Christina Houen & Jena Woodhouse (Eds). Hidden Desires: Australian Women Writing . Canberra: Gininnderra Press, 2006.
Reviewed by Ann-Marie Priest
With a title like Hidden Desires: Australian Women Writing , one could be forgiven for expecting a book filled with erotic revelations about Australian women. But this collection of prose and poetry by a diverse group of Australian writers is actually very light on sex, and even on romance. The secret longings of the women in this anthology are mostly associated not with their lovers or even with their children, but with their parents.
This makes sense when you consider the way the editors, Christina Houen and Jena Woodhouse, define their theme. In their brief introduction, they explain that they were looking for pieces in all genres that ‘tell of women's experiences that lie beneath the surface of daily life—the secret, inner life, the repressed, the unrepresented, the unacknowledged'. For many of these writers, what has been unrepresented and unacknowledged seems to be the complexity of women's obligations to others. Thus in the first story in the collection, Janey Runci's ‘The Visit', a middle-aged woman hides behind the door to avoid an impromptu visit from her elderly parents. As her father hobbles across the garden to peer through the window, where he can see the tell-tale light from her computer screen, she flattens herself on the floor. The scene—indeed, the entire story—is permeated by guilt. What kind of daughter would shut the door on her infirm parents (her mother has dementia) and calmly sit down at her computer to write? Or, more generally: what kind of daughter would put her parents in a nursing home?
The answer, one suspects, is the kind who defines herself as a person as well as a daughter. But to ask—let alone begin to answer—such a question in a culture in which women are still expected as a matter of course to take on the primary care of others is quietly but undeniably subversive. The woman in Runci's story cannot escape either her guilt or her empathy as she struggles with her conflicting longings for loving family relationships and a life of her own.
This kind of moral complexity is typical of the pieces in this wide-ranging anthology. There are several stories about women who care for the aged or incapacitated, and they are tense and spiky, torn with ambivalence about the caring role, about ageing, and about submerged but painful family relationships.
Other stories return to childhood to explore similar tensions, and it is a pleasure to read these richly textured and finely nuanced evocations of girlhood in Australia. The settings—from the bush to the coast to the city—are vividly rendered: this fictional landscape, like so many of the stories themselves, has the ring of authenticity. Laurel Lamperd's ‘Waiting for the Train' powerfully evokes the precarious life of a child growing up in a run-down country station house during the Depression, while Pamela Baker's ‘Howard's Way' gives us all the sights and sounds of a bakery at a time when the loaves were still delivered by horse and cart, as well as an oblique, child's-eye view of the hidden desires of a Good Wife and Mother.
Julie Gittus's ‘Whippy Taken' uses the lazy heat of a beachside town in the holiday season as the backdrop for her story of a young girl's sexuality, and her growing awareness of how her relationships with others are mediated by her changing body. It's refreshing to read a story in which a child is the agent of her own sexuality, rather than the victim of someone else's. At the same time, the story never diminishes the complexity of an adolescent's developing desire in a world that is all too ready to read her as a sexual object.
One or two stories do deal directly with adult sexual relationships—notably the fairy-tale-like ‘Mary Magdalena O'Hara Burke' by Narelle McCoy, which tells of a woman of mythological sexual power who experiences ecstasy when she massages a man's feet and dries them with her hair. For me, this story doesn't quite work, jumping uneasily back and forth as it does between elements of the fairy-tale genre and those of contemporary realism. But its conclusion, in which its heroine takes her leave of love and floats away to a freer life, seems emblematic, in a way, of the relationships in this book. The characters tend to be running away from romantic love rather than towards it.
When writers do speak of more obviously transgressive desires, they are nevertheless far from X-rated. The story ‘Drag Race', for instance, tells of a woman whose hidden desire is to dress like a woman—or, rather, like a stereotypical female prostitute or pop-star, with ‘tarty shoes', ‘tight, sluttish dresses', ‘lurid eye make-up' and ‘costume jewellery'. Ironically, the only way she can legitimately do this is by pretending to be a man in drag. It's a puzzling premise—a woman who can claim her femininity only by feeding it through a male performance of womanhood—and perhaps for that reason, genuinely interesting. But this is the closest the collection gets to anything remotely kinky.
In general, the diversity of this anthology, the mix of writers, subjects, genres and voices, is one of its strengths. It ranges from stories to poems to short prose pieces to a fragment of a screenplay, and from narrative realism to more experimental styles. Melissa Lucashenko's story ‘Singing the Revolution Blues for Alice' stood out for me. This is the work of a writer absolutely sure of her voice, and completely at ease with her subject matter—the loving support of one woman for another, making life a marginally better option for her than suicide. The less successful stories, to my mind, are the less realistic ones. Without a context, it is hard to get a sense of what, for instance, Cassandra Atherton's story ‘Libretto' is about. Is it surrealism or is it a vampire story? I had similar difficulties with ‘A Price to Pay', which seemed ultimately just too complicated for a short story.
Through all the pieces, though, a picture of Australian life emerges that is always vivid and often compelling. The chief pleasures of this book are not only the revelation of women's hidden lives but also the sense of recognition that stalks you as you move from piece to piece. This is Australia as women have experienced it, a fictional landscape of our own, both real and mythological. Jena Woodhouse's story ‘The Drought' is a case in point, evoking with great power both a specific, and devastating, individual experience—a couple forced to sell their property due to drought—and a timeless sense of the connection between a woman and her landscape. Its resonance at this particular time is, of course, inescapable. Equally powerful is the depiction in Vasso Kalamaras's ‘Two Women' of an elderly Greek woman living in inner-city Perth who befriends her aged Aboriginal neighbour. These are stories that give us ourselves.
Ideally, I would have liked a little more context for the theme of ‘hidden desires'. Houen has apparently completed a master's thesis on the topic, and it might have added to the interest of the collection to have a sense of how she originally conceived of it, and of the motivation behind the project. On the other hand, the lack of exegesis meant that I was constantly asking myself how each piece explicated the theme as I read, which certainly made my engagement with the text more active. In the end, what is of lasting value in this anthology is the complex, densely textured picture of the Australian women's lives it presents, the snapshots of thought and feeling, childhood and old age, losses, regrets and memories, yearnings and revelations—and, yes, desires, hidden or otherwise.
Ann-Marie Priest is an academic at Central Queensland University. She is the author of Great Writers, Great Loves: The Reinvention of Love in the Twentieth Century.