indecent assault on boys, Chatswood, Aug 28, 1952 courtesy Justice and Police Museum Collection |
And on the fringes, where the city meets the bush, there are places forbidden. Where women are exploited. Making films for soldiers to leer at. We’re drawn to Chinatown. The rooms above the shops. There’s the smell of blood. Closet abortions. The allure of smoke. Men with potions. A place to drift. We join a civilian chaplain who’s on the beat with detectives. Down at Central Street Police Station. He records the daily grind. The small confessions. The advice of cops. The places where crime happens. Murders, beatings, opium, prostitution, porn.
These are the dark spaces inhabited by Ross Gibson’s latest work of fiction, The Summer Exercises—part of UWA Press’s New Writing Series, which encourages innovative texts by emerging and established Australian writers (including Josephine Wilson, Emily Ballou, Fiona MacGregor [RT88, p40] and Sue Woolfe). Gibson comes from a background as a curator and producer of film and interactive media, and along with being former creative director of ACMI, he has also created installations (in collaboration with Kate Richards) for a series of exhibitions based on the collection at the Justice and Police Museum in Sydney: the major immersive audiovisual installation Bystander in 2008-09; and the installations Darkness Loiters in 2001 and Crime Scene in 1999-2000.
The Summer Exercises surfaced from Gibson’s research at the museum and its style is alive and manic in a meld of Peter Corris-pace and place, and the hardboiled terseness of Raymond Chandler—so hot the pages feel they are burning in your hands. Here there’s no nostalgic reminiscence about a bygone era; this is a dark and dirty Sydney, somewhere to try to escape from, not to return to. A stinking city of stifling heat, the kind of place where:
a competition has brewed up among the beat constables: tally every type of rain that can fall on this town.
Rain that is:
cutting
sandy
the size of a coin
smelling of sleep.
And along with a city gone to ruin, there’s an assault on the landscape of the body: the shot memories of a detective cowed and beaten, rediscovering his senses (“Imagine there’s some bladder in the brain and it’s squirting his past life back to him”) and putting himself under interrogation (“What does your flesh have stored up for you?”); the lament of a detective close to retiring (“Pain is rusted on to his lower back. Corrosion has both his knees now”); the intimate meanderings of our chaplain as he watches women dance, on film in tents, tries to resist, subjugated to their peachy flesh:
On the rump of a woman in the burlesque club tonight:
The faint outline of a man’s thumb
+
an intimate welt given by a flicked strap
+
high up where the thigh hinges—some pale skin that promises the taste of pear or vanilla
The only hiccup to the intensity and sophistication of the writing is the fictionalised Publisher’s Notes that interrupt the chaplain’s observations. These notes reflect meanings back to us before we’ve had a chance to discover, like a full stop to our imagination; it’s as if the writer is scared the reader will get lost in the seeking. But the searching is what keeps us enthralled.
death by accident, Carncleuth St, Kings Cross, Feb 9, 1954 courtesy Justice and Police Museum Collection |
And by the end of the book, the nature of the images is revealed in the List of Illustrations (don’t search them out at the beginning). These are photographs of crime scenes (or places of suspicious activity) where the violence is generally absent: “Man killed by fall, Room 202, Hotel Metropole, Sydney City, 19 March 1954”; “Drowning of family, Sugar Loaf Bay, Middle Harbour, 28 May 1959.” But the sadness, the melancholy, the fear—these emotions linger in the images themselves, traces of disturbia that inform the book’s mood and create a resonance that stays with us, like “an impossible pebble afloat in bubbling water. Disobedient to gravity. Opiate pebble. Blue smoke going in, grey smoke going out.”
Ross Gibson, The Summer Exercises, UWA Press and Historic Houses Trust of NSW, 2008, UWA Press New Writing Series, www.uwapress.uwa.edu.au/fiction
RealTime issue #91 June-July 2009 pg. 55
© Kirsten Krauth; for permission to reproduce apply to [email protected]