KUMAKANA - a Gronups tale

Launches 7 March 2017

How does Kumakana achieve what one journalist calls a ‘strong sense of place’?

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According to Jennifer E, Cross (PDF) ‘Sense of place has become a buzzword to justify everything from a warm fuzzy appreciation of the natural landscape to the selling of homesites in urban sprawl.’

Cross, frustrated with the concept of sense of place, examines the term as it is used in Anthropology, Environmental Psychology, Geography, Landscape Architecture, and Sociology — the main fields that study why certain places have an iconic identity and exhibit character that is felt by inhabitants and visitors alike. Cross’s dilemma emerged as two different aspects: one describing the relationship people have with places; and the other describing community attachments that evolve from the characteristics of a place.

Finding the term’s relationship to literature, however, is far more challenging and it causes me to ask why Elaine Fry used the phrase as a headline for an article referring to Kumakana: What about the novel evokes a reaction of this kind?

There is no question that place as a concept is important to the novelist.

Philip Hensher writes that ‘literature has to engage with the physical world, and with the culturally specific meanings of one place or another.’ He says that it is often the setting that comes to mind when he thinks of a novel he loves, not plot or character. ‘When the novelist’s eye falls on a particular stretch of earth,’ he says, ‘it can transform it forever.’

Transformation is, of course, the novelist’s ultimate cause, although it is usually associated with the transformation of character through the narrative, or of thought as a consequence of the narrative. That a novelist can transform a place perhaps raises the notional role of the novelist as artist, as a spatial realist. Kumakana tries to focus on its quality of place as central to its experience — after all its title emerges from this quality. I make the point, as Fry suggests, that having been raised on the land, there is a certain sense about the land that becomes part of you and I try to infuse the settings of my writing with that idea.

Fry says the novel ‘resonates strongly with a sense of place yet is not limited by location’. I’m interested in how Kumakana might achieve this.

The place of the great beginning

The story is located in a fictional place, but a setting generated by a real location. This is one of those curious aspects of Plot that Robert L Belknap talks about, where ‘The Fabula arranges events in the world the characters inhabit; the Siuzhet arranges events in the world the reader encounters in the text’. The fictional place and its making is the Kumakana forest – what I nominate as ‘the place of the great beginning’; but the reader can draw the connection to the real world place of the unique Australian southwest’s tingle forest — culturally, The Valley of the Giants.

We learn of this from Lavender Jensen’s mother:

Her mother had told her how the trees shaped the forest—the karri, among the world’s tallest, and the tingle, with its massive girth, one of the largest. She told her that their bark hid spiders with sixty-five million years of history. Some of these trees grew nowhere else on earth. But her mother didn’t stop at that.

‘There are secrets and legends far older than any recorded history,’ she said. ‘In an old language, this was called the Kumakana—it means the place of the great beginning. As far as forests go, this one is about as old as they get.’ (p. 5/6)

While the mystery of the forest grows in Lavender’s mind because of prior events like her mother’s scientific discovery in its ‘secret heart’, we become aware of its physical presence on earlier pages, when its trees are first identified as being ‘at the edge of the great forest’, and rising like columns in the ‘rampart of a great fort’, with leafy crowns that crackle as they toss ‘whispered incantations to the winds, passing on myths and legends of dark days and forgotten languages.’ The location of the Kumakana forest is specified as surrounding ‘a farm that was twenty-six kilometres by winding dirt road from Denmark.’ In Lavender Jensen’s eyes, this place might as well be as remote from her usual home as the country of Denmark, the size of which is about equivalent to that of the forest.

These images generate specific relationships people have with places like great forests and mappable geography, and they serve to establish expectations that the mystery the forest contains will be revealed at some point.

As the story unravels, we begin to see the forest from different perspectives, and therefore its potential as a location of community attachments which become evident in, as Hensher suggests, ‘part of the humanity at the centre of the endeavour’. The endeavour, of course, is to set the world right again, to return the Natural Order to its rightful settings, and this means unpacking, to some extent, conflicts that arise between communities because their purposes for the use of a place may be at odds.

These complex conflicts no doubt contribute to how Kumakana achieves its ‘strong sense of place’, but perhaps there exists another dimension to sense of place that is worth considering, and yet another that was a deliberate insertion into the story which may be recognised unconsciously, or not recognised at all.

Spirit of place

Environmental psychologist, Fritz Steele talks about Spirit of Place as ‘the combination of characteristics that gives some locations a special “feel” or personality (such as spirit of mystery or of identity with a person or group)’. Spirit, though, concocts the notion that something exists within the place outside of the characters who populate it, while at the same time it is carried within them. Which means, of course, that a spirit of place cannot exist without the characters that make it accessible.

The Gronups are the characters in Kumakana who represent the spirits, act as agents for the spirits, demonstrate that spirit is both part of who we are and some force that exists outside of us. The Gronups give Kumakana an added dimension to its sense of place by infusing their existence with characteristics that can only be drawn from place itself, such as the following example of how they get around.

The wind is Atnunga’s transport system—though not in any conventional way, as a bird or a kite or a balloon might use it. Atnunga surfs the sound waves the wind creates, riding the pulses to any destination that sounds penetrate. (p. 26)

But there’s another sense of place conjured by the word Gronup. What may not be evident to most readers is the use of ‘-up’ as a suffix.

In the local southwest Indigenous language, this term implies ‘place’. Consequently many of our southwest towns are named with the ‘-up’ suffix: Gnowangerup (place of mallee fowl – ‘gnow’), Cowaramup (place of purple crowned lorikeet – ‘cowara’), Pingrup (place where digging — possibly for bull-frog). There are many others of course.

Gronup was coined with a deliberate use of this suffix, intending to identify those who function in a place of grooming.

Gronups are everywhere, their principal role is to groom the animals, to provide their markings so that they are identifiable to their rightful predators, and it is in this way that they maintain the Natural Order and provide a Spirit of Place specific to their location.

Because ‘Kumakana’ is the place of the great beginning, it is only natural that Gronups originate there. In other words, Kumakana, as a location, cannot function without them. This becomes evident when we learn of how Babbildan Babbirra came to be appointed most revered leader of the Gronups — Yoolin-jah:

The spirits had nature worked out right down to the last detail. And there was no mincing their words when they told him that the appointment of Yoolin-jah is part of that detail.

‘It’s not something that can be changed. The magic is in you—not in the position of Yoolin-jah. It is your nature that holds the fabric of the Natural Order together. If we changed that, we’d have to change the Natural Order. And that’s not possible.’ (p. 63)

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Kumakana: On a par with 100 New York Times bestsellers

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In Nabokov’s Favorite Word is Muave Ben Blatt conducted a mathematical analysis to test Hemingway at his own laws of prose writing, in particular the use of the adverb. In a recent blog post, Blatt states that “standout books indeed rely on fewer adverbs.” (That sentence could do without its adverb, indeed.) Furthermore he suggests that books that use the least adverbs have been the most successful, not just those that are classics and prize-winners, but also bestsellers.

Kumakana meets the standard set by the bestsellers.

It’s important to qualify what we are talking about when discussing adverbs. I often say to my writing (and English) students that adjectives and adverbs are not your friends; that ‘your’ writing will be much clearer without them. This view is supported not only by Hemingway, but by Stephen King, and Strunk and White, who advise in Elements of Style that adverbs tend to try and explain too much.

Stephen King is a little more specific. In On Writing: A memoir of the craft, he says, “I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops.” King is being quite specific, however, and is talking of the common practise of using adverbs that end in -ly. (I could have used ‘usually’ — an example of what we are talking about — in that sentence before ends but I doubt it would improve my meaning.) 

Adverbs, I’m sure you are aware, are words that modify verbs. That is, they give ‘direction’ to the action being described by the verb. In most cases, the -ly adverb is concocted from an adjective: a slow object can become a slowly moving one; a soft voice can become a softly spoken one. What appears to happen is that a writer wanting to emphasise an action in some way feels it necessary to do so by directing the reader how they should perceive that action. The most commonplace use is after a speech tag: she said, softly; she moaned, loudly; he barked, angrily … and so on. In almost every case, a more direct active verb does a better job: she whispered; she wailed; he snapped …

Even better, much more lively writing comes from setting up how the action will be placed prior to the event. If an event is set up well, there is no need to direct the reader’s perception —  and this applies to any event, no matter how trivial — because the reader will already be there, where the event is taking place. This is the nature of vivid writing.

Blatt compared the use of the -ly adverb in three categories of writing: award winners, best-sellers and fan-fiction. He downloaded 9000 novel-length fan-fiction stories (greater than 60,000 words) written between 2010 and 2014, which he compared to all the books ranked number one on the New York Times bestseller list since 2000. and the 100 most recent winners of major literary awards.

What he found was that the average use of -ly adverbs per 10,000 words of text in fan-fiction was 154, in bestsellers 115, and in award winners 114. What he finds shocking in this discovery, is “the fact that their use [-ly adverbs] is somehow correlated with quality on a measurable level—even when just the best writers are being examined … .”

One possible explanation for the overall trend we’re seeing is that adverbs are an indicator of a writer’s focus. An author writing with the clarity needed to describe vivid scenes and actions without adverbs, taking the time to whittle away the unnecessary words, might also be spending more time and effort making the rest of the text as perfect as possible. Or if one has a good editor, these words may be weeded out.

The “focus” hypothesis finds some support from the true master of writing without adverbs. And it’s not Hemingway. (Blatt)

This author, he says, is Toni Morrison. Hemingway averaged 80 adverbs per 10,000 words; Morrison 76.

But this figure is a little confusing. In Nabokov’s Favorite Word is Mauve, Blatt writes that Hemingway’s “adverb use is about 5.8% of all words”, which translates to 580 words per 10,000. He then goes on to say that measuring only the -ly adverbs, Hemingway uses 80 per 10,000 words.

How does Kumakana compare?

Kumakana has 86,864 words and a total of 999 -ly adverbs: 115 per 10,000.

Why is the tingle tree central to Kumakana?

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a giant tingle tree

I remember first visiting the area that subsequently became known as the Valley of the Giants as a child of about eight or nine and seeing first hand the magnificence of these trees.

Our family returned to the site at least once more around 1966. This was a time before it became widely known. I also have dramatic memories of the image of a car parked inside the gaping mouth of the tree (although I don’t believe it was this one). For some reason, I recall this image being at a grandparents’ house—although I have no idea why that might be—along with other images of tree felling in the area.

This tree has ever since held a deep fascination with me.

When we started researching for Kumakana, we visited the tingle forest again, negotiating with a local expert to find trees that were off the beaten track. The day was fascinating because we got to be among true giants of the forest and what we saw became rich fodder for Lavender Jensen’s adventure as well as the source material for the remarkable illustrations that accompany the book.

Click on the picture above and look closely at the bottom left of the image when it is enlarged. You will see a child dwarfed by the tree. This will give you some perspective in terms of the size of the tree. The composite of photographs was the only way we could capture the tree’s significant size—somewhere around 10 metres diameter at the base and 80 metres in height.

What causes the hollowing out?

Although the tree pictured above does not have a hollowed out section visible, it is the red tingle that often has a burnt out section—carberdine in local indigenous language. The red tingle is one of three different varieties of the tree; the other two are the yellow tingle and rates tingle. The tingle is a remarkably fire hardy tree and the ‘hollow butting’ that occurs in the red tingle is the result of fire entering the tree where the trunk meets the roots. The enormous bole is a vast reservoir of water and while the inside may burn out, the external trunk remains resistant to burning.

Tingle trees have thick bark which insulates the cambium (the active cells that produce new secondary growth) and produces a protective layer that gives the tree the capacity to recover from catastrophic fire events, even when the crown has been 100% scorched. It’s as though the trees keep dormant buds hidden for this specific actuality, and release the new growth in spite of the fire.

Once the carberdine has opened up, weather and insects have an opportunity to go to work and create cavernous spaces that serve as shelter for animals (and, historically, humans). You can see by the outstretched arm in the picture above just how these big openings get a start in a (relatively) young tree.

On the right is an example of an opening already formed. There appears to be plenty of animal activity around the opening. This is the tree opening on which I modelled Spot’s encounter with Wonaiea. 

Spot had stayed awake, on guard against anything that might threaten them, lying with his chin on his forepaws, yellow ball in front of his nose and one eye open, absorbing the sounds and smells around the tree. The tree was alive, humming. He left the sleeping Lavender, grabbed the ball and nosed his way around it.

Every few paces, he dropped his ball to snuff the forest floor, hitting on hordes of ants, bugs, grubs and insects occupied with nature’s recycling. Some proved to be tasty morsels, others forced a grimace. A centipede came from nowhere and locked its pincers onto the septum of his nose. Spot shook his head violently and sneezed. He knocked his ball. It rolled around the tree and perched precariously at the lip of the gaping cavern formed by the tree’s split trunk, unsure about whether to enter the void or stay outside. (p.206/7)

The idea of the split tree as a portal seemed a fairly natural extension of the original ‘Alice-in-Wonderland’ moment. It gives rise to a mystery that was extended onto the cover of the book. And while there are other large trees in the world much more well-known, such as the Sequoia and California redwoods, there is probably no other so mysterious. As Lavender Jensen’s mother explains:

Her mother had told her how the trees shaped the forest—the karri, among the world’s tallest, and the tingle, with its massive girth, one of the largest. She told her that their bark hid spiders with sixty-five million years of history. Some of these trees grew nowhere else on earth. But her mother didn’t stop at that. (p. 6/7)

But it is the question of what lies on the other side that Lavender becomes most curious about.

Lavender circled the tree in search of where the animals went. It had swallowed hundreds, yet none emerged from the other side. When she peered inside, she saw their fading forms melting into the dark. (p. 229)

Much of the mystery of Kumakana lies behind the tingle tree.

To discover more of the mystery, you are invited to join me and my special guests at the launch of Kumakana: A Gronups Tale at 7pm Tuesday 7 March 2017 at Northside Books, 192 William Street Northbridge.

RSVP.

In praise of KUMAKANA

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As a parting gift—and to thank him for his valuable support—I gave an English teacher colleague with whom I worked last year an advance copy of Kumakana, A Gronups tale. A few weeks ago, while I was in London, he wrote to me and his email (minus the names to protect the innocent) is produced below …

[My daughter] and I read your novel Kumakana together in four sittings in a fabulous shared experience and we both agree it is a really engaging magical story and a wonderful work of art. 

Judith’s book design and illustrations are simply amazing. [My daughter] loved the images of the Gronups and said she would love a set of Gronup figurines or small statues.

This opens up a merchandising avenue for you for the book. [She] also said that she would love to see the Gronups animated and so this opens up a filmic avenue for you for the book.

The book cover with the enormous tingle tree with a hollowed out bottom, representing a type of portal, and the absence of a front cover title add to the mystery of the book’s contents straight away.

The introduction was a good inclusion to acknowledge Indigenous Australians and for addressing cultural appropriation and for providing the context for the story and to outline the unique language used in the story.

The map at the front of the book is great to refer to during the story and to find your bearings and the word list and character list at the back are also very handy references for translations and animal names. The unique chapter designs with drop down capitals are also very eye-catching.

The story itself provides easy access through the diction and instant engagement through the action that draws the reader in immediately to its bush bewitchery.

The intertwined stories of the koolongers, animals and Gronups make the book a real page-turner that you don’t want to put down. Added to this are the historical, spiritual and environmental layers, which deepen the experience.

The language of the story shows off your masterful wordmanship as an author in so many ways and I would like to highlight some examples.

[My daughter] really loved the comical names of your animal characters and your use of teenage vernacular, colloquialisms and idioms that she could relate to. She also loved the dialogue of the talking animals and the songs you included. There were some words that she found challenging but these proved good teaching moments for me to expand her vocabulary. I really loved your use of alliteration and onomatopoeia, which gave the text a musicality. I also loved your use of metaphor and simile, which provide humorous comparisons and vivid descriptions. Finally, your use of allusion added depth to the story by drawing in other references.

We would both like to know if all the events in the story actually took place or whether the whole story was a combined dream for Lavender and Jerrramunga that started when they fell asleep in the big tree stump on page 40 then awoke later in the big tree stump on page 368?

This book has plenty of material for a second book in the series or a second film in the franchise. For example, a prequel story could be based on Lavender’s mum’s discovery of the mass graves of Tasmanian Devils in the Kumakana Forrest.

[My daughter] compared Kumakana to Little Red Riding Hood, Alice in Wonderland, Narnia and The Hobbit and has declared Kumakana her new favourite book. I love the book as well and would like to see it placed on the SCASA recommended reading list for lower secondary students.

This book is uniquely Australian and is a winner and I can’t wait to attend the official launch in February.

This novel is about …

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This novel is about belief.

And the fact that in order to value the beliefs of others, we may need to let go the ones we hold.

This novel is both about it, and constructed around the way belief functions to create and maintain culture. For it is what we believe that comes to be what we tell stories about, and how we source, prepare and distribute our nourishment, and the music we make and draw from, the dances and signs that make meaning for those in the know and create befuddlement for those on the outter.

Belief is not culture. But there can be no culture without it.

It’s true to say that in order for the novel to be about belief, it must be centred on some form of belief.

It is this:

Kumakana is set on the belief that, regardless of how perfect it is that we see the world, there are those who believe there is always a better way.

A young girl believes in magic. A young boy of similar age, but from a different culture, does not mock her belief in magic, but mocks the magic in which she believes. A clan of foxes believe in the law of the jungle. Their leader believes the sweet meat of the young girl will bestow everlasting powers. The forest animals believe the Natural Order is the Way; they trust Gronups to guide them. In turn, Gronups believe the young girl’s spirit may open up a turning point in the path of destruction that has seen a contraction of habitat and extinction of animals. They believe the spirit of the young boy is ancient, and they have met it before. The young girl’s father believes her imagination is problematic; Gronups believe it may be the answer.

Kumakana is about belief, yes. But it challenges ownership of belief too.

We cannot write of one belief without attempting to explore others. Yet there are arguments that, if we are of a particular cultural heritage, we cannot write of beliefs held in another. We are told that by making use of cultural artefacts that can be clearly shown to belong to a culture other that the one we belong to, it is a form of appropriation.

In certain cases, these arguments make a lot of sense, but the problem is that culture, while it can be described, cannot be defined, which means it both belongs to no-one and belongs to everyone. At the same time, one can belong to more than one culture.

Human nature moves forward by sharing cultures. We share our nourishment, our knowledge, our beliefs our art and dance and music because it helps others understand who we are. It helps us understand who others are. When we are touched by the cultures of others, and we find a spiritual concert playing out in ourselves, we cannot help but be changed. When we actively deny others access to such change, we deny humanity the right to grow.

It is in this way that this story challenges belief.

I believe in story. In particular, I believe in its power to transform our understanding. I hope that when you read it thoroughly, this story will change the way you think about belief.

The cover without a title

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frontcov

The front cover of Kumakana

The cover of Kumakana has no title on the front.

The cover features an abstracted illustration of the opening in a giant tingle tree in the Kumakana forest. The image extends and wraps around the book, and the title appears only on the spine.

One of the main characteristics of Kumakana is its mystery and the designers felt that this mystery should be established as soon as possible. One way of doing this, according to designer Judith Price, is to leave the title details off the cover and let the image establish the mood of the work.

The tingle tree is the central symbolic figure of Kumakana. It acts as sentinel and portal, as a symbol of safety and strength, of community and comfort. It is one of the world’s largest and most remarkable trees, yet is largely unknown beyond its habitat, the area known as The Valley of the Giants. In terms of size and character, it rivals the Californian redwood and the Victorian mountain ash. It’s only right that it should represent the book on its own.

About the book

 

Kumakana: A Gronups Tale
ISBN 978-0-9942115-2-1
Casebound hardback edition, printed on quality creme stock
390 pages, 216mm x 140mm (8.5 in x 5.5 in) with a 25mm (1 in) spine
9 illustrations
Australian retail price $49.95.
Launch February 2017.

Pre-launch sales at Crotchet Quaver

Other purchasing options: Amazon, Book Depository

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Kumakana will be launched in Febrary 2017 by Crotchet Quaver

Fill in your details below to be on the book launch invitation list

The Magical Realism of KUMAKANA: Part Two

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Babbildan Babbirra

Babbildan Babbirra, most revered Gronup council leader (yoolin-jah), the bright, represents light. Illustration by Judith Price.

Right from its inception, Kumakana is intended to be culture building, challenging the traditional western ways in which we look at the Australian bush as something wild, something to be tamed.

Kumakana intends a broader sense of the real.

The myth and legend of Kumakana engages the bush itself as a character tied to a whole cast of multidimensional planes. It attempts to challenge many of the conventional tropes that define the Australian Legend so long dominating our gaze of the Australian bush.

In the beginning, it is the mystery of the bush that draws Lavender Jensen into a series of events driving her to enter the Kumakana forest.

When her imagination is challenged to provide resources for surviving the summer, ‘a desire to disappear into the blackness of the forest swept over her’. This feeling is linked to the behaviour of a pair of magpies ‘that perch high in the trees at the edge of the great forest, chortling back and forth like matrons snickering at the school gate’, and her witnessing of ‘sly, spectral, movements crawling on her skin as [hidden eyes] stared out from the shadows that consume the light’.

One of the magpies steals her earbuds and, in her pursuit of the thief, she inadvertently enables an injured joey to escape her father’s care, which intensifies her pursuit. Clearly, she doesn’t want to disappoint him through her carelessness, and she thinks ‘… life wouldn’t be worth living if she went home without the joey …’.

But it is the sudden appearance of a laconic Aboriginal youth whose puppy is responsible for the theft of her ball—who promises the return of her things—that takes her to the brink, and the ‘Alice in Wonderland’ moment that serves as the threshold into a different world.

Making community

The reader quickly discovers that the Kumakana forest is a community orchestrated by the intersection of multidimensional planes, one of which is the forest itself. Others comprise Lavender Jensen’s reality, Jerramunga’s alternative reality, the world of the forest animals and that of the Gronups. This intersection sponsors the unfolding of dialogue that invites the reader to consider the real from an alternative perspective.

The barriers that Lavender Jensen encounters, from the inaccessibility of a direct return to the world of the everyday, to the trickery of the old snake Cedric, are transforming moments of the narrative, enabling an exchange that lifts understanding across the different worlds the forest offers up, including a version of its own.

It is through this that community becomes the central organising principle of the Kumakana narrative.

The forest, for example, is a community of vegetation, ranging from the trees that rise like columns

‘in the rampart of a great fort, forming part of a landscape that sits idly, waiting as the crackle of their leafy crowns tosses whispered incantations to the winds, passing myths and legends of dark days and forgotten languages’

… to the ‘wall of springy ferns—the kind that snap back to their upright positions and slap you in the face after being pushed aside to pass through.’

Kumakana’s cosmic design not only uses the forest to present multiple obstacles, but to introduce passage-ways into that which remains mysterious.

Of particular note is the tingle tree.

The tingle tree is a massive tree unique to the south west corner of Australia, without question one of the world’s mightiest trees—in competition with the Californian redwood and the mountain ash for sheer size and presence. But largely unknown away from its natural habitat.

Throughout the narrative, the tingle features as barrier, signpost and passage-way, an iconic symbol of solidity and great age; it is central to the history and community of the novel, propelling the image of the Gronups as a centre of power that is both under and outside of their agency in the survival of the natural order. It is the gateway to the great corroboree captured in the Kumakana song.

Untitled-1

Deep in the heart of the Kumakana Forest,
’Neath the towerin’ spread of the tingle tree.
There’s a party tonight in the southern moonlight;
A murna in the forest spreading out on the breeze.
Kumakana Gronups in the shadows of the night,
When the sun’s gone down and the moon is bright.
Callin’ everyone to the tingle tree …
For a hootin’ tootin’, boot scootin’, knees-up, chivaree—
Hell raisin’ jamboree, corroboree.

Testing belief

This novel is positioned as an important read for those ‘who believe there is always a better way’.

Letting go entrenched beliefs is crucial.

When Lavender is trying to convince the vixens that Gronups are real, she asks Wonaiea to let the foxes see him, to which he replies: ‘I can’t … To see a Gronup you have to let go your beliefs’.

We establish our beliefs from what we think we know, from the way we construct our reality. According to Jeanne Rosier Smith, Trinh T Minh-ha (p16) writes that it is ‘only westerners who believe that elements such as the sacred and myth are incongruous with the real’.

I take the view that my writing is always an act of making, it is never fully made but an experience that positions the work as a natural extension of myself—that is, it does not exist outside of me and therefore, as Karl Marx would have it, constitutes a ‘prolongation of my body’. Writing itself, is therefore an act of belief, a form of possession and dispossession of the self.

The reading experience Kumakana offers enables examination of a real that I claim defies the western notions of legend and myth as make believe, while at the same time not claiming it to be a transmission of any Indigenous knowledge system.

It turns my writing, like a growing tumour, into an extension of me, functioning the same way as my balding, or my fluctuating corpulence—it is an added dimension that can’t be excised, an outgrowth that takes on a pathology of its own. I know there are those (Foucault and Barthes, for example) who would argue the writing exists outside of the writer, and the reader takes from it what he or she wants.

This is true to a point, but just the same as my writing of Kumakana couldn’t happen without the background of a pre-colonised Australia, or the presumed ‘fact’ that a spirituality existed without the notion of the Christian god, the reading of it could not take place without the writing from outside the conventional western ideas of myth and legend.

The idea of Kumakana, to both examine and create elements of the sacred, such as notions of the way we incarnate creation and the workings of nature that are given reverence, is to add to the myth and fantastic that goes with spiritual characters and god-like forces. It achieves its experience by mixing these elements of the sacred with some actual history belonging to the natural world and facts of people and place. This works to generate a different sense of the real, one that challenges the perceptions of how the common western views are formed, views that tend to hold that myth and the sacred are incongruous with the real.

Of course it requires a small amount of magic, which the reader must process more deeply. The result is a form of magical realism that does not position it only within the frame of Indigenous culture—as is the prevailing nature of critical discourse around magical realism—but removes it into a space somewhere other, where human and non-human move together in a single pattern.

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Kumakana will be launched in Febrary 2017 by Crotchet Quaver

Fill in your details below to be on the book launch invitation list

 

Launch postponed – an explainer

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Spreading it out: the final manuscript checking of Kumakana, A Gronups tale.

Contrary to wild speculation, I have not gone the way of the Tasmanian tiger, and Kumakana hasn’t all of a sudden disintegrated into a pile of dust (in fact, that’s it spread out on the left).

As someone once said to me, life gets in the way of getting things done.

And because of that, all of our publishing projects have been put back until early 2017.

The small press is always at the mercy of available time and resources, and they don’t come much smaller than ours.

Tentatively, we are looking at a launch date of February 23, 2017 for Kumakana. I will keep you posted.