The Best Australian Stories 2013 Read online

  Copyright

  Published by Black Inc.,

  an imprint of Schwartz Media Pty Ltd

  37–39 Langridge Street

  Collingwood Vic 3066 Australia

  email: [email protected]

  http://www.blackincbooks.com

  Introduction & selection: © Kim Scott and Black Inc. 2013.

  Kim Scott asserts his moral rights in the collection. Individual stories © retained by authors, who assert their rights to be known as the author of their work.

  Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holders of material in this book. However, where an omission has occurred, the publisher will gladly include acknowledgement in any future edition.

  ISBN for eBook edition: 9781922231222

  ISBN for print edition: 9781863956260

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publishers.

  Contents

  Introduction

  *

  Cate Kennedy

  Static

  Laurie Steed

  The Knife

  Favel Parrett

  Lebanon

  Liam Davison

  Birdcall: 33°21´N 43°47´E

  Ryan O’Neill

  The Traveller

  Marion Halligan

  Eating Oysters

  Tegan Bennett Daylight

  J’aime Rose

  Tara Cartland

  Frank O’Hara’s Animals

  Theresa Layton

  The Cartography of Foxes

  Wayne Macauley

  Keilor Cranium

  Tony Birch

  China

  Andy Kissane

  Old Friends

  Kalinda Ashton

  Kindling

  Chris Somerville

  Snow on the Mountain

  Bruce Pascoe

  Staff Dining

  Ruby J. Murray

  Hunting Animals

  James Bradley

  Solstice

  Madeleine Griffeth

  Lungfish

  Lucy Treloar

  Wrecking Ball

  Sinead Roarty

  Mortal Sins

  Georgia Blain

  The Other Side of the River

  Robyn Mundy

  The Forgeries

  Ashley Hay

  The Cat

  John Kinsella

  The Eagle

  Eric Yoshiaki Dando

  The Eulogy

  Publication Details

  Notes on Contributors

  Introduction

  Kim Scott

  How to justify this selection of 2013’s Best Australian Stories?

  As a young man learning the ways of literature I laboured over a book-length essay, S/Z, that was dedicated to a single short story. Translated from the French, S/Z unpicks Balzac’s ‘Sarrasine’ and, having demonstrated the technical rigour to which literary study might aspire, concludes that all literature – all storytelling – is fundamentally about exchange. All my barely post-adolescent self noticed was that the protagonist, in exchanging this particular story for a night of love, clearly got the best of the deal.

  I’m still not the most skilful of readers, despite the promiscuous bout of reading required to realise this Best Australian Stories 2013. Even with deadline anxiety, it was a great pleasure. A privilege. But if reading is an exchange, what exactly is exchanged? What do we give? Just our time? What gain? Entertainment only? Some say stories help us know ourselves better, and understand the lives of others. They shine a light into our lives. S/Z suggests that stories carry codes which can reveal the very texture of our social lives. I only know that I’ve profited from any exchange involved in reading the stories in this volume. I trust you will too.

  If nothing else, S/Z showed me that reading is energetic and creative. The writer is not the only one to tangle their life experience in a particular permutation of the alphabet. Alone together, reader and writer work out ‘what the story is about’ and in this collaborative act they build the consciousness behind the story, its way of looking at the world. It’s a rare and intimate relationship, essential to storytelling in print, whether on paper or screen.

  Once upon a time on TV the South American writer Eduardo Galeano told me that writing fiction is like using the skin of God to send messages to unknown friends in faraway places in order to embrace them in your language. Elizabeth Jolley made a similar claim: stories provide places for people to meet.

  Speaking of fiction in general, not yet of short stories in particular, I see I am nevertheless edging toward declaring what I mean by the ‘Best’ …

  Really, I did not intend to move quite so quickly. Allow me to retreat, to backtrack a little, and consider the process of selecting the stories in this volume.

  We accepted submissions from those who’d been published in previous Best Australian Stories, and also took stories from collections by individual authors and the following publications:

  The Age short story prize

  Arena

  Australian Book Review

  The Big Issue

  Etchings

  fourW

  Going Down Swinging

  Good Weekend

  Island

  Kill Your Darlings

  The Lifted Brow

  Meanjin

  The Monthly

  Overland

  Quadrant

  Review of Australian Fiction

  The Sleepers Almanac

  Southerly

  UTS Writers’ Anthology: The Evening Lands

  Verandah

  Westerly

  Many apologies to any journals or other sources we may have missed. Let us know, and I’m sure it will be rectified for future occasions.

  This system – of Black Inc. collecting and sending on ‘raw material’ for the anthology – hopefully excuses me from actually defining the short story. Just for the record though, I think that Edgar Allan Poe’s dictum that it can be ‘read in a single sitting’ is as good a starting point as any. By story, of course we mean fiction … I know, another slippery form to define.

  ‘Australian’? This issue troubles even so robust an institution as the Miles Franklin Award. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, certainly not myself. To be included in this volume the writer must be Australian or living in Australia, and the story published between the Augusts of 2012 and 2013. Pieces published in Australian journals by international writers are generally ineligible.

  Finally, the precedent established long before Best Australian Stories 2013 is around twenty to thirty stories, and a total of approximately 90,000 words. I’m happy to call that a tradition, and stick with it.

  Rather than at the end of this essay, I right now want to offer heartfelt thanks to Nikola Lusk. Nikola ensured stories were sent to me, and was always happy and helpful, whether on the phone or by email.

  I started reading stories pretty well as soon as they began trickling through the slot of my mailbox. I made notes, and devised a sophisticated system of ‘Yes,’ ‘No,’ ‘Maybe.’ Stories began to form into three teetering columns on the floor beside my desk.

  Of course my judgements are
subjective. Yes, I’m defensive about this. That’s why I began by talking about a literary-type theoretician, and name-dropping a list of authors!

  Reading, I recalled other short stories. My first encounters with the form? Was it Reader’s Digest? Didn’t those volumes include short stories? In my early school days we read Happy Venture books and I remember something about nasturtiums growing in a boot, and a tar-baby. Were they short stories? Then there was ‘The Drover’s Wife.’ But Australian stories were in the minority at school. Doris Lessing’s ‘Through the Tunnel’ – its glimmering light in darkness beneath the sea – stays with me. So does Jack London’s protagonist, plunging his cold hands into his dog’s warm entrails. The list from my own days teaching is more obscure: ‘Aunt Jane’ in The Bad Deeds Gang is paired in my mind with Judith Wright’s ‘In the Park.’ And there was one unlikely tale – ‘The Quest for Blank Claveringi’ – in which the protagonist, on an island with nowhere to hide, is chased down by a giant snail. I was always surprised at the spell such a slow but well-constructed suspense could cast over a class.

  At one regional West Australian high school I came across ‘Everleigh’s Accent,’ by Hal Porter. Along with Tom Hungerford’s ‘The Only One Who Forgot,’ it was one of the first attempts to put Aboriginal experience near the centre of a story. It haunts me still. There were few Aboriginal authors in those days and, despite my obligations, the number in this collection is also small. Aboriginal novelists are achieving solid publication records today: Alexis Wright, Melissa Lucashenko, Philip McLaren, Anita Heiss and Bruce Pascoe spring to my mind. Alf Taylor’s work approaches the short form of fiction, Ali Cobby Eckermann’s writing is clearly supple enough, and Sam Wagan Watson and Romaine Moreton demonstrate great control and dexterity. Others like Dylan Coleman, Dub Leffler, Marie Munkara and Tony Birch have demonstrated an interest in screenplays. However, there appears to be a limited range of Aboriginal writing finding realisation in the short story form. The online Review of Australian Fiction and some of the literary journals have from time to time published issues dedicated to Aboriginal writing.

  Other titles that spring to mind from long ago are Roald Dahl’s Kiss Kiss, Patrick White’s The Burnt Ones, Peter Carey’s The Fat Man in History … I think my first taste of anything other than school’s social realism – at least beyond a few pages of the Bible – was Octavio Paz’s ‘My Life with the Wave.’ I probably wouldn’t think it so impressive now.

  So, yes, it is subjective. Even the judgements of the younger me are not mine, now. At another time my choice will be different again. All the same – yes, defensively – I’d like to think that years as a student of literature, as a teacher of writing, as a judge of writing competitions, as a writer oneself, and as a reader most of all, must count for something. You get to know cliché, for one thing, along with an an appreciation for competence and craft displayed in familiar patterns. This in turn explains the excitement of finding a newly arranged narrative. And it makes it easier, for those so inclined, to trace the decodings or – heeding the advice of an arch-stylist like Vladimir Nabokov – ‘caress the details.’ Vladimir Nabokov, by the way, had his own idea of literary relationships:

  Up a trackless slope climbs the master artist, and at the top, on a windy ridge, who do you think he meets? The panting and happy reader, and there they spontaneously embrace and are linked forever if the book lasts forever.

  But of course a short story doesn’t last forever. And nor should this introduction.

  John Bryson’s short story ‘Kindly Death’ claims that taste and judgement come down to ‘a fine tuning of the heart strings.’ Does that mean that the best short stories are those that make the heart strings zing? Is this the ‘wow’ factor? Then what of stories that so retune your inner self that you resonate with other soundings of the world, other subjectivities? Some say fiction is enchantment, but perhaps each piece needs its own ideal reader to fully work its magic.

  I think that all readers will find at least a taste of enchantment in these pages.

  I had barely begun reading when the trickle of mail became a deluge. Realising the earliest stories had been read without the valuable experience I’d gained by the end, I started re-reading from the beginning. Some stories I read again and again. Piles of stories slewed across the floor, categories spilling: ‘Yes,’ ‘Yes/Maybe,’ ‘Maybe,’ ‘No/Maybe.’ Few were easily dismissed, which might indicate the quality of short fiction being produced in Australia at this point of the twenty-first century.

  No doubt, creative writing classes contribute to this quality and abundance, and the role of relatively small publication outlets – let me call them ‘literary journals’ – is also evident, particularly in the editing many appear to provide. Generally, editing is the difference between unpublished stories and those in journals or collections. Thus, I suppose, literary journals help build a community of writers. Let us hope they can also continue to build a readership.

  The ‘golden age’ of short stories – solid financial reward for publication in popular magazines – has long passed. Print is dying, I hear. Perhaps outlets like the online Review of Australian Fiction will help match the growing habit of reading the electronic screen, and its apparent predisposition to brevity, with the short story form.

  Truth be told, this volume could be twice the size, and I’m sad about some of the stories that are absent. Let me mention a few of those that are with us.

  Cate Kennedy’s ‘Static,’ from Like a House on Fire, inserts corny lines of dialogue to great effect: ‘Mayday. Man Down. I’ve been ambushed.’ Read it for yourself in order to see how such language is transformed into something very, very eloquent. This attention to language is, of course, a feature of good writing, though it needn’t always draw attention to itself.

  Point-of-view is also important to determining where our sympathy falls, and of course I need not tell you that this is most obvious when it comes to sex and violence. In ‘Hunting Animals’ Ruby Murray uses point-of-view as a structural component of the story, and also as an image within it, and thus succeeds in conveying not only a sense of menace, but also of a constricted perspective of innocence being opened and expanded.

  Introductory essays in previous volumes of Best Australian Stories have rightly dismissed the idea of short stories as a training ground for novels. Delia Falconer preferred the affinity between the short story, poem and essay. Liam Davison’s beautiful ‘Birdcall: 33°21´N 43°47´E’ made me think of poetry and particularly of T.S. Eliot’s supposed objective correlative – a ‘set of objects, a situation, a chain of events that represent a particular emotional state.’ Davison’s narrator blatantly manipulates his story, drawing attention to its artifice and paradoxically increasing its affective power. By degrees, with precision, we arrive at an emotional heartland. An objective correlative indeed, I think it a story that richly rewards attention, whether you read by way of decoding, caress or enchantment.

  The short story is kin to the essay because it helps us understand; it shows and demonstrates. Not always so good at explaining or linking cause and effect, a story can lure us into gaps and spaces that feel sacred in their silence. No wonder we feel for less-than-articulate figures like those in ‘J’aime Rose’ and ‘The Knife.’

  Sometimes a story is so cunningly arranged and seemingly broken that only reading can help put it back together again. ‘Frank O’Hara’s Animals’ by Tara Cartland is one of these; a story that heals.

  I wondered how to sequence this selection of stories. James Moffett once organised a short story anthology according to point-of-view, beginning with ‘interior monologue’ and reaching something akin to ‘free indirect discourse.’ I think this unjust to the short story because it implies evolution and progress, and unfairly favours an expansive form like the novel. We could use some form of chronology as an organising principle, I suppose. But what index of time would be best? Age of author? Of chara
cter? Or what about using gender as an organising principle? Some form of His and Hers. Cultural background, then? Perhaps we could resort to the alphabet?

  No. Why further impose on you, our dear reader? There’s no need to take these stories in any particular sequence whatsoever.

  Kim Scott

  Static

  Cate Kennedy

  ‘Anthony,’ says his mother, ‘what’s this we’re drinking?’

  He’d known this was going to happen, the minute Marie showed him the punch recipe.

  ‘You know they’re hyper-conservative,’ he’d said. She’d rolled her eyes, put a post-it note reminder on the recipe page and added it to her list.

  ‘For crying out loud, what’s not to like about melon ginger punch?’ she’d muttered. The glossy magazine bristled with post-it notes, annotated painstakingly by Marie with dozens of clever and simple Christmas lunch suggestions for people with more to do than slave over a hot stove, et cetera.

  Now his mother prods a perfectly spherical melon ball in her drink, and looks at him as if it was a floating dead mouse.

  ‘It’s punch,’ Anthony says, smiling hard.

  ‘Just something cool and refreshing,’ adds Marie.

  Anthony’s father Frank puts his down and pulls himself off the lounge chair. ‘How about a beer, son?’

  ‘Sure, if that’s what you’re after.’

  Anthony listens to the asthmatic wheeze of the leather chair his father’s just vacated, sucking back air into itself as if desperate for breath, the only noise in the room for a few seconds. In the deoxygenated silence, he feels what he thinks of as Evil Rays, like something in one of his old comics, jagged lightning bolts shooting across the room. They’re crackling from the fingertips of the archenemies seated on either side of him. Take that, Ice Maiden! No, you take THAT, Bitch Crone!