Final Draft - Great Conversations

Maryrose Cuskelly is an award winning writer or fiction and nonfiction. Her debut novel is The Cane.

The Cane transports the reader to the Northern Queensland canefields and back in time to the 1970’s.

The town of Quala is reeling from the disappearance of sixteen year old Janet McClymont. In the weeks since Janet failed to arrive at her babysitting job the canefields have been repeatedly swept by search parties and every man is the district has been grilled over his whereabouts at the time of her disappearance.

Told through a multitude of perspectives, The Cane delves into the psychology of a town on the brink. The questions of whether Janet is alive is almost secondary to the rarely spoken, ‘could have been one of us?’

This is a society that views outsiders with suspicion.

The new school teacher is too tall, too long haired and too free in his advocacy of social change. His alibi must be rechecked and still not believed.

The new publican’s daughter is old for primary school and too open in her ways with the boys. Raelene flaunts the unspoken rules that have turned the town in on itself. She freely walks alone and refuses to defer to parental authority.

The new copper brought in from Brisbane is just too much because she’s a woman and Quala’s men have their own ideas about the roles women should occupy.

With the harvest being held off in the hopes that Janet might be found before the cane burn the stage is set for tensions to run high. If the cops can’t do anything about the malignant force that seems to have invaded Quala the locals might just have to sort it out themselves.

The Cane has all the elements of a seat of your pants beach read, purpose built to give you aching arms and sunburn as you lay too long turning page after page. As it builds inexorably towards the moment the canefields are set alight the book shows us how social unrest brews in a town turned against itself.

The various narratorial perspectives glimpse at the ways this highly conservative social milieu is fighting against itself and the forces of change. Women in particular are given the spotlight as agents of change and targets of those who would maintain the status quo.

The narrative is based on a true story and it is not simply in this historical alignment that we can find resonance with The Cane’s exploration of social expectation and control.

It was interesting to read back fifty years in the wake of the current news cycle. While the sexism and misogyny of many of The Cane’s men is more bald than we might be used to today, there is undoubtedly a through line from older attitudes towards women working, reading and expressing themselves openly, and attitudes in certain sections of the media about ‘proper’ behaviour from prominent women.

By giving us perspectives from characters as diverse as children, established and recent arrivals we are privy to a world that is seeking a united front but is torn by feelings that something is not right.

As I entered the world of The Cane I fell into the trap of trying to solve the mystery alongside the characters. This is not a traditional ‘fair play’ style whodunnit although it offers a compelling psychological search. As a reader you are given enough of a glimpse into the ensemble cast of characters to wonder at who might be the perpetrator, and perhaps just as importantly, how that person may go unseen within a close knit community.

Check out The Cane. It’s an exciting read with its soul in the heart of contemporary questions about how we treat and respond to violence against women.

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.

The Furies takes us to Queensland in the nineties. Cynthia has watched her family fall apart and is left in a world she does yet understand. Driven by forces outside her understanding she must negotiate a world that is openly hostile to her.

Today's show features Mandy Beaumont discussing her new book The Furies

Join Andrew in conversation with Mandy Beaumont...

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.

Jessica Au is a writer based in Melbourne. Her debut novel is 2011’s Cargo. Her latest novel, Cold Enough for Snow is the inaugural winner of the Novel Prize, which will see it published worldwide and translated into fifteen languages.

Cold Enough For Snow begins in transit; the narrator has arrived in Tokyo and awaits her mother’s arrival on a separate flight. They are on a train station travelling to a gallery; moving from a Metro line to a suburban line and then walking through familiarly unfamiliar streets. As the move together the narrator is always conscious of her mother’s presence, testing out their proximity in space as well as time as she thinks back to the near and more distant past.

Cold Enough For Snow’s narrator is searching for something on this trip. She reflects on her mother’s youth in Hong Kong, paralleled with her own Australian upbringing. She wonders at her education that has shifted her perspectives away from her mother’s.

In a very slim volume Cold Enough For Snow covers a lot of ground, both figuratively and metaphorically. The pair of mother and daughter travel around Japan, moving every few days. All the while the narrator is moving through her life and relationships as moments trigger memories.

The narrator’s seeming quest has her reaching for moments and experiences and this is contrasted by the more relaxed aura of the mother who is happy to do anything. In these moments we see the narrator reflect on her education and the sacrifices her mother made to provide it. The narrator wants to return some of the wonder she has discovered but also struggles to put into words what that might be.

The journey of Cold Enough For Snow is both physical and existential and I could have stayed in the pages simply for the vicarious sense of flux and transit (it’s been so long since any of us travelled). The novel also gave me that tension you feel when you can’t quite allow yourself to simply be in a moment, when the conscious mind tears you away and forces you into ruminations and doubts.

The narrator’s mother observes to her that our education and understanding do not necessarily make us happier or improve our world and it is not until much later that the narrator comes to her own realisation; “I had one vague exhausted thought that perhaps it was alright not to understand all things but simply to see and hold them”.

Cold Enough For Snow is beautiful and thoughtful. I’d no sooner finished it than, like any good trip, I wanted to go back and do it all again safe in the knowledge that familiar locations could reveal new secrets.

Definitely check out Jessica Au’s Cold Enough For Snow

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.

Today though, we're branching out with a new conversation.

Do you need more books in your life?

The depth and variety of Australian publishing is such that there are always more books than we can ever cover on the show. Never fear though, because the strength of Australia's publishing is closely followed by the variety of Aussie book podcasters!

In a new segment Andrew will be sitting down with Australian book podcasters to find out a little bit about their shows, what they love to read and how they deal with a book nerds most scandalous problems.

Joining Andrew in our first podcaster conversation is Dani Vee host of the Words & Nerds podcast. Renowned for her infectious energy and insightful questions, Dani was a natural debut for our as-yet unnamed new segment!

Join Andrew in conversation with Dani Vee...

Final Draft is produced and presented by Andrew Pople

Dani is the host of Words & Nerds and has a picture book coming out this year!

Discover Dani and the Words & Nerds podcast...

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.

In Cold Enough For Snow we join a young woman and her mother on a holiday to Japan. Now living in different cities, the trip is a chance for the two to reconnect and spend time that feels increasingly spare.

As they travel from temples and galleries and eat together in restaurants the young woman searches her past looking for a way to understand who she is and how as an adult she relates to her aging mother.

Today's show features Jessica Au discussing her new book Cold Enough For Snow

Join Andrew in conversation with Jessica Au...

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.

Bri Lee is a lawyer and writer. Her books include the award winning Eggshell Skull and Beauty. Her latest is Who Gets to Be Smart.

Who Gets to Be Smart begins in Oxford. Bri Lee is visiting a friend there on a Rhodes Scholarship. As she wanders the lanes and cobbles of Oxford’s campuses Lee thinks back to Virginia Woolf decrying the iniquity that sees Women scholars living in relative squalor compared to their male peers.

Woolf wrote about this iniquity, positing the solution that women needed A Room of One’s Own, and five hundred pound a year.

Nearly a century later Bri Lee realises that this is not enough. That equality within the system does not address the systemic privilege and bias that props up the system, creating a framework of elitism that maintains power in the hands of a few. Where Woolf worries about the lack of money for women, Lee questions where the money comes from. In the money and power that prop up the colleges she finds a system of institutionalising education that reinforces the very systems that fund them.

Who Gets to Be Smart challenges the rationale of the academy and its stranglehold on so-called intelligence. The books takes the reader on a tour through the racist legacy of Cecil Rhodes and his bequest that founded the Rhodes scholarship, through to the contemporary parallel of the Australian Ramsay Centre. The Ramsay Centre’s mission to fund scholarships in ‘western civilisation’ highlights that tertiary institutions are not simply neutral spaces of so-called higher learning, but active participants in a process of consolidating power through ideas.

Lee asks the reader to consider the the concept of Kyriarchy and Kyriarchal systems. Now there are multiple wonderful, much better qualified explainers of Kyriarchy including Bri Lee and Omid Tofighian whom Lee engages with (Read them if my examples make no sense). My understanding of Kyriarchy is that it is interrelated systems in our social world that work to keep us off-balance and subservient, and thereby controlling us indirectly. Kyriarchy plays on your job insecurity and worries about getting a home loan, even as you strive to have an Insta-perfect life and send your child to the best school. And Kyriarchy relies on multiple, intersecting systems that worsen as you move away from my white-bread example above. Kyriarchy is particularly cruel if you do not follow the dominant religion, speak another language and don’t look like your neighbour.

Who Gets to Be Smart explores the myriad ways in which knowledge is held and denied and at its heart is the way that systems of power work to keep us always further down, while looking up. It asks to question why we are so fractured, viewing potential friends and allies as competition, while raising up our oppressors as paragons.

Throughout Who Gets to Be Smart Lee explores the various mechanisms of centralising power through smarts. We are treated to the dubious history of ‘intelligence’ and intelligence testing, a system that has sought to simplify a complex system and sort us all into our places. School systems and the ongoing battle for funding in Australia comes under the microscope.

As the training grounds for the type of institutionalised thinking the book discusses they are incredibly unequally served. Lee gives us the numbers on this iniquity and explores how a country that prides itself on having an egalitarian spirit will also commit to Olympic level mental gymnastics to justify this inequality.

Who Gets To Be Smart is an important book for a world that feels forever to be dividing itself along ideological lines, because it seeks to examine how those ideologues got where they are and what maintains their status. It puts in the readers hands a guide to pulling back the curtain.

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.

Today's show features Katherine Collette discussing her new book The Competition

The Competition centres around the Speech Makers annual conference and competition. Frances didn’t enter for the camaraderie, not the opportunity to attend workshops on timing your use of cliches. This year Speech Makers is offering $40,000 to the winner and that would go a long way to setting Frances up and convincing her parents she isn’t failing at life.

Keith has mentored Frances in getting this far, but as her competition he can’t reasonably want her to win. The money would be nice, but for Keith the glory of being a Speech Makers champion would finally show people he’s got what it takes.

As the competitors line up only to fall each round there’s rumblings that this year there’s more changing in Speech Makers than just prize money. Could it be that the organisation isn’t what it used to be?

Join Andrew in conversation with Katherine Collette...

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.

Amy Remeikis is a political reporter working for Guardian Australia. She is also a regular panelist on Australian TV and perhaps many listeners met her in this capacity recently as she appeared on The Project. Remeikis was appearing to promote her new book On Reckoning and the segment quickly became a prime example of the concept of reckoning that Remeikis explores in her writing.

On Reckoning is part of Hachette’s On series. A collection of bite sized books exploring ideas driving our society.

In On Reckoning Amy Remeikis explores the evolving public narrative around sexual assault and how survivors of sexual assault are treated. In doing so Remeikis looks at how inadequate our current ways of engaging with sexual assault survivors are and how this inadequacy is leading to a ground swell of anger that is changing the story.

Remeikis begins with the moment the Prime Minister responded to allegations that Britany Higgins had been raped in Parliament House. The Prime Minister’s response was contingent on his understanding being conditioned, or perhaps filtered through his relationships as a father and a husband.

Remeikis points out that it is simply wrong that women and their safety should be conditional on men having a significant other in their life who can act as the lens through which violence is first understood and then condemned.

On Reckoning goes on to explore the inadequacy of a public narrative that cites bad men as perpetrators of sexual assault, in a world where we only seem to know ‘good blokes’.

Remeikis points to the statistics of sexual violence and identifies the liklihood that not only do we all know a woman who has been a victim, we also statistically would know a man who has been a perpetrator.

The public narrative would have us believe that bad people commit crimes and are caught and punished but in On Reckoning Remeikis is telling us that this is a story that hasn’t had its third act. The anger and pain of women who have been made victims has continued to rage and a new story was needed; one that dealt with the very real and ongoing threats that women dealt with every day.

On Reckoning is a combination of reporting, commentary and social philosophy and it arrives at a moment that is both immediate and long developing. It succinctly describes the evolving discussion of how we deal with sexually violent men and the world that has allowed them to escape so often unscathed by their crimes.

On Reckoning also highlights for us the failure of our stories; prevailing narratives of the good bloke or the woman who was asking for it, the misunderstanding or the private matter that’s none of our business. It shows us that these stories have allowed crimes to committed as a matter of course and that we can no longer hide behind ignorance and apathy.

On Reckoning by Amy Remeikis is out not through Hachette

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 Linda Jaivin discussing her new book The Shortest History of China

Linda Jaivin is an internationally published Australian author, translator, essayist, novelist and specialist writer on China. Her new book is The Shortest History of China, and it’s a fabulously readable account of Chinese history that attempts to take us beyond the partisan headlines and explore the story of the most populous nation in the world.

Join Andrew in conversation with Linda Jaivin on The Shortest History of China...

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.

On today's show Felix Shannon taking over the microphone joined by Michael Burge discussing his new novel Tank Water

James Brandt didn’t look back when he got away from his rural hometown as a teenager. Now, he’s returned to Kippen for the first time in twenty years because his cousin Tony has been found dead under the local bridge.

The news that Tony has left him the entire family farm triggers James’s journalistic curiosity – and his anxiety – both of which cropped up during his turbulent journey to adulthood. But it is the unexpected homophobic attack he survives that draws James into a hunt for the reasons one lonely Kippen farm boy in every generation kills himself.

Standing in the way is James’s father, the town’s recently retired top cop, who is not prepared to investigate crimes no one reckons have taken place. James must use every newshound’s trick he ever learned in order to uncover the brutal truth.

Felix Shannon is in conversation with Michael Burge on Tank Water...

Final Draft is produced and presented by Andrew Pople

Felix Shannon hosts Death of the Reader on 2ser 107.3