12 Edmondstone St by David Malouf - Book Review

12 Edmondstone St by David Malouf - Book Review

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Posted 2014-08-23 by Marina Marangos follow

Sun 23 Nov 2014

I am reading David Malouf's book 12 Edmondstone St, after listening to him at Brisbane City Hall. I had no idea who he was but knew that he was important enough for the Museum in Brisbane to centre an exhibition around him which coincides with his 80th Birthday.

Last week I went back to the Museum to hear a panel of writers talking about the author. Having listened to them talk about this giant in Brisbane's literary circles I now understand what an important and iconic author he is to the city. Matt Condon at various times in the discussion described authors as "the pigeons that alight on his statue" as "mining his own head we come up with gold".

So if you are like me and need to understand more about what Brisbane was like and how it has become, go along to the exhibition on the 3rd floor at the Musuem of Brisbane, which is on until the 23rd of November 2014 as it is perhaps a very interesting marriage of how the genres of writing and of art come together where five contemporary artists pay homage to Malouf by creating new artworks inspired by his works.




David Malouf is possibly one of Brisbane's best known writers and though he no longer lives in the city, he visits family often. His books have won a number of awards, but awards are not why I read books. I read them to better understand a place or people. In this case Brisbane and what the city was like and in particular 12 Edmondstone St in South Brisbane which is now the cultural precinct of the city.



It's only a slender little edition and even has room for a couple of other stories, one of which, his trip to India, particularly fascinated me. He paints the picture of his home, going through every room, singling out the bits that meant a lot to him, detailing the differences that at that time were common place but now seem almost rare. The empty spaces below the houses for example. He talks about the history of the site and how it has changed over the years, from an Aboriginal burial place, later planted with huge Moreton Bay figs which form Musgrave park to the factories, (it was very much more industrial in those days ) to the rather oddly named Yasmar hospital where he was born and the house, no 12 where he spent his formative years and which he takes us through, room by room, with his eyes shut.

The house was a weatherboard house, totally unremarkable and common. In fact he talks of his father feeling that these houses were poor men's houses, and that he would have preferred a more substantial one of bricks and mortar.

Malouf notes that "First houses are grounds of our first experience. Crawling about at floor level, room by room we discover laws that we will apply later to the world at large."

He adds – "it is this whole house I want to go back to and explore, rediscovering room by room what it was that I first learnt there about how high, how wide the world is, how one space opens into another , and from the objects these rooms contained, and the habits and uses they were caught up in ( including the forbidden ones) what kind of reality I have been born into , that body of myths, beliefs, loyalties, anxieties, affections that shapes a life and whose outline we enter and outgrow."

I marvel at his clarity of thought and his beautiful prose and it wants to make me want to read on. The rooms are investigated, visited and turned around as he makes his way back into them, telling us about the habits and the norms of the day, the characters and family ties and his own sometimes mischievous role in them as a boy growing up in a household of strong women.

The prose is evocative of his family, but also the smells, the foods that were eaten, the way people travelled, the ideas they espoused. It is in every sense a journey back in time in which Malouf explores the Queensland soul and gives us the heart of the city as it then was.

#books_writing
#brisbane_city
#exhibitions
#november
!date 23/11/2014 -- 23/11/2014
%wnbrisbane
193883 - 2023-06-16 03:55:44

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