Tirra Lirra by the River by Jessica Anderson

The dressmaking provides her, belatedly, with the means of earning her own living. What sustains Nora through these bad years is the imaginative space she creates through her design and dressmaking work. His insistence on a divorce shocks her out of depression and frees her. On moving with him to Sydney, she is happy at first in bohemian Kings Cross, and then miserable, trapped in her mother-in-law’s desperately respectable suburban house. Her adolescent longing for something more than dull suburban existence with her mother and sister push her into an ill-considered marriage to the genteelly sadistic Colin Porteus. Within this narrative framework, the events of Nora’s life are presented through her emotions. The novel shuttles back and forth between present and past events, and between ‘truthful fictions’ and traces of the repressed, as Nora tries to set the record straight, to recover memory from the distancing imagination. Now she cannot entirely control the spinning globe, and along with the ‘truthful fictions’ she has told so often to amuse or shock her London friends come unbidden memories of events she has relegated to the dark side.

She has been accustomed to resisting these ‘accidental flicks’, which open onto dark patches on the obscure side of her ‘globe of memory’.

In her feverish state, Nora becomes possessed by her memories, some consciously recalled, others which return suddenly, evoked by a sight or sound. Her parents, brother and sister are all dead, and neighbours care for her when she falls ill. The novel opens as an ageing woman, Nora Porteus, returns after a long sojourn in London to the Brisbane house in which she grew up. Anderson, who died in Sydney on 9 July 2010, was the author of seven novels and a volume of stories, but it was her fourth published book, Tirra Lirra by the River (1978), which won the Miles Franklin Award and made her name as an Australian writer. But why don’t we hear anything about it today?’ This was a young journalist who had been assigned to write Jessica Anderson’s obituary. ‘Everyone I talk to remembers Tirra Lirra by the River as a wonderful book, sometimes even as a life-changing one.

Tirra Lirra by the River by Jessica Anderson