To slightly paraphrase Forrest Gump, anthologies are like a box of chocolates – an assortment of sweet, sour, decent, undercooked and forgettable, with some humdingers somewhere in there. The latest Furphy Anthology, its fifth issue and edited by Joanne Holliman, is no exception.
Kathryn Lomer’s ‘Nothing About Kissing’, is certainly a well-written piece, but if it wasn’t the winner and first in the book’s chronology, this reader would have barely noticed it.
In fact, the book’s three winners, to this reader, failed to excite. This changed with the fourth story, Elizabeth Walton’s ‘Casino’. It’s let down by the overly simplistic and unbelievable way the protagonist again loses her fortune, but humanising such a character – a drunken pokies addict on government payments – is admirable.
Robert Johnson’s ‘Crook Creek’ is one of the book’s crowning jewels. It’s emotional, incredibly Australian in its use of slang and extremely funny, in a dry Australian sense of humour way. The final scene turns from highly emotional to absurdly funny and back to emotional effortlessly. Kathy Sharpe’s ‘E For Eternity’ is a short, detail-rich mood piece set in Sydney in the 1920s. Poetic, symbolic and wonderfully economic, it understays its welcome and leaves you with memories of a feeling more than a story. Excellent.
Meanwhile, Paulette Gittins’ ‘Herbie and Gerda Bring Cake’ is good, but its astronomically improbable meet-up, which drives the entire finale, is just too noticeably unlikely for a short story format. A novella would suit it more.
We also have in the mix, Amy St Lawrence’s ‘Island Fever’. This one is moody and effective until the end. In pacing terms, it feels like a rushed deus ex machina and, in narrative terms, unsatisfying.
However, Emma Ashmere’s ‘Quarry’ is one of those rare stories that this reader immediately needed to reread to see how the ending worked with the beginning. It’s an intriguing tale of interwoven narrative voices who never specifically identify themselves, hence needing a second read. It’s dreamlike and abstract and simultaneously straightforward and challenging. Brilliant.
The last two highlights are Minh Hiền’s ‘My Mother’ and Phillip M Everett’s ‘The Bear’. The former is by a Vietnamese writer, telling the tale of not just her challenges of migrating to Australia to study, but also her relationship with her mother. When her mother finally comes to join her in Australia, she is wheelchair-bound, stricken with Motor Neurone Disease (MND). It’s eloquent, poignant and filled with insights into Vietnamese culture.
Everett’s story involves an Indigenous Australian, presumably from when Everett was teaching creative writing at the Aboriginal Community College in Port Adelaide. It’s a story of a story, that of an Aboriginal man telling the writing group his tale of a day in the pub. It’s wonderfully simple and features some gloriously Australian lingo.
However, those last two stories highlight the book’s fundamental flaw – its dust jacket claims that it shows “Australia in all its guises”. However, with an author list with surnames such as Smith, Johnson, Sharpe and Lawrence, you’re in for a pretty Anglocentric ride. Hiền’s and Everett’s stories seem to be token gestures to show some diversity and, as entertaining as Everett’s story is, it hardly shows First Peoples in the most flattering of lights – indeed, it could be interpreted as merely reinforcing stereotypes.
Read: Book review: mark the dawn, Jazz Money
The overwhelming quota of Anglo writers may not be a bad thing, but it’s incredibly noticeable. All in all, it’s a decent anthology, featuring the good, the bad and the etcetera, and for the good ones it’s worth your while.
The Furphy Anthology 2024 edited by Joanne Holliman
Publisher: Hardie Grant
ISBN: 9781761451911
Format: Hardback
Pages: 256 pages
Publication: 17 December 2024
RRP: $35
