Very evocative of the landscape, climate and characters of the Mallee. 1950's attitudes to mental illness highlighted. ( )

This book is set in the Mallee in Victoria's northwest, a place of legendary hardship that was the subject of extended discussion over at Bill's blog, The Australian Legend. This discussion took place BC (Before Covid) and canvassed the idea of a literary trail in the Mallee, handicapped by us not knowing much about books and authors from the area. Since then I have read Small Town Rising, by Mallee born-and-bred author Bill Green, but Wearing Paper Dresses is not just authored by someone who spent her childhood in the Mallee, and not just set in the Mallee either. The Mallee is a character in the novel.

...you can talk about the Mallee: a land and a place full of red sand and short stubby trees. Trees short of leaves and short of shade and overall stunted from the effort of precarious survival. The Mallee is quiet on the surface of things in its own arid way, and seemingly insipid in its semi-desertness. With its emaciated trees, its restless shifting sand, its spear grass, its prickles and its prickle bushes. But it watches. Waiting for a chance to get rid of you. Clear off, you lot, it says. Go back where you came from. There are too many of you here already. There is no permanent fresh water in the Mallee. The Mallee won't allow it. (p.61)

This personification of the Mallee as a hostile, malevolent being, just waiting for an opportunity to break someone, is like the sabotage of Resistance fighters repelling invaders. Farmers who first came to the area and tried to clear it for ploughing had no idea what they were up against:

If you think Mallee farmers are stubborn you need to think again. You need to think about the Mallee. Life in the Mallee is a deceptive, delicate balance and proper husbandry of that balance is necessarily brutal. These farmers, though, are a hard-wearing lot. And they need to be, because the Mallee never gives up on sending hot winds and choking dust to blast sheds; salt and drought to ruin crops; blowflies and crows to torment sheep. Marjorie always knew that. She knew too about all those Mallee stumps: lurking below the dirt, waiting for their chance.

Mallee stumps can do anything. They can break a plough or damage a tractor or smash a man. And the farmers couldn't get rid of them. They put up a good fight in the early days, but it wasn't enough. The men, camping out there on their hot semi-arid selections with their swags and tents and their bright buoyant optimism, attacked that scrub with axes. And the scrub laughed while its skinny little trees grabbed those axes and ground down all that dour iron into stubs of their former selves. So the men tossed aside their dismal axes and took to scorching the scrub with fire. But that scrub just stared back at their fires and stood and sacrificed its limbs to the flames. Then it turned its back on all those men and went underground. To wait them out. So the men, getting the wrong idea about the insurrectionary tactic, were cheered, made confident by their fires and the downed limbs, and they decided it was time to plough up.

Which was what the Mallee had been waiting for. That underground Mallee attacked. Because those lurking insurgent Mallee stumps had been setting traps. They broke ploughs, they smashed seeders, they upended carts. They were ruthless and relentless as they hit out at men and horses alike. (p.59)

It took the late 19th century invention of the stump-jump plough to solve the problem. It literally jumps over the stumps hidden underground. That is because the mallee tree is a dissident. It does not have a trunk like other trees; and the Mallee root [...] is not a root at all. It is the trunk.

In other words, everything in the Mallee had to modify in order to survive. Mallee farmers have to be tough.

And people who survived knew austerity and frugality were paramount in the Mallee [...] you needed to conserve. Mallee people were frugal with water. But Mallee people were also frugal with behaviour. They were thrifty with their speech and prudent with their dress and parsimonious with their movements. (p.36)

But Elise, a girl from the city couldn't adapt. She loved opera and art and making beautiful dresses. She baked French macaroons instead of hearty British scones. She was profligate. She was lavish.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2021/02/15/wearing-paper-dresses-by-anne-brinsden/ ( )

Wearing Paper Dresses was a difficult read for me. I’m in the minority of people who didn’t like The Dressmaker, so the comparisons didn’t really help. I struggled with the first part of the book but made the decision to persevere to see if the book could stand on its own away from comparisons. The second half was much stronger and more dramatic but overall it wasn’t my cup of tea.

The story is about a family who move from the city to the country to assist on the family farm in the 1950s. Elise is truly a city woman and she’s far too glamourous for the women in the Mallee region who are suspicious of her coloured meringues and fashion. It makes for a lonely life, without friends and few supporters as it seems her husband is under the thumb of his father and initially neglects to realise the toll the move is having on his family. The daughters, Marjorie and Ruby, realise something isn’t right with their mother. At first they worry, but then they relish their freedom until it’s gone again. As the years pass, Elise’s mental health worsens and the men in the family ignore it or are blinded by other issues. Eventually tragedy strikes and the family are forced to confront what has happened.

I had some issues with the time period in the novel. It starts in the 1950s but later on, it sounds like it is almost in the modern day. Trying to keep track of Marjorie’s age was the way I tried to keep in my head the time period. The majority of characters were also quite unlikeable – Marjorie chooses to shock at times but sometimes I felt she chose to close her eyes to issues (perhaps following in the footsteps of her father and grandfather, the latter who needs to stop being such a pig). Elise was someone to be pitied at first, but her mood swings could be fearful. The townspeople were also downright cliquey and nasty to anyone who didn’t meet their idea of ‘normal’. In the end, my overall feeling towards the majority of the characters was anger. Anger that the way they deliberately closed their eyes and shunned others and chose to stay away from what they did not understand. I’d like to hope that things have changed in modern times.

Overall, there are some moments in Wearing Paper Dresses that brought out strong emotions for me. Other times I was confused and frustrated at the lack of events and realisation of the characters. The writing is well done and very polished for a debut novel.

Thank you to Pan Macmillan for the copy of this book. My review is honest.

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