It’s 1965. The Sydney Opera House – still a shell – has become a national scapegoat, slandered in the media and grumbled about in pubs. Its extravagant design and escalating cost has made it emblematic of the divide between the haves and have-nots, and tipped it into the centre of a battle between Labor and the Liberals. The ongoing tenure of Danish architect Jørn Utzon pokes Australia’s xenophobia in the funny bone. Newspaper cartoonists have a field day.
The glittering sails loom large over Kristina Olsson’s hotly anticipated third novel, Shell.
“It’s set in the year that Utzon was really falling in public estimation and we’d gone into Vietnam,” she explains. “The idea of those two things happening at either end of Macquarie Street [home to Parliament House] seemed to me quite shattering.”
Shell has two protagonists, one Australian (as is Olsson’s mother) and one Swedish (as is her father). Olsson uses them as a dual perspective on the national temperament. In the mid-60s, Australia might be experiencing a countercultural revolution – including the women’s lib movement – but the boot of paternalism is bearing down all the harder.
For the crime of being photographed at an anti-war protest, journalist Pearl Keogh is exiled to the women’s pages, writing about the Royal Easter Show, hats at Randwick and recipes for meat loaf instead of the Freedom Rides and the Wanda beach murders.
It was a common punishment for unruly female journalists, Olsson says, and not confined to that decade. Not only had her publisher at Scribner, Fiona Henderson, been subject to the same purgatory during her years as a journalist, but Olsson herself was sidelined as a newspaper staffer. “One night, one of the early coups in Fiji blew up. I was the only graded journo in the newsroom with a passport, and they sent the sports editor.”
The prose of Shell is a world apart from flinty news writing. It has a sensory aesthetic and a gentle fluidity, even when skewering Australia’s old guard. Its other protagonist, Axel Lindquist, is a glass artist working on the Opera House and is as languid as Pearl is hot-headed. He’s the recipient of low punches from the characters he encounters in Sydney’s bars, who feel aggrieved that Sweden played a neutral role in the previous war. Similarly, his emotions are parked in neutral from a past trauma.
Pearl’s two younger brothers disappeared into the welfare system when their mother died, and are now of conscriptable age. She pulls every string to find out more about the upcoming draft, and the desperation of her hunt for them in part comes from her shame at letting them slip away. Shame – in its many forms – has its tendrils all through the book.
Regular readers of Olsson will be familiar with this theme. She has previously written about her mother’s experience of having her infant son, Peter, snatched from her arms by her abusive husband as she tried to escape by train. When the family was reunited with Peter 40 years later, it was he who urged Olsson to write the memoir Boy, Lost.
“Three quarters of the way though writing that book, there were still all these questions,” she says. “How could a child be stolen in broad daylight in a public place, and no one help? All those times when someone could have intervened to help my mother or Peter.”
Upon hearing a radio program about the Forgotten Australians, she realised denial was a national phenomenon. In 2009, a year after the Stolen Generations Apology, the Australian Government delivered a National Apology to the Forgotten Australians and Former Child Migrants. It acknowledged that an estimated 500,000 children were placed into institutions, children’s homes and orphanages until the end of 1989, with a further 7000 or so child migrants who had been similarly stolen.
“Kids were removed from their families for being poor, basically,” Olsson says. “I started to see, this is why no one helped; because just about every second person was losing a child, and this was the kind of country we were. There was absolutely no feeling for maternity or childhood. We’re still removing Aboriginal children, at a faster rate. We paper over it; we don’t deal with the losses and the results of those losses on those who lose, and those who are lost.”
Olsson re-read Donald Horne’s The Lucky Country, written in 1964. “He kept talking about the way we referred to ourselves as if we were one big homogenous mass. Everything was flattened to the lowest common denominator.”
Not much has changed, she reflects. “It’s interesting to watch how we deal with shame. In some ways, shame allows a kind of violence in yourself and an anger. There’s self-protection that clicks in, and it means that you’ve got to prove to yourself that you’re not ashamed.”
The gleaming tips of the Opera House become a metaphor for this notion. “I got interested in the whole idea of shame being like a shard of glass in the national belly,” Olsson says. “If we dug in and looked at those shards of glass it might allow us a different way of being in the world.”
This year marks the centenary of Utzon’s birth and also the Opera House’s 45th birthday, both of which are celebrated with a program of activities from 13 October. Olsson believes that one of the architect’s intentions had been to return sacredness to Bennelong Point: a ceremonial site at which shell middens had been found. At a state memorial for Utzon in 2009, representatives of the Darug People gave his family a shell painted with ochre, and a message stick decorated with a star to represent Jørn. In return, the Utzon family presented gifts of petrified flint that the architect had kept on his desk, and a small Inuit canoe.
“One of the reasons people couldn’t cope was that he uncovered the sacredness of the place,” says Olsson. “It wasn’t just a big blocky thing for opera. It was this extraordinary shape that made people think, and made even the hardest people walk around and around it, wondering at its meaning. But it also made people angry.”
• Shell is out now in Australia through Scribner
