Final Draft - Great Conversations

Yumna Kassab is a writer from Western Sydney. Her work has been featured in Kill Your Darlings, Meanjin and the Sydney Morning Herald amongst. Yumna’s debut book is the critically acclaimed and much prize listed, The House of Youssef.

The subject of today’s book club is Yumna’s debut novel Australiana.

Australiana takes us to the north-eastern New South Wales region around Tamworth, an area Yumna lived for many years as a teacher.

Across diverse and interwoven sections Yumna weaves a tale of a region overwhelmed by drought and struggling to reconcile itself to the threat of oblivion that the lack of rain brings.

The book travels across literary styles and moves through time to evoke the region and the people who live there.

The opening section entitled The Town moves in tightly narrated vignettes that link each other via small details, almost talismans. Yumna describes her inspiration as the tales of the One Thousand and One Nights, where every evening the story dangles linking to the next to ensure the continued telling and life of Scheherazade.

In the interlinking tales I felt the kinds of bonds of community that bring people together. Whether near or far everyone knows a little something of each other and these links forge the greater whole.

In the telling of the stories in Australiana we become privy to the minds of the town, riding alongside them as they face the increasingly dry landscape. In these perspectives we see something of what keeps each person on the land and the extremes that may yet drive them off it.

In the section entitled The Blind Side we sit and listen as the narrator tells the story of Barry to Barry’s son. Now missing, the narrator weaves a tale that encompasses a group of young friends moving to the city and their various fates away from the town.

As the only one to return to the town they grew up in, the narrator has some suspicion and disdain for his old friends but remains steadfast even as Barry finds himself with the town turning against him. Through the changing fortunes of Barry and the struggle of the narrator to stay true to his friend we learn a little more of how the land pulls at people in a way that perhaps we can never know in the city.

Australiana is a unique and fascinating novel, both for its subject and its ever shifting style. The name Australiana seems to evoke a kind of nationalistic kitsch. I imagined Henry Lawson and Dorothea McKellar kicking the footy while Banjo Patterson burns sausages on the barbie. But the result is a work that challenges the sacred cows of white Australian ruggedness whilst also asking us to look closer at environments that we often take for granted or see as only regional jaunts.

In describing the book, Yuman Kassab told me she shys away from the term ‘novel’ in favour of an ecosystem. The book seeks to encompass the human and non-human, living and organically inert to more fully encompass place and life.

The book is at turns serious and absurd, challenging and evocative and offers a unique perspective on our world.

Yumna Kassab’s Australiana is out now from Ultimo Press.

Book Club is produced and presented by Andrew Pople

Want more great conversations with Australian authors?

Discover this and many more conversations on Final Draft every week from 2ser.

The Final Draft Great Conversations podcast is all about books, writing and literary culture. We're dedicated to exploring Australian writing, looking into the issues that drive our storytelling to discover more from the books you love.

These are the stories that make us who we are.

Rhett Davis is a writer whose work has appeared in publications like The Big Issue and Meanjin. He won the 2020 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript. His debut novel is Hovering

Alice Wren is mid-flight. At the insistence of an urgent email Alice has fled Berlin, returning to Australia and her hometown of Fraser.

After seventeen years the city is not what she remembers. The taxis are blue, her sister resents her disappearance and the nephew she has never met is now almost a man.

As for the city of Fraser; it changes daily, shifting, dislocating and rearranging itself in unfathomable ways.

Lydia and George don’t know what to make of Alice’s sudden return. Who is this woman who says she is there relative and what is the dark secret she is trying to escape from?

Rhett Davis joins Andrew to discuss Hovering...

Final Draft is produced and presented by Andrew Pople

Want more great conversations with Australian authors?

Discover this and many more conversations on Final Draft every week from 2ser.

Festivals are back and it's time to get amongst it with like minded book lovers!

With book stores featuring author events and Sydney Writers Festival about to drop its 2022 programming the time to read and mingle is now!

Blak & Bright Festival was established in Naarm in 2016. Making a triumphant return in 2022, the festival now features a Sydney event!

What – Blak & Bright Sydney Satellite event

When – Saturday the 19th of March

Where – Writing NSW, Callan Park, Balmain Road, Lilyfield

Details – blakandbright.com.au

You can check out interviews with so many writers from the Blak & Bright Festival line up.

Check out the Final Draft Great Conversations archive!

Book Club is produced and presented by Andrew Pople

Want more great conversations with Australian authors?

Discover this and many more conversations on Final Draft every week from 2ser.

The Final Draft Great Conversations podcast is all about books, writing and literary culture. We're dedicated to exploring Australian writing, looking into the issues that drive our storytelling to discover more from the books you love.

These are the stories that make us who we are.

With International Women’s Day recently being marked on March 8 it was impossible to go past Eliza Reilly’s new book Sheilas. With the tagline Badass Women of Australian History, Sheilas promises to kick down the doors of history classrooms and rip the stale, pale and male textbooks from your hands delivering a powerful hit of the women that chroniclers of history forget or relegate to the footnotes.

Featuring more than a dozen women across a century of Australian History, Sheilas is all the inspiration you need to go out and change your world for the better.

Eliza Reilly joins Andrew to discuss Sheilas, Badass Women of Australian History

Final Draft is produced and presented by Andrew Pople

Want more great conversations with Australian authors?

Discover this and many more conversations on Final Draft every week from 2ser.

Eliza Reilly is an award winning writer, director, performer as well as a community radio legend over on FBi, presenting the long running Girls Gone Mild.

Eliza’s debut book Sheila’s grew out of the web series of the same name Eliza produced and starred in alongside her sister Hannah.

Sheila’s presents profiles of prominent women who have played important but often unheralded roles in shaping the world we live in.

Beginning in the 1860’s with Mary-Ann Bug; bushranger and highway woman extraordinaire, the book intersperses badass lives with historical tidbits that serve to illuminate just how awful it was to be a woman, let alone a poor woman, or a woman of colour.

The thrust of the book is that progress has not been made in a vacuum and is directly the result of people who wouldn’t sit down when they were told.

Australia has a revolutionary but not uncomplicated history of women’s rights. I mean we can just start with the whole battle for rights and the fact that it’s quite a bit shit that men have never seen fit to shuffle over and make space but have had to be cajoled and bludgeoned into doing what is just right.

I mean just take the fact of Australia’s early introduction of women’s suffrage and then the abhorrent asterix to that achievement that *first nations women were only recognised as human in 1967 and their full right to vote was only secured completely in 1984 when the government made enrolling to vote at federal elections compulsory for First Nations people.

Sheila’s speaks to the reader in their own voice and does not shy away from surprise and disgust at the facts it reveals. The book also intersperses contemporary perspectives whilst trying to avoid universalising or talking over its historical subjects.

I read Sheila’s as a fan of the web series and of Eliza’s TV work. In Sheila’s she’s created an immensely readable text that takes on established ‘history’ by writing itself into the cracks and shadows. This is a book that understands the process of erasure that has been undertaken for generations and reminds it that women aren’t going to smile and cop it anymore.

Of course the process of redressing historical blinspots, erasure and general bastardry isn;t the work of a single book. If you’re thinking of reading up on more of these issues around women’s roles that are underappreciated you can also check out

You Daughters of Freedom - Clare Wright

This is What a Feminist Looks Like - Emily MAguire

Talkin’ Up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and Feminism - Aileen Moreton-Robinson

Book Club is produced and presented by Andrew Pople

Want more great conversations with Australian authors?

Discover this and many more conversations on Final Draft every week from 2ser.

Jane Harrison joins Andrew to talk about the importance of First Nations writing and the Blak & Bright Festival, coming to Sydney!

Jane Harrison is a playwright, novelist and researcher descended from the Muruwari people.

Jane is also the director of Blak & Bright a First Nations Literary Festival based in Naarm (Melbourne).

Blak & Bright Festival is making a triumphat return in 2022, and the festival now features a Sydney event!

What - Blak & Bright Sydney Satellite event

When - Saturday the 19th of March

Where - Writing NSW, Callan Park, Balmain Road, Lilyfield

Details - blakandbright.com.au

Great Conversations is produced and presented by Andrew Pople

Want more great conversations with Australian authors?

Discover this and many more conversations on Final Draft every week from 2ser.

The Final Draft Great Conversations podcast is all about books, writing and literary culture. We're dedicated to exploring Australian writing, looking into the issues that drive our storytelling to discover more from the books you love.

These are the stories that make us who we are.

Maryrose Cuskelly is an award winning writer of fiction and nonfiction. i

Maryrose joins Andrew in conversation to discuss her debut novel The Cane.

Sixteen year old Janet McClymont went missing weeks ago and the town of Quala in North Queensland is on edge. Parents are jumping at shadows, ferrying kids to school lest they walk too close to the cane fields where Janet disappeared.

Every inch of the region has been searched and the worst is feared.

Tensions run high as the townspeople watch each other with suspicion. Every man in town has been questioned and while Janet could have been taken by an outsider, the townspeople cannot help but ask; what if the culprit is among them?

Join Andrew as we discover Maryrose Cuskelly’s The Cane...

Final Draft is produced and presented by Andrew Pople

Want more great conversations with Australian authors?

Discover this and many more conversations on Final Draft every week from 2ser.

Rhett Davis is a writer whose work has appeared in publications like The Big Issue and Meanjin. He won the 2020 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript. His debut novel is Hovering

As Hovering begins Alice Wren is mid-flight. At the insistence of an urgent email Alice has fled Berlin, returning to Australia and her hometown of Fraser.

After seventeen years the city is not what she remembers. The taxis are blue, her sister resents her disappearance and the nephew she has never met is now almost a man.

As for the city of Fraser; it changes daily, shifting, dislocating and rearranging itself in unfathomable ways.

Lydia and George don’t know what to make of Alice’s sudden return. Lydia retreats into an online sanctuary, craving the predictability and control of her digital garden. George maintains a kind of stoic silence, communicating online through text. It is the only way he can quiet the voices that flow unbidden through his head.

Hovering is a fascinating, conceptually dense novel that seeks to engage with our digitally saturated world by exploring its extremes. The action radiates out from the novel's central family of Alice, Lydia and George..

Alice initially fled Fraser because she felt it was a cultural backwater. Her quest led her to a state of permanent dislocation as she struggles to find anywhere that is truly home. In Alice we confront cultural cringe in all its permutations…

Lydia and George lead diverging online lives. Lydia is the fear of the iPad generation all grown up. Despite her son reaching out to her to bridge the gap, she would rather stay logged on and seek comfort in the algorithms she understands better than people.

George navigates these ructions with seeming equanimity. He lives comfortably on and offline. At least as comfortably as anyone might trying to move forward in a constantly changing world.

Hovering concerns itself with the ways and means of our daily communication. Davis explores how the flow of communication can facilitate or interrupt life.

In the ever changing geography of Fraser it is impossible to know if your commute to work will remain the same, or even if you’ll return to your address and find your house or a skyscraper. This is, as you might imagine, off putting to the residents and yet for the generation growing up knowing no other way they are comfortable, even happy with the uncertainty. It is near impossible to enjoy the privileges of property status when anyone could find themselves in a mansion or a hovel.

Within the text Davis explores the nuances of our everyday communication. From newspapers and emails, to an entire section written in metadata we are afforded the opportunity to explore what it means to separate the signal from the noise.

All this finds its zenith in George. Afflicted with bouts of crippling noise, George must shut down communication lest he be drowned in the noise. It seems that George is filtering an impossible amount of transmission but can he sift through to make some sort of meaning?

The unrest in Fraser builds with the revelation of Alice’s secret. Physical and digital space become blurred and the how and why of our way of life becomes a very important question to those who want to hunt down Alice and see her answer for her actions.

I feel like I’ve been a little opaque in this review and that’s partly because there are secrets to keep and in part because in challenging form and style Hovering is a novel you have to experience not explain.

Defying genre and challenging convention, I found Hovering an exciting read. Where others look back to understand our moment, Rhett Davis has looked forward, inward and beyond to craft a narrative space all its own.

Book Club is produced and presented by Andrew Pople

Want more great conversations with Australian authors?

Discover this and many more conversations on Final Draft every week from 2ser.

The Final Draft Great Conversations podcast is all about books, writing and literary culture. We're dedicated to exploring Australian writing, looking into the issues that drive our storytelling to discover more from the books you love.

These are the stories that make us who we are.

Claire G Coleman is a Noongar writer of fiction, essays, poetry and criticism. She is the author of Terra Nullius, The Old Lie and Lies Damned Lies.

Claire joined Andrew in conversation to discuss the impact of the pandemic on authors whose books have released in the last two years. In the course of their conversation they discuss the ways we interpret and understand history. The impact of wholesale lies being sold as alternate truth and even get into the workings of Claire's writing.

Featuring Claire discussing her upcoming novel 'Enclave'!

Join Andrew in conversation with Claire G Coleman...

Final Draft is produced and presented by Andrew Pople

Want more great conversations with Australian authors?

Discover this and many more conversations on Final Draft every week from 2ser.

The Final Draft Great Conversations podcast is all about books, writing and literary culture. We're dedicated to exploring Australian writing, looking into the issues that drive our storytelling to discover more from the books you love.

These are the stories that make us who we are.

Today's show features Vanessa Len discussing her new book Only a Monster

Joan was always told her family was different. Every summer she visits her mother’s family in London. From volunteering in her dream job at a museum, to the cute boy she volunteers with her holiday is just about perfect.

Except Joan’s got a secret even she doesn’t know. Monsters are real and she is one. What does this mean? Well her date’s not going well and Joan has questions for her grandmother, but that’s all going to have to wait until Joan is done running for her life!

Join Andrew in conversation with Vanessa Len...

Final Draft is produced and presented by Andrew Pople

Want more great conversations with Australian authors?

Discover this and many more conversations on Final Draft every week from 2ser.