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Author: Delia Falconer, Acting Head, Creative Writing, University of Technology Sydney
Original article: https://theconversation.com/remembering-brenda-walker-245840
Vale Brenda Walker, 1957–2024
I first met Brenda Walker in 1995 at Varuna Writers’ House in Katoomba, where she was working on her third novel and I was working on my first. The yellow house above the cliffs had been the author Eleanor Dark’s home. Her annotated research books were still on the shelves and her son’s gilded baby shoes on the mantel.
Within days, we had struck up a deep and sustaining friendship. In an early draft of Brenda’s novel Poe’s Cat (1999), I was the writer who climbed to the widows’ walk to watch the clouds. But Brenda was fearless in making swift cuts as she arranged strands of calm unspooling prose. In the final version, the too-close cousins Thea and Finn meet in a house that is still modelled on Varuna, with its long rhododendron-lined driveway, but it has become a dead relative’s half-abandoned home.
Across her five-book oeuvre, which included the novel The Wing of Night (2005) and the memoir Reading by Moonlight (2010), Brenda’s writing and speaking voices were strikingly alike: tranquil, sharply observant, buoyed by a light sense of wonder.
An assiduous journal keeper, she would often take details of the environments in which she had lived – the northern rivers of New South Wales, Sydney’s inner east, Perth – and tip them into heightened patterns of human light and shade. Over the years I would look forward to hearing her voice on the phone from Perth, or in texts or emails, often recounting a dream or funny detail that she thought would give me pleasure. During a terrible time in my life she would keep me alive with her steadying calls, bringing firmness and courage to the act of navigating with me through my loss.
When the Soviet literary critic Viktor Shklovsky fell in in love with Elsa Triolet while he was in hiding in Berlin, she would accept his daily letters only on the condition that they never mention his romantic feelings. Yet Shklovsky’s lively dispatches to Triolet about writing, art, and German and Russian life, still crackled with the forbidden emotion, all the stronger for its suppression. Shklovsky’s novel Zoo, or Letters Not About Love, published in 1923, was a touchstone book for Brenda, who delighted in its tension between lovesickness and restraint, its transformation of exile and rupture.
But it was Samuel Beckett, whom she discovered at 19, who was her lodestone, and key to the dance of lush and strict in her own writing. Reading the Irish writer’s minimalist prose aloud, she wrote, allowed one to slip into a calm state that had nothing to do with resignation. She admired Beckett for his “great capacity to steady himself, to live with simplicity and steadiness whatever the circumstances. Nothing can be achieved otherwise”.
Brenda Walker was born in Grafton in 1957, the younger sister of two brothers. The family’s house on the river had a resident poltergeist, which, as she recorded in fictional form in the story Mrs Holland, she would sometimes hear her father gently chiding. The enduring motifs of her writing life were laid down in this lush riverine environment.
In a primal scene that Walker memorialised in different texts, her father dived in deep floodwaters to free the tow rope of the boat that would take the family to safety. Dreams of unstable water, she wrote in Reading by Moonlight, would recur throughout her life.
Brenda’s childhood was also marked by stories of young rural men lost on the battlefields of two world wars and the tough women who waited for them. Among the living ghosts who did return was Walker’s paternal grandfather, his face badly maimed by shrapnel. When she was 14, she moved with her mother to Armidale. The mummified head of an Egyptian girl resided in a wooden box in the school library. It would appear often in her writing. So too would characters living in coastal cities, who felt the pull of rural hinterlands where deep practicality coexisted with hidden damage.
After completing her undergraduate degree in Armidale, and her PhD on Beckett’s fiction at Australian National University in Canberra, Walker moved to Perth in 1984 to take up a lectureship at the University of Western Australia; she would rise to the position of Winthrop Chair of English Literature and Cultural Studies, the first female professor in the history of the department.
In 1990, she won the Tag Hungerford Award for a work in manuscript and her novel Crush (1991) was published by the Fremantle Arts Centre Press. An experimental crime novel about storytelling and fathers told in a springy, condensed prose, it drew lightly on her academic work on writing and gender.
For fellow writer Deborah Robertson, her forensic but tender writing brought a fresh eye to the city. “Her mordant wit, the lash of her intellect, her felt understanding of perversity and corruption and the unseen – they all worked to penetrate a city that was otherwise hard to see and understand – all that blinding light, erasure of memory, bullying wealth.”
Now part of an astonishing generation of young Western Australian women writing lyrical, ambitious fiction, Walker published One More River (1993). In the novel, her unconventional narrator Faith Bright goes on the run with her young bloke from her river-island home in northern New South Wales to Sydney’s gritty Kings Cross, familiar territory to Walker, who visited her musician brother there often in the 1980s. The novel was adapted for screen and the script went through various stages of development but the film remains unmade.
Poe’s Cat, published in 1999, balanced the contemporary story of Australian cousins Thea and Finn against Edgar Allan Poe’s marriage to his 13-year-old cousin Virginia Clemm. The novel continued Walker’s exploration of gender and storytelling as Thea appropriated characters from the novelist’s disturbing oeuvre into tender stories that aimed to “put the love back into Poe”.
Based on research Walker undertook as a visiting fellow at Stanford and Virginia universities, the novel also established an enduring north American connection. NYU-based critic Nicholas Birns described Walker as one of the three best prose stylists in Australia. Poe’s Cat was shortlisted for the Victorian and New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards.
The Wing of Night drew on childhood stories of war-damaged men and women, though Brenda was also thinking of the second Gulf War. The novel shifts obliquely between the horrors of horseback warfare for the Australian Light Horse men and animals on the Middle Eastern desert battlefields of World War I and the women on Western Australian farms waiting for them. It earned an Asher Award for a novel with an anti-war theme for its invocation of the ongoing harms of global violence. Its surefootedness belied its difficult completion during Walker’s treatment for breast cancer.
Brenda would write about the books that sustained her during the treatment and recovery from this breast cancer in her memoir Reading by Moonlight. Looping with a clarified intelligence through a lifetime of reading and living, it was intended for other readers who might need to find the company of the right book in times of crisis. She loved novels, she wrote, for their sense of human largeness – “where dream and memory, impulse, unforeseeable events and helpless longing are part of otherwise rational lives”. The book brought her new readers and won the Nita B Kibble and Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards.
“I thought this may be my last book but I seem to have survived,” Walker told an interviewer, “and the book marks a point of division in my life and work. I was very interested in the Australian response to war, in Australian rural life, and in the historical novel. I’m still interested in these things, but the projects I am working on are more contemporary and autobiographical or stimulated by my immediate circumstances. My memoir helped me to see the value of that.”
Walker published her creative work while sustaining a demanding academic career, in which she also achieved significant academic publications, including editing books on gender and poetry and the writing of Elizabeth Jolley. She also edited and contributed to the anthology Risks, which drew together short fiction by major authors of the 1990s.
She is remembered as an inspirational teacher and supervisor of PhD Research, with many published authors stating that they would not have begun their careers or found the courage to publish without her.
Former colleague, Yasmin Haskell, UNESCO Chair in Intercultural and Interreligious Relations at Monash University, remembers Brenda as an “‘esprit de finesse’, whose mind and conversation bubbled with curiosity about literature and art from Ireland to Italy, Russia to Japan. She cherished her friendships with colleagues from Classics, Italian, History, Fine Arts and Philosophy.”
Walker’s influence in building Australian writing with knowledge, skill and kindness extended beyond her state. In addition to her work as a mentor for Varuna, she was a member of the Australia Council’s Literature Board from 2012 to 2014 and chair of the judging panel of the national Stella Prize for women’s writing from 2016–2017.
In the days since her death, I have heard from many writers who received generous letters of encouragement, unbidden, in a spirit of solidarity. One recipient described being in the same room as her at the many festivals to which she was invited, in Ubud (Bali), Cheltenham (UK) and Australia, as “magical”.
Yet Brenda’s readers may be unaware of the significant body of short work that she produced before and after her retirement as emeritus professor.
These stories and essays – which explore key preoccupations of risk, motherhood, and the steadying forces of family and music – appeared in one-off Australian collections like Carmel Bird’s Daughters and Fathers and international literary journals. The story The Houses that are Left Behind, in the journal Kenyon Review, won a prestigious O Henry Prize.
Alexander Ruskulis/Penguin Random House
I had the joy of commissioning work from Brenda twice for Best Australian Stories. Big Animals, about a mother and recovering daughter visiting Ubud, with its giant funerary animals and grim elephant shows, remains a personal favourite. Our mothers, she wrote, are our first big animals. Brenda’s joy in being a mother to her son Tom shone from many of these short works. “In the night the baby and I turn about each other like the planets,” she recorded in one essay, “as we shift from one breast to the other.”
In her last published works, two essays for the Times Literary Supplement, Walker enlisted her beloved Beckett to think about accelerating climate change and the future of the planet. The essays loop out across the dried-out gardens of once-lush Armidale, literature, the violence of colonial settlement, and Brenda’s desk in her Perth apartment with its view of the Swan River.
The world comes to us through sound, she wrote from her quiet city, cut off from the rest of the world by the pandemic. Like Beckett’s Molloy, she hoped she might be able to hear “the far unchanging noise the earth makes”.
This acute attunement to sound, in the form of music, was another gift from her “large steady family” in the east and another deep wellspring of her craft. The piano that echoed through the timber hallways of her childhood often made its way into her fiction, especially the arabesques, with its counterpoint and rapidly changing harmonies.
Daily work at the piano in the apartment near her beloved Kings Park, where she was settled happily with her husband Alex, was a joy. “Yesterday my exacting teacher said, ‘You are in full control of this piano!’” she reported in August. “And I WAS.”
It is as unthinkable that there will be no more work of Brenda’s to read as it is that I can never speak with her again. A new novel, recently begun, was to be set in northern New South Wales and she was working on its separate pieces, in microcosm. We would meet again to write together soon. Perhaps in Rome, she messaged.
Keep in mind: streets lined with fruiting mandarins. An old man with a cat in a harness on a bus stop bench taking a little bottle of water from his backpack and a tin and pouring the cat a sip of water. These things are more precious than the Sistine Chapel.