This month Stella celebrates Iris, longlisted for the 2023 Stella Prize.
To start with the most important question — what are you currently reading?
Mavis Gallant short stories – From the Fifteenth district, and Libération because I was just in France. Kim Mahood’s Craft for a dry lake and the catalogue for Desert Mob as I’m Alice Springs / Mparntwe to cover the festival. In Sydney, unfinished, Poof – JM Tolcher, Rock flight – Hasib Hourani.
What first drew you to Iris Webber’s story?
I saw her mug shot in an historical exhibition on (what we then termed) Gay and Lesbian Sydney. The information about her was minimal, and sensationalist. So I set off on my research journey to find out more.
You’ve brought Iris to life from within a history shaped by brutal systems (police, courts, the press) that often silenced or distorted the voices of people like her. Writing from her point of view, almost like a fictional autobiography, how did you navigate the balance between historical truth and creative invention?
I like that term fictional autobiography. I had a parameter of never altering the public record. Names, dates, events, places were all to be rendered with historical veracity. Within that is loads of room for imagination, because novels are propelled by the emotional journeys of your characters, and their interpersonal relationships. These things aren’t to be found in the public record.
Also, for people who held no power, who were criminalised, what was written about them was distorted by ignorance and bigotry. So parsing and interrogating that record (court depositions, police commentary in the gazettes, newspaper articles, etc) was necessary. In fact, once you’ve gone deep into it you are sometimes obliged to completely contradict it because it is so wrong.
I wrote something between what was probable and what was possible. Once you have learnt the material, you set off instinctively. You listen to what you have found and you let the novel find its way through you, as with any work of fiction.
(I dare say these brutal systems are still at work, even if the demographics of the marginalised and demonised have morphed.)
McGregor’s Iris is a bold example of literary craft that demonstrates a profound historical understanding of place and time.
The novel opens with a foreword about the language used throughout. What was it like writing in such a violent and visceral vernacular at times? What kind of research went into capturing that voice?
I read loads of fiction and non-fiction either written at the time or set in the time. Mostly Australian, but also foreign. I noticed the more contemporary writing often sanitised the language, and by extension people’s behaviour. I dislike that immensely, I think it is timid and even dishonest. It defeats the purpose of trying to explore and reveal the lives of people from the past.
So, I tried to get as close as possible to the source, and essentially I had to invent my own vernacular because every writer renders idiomatic language differently. Just reading Ruth Park, D’Arcy Niland, Kylie Tennant, Christina Stead and Louis Stone reveals this variety. I also had to draw from the language of the police and the media. It’s an act of listening more than anything, but with a very solid foundation of research.
What do you think Iris would make of Sydney today?
Great question. She would notice how big people are, with even, white teeth. She’d notice the botox. She’d be agog at the material wealth – the accoutrements we have, especially the technological ones. She’d be struck by the racial diversity, and how comparatively unsegregated the city is – and if she got on a train to the western suburbs she’d feel like she was in a foreign country. She’d notice how casually people dress, especially women – trousers, short hair, tatts. She’d be agog at how much food is available and how exotic the range is. And the cars, the new trams, the planes overhead. Maybe the biggest shock of all would be how fancy houses in Surry Hills are now!
But in a way, I don’t think the attuned person from then would be as shocked as we may assume. A person like Iris Webber might think it all through and find the logic of it easily enough.
What do you hope readers carry with them after reading Iris?
A feeling of the city beneath their feet as it used to be. A visceral sense of that, highlighting the way we live now by contrast. I want history to be something alive, and ever present. I want people to have a gritty and empathetic sense of lives then, to not romanticise or even try to redeem them. Just to be with them.
I also want people to understand the place of queer people, how we were treated and what it’s like to live as a pariah, and the tricky place of women who were not technically criminalised but suffered enormously. A corollary of that is the place of women in general.
I want people to look critically at the Anglo-Saxon majority, the very masculine, punitive and white supremacist culture we were founded on, and to consider the legacy of that. If you read about people directly affected by the Law then, you might consider more closely the lives of people in the present day affected by poverty and marginalisation. What are our systems? Our values? Who survives and who thrives?
About the Author
Fiona Kelly McGregor has published eight books, including Indelible Ink, which won the Age Book of the Year and was shortlisted for several other awards; Strange Museums, the memoir of a performance art tour through Poland; the short story collection Suck My Toes / Dirt, which won the Steele Rudd Award; and the underground classic chemical palace. Her most recent titles are the essay collection Buried Not Dead, shortlisted for the VPLA and the genre-busting photo-essay A Novel Idea. McGregor is also known for a large repertoire of performance art and event curation, and contributes regularly to The Saturday Paper, Sydney Review of Books and The Monthly, to name a few. When in Sydney, she lives and works on Gadigal land.
About the Book
In late 1932, Iris Webber arrives in Sydney looking for work but it’s the Great Depression and there are few jobs for women at the best of times. She makes her way as best she can, a scam here, a shoplift there, busking with an accordion. And she knows how to use a gun.
When Iris meets young sex worker Maisie Matthews, everything changes. But what options are there in a world where even on the margins, queer desire is harshly punished? The only way forward is paved with violence.
Whip smart, fierce, a woman far ahead of her time, Iris navigates these mean streets with a growing awareness not just of herself, but also of the system enclosing her: narrow, corrupt, brutally prejudiced. Yet there is still pleasure, sometimes even transcendence.
Based on actual events, narrated in gritty lyrical prose, Iris is a teeming social portrait of schemers, gangsters, goodtime girls and sly-groggers; a vivid resurrection of a city buried in the sands of time.
Judges Report
Set in Depression-era slums in Sydney, this work of historical fiction explores class, marginalisation, and Queer identity at a time when social mores were oppressive and violence was rife. The narrative imagines the life of the real (albeit obscure) Iris Webber and her contemporaries. McGregor does not shy away from depicting brutality, but ensures sex work and crimes of poverty are explored with nuance and depicted sensitively.
The evocation of voice and character development is exceptional. Capturing vernacular dialect on the page is notoriously difficult, and McGregor’s Iris is a bold example of literary craft that demonstrates a profound historical understanding of place and time. The experience of Iris – a woman defiant in the face of injustice, and fierce, despite hardship – in a time of economic pain, social uncertainty, and looming war, remains starkly relevant today.
Further Reading
Reviews
“A brawling, picaresque book by one of our foremost cartographers of settler Sydney.” Declan Fry, The Sydney Morning Herald
“Iris is an in-depth character study, as well as a vivid and panoramic recreation of a place and time.” Susan Sheridan, The Conversation
“An exhilarating squeezebox of a novel.” Felicity Plunkett, The Australian Book Review
Links
Read an interview with Fiona Kelly McGregor on Words Without Borders
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