17. Tirra Lirra by the River

Writers belong to their time.  Jessica Anderson was born in 1916, and Tirra Lirra by the River was published in 1978.  If we wish to furnish the years between, we’ll need a world war or two, a depression, a terrifying nuclear bomb, and we mustn’t forget a couple of waves of the women’s movement, altering the consciousness of somewhat more than half the human race.  One way to see this change is to examine the claims made by activists demanding a different interaction of males and females, and a related and somewhat more cooling way to look at it is to ask how far, if at all, the clamour, the public disturbance, actually changed women’s lives.  Tirra Lirra is something of a case study in this respect.  It begins by bringing Nora Porteous, a woman in her seventies, home to the house where she was brought up, a Queenslander on stumps, with fourteen steps to get to the living quarters, and Brisbane around her, the city she couldn’t wait to get away from.  At the beginning of the book she’s back, and at the end of the book she’s still there. [read more]