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Namn enligt folkbokföringen: Tennant, Kathleen Kylie
Födelsedag: 1912-03-12
Avled: 1988-02-28
Kön: female
Nationalitet: Australia
Födelseort: Manly, New South Wales, Australia
Dödsort: Chatswood, New South Wales, Australia
Bostadsorter: Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Utbildning: Brighton College
University of Sydney
Yrken: novelist
playwright
memoirist
biographer
children's book author
Priser och utmärkelser: Order of Australia (Officer, 1980)
Särskiljningsnotis: born Kathleen Tennant, married name Rodd.

Medlemmar

Recensioner

The Battlers av Kylie Tennant

So often I am startled by what we forget. Australian literature is a goldmine of works once deeply prized, still important for what they tell us, but lost to public knowledge for a variety of reasons. Time, of course (not everything relevant can be lasting); rapid changes in society (portrayals of the marginalised which seemed hard-hitting or controversial - or even sympathetic - can now often seem backward or unsettling); the move from literature to popular fiction that has left some styles behind; an education and cultural system which prioritises the new and a limited canon of old; and at least a little dab of that famed cultural cringe. It's fading, but it still lingers.

All of which is to say that The Battlers, while not a perfect novel, is compelling Australian fiction that must have been truly powerful in its day. Contrasting the lives of down-on-their-luck, itinerant Australian folk, Tennant weaves a tale of mateship, possible romance, hope, and humility. I remember this from a considerably romanticised adaptation by the ABC in the '90s with Gary Sweet and Jacqueline McKenzie. The book is rougher - aside from a few specks of mud on occasion, neither Gary nor Jacqueline ever look worn down by the road!

On literary merit, I'd give this 3 stars. But the weight of history, and its oft-neglected place in the canon, bump this up to a 4 for me.… (mer)

Flaggad

therebelprince | Oct 24, 2023 |

Ride on Stranger av Kylie Tennant

According to the PEN Macquarie Anthology of Australian Literature edited by Nicholas José) (2009), which includes an excerpt from Ride on Stranger, Kylie Tennant was sued for libel over one of the scenes in it. In satirising the social life of the Communist Party of Australia, she apparently made one of her characters identifiable, so Angus & Robertson withdrew the edition and paid up £250. But unless that was included in Kerryn Goldsworthy’s Introduction to the 1990 A&R edition, I didn’t know that when I scrawled my thoughts in my journal. In 2006, I had not read anything else by Tennant, and as you can see, I was a bit dismissive.

6th October, 2006
Beware: spoilers

Written in 1943 and made into a tele-series in the 1980s, this is probably the most well-known of Tennant’s novels. In her day, I think she was as popular as George Johnson.

It’s the story of Shannon Hicks, whose father works in the butter factory and whose mother wanted something better for her daughter. It’s ironic then that Shannon ends up back in small town Kerluit (?sp) milking cows. Then again, maybe not, because she left school prematurely, and never stuck at anything.

She is destined to be alone and independent, and yet she is the one on whom others depend—because she has an innate ability to learn new skills and to organise. She goes to live at her Aunt Edith’s Sydney boarding house as an unpaid skivvy, but leaves when Edith marries a snake-oil salesman called Vincent Sladder (who eventually ends up in gaol.) Shannon goes on to work in a variety of jobs unworthy of her and nearly marries Quilter, for whom she organises a political campaign. She mixes with anarchists and lefties and has a harshly cynical view of the world. I didn’t like her much.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2021/01/24/ride-on-stranger-by-kylie-tennant/… (mer)

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anzlitlovers | Jan 24, 2021 |

The Honey Flow av Kylie Tennant

A reader needs to be a bit patient with this novel, the eighth from the prolific Kylie Tennant (1912-1988) but not IMO in the same league as the more well-known The Battlers (1941) and Ride on Stranger (1943). The first part of the book is taken up with explaining more than most of us want to know about the mechanics of bee-keeping by itinerant apiarists out in the Australian bush.

But once that’s out of the way, the novel settles down to what Tennant does best: quirky characters and a central female character who doesn’t fit the mould. Mallee, so named because that’s where she was born, is a tetchy loner who yearns to be a writer but instead has to keep the family afloat by writing drivel for a radio serial (not unlike Blue Hills, by the sound of it). And she wants to be a ‘boss’ bee-keeper among the entirely male company of migratory bee-keepers who travel about following the moving feast of blossom of the great eucalypt forests. She drives a truck called The Roaring Ruin, and for preference she sleeps on the ground in a sleeping bag, despite the protests of the occasional women she meets, who offer her a bed and a bath—and symbolically, a return to a ‘normal’ woman’s life.

Tennant was known for the authenticity of her writing. As Wikipedia says:

Her work was known for its well-researched, realistic, yet positive portrayals of the lives of the underprivileged in Australia. In a video interview filmed in 1986, three years before her death for the Australia Council’s Archival Film Series, Tennant told how she lived as the people she wrote about, travelling as an unemployed itinerant worker during the Depression years, living in Aboriginal communities and spending a short time in prison for research. (Wikipedia, viewed 3/11/18)

It’s common practice now to research for a book online, but IMO nothing replaces being there in order to write prose like this:

Of course when we settled down to extract, we fell naturally into two opposing parties, me and Joe in the extracting house, and Big Mike and Blaze out in the yard, working against each other for dear life. Having Big Mike instead of Mongo must have been sheer delight to Blaze, for Mike was a man who could work as smoothly and as well as he did, a man who never dropped the super on his hands as Mongo did, or trod on bees, or fell over Blaze’s feet. They shared their own jokes and catchwords and they kidded Joe to death. But the honey was coming off, and we were doing better than three tins to the hive, so the feeling of exultation and the pace of the work carried us headlong over any slight discords.
Besides, it was that gentle weather, with a bloom on it like a grape, the stillness of perfection when the year surveys its handiwork. We would drive out in the morning with the dew or the tender vapours of mist, and eat at noon in some sun-warmed hollow of old gold-diggings, with a screaming, plunging surf of bees about us and the smell of wild roses in the short grass the sheep had nibbled. Long after dark, tired and dirty, we would come home, singing, to eat steak and boil our overalls. (p. 141)

Tennant was never a city girl at heart. Her characters are working in the area about to be dammed by the Snowy Mountain Hydro and the engineer Lee Stollin is proud of it as a symbol of Australian progress. But Mallee isn’t impressed:

But what kind of country was he making self-supporting? A country where three-quarters of the people—more than three-quarters—lived in cities and worked in offices and factories, filling up sheets of paper or transporting other workers to their various jobs. What a life! (p. 119)

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2018/11/04/the-honey-flow-by-kylie-tennant-bookreview/… (mer)

Flaggad

anzlitlovers | Nov 3, 2018 |