here to the beginnings. They were dug in under stones, or they clung with shrill tenacity to the bark of pines.’

So much of the serious literature of this century emphasises alienation, despair, and, for many writers, the inadequacies and constraints of fictional representation. Malouf’s work acknowledges the power of death and isolation, it is also extremely conscious of its narrative qualities, but it does not dwell on gloom or futility.

Antipodes has much to recommend it on a formal level, for Malouf’s prose is finely textured, lyrical yet spare. Here is the aftermath of a scene in which a man’s last act, before shooting himself, is to smash the jars of preserved and spiced fruit which he has prepared earlier in the year. His season, like the mango season, has passed:

The remaining jars of chutney, all shot through with gold as the sun struck them, were still stacked in a ruined pyramid in the grass. The police found them difficult to fit into the picture, and the others, faced with them and with the dried stains on the storehouse wall, which looked almost natural, as if the wood had experienced a new flow of thick golden sap, turned away in common embarrassment.

This is characteristic of Malouf’s deft but unobtrusive use of imagery. His style is not merely descriptively appealing. Dialogue and monologue are plausible and at times comical. The self-mockery of this exchange between adolescent boys in ‘Out of the Stream’ balances the ritualistic elements of the story:

[…] ‘I figure,’ Hughie told him now, ‘that if I eat all that stuff they eat on television—you know, potato crisps, Cherry Ripe, Coke, all that junk, I’ll turn into a real Australian kid and have a top physique. Isn’t that what’s supposed to happen?’

‘Maybe you’ll turn into a real American kid and stay skinny.’

The idea of the potential for change and transformation, which is treated seriously in the rest of Antipodes, receives flippant attention here.

Antipodes, as the blurb and the early reviewers suggest, concerns opposites—but the barriers between these opposites are not always impermeable and the possibility of movement between culture, between the physical and the intangible, between the world and the senses and the imagination, constitute the affirmative dimension of the collection. To achieve affirmation without blandness or complacency, without earnestness or sentimentality, is cause for celebration.

Brenda Walker (1957–2024) was a novelist, short story writer and non-fiction writer. Her work won numerous prizes, including the Victorian Premier’s Award for non-fiction and an O. Henry Prize. Brenda was an integral and beloved member of the Western Australian writing community and the Westerly team are especially grateful for her contributions to the Magazine over the years, as writer, editor, advisor and colleague.

This review was published in Westerly 30.3.

Review of An Open Book by David Malouf

Reviewed by Shevaun Cooley

Malouf, David. An Open Book. St Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 2018. RRP $29.95, 104pp, ISBN: 9780702260308.

‘Parting is where / we began. Where we begin.’ So ends the first poem of David Malouf’s most recent collection, An Open Book. The poem—an aubade of sorts—is not a goodbye, but lingers instead on a threshold, where he offers blessing to both ‘fresh beginnings’ and ‘the partings they lead out from’ (1-2).

Malouf’s attention will return to such poised moments; nascent, or brimming with possibility, as when a room ‘fills like a sail / on the rumour of horizons.’ (64) In ‘Waiting for the Moon’, both the moon and an owl are poised to rise, and

to pinpoint and hoist bodily      to an unimagined
         height       a quick earth-creature
                         to where the moon
                           rises above cypress
         -tops and summer paddocks and their odours (40)

There’s impatience in the enjambment, since what is described has still not, at the poem’s end, happened.

It’s expected, to find the liminal in the early autobiographical sequence Kinderszenen. Thirteen brief poems make up these Scenes of Childhood, which owe something—perhaps only title and number—to Schumann’s short and sweet piano pieces. These poems, decidedly not saccharine, look back to Malouf’s boyhood years in Brisbane, and often depict silent and empty rooms nonetheless dark with secrets, the humid air thick with the scent of something half-understood. There’s a world behind this world; words behind the words we hear. The title poem (almost, since it is ‘The Open Book’ and not An Open Book), is illustrative. ‘My mother,’ it begins, ‘could read me, or so she claimed / like a book.’ But books

like houses have their secrets. Under the words
even of plain speakers,
echo and pre-echo.
I learned to stay quiet, play apart,
and wait for the plot
to thicken. (6)

(How lovely to feel the lines thicken here too). This is the portrait of a boy in retreat, not necessarily unhappy to sit apart and watch what unfolds, but as in ‘Odd Man Out’, a boy ‘never lonely / enough’; who ‘deals / in singles’, ‘develops an ear / for echoes’ and holds off the parents who ‘try to locate him. / In time. / Out there.’ (16-17)

This agrees with the impression of Malouf as a private man, and even a private poet, unusually shy of the personal pronoun, who always gives, but rarely gives away too much.

At times, this tendency wanders into euphemism, as in the coy description of himself as ‘something more / than fourscore.’ (87) Because, it is unavoidable fact that Malouf is old. At 87 years, we might reasonably expect this to be his last collection. It’s difficult not to read these ‘late poems’ through this lens, and use it to make sense of his preference for wonders small and simple; the ‘the small comfort / of light,’ (31) ‘sweet nothings in our ear,’ (54) and ‘the dumb / eloquence of bread / -and- butter occasions // with the smaller / sacraments, hand / to mouth, cup to lip.’ (34)  He sometimes over-sings his praises of the quotidian (another loaf of bread is delivered ‘new-risen like the sun,’ each crumb ‘a point of enlightenment’ (33)), but at any age, we find might find ourselves similarly struck. I keep returning to this description of still-life objects:

Like the as-yet-unborn,
or the old who have outlived
their gestures, they bear only
the messages of themselves. (58)

There’s no sense, though that Malouf is one who has outlived his gestures. If anything, there’s an urgency to them. Many of the poems begin in media res; suggestive, that it is at dusk ‘when proximate / stars are the most urgent / attendants on the scene.’  (81)

Sometimes we speak of poets as at the height (or the waxing or waning) of their powers, as if they were so many inconstant moons. Some years back, I wrote a slightly breathless blog post on Malouf’s novel Ransom, a book defiant in the face of the idea that power dies away when you age. Instead, I argued, ‘Sometimes it takes the very old, the dying even, to take the step that changes everything. We are not at the end of our power until we are dead … I don’t think this is what Homer wanted to say, but I think it’s what Malouf wanted to say.’ (Cooley) Perhaps I wasn’t wrong. Listen to the exhortation of ‘A Word to the Wise’ (from the final, aphoristic sequence, ‘A Knee Bent to Longevity’); not to ‘shuffle or totter’ but to be

as a wheatfield, all ears
for the breezes that come
stalking and sighing, full
of birds’ cries and the whisper
of change.

                        Or as a leaf that dances
in scarlet as it falls. (74)

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Work Cited

Cooley, Shevaun. “Actually why don’t you read … Ransom, David Malouf.” it gives it thew and fires it and bloods it in, tumblr, 19 April 2010, itgivesitthew.tumblr.com/post/533430599/actually-why-dont-you-read

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Shevaun Cooley is a Western Australian poet, essayist, and climber. Her poetry has been published in Cordite, Island, Poetry Wales, Meanjin, Southerly, The Best Australian Poems (2009, 2017), and she has been shortlisted for both the Newcastle Poetry Prize, and the University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize.

Her debut collection of poems, Homing, was released in 2017 by Giramondo Publishing.

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