Review: This Water by Beverley Farmer

At the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art this year I encountered a beautiful artwork: in a dark room, an array of hung strings threaded with crystals like droplets, glittering in the low light. Underneath, a train of grey stringrays, carved and painted realistically from wood. It was one of those artworks that provoked immediate wonder and feeling — the question, what does rain on the surface of the ocean look like to those underwater? — deepened by artist Abdul-Rahman Abdullah’s explanation that it refers to the death of his beloved grandfather.

Beverley Farmer offers a similarly striking scene towards the end of A Ring Of Gold, the first that makes up this collection of five watery tales. That image is so exquisite and well-earned by the work that has come before that it floored me on first encounter. It, too, is a representation of grief. Farmer has introduced the ideas that make up the image earlier — stingrays under the jetty (“can they see up through the smashed water?” she wonders, “Might as well be under glass”), reflections and shadows, the play of light with water, loss:

Sometimes at home a presence seems to amble up beside her, keeping her company, some vast and benign presence, ponderous, resplendent, just under the surface of the everyday, like the stingrays — a surface as clear as day, as sea, and yet, like sea, so covered in facets and flares of light that only shadows show through.

“The underwater, another world half-hidden in this one,” Farmer writes, and in each of these five tales the boundary between worlds becomes shaky, a trembling membrane where myths, memories and ghosts might gather. She pursues water, following its flow. In A Ring Of Gold it is the Southern Ocean and its wonders on the Bellarine Peninsula in Victoria, where a woman whiles away the seasons swimming in the cold water and walking the coastline. Then we’re taken somewhere very different, the cold, green damp of Celtic myth (Farmer worked on these tales at a residency in Ireland). In the title story, a young woman reneges on her betrothal for a younger man, knowingly incurring a lifetime of pursuit and a debt to be repaid. This is followed by The Blood Of Her Red Silks, in which four children are cursed by their step-mother to live as swans for 900 years. Tongue Of Blood gives voice to the shade of Clytemnestra, the wife of King Agamemnon, whose daughter Iphigenia was sacrificed so that the king’s navy could sail for Troy. Ice Bride seems an otherworld part-Frozen, part-Frankenstein, a polar place and time, in which the Master of Ice and Snow keeps his bride imprisoned in a translucent castle on the ice. Women transgress in various ways. These are often bloody tales; Farmer is a fine writer of a queasy kind of horror.

These are stories of knowing and feeling the world. The woman in A Ring Of Gold ponders her memories of books. The swan-children encounter a Christian man, rendering their tale a swansong for an older way of knowing. In the final tale, where the ice bride awakes without past in the long polar winter, her knowledge of the world utterly at the mercy of her master. “By herself she knows nothing,” Farmer writes, but gradually the world changes and so does she. At first she believes there are several moons that cross the sky, but she sees that “there is a pattern the moon weaves over the stars, a repeating and developing pattern” that she compares to a timepiece. When day finally arrives, it is “a round, red-gold apparition”.

Like the ice bride, Farmer is attuned to the materiality of even the most fantastical of her worlds. Wandering the underground, Clytemnestra finds that:

only here in the upper caves may a crack

of light, a scrape of blood

seep down to me in long threads

like the roots that grasp

cut in midair

turned to immortal stone

or sweet water trickle down to me

or a nipple of stone that swells as I close

my mouth

over one drop

The swan-children, returning from centuries of exile to fly over their kingdom, find it has been reduced to “only high mounds of green fur”. Later they settle on a lush wooded island where:

the mushrooms come alive underfoot in the wet woods as if from the otherworld, in shapes like shreds of firelight frozen to flesh, lips and earlobes and, each in their quick season, scallop shells, corals, sea urchins, winkles, sponges and jellyfish, petals, gemstones, woolly caps and domes and bells, pearls, moonstones, snake heads, moth wings, rags of dried blood and red silk in the green ivy and the leaf litter. Quick to emerge, quicker to shrink back.

Blood, silk and spiders, fire, reflections and shadows, gold — Farmer builds her images through layered motifs, suggesting connections between otherwise disparate tales. I was astonished by her ability to capture like a photographer or painter what is before her characters’ eyes, particularly the play of light, the way the shadows of leaves “make a fine openwork”, the way waves create a “net” of light on the sea floor. On the southern coast, the woman climbs a dune and sees a vista, “the sea is rising to a height of horizon, a blue wall right across, with a toy ship on top, tossed high in the air.” Later she crosses a rocky platform beneath a lighthouse:

at any time of day when the reef lies open at low tide the rock pools at the foot of the cliff have a lighthouse in them, columns superimposed, twitching and fraying in the water light, fuming away like salt.

It’s enough to make you believe that the otherworld may be closer than we suppose.

Gay rating: not gay