Tiding Us Over

Wendy Morgan

Post Pressed, Teneriffe, 2006

Reviewer: Geoff Danaher

Wendy Morgan is a Queensland poet who lives in the Tambourine Mountains. This is a rich anthology of her work that evokes a breadth of experience, ranging from the domestic to the exotic, the particular to the epic and the present to the past. Concerns with pets, friends and lovers intermingle with poetic excursions to Homer and the Greeks, stopping along the way for a postmodern riff on real estate and an evening in New York, where an encounter with a Seurat in the Met suggests another in Central Park: "a pale lake walled around by ultramarine trees, model yachts rigidly on course, watchers solid as warehouses". These indeed are wonderfully realised poetic experiences to tide us over in shifting formations of word and image.

Aphrodite and the Others

Gillian Bouras

Penguin Books Australia Ltd Ringwood Victoria, 1994

Reviewer: Peter Roper

The fires in the Peloponnese peninsula of Greece made the news in Australia with scenes familiar to us from our own summers of conflagration. Mountain villages were evacuated and some destroyed with over sixty lives lost. My journey there soon after revealed blackened landscapes encroaching into towns and ancient monuments. Although this slim volume was first published in 1994, I found it a delightful and insightful read during my own recent Greek odyssey.

Aphrodite, the mother-in-law of the author lived her long life in one of these villages in the south where existence was an on-going battle with nature's elements in a harsh environment. The author, an Australian from Melbourne city, was launched into this life after marrying Aphrodite's son George and agreeing to live where her husband was happy. This set the scene for conflict with the mother-in-law and survival in a relatively primitive village witha foreign culture and a long history of war and conflict.

There are no common grounds between Aphrodite and the author. Aphrodite is illiterate, does not understand the meaning or purpose of the written word or the modern invention of television with people in her living room speaking a language not Greek. She echoes Zorba's question What do teh notebooks say? but remains happy in her own culture of oral tradition. The book highlights the characteristics of this: the importance of memory, the lack of reaction to strange experiences, the constant presentation of confidence as a vital part of identity to prove superiority. This is demonstrated in the lack of knowledge by the autor in the important practicalities of living in a village, cheese making, weaving on a loom, rearing animals needed for survival, harvesting olives and other crops. The author laments after ten years there is little real understanding on either side. The life of village women is one of constant labour, in the field, bearing and rearing children, caring and cooking for the family. A moment's reflection reveals that all of us in today's modern society would have had forebears living village life generations ago.

Life in the village is insular but the long oral history mirrors events outside in the wider sphere. The contryside is steeped in myths and legends, Homer's heroes live in rock piles of former palaces. In 1827, a naval battle in nearby Navarine Bay with western fleets defeating the Turks determines the course of Western civilisation. The sad history of the ten years of civil war following World War II tearing the countryside apart sets neighbours against each other in the village. We are fortunate in Australia to have never experenced this.

(As the tourist outside to the Peloponnese, I glimpsed some of the intimacy and difficulties of village life through the book.)

In the end, the author acknowledges Aphrodite is secure in her place and her culture whilst she, the literate outside, is the displaced person trying to maintain with her background and spiritual home.

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