{"id":1830,"date":"2022-02-14T06:33:49","date_gmt":"2022-02-14T14:33:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/?p=1830"},"modified":"2022-02-14T06:33:49","modified_gmt":"2022-02-14T14:33:49","slug":"pivotal-times-and-their-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/2022\/02\/14\/pivotal-times-and-their-books\/","title":{"rendered":"Pivotal times and their books"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been thinking all day about Louise Lawrence\u2019s first novel, Andra<\/i><\/a>. I read it when it was first released in 1971. I was ten and there was one scene where Andra (the protagonist) was addressing a crowd and winning them over. That scene helped me become a bit more political and when Gough Whitlam became Prime Minister of Australia in 1972, I could hear some of the devices used in Andra\u2019s speech in what he said. Whitlam was an amazing speaker and very witty, so the combination of the book and the politician were big influences on me.<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t why I was thinking of Andra<\/i> today, however.<\/p>\n

Andra<\/i> is a political novel. It\u2019s science fiction, about how teenagers handle authoritarian governments and about how governments talk and listen and where everyone fails. That was my reading of it when I was a child then again when I was a teenager, anyhow. It was a novel I read for comfort whenever anything politically challenging happened.<\/p>\n

For two weeks now, my city has been visited by protesters. The unruly mobs causing problems in many capital cities have not spared Canberra. We normally support demonstrations here, but this one is different. If you want to know just how different and why it\u2019s so very uncomfortable, find me and chat about it. While many of the protesters are probably exceptionally nice and simply want a better world, there are enough seriously disruptive and difficult people among them to turn a crowd into a mob. A mob during a pandemic is not a good thing.<\/p>\n

I need a novel that\u2019s as important to me now as Andra<\/i> was in the 1970s. I don\u2019t know if one exists, or whether I need to write it. If I have to write it, I haven\u2019t reached the moment where I know what is critical in it. All I know is that something in me needs a book that touches that emotional trigger and makes it possible for me to think past the politics of this strange situation and to reach the heart of it.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s funny, because when I was ten I needed the opposite. I needed a novel that taught me that politics existed and that words could address it and that not everything worked out well all the time.<\/p>\n

If I find that book that I need, I might have to compare it with Andra<\/i> and to discover how fifty years of my life has shaped me. Or maybe I\u2019ll discover what fifty years in the world has done to our image of politics. Andra<\/i> was written soon after the 1968 student protests and in the middle of the Cold War. In years leading up to Andra<\/i> humans travelled in space and landed on the moon. The Chicago Seven were put on trial and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty changed international relations. The Beatles broke up and Hutt River Province seceded from Australia. I didn\u2019t know any of this, of course, but Andra<\/i> was published in one of those pivotal times when everything changed. This is why Whitlam became Prime Minister, in fact. We used to sing \u201cIt\u2019s time\u201d<\/a>\u00a0 \u2013 the election jingle that helped persuade voters to choose a different party to the one that had ruled for 23 years.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re in one of those times now. No-one told me when I was ten just how uncomfortable pivotal periods can be. I hope I find that book.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been thinking all day about Louise Lawrence\u2019s first novel, Andra. I read it when it was first released in 1971. I was ten and there was one scene where Andra (the protagonist) was addressing a crowd and winning them over. That scene helped me become a bit more political and when Gough Whitlam became […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[335,166,6,56,7],"tags":[429,431,430],"class_list":["post-1830","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-2","category-covid-life","category-fiction","category-life-experiences","category-sciencefiction","tag-andra","tag-gough-whitlam","tag-louise-lawrence"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1830","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1830"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1830\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1831,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1830\/revisions\/1831"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1830"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1830"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1830"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}