Article written by Rory Hawkins.
You don’t always need the length of a novel to make your reader feel something. In fact, short fiction is often much harder to master. Fitting in the right amount of exposition, thought, dialogue or action is a balancing act that defines what you’ve written more than it does any book. You can’t get away with treating it like a chapter, just doing the one. That’s why the best of short stories are few and far between.
They’re also insanely American. Like reading an entire book isn’t cosmopolitan enough, the short fiction “greats” of the 20th century seem almost entirely exclusive to American writers. Don’t get me wrong, I love some of the stuff they’ve written. There’s no replacement to Ray Bradbury and Steven Millhauser. Look them up – they’re worth reading more than once. And you can actually read them more than once.
But it’s time for Aussie writers to take the stage. Our country’s identity is constantly discussed – the oh so many influences, how it’s still taking shape, how it’s changing for good or bad. Identity politics aside, Australian authors still have the skill to write thoughtful and thought provoking stories alike.
The following are by no means a ranked “best” of Australian short stories. They’re just five I enjoyed when I first dipped my toe into what short fiction we have to offer. If anything, they’re a gateway into the world of Australian short fiction.
1. The Chance by Peter Carey
Reading The Chance, you won’t entirely know all of the background to what’s going on. Here’s what I could gather: somewhere in the far future (possibly in the age of interplanetary travel), human society on Earth has become a shadow of what it had attained. The US had grown in vast scientific power before collapsing, leaving a world in political strife.
Then the Fastalogians arrived – business-like aliens with the technology of the Genetic Lottery, dubbed by people “The Chance”. For two thousand intergalactic dollars you can put yourself under the knife and walk out a completely different person, memories semi-intact. What’s left of human organisation gets wriggled under the Fasta’s industrious thumbs.
Carey’s somewhat absurd tale puts us alongside an everyday man, one who’s Changed and is still coming to terms with what that really means. Think Orwell’s 1984 with some added thoughts on what physical appearance is and does to us. The Chance is one of those “if you could, would you?” stories taken to a dysfunctional extreme.
‘It was through these streets that I strode, muttering, continually on the verge of either anger or tears. I was cut adrift, unconnected. My face in the mirror at morning was not the face that my mind had started living with. It was a battered, red, broken-nosed face, marked by great quizzical eyebrows, intense black eyes, and tangled wiry hair. I had been through the lottery and lost. I had got myself the body of an ageing street-fighter. It was a body built to contain furies. It suited me.’ – Paul Carey
2. Butter by Lauren Aimee Curtis
A recent addition to Australian literature, Butter is the short recollection of a woman now grown, of when she and her friends were young and bored in summertime. By chance they meet an older man, his intentions with them clear at first. They fall into a strange relationship with him, thrilled by the danger of it all, but aware of how their sexuality controls whatever happens.
The epitaph of “short” fiction, reading this once won’t take any more than a few minutes, but mulling it over will last you all the longer. Curtis explores the themes of sexual thrill seeking, and the youthful abandon to take any advantage.
‘We met him in a park down by the derelict part of the harbour. It was just an oblong of yellow grass and some lopsided play equipment. We used to go there at night and drink cheap, fizzy wine we bought from the lady who owned the Chinese market nearby. This man was standing by the water taking photos of the bridge. He told us we looked mature for sixteen. We told him butter wouldn’t melt in our mouths.’ – Lauren Aimee Curtis
3. The Drover’s Wife by Henry Lawson
As the name suggests, this short story is quintessentially Australian. Written by Henry Lawson in 1892, we are taken back in time to an isolated homestead in the outback. There, a mother – the namesake and protagonist – is left to eke out an existence for herself and her four children. Without her husband, she protects what she has from a venomous snake and the occasional crook.
The Drover’s Wife tells us of the everyday harshness of life in the bush, and is one of the firsts of its kind. Though stereotypical in what makes it “Australian”, I think it’s still a pivotal moment in capturing the initial harshness settlers found in living here. The wife herself shows how indomitable a mother can be over the world around her.
‘She gives some supper, and then, before it gets dark, she goes into house, and snatches up some pillows and bedclothes – expecting to see or lay or hand on the snake any minute. She makes a bed on the kitchen table for the children, and sits down beside it to watch all night. She has an eye on the corner, and a green sapling club in readiness on the dresser by her side; also her sewing basket and a copy of the Young Ladies Journal.’ – Henry Lawson
4. Nails by Paul Jennings
If you’ve ever watched Round the Twist as a kid, then you’ve already been exposed to the downright strange imaginings of Paul Jennings. Created and written for screen by Jennings, it served as a televised anthology of his short stories for kids, individual short stories made into episodes.
But just because he’s written for children doesn’t mean he can’t do any darker stuff. Nails (from his Unbearable collection) stuck with me as one set apart from his usually absurd but light-hearted tales. As a boy starts going through puberty, finger nails begin to grow on the rest on his along his arms. They spread across his whole body, with no sign of stopping.
To hide this, his father moves the two of them to a secluded seaside cottage. He becomes obsessed with the ocean, searching for something out on the water for days on end. His health begins to fail and the boy, now head to toe in fingernails, is alone and without any answers.
While the Round the Twist version softens the overall tone of Jennings supernatural tale, I believe the original short story stills stands as a younger Steven King-esque tale. For anyone younger, Nails is still a great inspiration to start reading more supernatural and darker fantasy.
5. Glisk by Josephine Rowe
Winner of the Jolley Prize for Short Fiction in 2016, Rowe’s writing is something you need to read slowly to make full sense of; the emotional baggage and weight the protagonist has been carrying, what you’re finding out like an old family friend left in the dark.
After years of estrangement, Raf’s brother Fynn is back in their hometown, not knowing if he’s visiting or there to stay. It’s a place he rightly left. After a fatal car accident, he’s an alien to a tight knit community – and he knows it.
Rowe does so well to show how her characters feel, not just through dialogue (which is sparse but meaningful), but through the nuances of how they react to one another, how wary her protagonist is of his brother. In so little time, relationships are built and padded out to breaking point.
‘There are Fynn's hands, threaded mangrove-like around his glass. Roughened by work that has nothing to do with him, work that carries nothing of himself. In my shed there's a second table and a set of chairs and a bookshelf. In February it heats up to a million degrees in there – six bloody summers – all the wood has buckled and split along the joins, the wires gone slack or snapped, all that careful tension ruined. I should have kept them inside.’ – Joesphine Rowe
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