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260 Chapter 15 Creditable or Reprehensible? The Literary Journalism of Helen Garner Willa MCDonald The ReaCtions By critics and the general public to the literary journalism of Helen Garner, one of Australia’s leading writers, demonstrate that writing reportage with the eye of a novelist raises professional and ethical challenges. Garner’s nonfiction, while masterly in its use of language, has a history of drawing heated comments from the mainstream Australian media but little attention from the academy as the subject of literary analysis. While she has many champions, Garner remains a controversial writer to many critics , such as Katherine Wilson, Matthew Ricketson, Virginia Trioli, and Inga Clendinnen, for the way she utilizes fictional techniques in the portrayal of factual situations, concentrates in her work on the subjectivity of the narrator, and, consequently, displays her personal politics.1 It is uncomfortable territory for those who prefer their reportage straight and who distrust emotional analyses in favor of the rational. This essay examines some of the critical reactions to Garner’s writing, in particular her long-form literary journalism, and proposes that her work has provoked censure when it has refused to follow traditional journalistic conventions ; chosen not to establish a clear contract of intention with its readership ; privileged the exploration of the writer’s emotions over intellectual frameworks; and challenged traditional notions of subjectivity and objectivity . What I hope to demonstrate is that a closer engagement with Garner’s nonfiction by academic critics would be a fruitful contribution to the field of literary journalism. An Uncommon Career The extent of the antipathy aroused by Helen Garner’s work is a testament to her abilities and influence as a writer/journalist. Her career trajectory has been an unusual one. While many writers aim toward the publication of successful Creditable or Reprehensible? The Literary Journalism of Helen Garner 261 novels as the pinnacle of their ambitions, Garner shifted in midlife to concentrate on writing nonfiction exclusively. Her first five books—Monkey Grip (1977), Honour and Other People’s Children (1980), The Children’s Bach (1984), Postcards from Surfers (1985), and Cosmo Cosmolino (1992)—were acclaimed works of literary fiction, her writing at the time largely supported by freelance journalism. In the 1960s she had worked by day as a high school teacher, writing in her spare time while participating in the collective that produced the alternative fortnightly magazine The Digger. Her future as a teacher, though, was permanently terminated in 1972. The cause was an article she wrote for the magazine about a series of impromptu sex education sessions she held with her thirteen-year-old students at Fitzroy High School. The frankly written piece, which seems relatively tame today, became part of an obscenity trial that forced The Digger to close in 1975.2 Undeterred—and perhaps encouraged—Garner continued to write journalism over the years. Though never formally trained as a journalist, she wrote prolifically for mainstream publications including the Age newspaper and Time Australia magazine. In 1993 she won her first Walkley, Australia’s most prestigious journalism award, for her Time article about domestic violence, “Did Daniel Have to Die?”3 The story focused on the death of a two-year-old at the hands of his stepfather, in particular the failure of the child’s mother, and the twenty or so professionals and concerned individuals surrounding the boy, to take any action to protect him. The award roughly coincided with her third marriage, to the novelist Murray Bail, and her shift toward writing only nonfiction for the next fifteen years. This was so as to leave the novel-writing turf to Bail, Garner commented offhandedly at a bookshop reading in 2008.4 In 1995 Garner produced her first book-length work of literary journalism, The First Stone: Some Questions about Sex and Power. As will be discussed in more detail later in this essay, the book was highly controversial both for its politics and for its breach of journalistic conventions, with Garner adding a fictional element to the nonfiction text. Two collections of Garner’s feature articles were to follow: True Stories: Selected Non-Fiction, which came out in 1996, winning the Nita Kibble Literary Award, and The Feel of Steel, which was published in 2001.5 Then in 2004 Garner brought out her second nonfiction book, Joe Cinque’s Consolation: A True Story of Death, Grief and the Law.6 Although some academic reviewers remained unpersuaded about the value of her nonfiction work, continuing to distrust its...

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