Ship to shore

Georgia Blain's We All Lived in Bondi Then

The next edition of SUBTRACTION will arrive in your inbox on February 15, on the topic of ‘Resistance’. In the meantime, here is an extra post for all free and paid subscribers. It is my foreword to a new collection of stories by the late, beloved writer Georgia Blain, We All Lived in Bondi Then, which is published tomorrow, January 30 by Scribe Publications. An edited version of this foreword appeared in The Guardian on Saturday.

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Foreword to We All Lived in Bondi Then

A short time after Georgia Blain died, I discovered that I’d somehow deleted her voice messages from my phone. It was another devastating loss: I mourned those random, ordinary messages about nothing — about running late for coffee, how to cook burghul — because I couldn’t bear never to hear her voice again.

Sometimes when I miss her now, I listen to our conversation about her work recorded for a writers’ festival, or I find one of her many radio interviews still available online. I love to hear her speaking voice: clear, unsentimental, truthful, funny. Self-deprecating, yet completely unashamed.

Those same qualities are found in her writer’s voice — in her memoirs and essays and in her fiction, most especially her last, finest novel.

In 2016 Georgia’s friend the writer James Bradley wrote that her memoir, Births Deaths Marriages, ‘unlocked something in Georgia’s work, liberating her somehow, for after it her writing shifted registers, becoming simultaneously more personal and more expansive’.

I agree with James. I think her work grew in stature and clarity, and in the expansive confidence he notes — the confidence to hide nothing of herself, even in the works most full of invention. Her last works shine with authority and truth and courage. My grief for Georgia was also about the terrible unfairness of losing her work, just when her talent was approaching its height.

How precious then, to have these ‘new’ stories, written between 2012 and 2015. Georgia had read them again around the time she was finalising Between a Wolf and a Dog, intending to offer them as a collection at an appropriate interval after the novel’s publication. Then life changed suddenly and other things, other work took priority, particularly the writings that became the magnificent, posthumously published The Museum of Words: a memoir of language, writing, and mortality. But the stories remained, and now here they are.

These stories once again enter the terrain of Georgia’s familiar preoccupations. She had, by the time she died, let go of any youthful shame about being drawn back and back to the same ground. In an interview in 2016 she told me:

I [used to be] embarrassed about it — there was that male sort of notion that you had to write completely outside yourself, and you should be demonstrating a breadth of skill. But I’m not that kind of writer. And I’m not embarrassed anymore, because many writers I love — like Alice Munro and Richard Ford, for example — write into the same material over and over. And what you write in your twenties is very different from how you interpret things when you’re fifty. You have quite a different angle on the same concerns.

It was Flaubert who said fiction is ‘the response to a deep and always hidden wound’. But there was nothing hidden about the great wound in Georgia’s family — the loss of her brother to schizophrenia and drug addiction at a young age — and over time she came to accept this loss as a natural wellspring for her fiction. This collection is no exception. But in these stories we also see exploration of another lifelong preoccupation — one hinted at beneath the fiction in Between a Wolf and a Dog, fully visible here: Georgia’s deep and complicated attachment to her mother, and the new agony of watching her be consumed by Alzheimer’s disease.

But of course, writing fiction ‘close to home’ is not the same as writing memoir. Like all good art, Georgia’s fiction takes the intimate experience of her own life and transforms it, and in doing so reveals new and surprising discoveries for all of us.

We All Lived in Bondi Then has an elegiac quality, often meditating on the isolating aftermath of loss: the parents in the devastating ‘Ship to shore’, unable to reach each other after the death of their child. The filmmaker sister in ‘Australia Square’, trying to reclaim her own sidelined experience of a terrible childhood incident while her brother still suffers the consequences. Or the regretful Annie in ‘Last days’, contemplating her lost self in motherhood.

The stories are complex, sometimes morphing from one ‘subject’ into quite another, like ‘Dear Professor Brewster’. A daughter’s account of her mother’s slowly blossoming Alzheimer’s disease is also an account of her father’s absence — she being the child of an affair, her mother the eternal other woman — and of the almost-siblings she could have had, the mixed-up family with their mixed-up resentments and loyalties. It’s a beautifully bevelled story; each time you turn it, it shows itself in a different light.

Youthful ambition’s evaporation is another thread through these stories, often told from middle age, recalling the brutal clumsiness of youth. Twenty-something actors, writers, filmmakers, musicians, and dancers parade gorgeously through share-house parties in their opshop finery, glittering with potential, drug-heightened recklessness, lust, and destined fame. As one narrator says: ‘my hopes and desires and plans all unsullied, the self that I was to become beckoning, waiting’. These artists in waiting reappear decades later in accidental meetings, now ruefully teaching drama in high school or managing music-licensing databases, chastened by the years and reality’s bruises. It’s testament to Georgia’s clear-eyed vision that these transformations contain no lessons, no authorial judgements — simply her compassionate observation of the ways life has of turning out differently than we’d hoped.

Okay, maybe there’s the occasional judgement. Sometimes Georgia’s dark wit can’t resist a brief, delicious satirical impulse, as with aspiring novelist boyfriend Nate in ‘Still breathing’.

He worked as a waiter at night and had been writing a novel for years. At first I listened when he told me what it was about … The central character was in a coma, able to hear the thoughts of his family and friends who gathered around his bedside, but unable to utter a word himself. Nate wrote well, and I didn’t mind listening. The problem was that he didn’t know how to create an entire tale around his idea, and so it had stayed poised, stuck in the middle, sagging with the weight of each polish he gave in place of progress.

Naturally, when the young narrator is poleaxed by glandular fever, feverishly sweating and immobilised, Nate is unable to help. He stands outside her bedroom window, fearing contagion, and explains that he can’t look after her because ‘I’ve just gotta finish the book.’

I doubt I’ll be the only writer cringing in recognition of the Nate in my younger self.

Then, there are the dogs. Old dogs, disobedient dogs, abandoned dogs, mysterious telephone-answering dogs, dogs named Dotty and Pixie and Edna plod and skitter their way through these pages. Dying dogs, who carry meaning and knowledge we humans overlook or ignore, but who lead us to things we need to see. ‘You can’t close their eyes when they die,’ says a child in ‘Last one standing’, and the narrator finds that it’s true.

Things are still to be seen, difficult things, following a death.

In ‘Australia Square’, the narrator discovers her late mother’s obsessive notes and diaries, documenting attempts to make sense of the event that changed the family forever. The middle-aged narrator learns that she and her mother shared the same recurring dream of the calamity in one of these diaries.

I’d held it with trepidation, hoping I would find a clear, concise explanation for her relentless attempts to retrieve my brother’s memory, perhaps some awareness of her own madness, maybe it was an apology I wanted, or a glimpse of softness and love, even regret that she had lost me.

They were all there.

And then I put the book away. It was just one slim volume amidst piles of notes and tapes, a few words that revealed another hidden, but not definitive, self.

I had found something secret, but that did not mean I had found her.

This ending shows us what Georgia always knew, what her writing has always told us: there are no easy answers. No clear conclusions will emerge to save us. Life will do with us what it will, and our only task is to love one another as best we can. Like the bereaved couple lying mute in the dark, Georgia’s clear, insightful voice tells us this is our only duty: to keep sending those whispered signals out and back, ship to shore, shore to lost ship.

We All Lived in Bondi Then is available at bookstores in Australia from tomorrow, January 30 2024. Published by Scribe Publications.