What do you think?
Rate this book
Journeys: Modern Australian Short Stories
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
July 1, 2022
My search continues for Australian authors I can get really enthusiastic about.
Here are some interesting tales among an otherwise lacklustre lot. The anthology contains some good names: Tim Winton, David Malouf, Elizabeth Jolley and Helen Garner. But Winton’s tale of two boys south of Perth finishing high school and buying a fried out Kombi reads like a first chapter; Malouf’s story of the country father attending the funeral of his estranged daughter in the city is suffused by a lack of connection and leaves you very flat and Jolley’s story of an insidious passenger is a bit tiring.
Helen Garner’s on the other hand is quite affecting, a piece of reportage, rather than a short story, as she is embedded in a morgue and shows the matter of fact professionalism of the morgue workers, doing a job just like you and me, assuming you are not a morgue worker. Parenthetically Garner’s piece was ten years old when this anthology was published as was one other story, which suggests there might not have been enough recent material available.
I did like Robert Adamson's contribution, but it is taken from his autobiography, which is not fiction, so the definition of short 'story' has been stretched a bit. Similarly with Luke Slattery's Ithica, which I found absorbing, but it's Greek mythology, with travel thrown in. As for the rest, it’s all a bit depressing: broken families, children shared between parents, addiction and desultory things happening overseas. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the subject matter, but there is an absence of inspiration.
There must be an Australian short story writer comparable in quality to R K Narayan (India), Guy de Maupassant (France), Owen Marshall (New Zealand) or Jhumpa Lahiri (whatever country she’s living in at the time), I’ve just got to keep looking.
Here are some interesting tales among an otherwise lacklustre lot. The anthology contains some good names: Tim Winton, David Malouf, Elizabeth Jolley and Helen Garner. But Winton’s tale of two boys south of Perth finishing high school and buying a fried out Kombi reads like a first chapter; Malouf’s story of the country father attending the funeral of his estranged daughter in the city is suffused by a lack of connection and leaves you very flat and Jolley’s story of an insidious passenger is a bit tiring.
Helen Garner’s on the other hand is quite affecting, a piece of reportage, rather than a short story, as she is embedded in a morgue and shows the matter of fact professionalism of the morgue workers, doing a job just like you and me, assuming you are not a morgue worker. Parenthetically Garner’s piece was ten years old when this anthology was published as was one other story, which suggests there might not have been enough recent material available.
I did like Robert Adamson's contribution, but it is taken from his autobiography, which is not fiction, so the definition of short 'story' has been stretched a bit. Similarly with Luke Slattery's Ithica, which I found absorbing, but it's Greek mythology, with travel thrown in. As for the rest, it’s all a bit depressing: broken families, children shared between parents, addiction and desultory things happening overseas. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the subject matter, but there is an absence of inspiration.
There must be an Australian short story writer comparable in quality to R K Narayan (India), Guy de Maupassant (France), Owen Marshall (New Zealand) or Jhumpa Lahiri (whatever country she’s living in at the time), I’ve just got to keep looking.
June 3, 2024
A few of the stories were really difficult to get into, just dense with knowledge and references I couldn’t relate to. But others… oh my goodness- they’ll sit with me for days. Some really fantastic writing in there and themes that really settle into the back of your mind.
May 22, 2013
There were gems in here. Really, there were. But I just can't get past what has started to bother me about modern Australian writers with their obsession with present tense. To me, it so often comes across as an awkward and try-hard technique for sounding 'literary'.
And so many of these stories fall into this category. Throw in the clichéd 'Melbourne-dwelling recovering heroin addict' story (Helen Garner's 'Monkey Grip' has already set the bar so high...in the 70s! Leave it alone!) and the 'Let me tell you the story of how I got out of this Godforsaken place to experience something terribly exotic overseas and you didn't' tale and I think this book will also have you bending the forthcoming pages to see if there's anything to look forward to.
So back to the gems.
•Ian Callinan’s ‘The Romance of Steam’ for his accurate, warm and sincere narrating in an elderly female war veteran’s voice, telling the story of 300 starving female military personnel who couldn't get a midnight meal after 33 straight hours of train travel – in their own country, or from their own countrymen/servicemen.
•Helen Garner’s ‘At the Morgue’. I’m usually a queasy reader of subjects like this, but, despite worrying whether I could get to sleep or not afterwards, I read it all in one sitting, due to Garner’s knack for having you care so much about any subject matter from the very first line.
But besides highlights from a Tim Winton excerpt here, a Robert Adamson story about juvenile bird-theft there, and Bill Collopy’s depiction of an innocent asylum-seeker’s experience in a detention centre located within 50 metres of white-bread Hills Hoist Aussie suburbia, this collection falls flat about 50% of the time.
And so many of these stories fall into this category. Throw in the clichéd 'Melbourne-dwelling recovering heroin addict' story (Helen Garner's 'Monkey Grip' has already set the bar so high...in the 70s! Leave it alone!) and the 'Let me tell you the story of how I got out of this Godforsaken place to experience something terribly exotic overseas and you didn't' tale and I think this book will also have you bending the forthcoming pages to see if there's anything to look forward to.
So back to the gems.
•Ian Callinan’s ‘The Romance of Steam’ for his accurate, warm and sincere narrating in an elderly female war veteran’s voice, telling the story of 300 starving female military personnel who couldn't get a midnight meal after 33 straight hours of train travel – in their own country, or from their own countrymen/servicemen.
•Helen Garner’s ‘At the Morgue’. I’m usually a queasy reader of subjects like this, but, despite worrying whether I could get to sleep or not afterwards, I read it all in one sitting, due to Garner’s knack for having you care so much about any subject matter from the very first line.
But besides highlights from a Tim Winton excerpt here, a Robert Adamson story about juvenile bird-theft there, and Bill Collopy’s depiction of an innocent asylum-seeker’s experience in a detention centre located within 50 metres of white-bread Hills Hoist Aussie suburbia, this collection falls flat about 50% of the time.
August 7, 2020
Came across this book by chance on one of my roadtrips in Tasmania so there couldn't have been a more fitting time really 😀 The stories gave neat little insights into Aussie life and life as a journey in general. This will be one of the souvenirs I take back home.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews