Swallow the Air, by Tara June Winch. Published by University of Queensland Press in 2006. ISBN 0702235210, RRP $28.
Authors reading their works before an audience can usually anticipate a couple of questions. They will likely be asked whether their characters are based on real people and whether the events in the plot are autobiographical.
These questions are somewhat demeaning because they imply that the writer’s creativity is severely constrained. There are limits to the author’s imagination, and so older readers might wonder whether a young writer can adequately represent people and times that they have not experienced personally. On the other hand, the existence of the historical romance genre suggests that readers sometimes happily relax their scepticism.
Cross-cultural creativity may be another matter, and some Australian critics appear to be determined to spot the next Demidenko. While critics might legitimately feel obliged to expose frauds, it would be limiting if not absurd to expect writers to establish some special authority to create characters. Recently, a reviewer in a newspaper expressed admiration for the courage of a middle aged white male author writing about the thoughts of a young indigenous woman. This was fair comment, but it reminds the reader that the current critical paradigm has some odd priorities. In fact, there is no guarantee that one middle-aged white male can realistically reproduce the mind of another, and no one fictional character should be considered as a prototype for every young indigenous woman.
Tara June Winch has no such problems, and neither will most of her readers. The stories in Winch’s Swallow the Air are so personal that readers might wonder whether anything within is merely imaginative. Sometimes, it seems possible that such a young writer could have experienced the life extremes that Winch describes so vividly in her first person stories. Sometimes, you wish it were not so, because the mature reflections in this volume are so often sad, tragic and painful. In ‘Territory’ for example, narrator May Gibson fondly remembers her father fixing her mother’s bike. ‘He looks over to me and smiles. Perfect.’ But then, watching a bare knuckle fight she remembers how her mother was ‘a beaten person’.
‘Mum’s stories changed when he left. She became paranoid and afraid of a world that existed only in her head. Who was going to beat her mind?’
Her mother bottled it up ‘until one day all those silent screams and tears came