Unpretentious Gem

(Image from theage.com.au)

As part of the VATE (Victorian Association for Teaching of English) State Conference which I've just been on for the past 48 hours, I was fortunate enough to hear two Australian writers speak. The first I will not name, not because there's anything wrong with him, but because I'd rather not sound like I'm criticising him personally. However, I will say this about him: he is a successful film and television actor who has recently branched out into writing, starting with his memoirs, and then putting out a novel last year. He was an incredibly charismatic and engaging speaker, and, judging by what he read of his novels, he has quite a skill with telling a story. He had us all entertained with the extracts he read.

That being said, there was something about listening to him speak that made me quite uncomfortable, and for a while I couldn't put my finger on it. For the first half of the night, he spoke about a film he had acted in, a certain award-winning Australian film written and directed by his wife, now on the Year 12 VCE English syllabus and taught in almost every Victorian school. As he described the movie as "a great film", "a wonderful piece of cinema", etc., I resisted every (very Australian) temptation to think of him as self-aggrandising, a "tall poppy". Why shouldn't he be upfront about the movie being great? I asked myself. After all, it was other people's work he was acclaiming more perhaps than it was his own. He spoke very highly of his wife, and of his fellow actors, and did not say anything particularly arrogant about his own performance.

Then came the moment when he moved onto talking about his books, which he did so with a bit of a mumble, and some posturings of humility. "Well, I my might just go on about me books for a while," he said, a couple of times. Explaining why he had decided to start writing, he made the following comment: As an actor, he said, you have a "used-by date". So the trick is to recognise that, and "bridge the gap between when you start to go off and when you become a nice bit of yoghurt". The metaphor was a funny one. We all laughed. Mumbling some more, he tried to cover up the point at which he started reading from his book. He then entertained us all with a reading. It was clever; it was touching. We laughed; we didn't exactly cry, but you get the idea.

Yesterday, I had the great privilege of listening to and meeting the lovely, 26-year-old Australian writer Alice Pung, author of one of the most well-received first novels of the last couple of years, "Unpolished Gem", an account of growing up in Melbourne's Western suburbs in a Cambodian immigrant family. Alice had a beautiful Western suburbs accent, spoke simply, with the occasional grammatical slip, but with clear intelligence. Her description of the novel was humble, straighforward and entertaining. It was quite an intimate, personal experience to sit only metres away from her while she described a book that revealed so much of her life and personality. When the woman chairing the discussion asked her to read from her book, she seemed a little embarrassed, had no passage chosen beforehand, but read clearly and with simple but striking flair. The readings were unembellished and touching, and all the more expressive for being unprepared.

Later in the session, I took the opportunity to ask her a question. Having heard her speak a lot about the pressure to succeed in a migrant family and the impact this had had upon her, I wondered if her first novel had now brought up a new kind of pressure to succeed for her. Was she being pressured to write another book? How did that make her feel? When she answered this question, I was able finally to put my finger on what had made me feel uncomfortable by the previous night's author. Alice described how her Buddhist faith - not about religion as much as a way of life - makes her think about what is best for others rather than herself. She had written this first book, she said, because she had something she wanted to offer society, particularly migrant communities. She would only write another book if she thought she had another one worth offering to society.

The difference was clear. The first author wrote because he wanted to remain in the public eye, and his talk, despite all his attempts to appear down-to-earth and humble, was influenced so clearly by that. Alice, on the other had, wrote because of what she thought her writing could offer others. Clearly an introvert, she had no need to be in the public eye. She just had something worth expressing.

I bought a copy of the book, and very much look forward to reading it. I think I'll read the other author's memoirs sometime as well, but I know which author I preferred meeting.