Tirra Lirra by the River

by Jessica Anderson

To escape her stifling, small-town family, Nora Porteous marries, only to find herself confined with a selfish, sanctimonious husband in a suffocating Sydney suburb, so she escapes to London to find herself

Genres: Fiction, Australia, Classics, Literary Fiction, Book Club, Novels, 20th Century

160 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1978

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.

This is Jessica^Anderson, where ^=space.

About the Author:
Jessica Margaret Anderson (25 September 1916 – 9 July 2010) was an Australian novelist and short story writer.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Marchpane · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tirra Lirra by the River brought to mind for me Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively, and Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood. Published in 1978, Tirra Lirra is the earliest of the three, which each examine the life of a singular woman through the lens of personal recollection.

I’d vaguely heard of Tirra Lirra because it pops up on those lists of Best Australian Novels and had won the Miles Franklin award. I knew it was frequently assigned to high school English classes, which is not exactly a distinction, considering the truly awful Australian books I was made to read at school. Being from the 1970s I was prepared for it to be fusty, dated, parochial, or all three.

Instead I found a wise, poignant and incisive novel, a worthy forerunner to Moon Tiger (1987) and Cat’s Eye (1988), and inventive in its approach to the shifting sands of memory. Nora Porteous’s life takes her from Brisbane to Sydney to London and back again, living through both World Wars and the Great Depression, but this never feels like a work of historical fiction. Major world events are skimmed over or elided completely (Nora lives in London and loses friends during the Blitz, yet WWII barely rates a mention).

The novel’s focus is avidly personal; its first-person POV, wry observation and regretful – but never nostalgic – tone make it feel extremely contemporary. Nora laments the ‘vile wastage’ of her marriage and examines her life in all its shabbiness with an unflinching eye.

At around 150 pages it is very short. Despite Anderson’s skill in rendering complete characters in few words, I’m left wanting more about Ida Mayo, Lewie, Hilda and the rest. The prose has a starchiness about it which mostly suits the elderly narrator but doesn’t feel quite right in the more emotional moments.

This is a wonderful book that is entirely unsuitable for teenagers – it needs a reader with more life experience. If you read this for school and hated it, please try again in a few decades!

[zed · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very very good book and a worthy winner of the Miles Franklin. Though short, about 140 pages, author Jessica Anderson has packed in a life time of emotion with an almost seemingly bitter sweet "autobiographical" work.

The books narrator, 70 year old Nora Porteous, has returned to Brisbane after many years absence and reflects back on her life. She recalls early lost opportunities but also that one daring life decision that would also have been an anathema to the conservative attitudes of her depression years life and times. Generations of women trapped into, and by, the constrictions of those times I could imagine being dragged into the maelstrom of conflicting emotions that are Nora's memories and thoughts.

Reading this as a male in their late 50's I feel that this review hardly does the book justice. Highly recommended.

[Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

“We don’t all think we’re too good for this place, Lady Muck.”

Here’s yet another under-appreciated novel celebrating a non-conformist woman ahead of her time.

The 30s and 40s in Australia wasn’t a friendly place for a “different” woman. Nora wanted out of her small town and as tended to be the custom of the time, marriage offered the only ticket. And then? You’re even more stuck. Of course, it didn’t help that Nora’s husband was a prick (one especially fun part was him calling her frigid when she’s tentative sexually, and then a whore when she finally gets into it.)

Nora’s life was unusual for the era, and upon going home again in her 70s after a lifetime abroad, she was hit with her mortality and the gentle acceptance that comes with letting go, at least a little, of all that regret and self-doubt. This is a glum tale without much triumph. Change, when it finally arrived, came too late for the women of Nora’s generation.

[PattyMacDotComma · Rating 5 out of 5]

5★
1978 Miles Franklin award winner (and no wonder)

Nora Porteous, now in her 70s, returns from London to the Queensland house she grew up in. She calls it a house, not a home. She arrives exhausted after a long train ride up from Sydney, doesn’t remember anyone, doesn’t care to.

But she’s almost immediately bed-ridden with pneumonia so becomes a reluctant captive of the townsfolk who take solicitous care of her and insist on reminiscing. She is stunned when they show her gifts they’d saved that she’d made as a girl.

She had fled home for Sydney as soon as she could, finding freedom as a talented seamstress in a colourful community of artists and designers. But before long, she’d acquired a disapproving new husband, who moved her into his mother’s house in the suburbs.

From the frying pan into the fire.

Escaping her marriage (and other grim repercussions of Sydney life), she headed for London, where she was adopted by theatrical costumiers and created another new life with more new friends.

She wonders now what her clever London flatmates would think of these dull hometown folk, until she is startled to learn shocking things about her past--some she never knew, some she is rediscovering.

An axe murder. An old scar on her wrist. Nightmares of drowning in blood.

She says her friends in London consider their past lives as “a string of roughly-graded beads” or a linear “track with detours”.

“But for some years now I have likened mine to a globe suspended in my head, and ever since the shocking realization that waste is irretrievable, I have been careful not to let this globe spin to expose the nether side. . . I like to manipulate the globe myself. I don’t like those accidental flicks. In fact, there are some that I positively dread, and if I see one of these coming I rush to forestall it, forcing the globe to steadiness so that once more it faces the right way. . . there is always a nether side to my globe, and on that side flickers and drifts my one-time husband—and, I have often thought, a very good place for him too.”

Today, the most important people in her life are the very people she’d dismissed to that nether side. As it spins toward the light at last, it shines on her father, who died when she was only six, which triggers more memories.

As she recovers, she misses her London friends, but she’s determined to remain alone. If they are her audience, that “imposes restrictions”, because we “present truthful fictions of our lives” to each other.

She she no longer wishes to censor her memories: “. . . at present, my concern is to find things. My globe of memory is in free spin, with no obscure side.”

And there we leave her. I love thinking of her there.

[notgettingenough · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an absolute stunner. It gets Australia completely right without the cheapness of St John's shots. It nails the state of captivity of women without agency. Nora's need to escape, and taking marriage as the way out is heartbreaking. The role of education, and even more that of reading, which I might add is big in Women in Black and also in My Brilliant Friend comes comes into play here too. To be educated is to escape the poverty and meanness of life in city Australia and country Australia as much as it may extract you from neighbourhood Naples. To forsake education in favour of marriage as one's saviour is to court utter ruination. To read is to build one's dreams of escape. Oh, I did this as a child and many must have had it much, much worse than I.

Rest here:

https://alittleteaalittlechat.wordpre...

[Michael Livingston · Rating 4 out of 5]

A beautiful quiet book about an old woman returning to her childhood home fifty years after fleeing it. Nora escapes small town life for a bad marriage and then escapes the marriage for a life in London. As she settles back into the old Queensland house, she reminisces about her life, her family and her decisions. This is a short, sad book that somehow presents a complete picture of a women caught in a time where wanting anything other than a marriage and kids was almost impossible and captures her quiet reflections on the life she managed. It's lovely.

[Gisela · Rating 4 out of 5]

Such an understated but wonderfully written and cleverly structured novel. I agree with all the enthusiastic reviews, but must admit I was starting to get as bored and frustrated with her first marriage as she was. And then just at the right moment, Nora makes a big move. Literally! My keen interest returned for the rest of the novel.

But at the end I felt that I was still missing an important part of the jigsaw that had been so beautifully pieced together for me by Jessica Anderson: the significance of the title. Despite the early allusion to its source ("The Lady of Shalott"), I just didn't 'get it'.

So, I started to dig around to find out more, and thanks to Lisa's excellent GR review and link to a longer review on her own site (Tirra Lirra by the River on ANZLitlovers Litblog), I found this pointer to a 2012 review by Claire Corbett in Overland which made the penny drop for me with a huge BOING! Brilliant! Perfect!

Here is the relevant section of the review but it's well worth reading the whole article.

Tirra Lirra by the River quotes from Tennyson’s poem The Lady of Shalott. The Lady is cursed never to look directly upon reality but may only see reflections in her mirror and then translate those shadows of the world into her weaving. So, she is an artist but an artist who cannot bear the full glare of the Real, the Real that flashes into her mirror in a vision of masculine splendour: ‘Tirra lirra,’ by the river/Sang Sir Lancelot.

The Lady of Shalott is the perfect symbol for Nora Porteous: the glamour of European high culture, of Camelot, is unattainable, as is its male apotheosis, the shining knight with his ‘gemmy bridle’ and his ‘coal-black curls’. Nora Porteous is also an artist in textiles: she embroiders beautiful tapestries and later becomes a skilled dressmaker.

Another great observation by Claire Corbett:

The interweaving of the strands shows that Nora is never truly at home: not in her Queensland childhood house, not in Sydney except for the all-too-brief idyll at Potts Point, not in the longed-for escape to London and not in the final return to the childhood house.

The book ends, true to its chosen form, in a revelation. This is the meaning of an image that has haunted the narrator her whole life: the step of a horse, the nod of a plume. For me the revelation was so moving I finished the book in tears. Anderson’s story hints that finally, our home is in other people.

QUOTES OF FAVOURITE LINES
* "My mother didn't like me much. I first realised it when I was about six, and had started school, and ha seen other children with their mothers. 'You don't like me much, do you?' I asked one afternoon.
'Don't be ridiculous, child. The very idea! Never, never let me hear you say that again.'
It must have been hard on her, having to pretend. I can't remember feeling deprived, as they say today, or holding it against her. To tell the truth, I didn't like her much either. Our natures were antipathetic. It happens more often than admitted." (p. 20-21)

* "Having gone to so much trouble to deceive them about my feelings I should not have been made so bitter by my success. On the long train journey back to Sydney, torpid and exhausted, I kept hearing those three words—reckless, cynical, frivolous. Reckless I was, and cynical and frivolous I sometimes felt, but even at the top of that bent, even as I was walking up the gangplank of the ship, with a tiny hat clamped to one side of my silly head, I as weighted by a sub-stratum of sadness. I knew that like fruit affected by hard drought, I was likely to be rotten before ripe. Sometimes I believed it was already too late, but at others I was seized by a desperate optimism that expressed itself in spates of chatter and laughter and hectic activity." (p. 103-104)

*"Colin [her ex] sent a bunch of roses with a card on which he had written 'No hard feelings.' 'They're like bloody pink cabbages,' I said, and threw them overboard. Ida and the watercolourist [her friends] were shocked.
Those roses, as I see them now, rocking on the thick green water of the dockside do pose a question. Although I still believe that Colin sent them to demonstrate his nobility to Pearl [his new wife], and although at the time I could feel, almost as if I were there, the exudation of his self-satisfaction as he wrote 'no hard feelings', other reasons do occur. I consider regret, even shock at the realisation of how we had wasted each other. And because I can still ask the question, I must ask another. Have I given an accurate account of Colin Porteous, or have I merely provided another substitute? At number six [a house in London that she lived in] our speculation on the roses always ended in laughter.
'Well, it was certainly very cryptic of Colin.'
Perhaps the real man has been so overscored by laughter that he will never be retrieved. As a rule, when we can't find even one good quality in a person, we are prejudiced, and by that rule I must admit my prejudice. Pearl may have been able to mine seams in him disregarded by me, or may have been practical enough to disregard the ones I mined." (p. 104-105)

* “He was a middle-aged, squat-bodied American, of considerable honesty and charm. He began by making me laugh, and laughter weakened me easily to love. Hilda, out of her varied experience, used to say that of all aphrodisiacs, laughter is the one most unjustly ignored, and I, out of my limited experience, my very limited experience, used always to agree.” (p. 105)

* “One day in the Mediterranean he remarked that if he had been free he would have liked to marry me. It is an easy thing for a man to say in such circumstances, but because he was not a man who said easy things, I believed him, and in retrospect, I still do. All the same, I would have been afraid to marry him. I felt it was precisely the absence of a future together that enabled us to love without cruel possessiveness. The voyage was peaceful, with calm seas and skies, and as day succeeded day, and I continued to keep this friend and lover by my side, and to wake up each morning to the instant realisation of his presence in the ship, I grew incredulous of so much luck and happiness, and would not have dared to risk it by extending it further. The definite break on arrival—goodbye and no addresses—was at my insistence, and the argument that caused confirmed me in it.” (p. 106-107)

* “ ‘I want to be simple, utterly simple. Like water.’
‘No chance. You’ll never be simple, and neither shall I. We both had to start disguising ourselves too early.’
She looked at me, half-frowning, half-laughing. ‘You know, Nora, you’re very intelligent.’
‘I know. Isn’t it a pity I’m so stupid.’
Of course, I underestimated Olive. If she did not arrive at simplicity in her person, she did so in her later books, whereas I never have, in anything.” (p. 119)

• “[Further on in the novel, Olive writes to Nora to tell her she] had met an Austrian Doctor of Philosophy and was going to live with him in Vienna. I wrote and asked if that would make her simple, and she replied that she thought it very likely.
‘He is very serious. You would laugh at him, or perhaps not. In any case, he has amplified my life as no one else has done. I see now how mechanical my life was, and my writing as well.’ ” (p. 121-122)

* “I was proud to be keeping myself above the hunger line. I had the curious feeling that the period of hard work and privation had been lying in wait for me for a long time, and to meet it at last, and survive it by my own efforts, gave me intense satisfaction.” (p. 122)

* “ ‘Some people are homeless wherever they live,’ he said. ‘You are. And so am I.’
‘But you are an Englishman in your own country.’
‘I am homeless on this earth,’ he said with a smile. ‘And so are you. Once you admit it, you know, you’ll find it has advantages. The thing is to admit it, and relax, and not be forever straining forward.’
‘I am not straining forward. I am waiting, and occupying myself while I wait. Which is quite a different matter. And besides,’ I said, to turn the conversation, ‘I don’t want to live in a climate where they can’t grow oranges.’ “ (p. 125-126)

* “ I continue to smile after [Jack Cust] goes, extending the amused indulgence of old age to that foolish young woman and that boy. I speculate on what would have happened if I had met him again when we were both adults—say, on the visit I made before sailing for London. It could easily have happened. I imagine myself sitting beside the creek with my nephew, listening to the she-oaks and watching the yabbie rising to the bait suspended in the muddy water. I look up suddenly, and see him standing there. But of course, his face is now the face of my shipboard lover.
Later that day, it occurs to me to wonder what they would have made of Arch at number six. And I find I am glad, very glad, that I did not recall him in time to expose him. I believe there were times when I very nearly did so, because I remember that when we talked of jobs we had had, work we had done when young, I never once mentioned having worked in a newsagent’s and stationer’s shop. And I remember too that this avoidance, and my impulse to change the subject, used always to slightly puzzle me. I knew it was not snobbery—my snobberies were never of that sort—and even as I diverted the flow of the conversation, I mentally charted those little snags of perplexity, so that ‘one day’ I could return on my tracks to examine and resolve them.
But I never did so, and Arch stayed on the dark side and now I can be glad that he was never overlaid by the discussion, speculation, and humour that will always bring uncertainty to my view of Colin Porteous.” (p. 140-141)

[Calzean · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thanks again to http://australianwomenwriters.com/ for bringing to my attention another great Australian author who I had not previously been aware of.
This is a beautifully scripted novel of the ageing Nora who has returned to Australia after 30+ years in London. Nora wanted independence and the ability to make her own friends and choices. Her mother and sister were dominating, her marriage to her egotistical and mean human a disaster.
But the book contains more important themes such as, the unreliability of memory, the impact of war on the survivors, the loss of a parent when in childhood, the narrowness and meanness of people, the joy of reading and the fragility of old age.
It was a joy to read.

[Miriam Cihodariu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Continuing my Australia-themed reading spree, this came up on my reading list and I'm so glad it did!

It's not only a great novel that deserves a place in the topmost important classics, but it's also a wonderfully astute and sensitive exploration of proto-feminist themes, written in a time when most mainstream literature was not touching them.

This is a story about a woman that is born with a full predilection and talent to be an artist, but at a time when women are not thought of as artists, in a small community that thinks artists exist but somewhere else (*gestures vaguely*). The result is not only that she is guided to focus on simple work and practical skills with no hope for higher education, but, being a woman, she is also pushed into a stifling and abusive marriage because women apparently can't be left on their own.

The novel also addresses the issue of women's desire in a groundbreaking and unapologetic way (for the time it was published in). Firstly, there is a moment in which the main character feels a fleeting attraction for a man, and the witness who notices it then proceeds to sort of shame her for it, because women are not allowed / not supposed to feel anything like that, they are confined to the role of the desired object and have no agency of their own.

Secondly, I liked the fact that the author allows the main character to also have an affair at some point in her life without punishing her for it later on, as most moralizing tales from older literature tend to do. She's not heartbroken, destitute, or stuck with an unwanted pregnancy/diseases from it, it's just a thing that happened and it was a positive experience and life goes on. How refreshing for a piece of classic literature, don't you think?

But all in all, the life described in the novel is not rosy and with a cloyingly sweet happy ending. It's hard and pretty realistic in the bad as well as in the good. The story also addresses friendship and communal living, dealing with mental health and the limits of creating a support group for it, and so on. I think it was great and I would put it on a must-read list for anyone.

[Rosemary Reilly · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book...is basically the epitome of supposedly meaningful Australian books that I can't stand. The only way I got through this hideous attempt at literature was to force myself to sit down and read it late one night, on pain of actually writing an assignment. It starts off with something like "...I am wearing a woollen suit - greyish, it doesn't matter." WELL IF IT DOESN'T MATTER, DON'T START THE DAMN BOOK OFF BY SAYING IT! And this is what we are meant to be studying for our final year in high school...yep, our generation will be SO well-educated. But I digress.
The "novel" is written in a hazy, Dick-and-Jane-go-to-the-Seaside present tense throughout, which furthermore underlines why this book should not be read by anyone with a higher reading capacity than twelve. The protagonist is a wishy-washy, complaining, unsociable, vague woman that I don't believe any reader could like. She's not even an unpleasant-but-yet-beloved-by-readers type character, like good old Snape (although I suspect the addition of Alan Rickman played a large part in that interpretation) - she's just awful. Throughout, Anderson hints at vague trauma (the young Archie, Colin in bed) in the woman's life, but it is all so vague that I just felt incredibly confused. Apparently, it's supposed to be about "finding one's identity" and "the connection between places we grew up and our identities" but Nora (our charming protagonist) has no personality! Apart from being intolerably boring, and disliking everyone who tries to help her out! And after spending the entire novel basically talking about how much she wanted to get away from "the house", she suddenly decides to return there as an old woman just recovered from pneumonia, and live alone in a house that she claims she hated, aided by a lovely old couple she whinges about the entire time! What is the point? She seemed to be a mighty lot happier in London, a place in which she knows people she actually likes!
The best thing about the publication was the inclusion of the Tennyson quote.

[Justin Evans · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a GR friend has said, the writing feels awkward at the start of the novel, but settles down reasonably quickly, and thereafter is a pleasure to read. It's also a fine technical feat: two parallel narratives, one of Nora in the let's call it present, and then the how did she get to be in this present narrative that she's remembering. Most impressive of all is present Nora's own interpretation of past Nora's activities, and even of present Nora's; few books are willing to explicitly show the workings of the character's mind about herself in such depth.

Otherwise, a raft of themes and issues that make this an obvious revival book: gender, art, poverty, modernization, you name it, all done in an unpretentious, non-judgemental way. Which makes sense, since the narrator is an aged, sickly woman who is slightly distant from her self and others around her.

[CanadianReader · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Anderson's Miles-Franklin-award-winning novel, an elderly woman, Nora Roche Porteous, returns to her childhood home in Brisbane, after living many years abroad. Diagnosed with pneumonia upon her arrival, she spends many days in bed, tended to by kind neighbours. As she rests, she reflects on her life--on the stifling conventionality of her childhood home in which she finds herself once again, and particularly on her overbearing, now deceased, elder sister. Early on in life, Nora found it natural and necessary to create a realm of the imagination for herself--a place in which she could take intense and joyful refuge. At first this kingdom was based on what she saw from one of the windows of the house by the river, but eventually it could be entered through the poetry found in one of her father's books, and then spontaneously as needed.

Nora's father died when she was a child, and there is a sense throughout the book that this event has haunted her, trailed and affected her in a slippery way she can't quite grasp. Family members have commented that she was broken to bits by grief, yet she has almost no recollection of the event or her response to it . . . until the end of the novel when a dreamlike image emerges as her convalescence comes to an end.

Much of Tirra Lirra focuses on the small human tragedy of Nora's marriage to a petty tyrant and her attempts to flee this claustrophobic and stultifying relationship. She finds some freedom with a group of artists who live near her flat. A creative and skilled seamstress teaches Nora some fundamentals of dress-making and encourages the artistic spirit within her. However, Nora's husband resents and rails against her hanging about with this decadent, free-spirited lot, and is particularly threatened by the fact that she has a close male friend who is gay. Ultimately, the Porteouses move from their lovely rooms in a decaying Sydney mansion to live with Nora's overbearing mother-in-law, the ever critical and perpetually dissatisfied, Una. The fact that Nora can't seem to produce a child only makes matters worse for her. In the end, though, the lack of dependents makes it a great deal easier for her to escape to England, where she is able, finally, to come into herself.

A commentary at the end of the edition I read states that Jessica Anderson saw Nora as an artist who did not fully understand that she was one. Nora's struggles against convention, her quest to find a place to be herself, as well as her yearning to create and be surrounded by beauty represent the impulses and the archetypal journey of the artist. In naming her book Tirra Lirra by the River, Anderson nods to Tennyson's poem, The Lady of Shalott, and enriches the novel with a poetic subtext about the tensions between artistic creativity--which requires solitude and detachment--and the romantic, social, and physical yearnings of a woman.

Initially, I found the novel a little disorienting. Anderson quite deliberately discombobulates the reader, perhaps to encourage more complete identification and sympathy with the ailing and displaced Nora, the first-person narrator throughout. However, it didn't take long to be rewarded by the book. I enjoyed it very much and was surprised by the degree to which I could relate to Nora's experiences, though I'm of quite a different generation.

[A.J. · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Well, I am what I am… I forgive myself everything.”

Breaking away from expected societal conventions and chasing diaphonous hopes can be a rough business. Looking past who we so often hear about - those who prevail - there are those who try, and perhaps claim some small victories along the way, but in the long run founder. What happens when one desperately yearns for something more out of life, and has the courage to go after it, at times, in one’s own way, but doesn’t have the strength of personality or support to really succeed? What to make of one's worth, one's life?

This is a short, delicate masterpiece concerning, among other things, repression, by others and of oneself, and unrealised potential. Like Nora’s girlhood tapestries it is a work of art that humbly weaves variegated strands into a small, beautiful whole.

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very good indeed - deserves a global recognition at the level of that it apparently has in Australia. Highly recommended.

[Kathryn · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this because it was the first book that the women read in Liz Byrski's A Month of Sundays which I read and enjoyed a month or so ago. The women in the bookclub had enjoyed this and their comments made me want to read it for myself.

It was a slow read - more based on descriptions of characters and places than plot-driven. At times it was a little difficult to understand what was happening and whether Nora, the main character, was remembering events or dreaming them or whether it was currently happening. It starts in the present, with Nora returning to her childhood home as a 70 year old woman, but much of it is Nora's reflection on her life and events.

The ending was a little strange. It did win a Miles Franklin award - I'm not sure whether this explains the strange parts, or whether the strange parts make the fact that it won the Miles Franklin understandable! I can't say that I generally have a good relationship with books that are award winners. But it was a short read, and overall I'm glad I read it.

[Joanna · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had never heard of this book before a friend gave it to me. I really enjoyed this book. It's the sort of quiet prose that sneakily worms its way into your thoughts and won't let go. The book gives reminisces of Nora, a now elderly woman who has returned to her home in Sydney to reflect on her life, wait out her illnesses, and, eventually, to die. The reflections on the role of women, the struggle for belonging and for place, and the details of the family relationships that emerge from this slender book are wonderful. Recommended.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wasn't expecting this to feel so contemporary. Perhaps I was thrown by the title!

The prose is quietly lovely. The tone is emphatically feminist. That can sometimes amount to a dull and meandering lecture. What saves it, I think, is the narrator, herself: She's so relatable, so painfully human that the book is infused with palpitant life. There's a gentleness, an ever-present undercurrent to the wryly detached narration. And so, the narrative is less a dry lecture and more a moment of quiet contemplation beside a swift, meandering river.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a wry novel, softly evocative of warm Queensland nights and deceptively gentle. In her old age, Nora Porteous returns to her childhood home after a long period away in London. As she recovers from a bout of pneumonia, like Albert Facey in A Fortunate Life she reflects on her life, in her case finally facing up to memories long suppressed.

To read the rest of my review please visit http://anzlitlovers.wordpress.com/201...

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

This novel is an interesting study of a woman trapped in a "Doll's House" of gender stereotyping. Nora finds herself playing out roles which force her to conform to social expectations of what a wife of a successful upper middle class businessman should embody. Her struggle to achieve an identity beyond that is the main focus of the book.
I enjoyed the way in which this theme is worked out, the exceptionally fine writing, and the vivid characterizations of the individuals Nora encounters. Particularly effective is her portrayal of the horrible control freak she marries. I enjoyed the result of his accusation that Nora is barren and "frigid". Unfortunately, I found Nora herself less interesting as a character than those around her. I simply failed to empathize with her as much as with the themes that involved her.
The novel concludes with an excellent "Afterword" by Anna Funder who analyses a number of the interlocking themes in the book.

[Teena · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can't believe I haven't read this before. It's such a classic Australian novel and I really enjoyed it. Similar suggestions - The Harp in the South by Ruth Park, Angel Puss by Colleen McCullogh, Water under the bridge by Sumner Locke Elliot and even Indelible Ink by Fiona McGregor. There's something about the Sydney area that is quintessentially Australian - we haven't quite matched this in Melbourne. Responses to this - and suggestions for similar Melbourne books - would be welcome.

[Eleanor · Rating 4 out of 5]

A beautifully executed portrait of a woman born at the beginning of the 20th century reflecting back on her life when she is in her seventies and has returned to Australia after a long absence.

The book is full of sadness because of Nora's low self-esteem, entrenched by a lifetime of the experiences of so many women of that time. The changes that came for many of us in the last decades of the century came too late for Nora's generation.

Heartbreaking but highly recommended.

[anise · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read a little, and I watch on television a documentary program on other parts of this continent—deserts, rainforests, tropical reefs, and mountains indented with snow—and realize with a quiet musing wonder, but with no discontent, that this shadow is all I shall ever see of them. To familiar places in London, seen on the same small screen, I respond with a detached interest that begins to contain a touch of incredulity.

'Once upon a time, a woman whose name is of no consequence passed that place ...'

I feel as though I’ve aged with this book. goes quite well with the magnetic fields. reflective and wistful.

[Trish · Rating 4 out of 5]

Apparently this was set as a high school text in Australian schools in the 80s. I'm so glad I didn't read it as a teenager as I just don't think I would have grasped the sense of loss or appreciated Anderson's evocation of suburban Brisbane in the early 20th century. I'm not sure I fully appreciate it now as an adult but I get why it won the Miles Franklin award and is regarded as a literary classic. Most of the drama happens on very small stages but it pulses with the thoughts, feelings, sights, smell, taste of the human condition. I feel like I've missed so much - I didn't even get the "woman as artist" theme until the end - so I think a re-read is in order.

[Debbie Robson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was very surprised by the character of Nora Porteous in Jessica Anderson’s Miles Franklin winning novel Tirra Lirra by the River. I knew from the blurb that I would be reading about a woman who wants to escape “the suffocation of suburbia”. But I wasn’t expecting her to be so prickly.
I love history but I also like to feel anchored so I was a little lost trying to work out when Nora was born. I’m guessing in the first year or two of the 20th century but this isn’t confirmed in the novel. All we know in the opening of the novel is that she is probably in her seventies and has arrived back in Australia after living abroad for many years.
Nora is actually aware she is not the easiest of people. “I have one rather contemptible characteristic. In fact I have many. But never mind the others now. The one I am talking about is my tendency to be a bit of a toady. Whenever I am in an insecure position that is what happens.” With this admission I felt Nora is, therefore, underhand but somehow she is compliant instead of independent. At least in the later sections of the novel and I put this down to her being quite ill. Nora and her sister don’t get on when they are younger and by the time Nora returns to Australia, her sister has died and willed that Nora can live in the house as long as she needs to.
After Nora’s arrival in Grace’s house in Queensland (she has stopped off to see Grace’s son in Sydney) Nora begins to reminisce about her life. “My brother was killed in the trenches in France. So was Grace’s soldier, and all four of the boys under the camphor laurel trees.” She also remembers the beautiful Dorothy Irey, the mother of Doctor Rainbow who attends Nora when she falls ill after her return to Australia.
In between these memories, the neighbours Betty and Jack Cust pop in to see her. After a day or two Nora becomes ill and the doctor is called. Like other readers I really enjoyed the middle section when Nora marries the awful Colin Porteous and lives in a tumble down mansion in Potts Point. Her neighbours are artists, writers and the very likeable Ida May, a seamstress. Later in the novel Nora escapes to London where she lives for nearly twenty years working as a seamstress.
Yes she does escape to London but she is a contrary being. Not as independent as she could be (even considering the times) except when it comes to her body. I won’t go into the details but I was surprised by the second medical procedure she has. All the while I was reading this fascinating novel I kept being reminded of my aunt who was born in 1917, a year after Anderson herself. Her life was sort of wasted too and she told my grandmother as much shortly before my grandmother died. Like Nora my aunt fled to England and lived a strange grey life in London. She missed Australia and the heat but died there in her eighties after two failed marriages.
Tirra Lirra is an important novel because it reminds us that women of the 20th century just did not have the choices we have today. Small town life in Australia was crippling intellectually (think Charmian Clift) and job prospects for women limited. Sometimes I found Nora frustrating but her life was very believable and illuminating. This would have been five stars except for the storyline of what happened to Dorothy Irey. Just couldn’t believe it somehow and I felt the reader was missing some crucial details.

[Lewis Woolston · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a serious contender for the title of THE Great Australian Novel.
A small book clocking in at just over 200 pages it is nonetheless meaty, weighty, accomplished and truly full of the stuff of life.
You could almost call this a feminist novel. The main character is a woman who grew up in a time when women had few choices in life. She looks back at her life with some regret for time wasted and opportunities lost forever but her memories aren't entirely grim. She remembers friends and love and laughter, the small happiness that makes it all worthwhile.
Definitely well worth reading, a true Australian classic and a timeless meditation on life, time and regret.

[MaryG2E · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exquisite writing.
Quite moving, as the story examines the end of the life of a woman who faced many personal challenges.
A deserved winner of the Miles Franklin Award for 1978.
1978 - so long ago...most young people would not be bothered with such a fossil.
It is an important piece of literature arising from the second wave of feminism in the 1970s...
Doubly important because it is a genuine Australian voice.

[Susan Steggall · Rating 4 out of 5]

In 2017 the NSW Writers’ Centre in conjunction with the State Library of NSW has been showcasing the work of major Australian writers whose work has slipped into semi oblivion: Thea Astley, Elizabeth Jolley, Amy Witting and Henry Handel Richardson, among others. I attended the seminar on Jessica Anderson, an inspiring afternoon animated by Anna Funder, Michelle de Kretser and Geordie Williamson in the presence of Jessica’s daughter, scriptwriter Laura Jones. Anderson’s evocations of place, in particular ‘Sydney’ both contemporary and colonial, and her exploration of what it means to be a feisty woman with ambition, were discussed in clear and insightful presentations. I have just finished Tirra Lirra by the River − a powerful story of one woman’s rebellion against the society into which she was born. It was easy to become immersed in worlds created by Anderson: the 1930s (the years of Nora’s youth and marriage in Sydney) and the 1970s (those of her old age in Queensland) with the London years of career and independence in between. Anderson's words ring true today.

[Sally Edsall · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the few books I have re-read in adulthood, having discovered it in late teenagehood. Very good indeed. Its descption of life for a woman seeking independence in Sydney on the post-WW2 period is excellent, as is the exposition of aging, and the bitter-sweetness of an expat returning to a former home. In the scenes in Brisbane suburbia you can almost smell the frangipani and mango trees!

[Story · Rating 4 out of 5]

A classic.

[Susan Wishart · Rating 4 out of 5]

Can't imagine why I hadn't heard of this wonderful Australian writer before. Jessica Anderson was born in 1916 and didn't begin writing until she was 40. She won the Miles Franklin award in 1978 for this book and again in 1980 for "The Impersonators".
The narrator, Nora Porteous, is in her seventies when she returns from many years living and working in England to take up residence in her childhood home in Queensland. She is now quite frail and spends the first few weeks after arriving in bed with a serious chest infection. Her mind wanders as she dreams and reflects on her long life and remembers the people who had an impact on her life. It is a well written and insightful picture of a complex character in her declining years.
I'll definitely look out for more of Jessica Anderson's novels.