1994 Winner - "The Grisly Wife" by Rodney Hall

Commenting on the winner's novel, the Judging Panel wrote:
"Rodney Hall’s The Grisly Wife is a novel with a rather surprising vision. In it he interrogates that curious kind of mind which desires things to be the way they are said to be, and observes what happens when that is found to be not so. For this is a place where astonishing things happen. Given this is about an unorthodox religious group, a band of, as it happens, deformed women led to colonial Australia by a bizarre zealot, this could have been a grimly gothic tale; but it is not. For example, the repressions are all redeemed by the heroine’s comic self-possession and the poetic power of her narrative. Essentially, Hall distinguishes between the fundamentalist and nonconformist cast of mind, and that is a very unusual subject for an Australian writer."

Miles Franklin Literary Award 1994 Shortlist

The Grisly Wife, Rodney Hall
Remembering Babylon, David Malouf
Water Man, Roger McDonald

Judges' Report

"Forty-three books were submitted for the 1994 Miles Franklin Literary Award, various in kind and about all sorts of things: thrillers and romances, satires, chronicles, quasi-documentaries, allegories, novels conventional and unconventional, mischievous and serious, realist, serialist and surrealist. To our surprise, pianos figured in quite a number of these: that may be fortuitous, or it maybe an important cultural marker. Who can say? It is not clear what this means; but possibly a piano should not mean, but be. Of these entries, six in particular attracted the Judges’ attention as outstanding, or having, in the terms of the Conditions of Entry, “high literary merit”.

This list was further narrowed, after careful consideration, to a final shortlist of three. It is this final list that the Judges comment on at the Award presentation; not books which did not make the final list, even if they have been the occasion of recent media speculation.

Rodney Hall’s The Grisly Wife is a novel with a rather surprising vision. In it he interrogates that curious kind of mind which desires things to be the way they are said to be, and observes what happens when that is found to be not so. For this is a place where astonishing things happen. Given this is about an unorthodox religious group, a band of, as it happens, deformed women led to colonial Australia by a bizarre zealot, this could have been a grimly gothic tale; but it is not. For example, the repressions are all redeemed by the heroine’s comic self-possession and the poetic power of her narrative. Essentially, Hall distinguishes between the fundamentalist and nonconformist cast of mind, and that is a very unusual subject for an Australian writer.

Hall’s is a world of the entered imagination. David Malouf consciously reflects on the world of story. In Remembering Babylon he returns to his previous concern with the shaping power of language: is it possible to lose a language? are we determined by the language we speak? Can we get inside another order of experience through language - as say, the language of bees? And is it the saying of things, or the power of belief, that changes circumstance? What is the language for here and how may we speak with each other? It is a novel that raises big questions; a remarkable and beautifully written novel, calling attention to sounds, reverberations, patterns of light, so that it becomes in effect like a piece of theatre, a dramatised meditation perhaps, presenting itself as inclusive spectacle.

Roger McDonald’s Water Man looks for its reverberations not in legend and not in quasi-allegorical poetic fabrication, but in the interchange of generations - a revision of the world of saga. He has a particular talent for description, for getting at the distinctive subtlety of this country’s difficult beauty. He modifies the romanticism, and anti-romanticism, of the conventional pioneering novel: these are latter-day pioneers, and this is a world of weak heroes. Knowledge and wisdom are hard to come by. McDonald is intrigued by the possibility that balances between experiences open out, rather than close off, possibilities: balances between generations, between moral forces, between town and country. These balances are not, however, closed equations. We, like his many characters, all make different sense and use of the past, just as we all have different pasts to make sense and use of. And all this is caught up in a familiar but still powerful symbolic theme, the necessity for a permanent source of water - with all the traditional resonances that has."

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