GREGORY DAY Words are Eagles. Reviewed by Paul Anderson
Gregory Day’s writing is inextricably bound with the landscape in this collection.
Words are Eagles is a tonic selection of Gregory Day’s various non-fiction published in Australian journals, magazines and newspapers over recent years (roughly the period 2015 to date). It anthologises his excellent essays for the Nature Conservancy Australia Nature Writing Prize and dips into his wreading – ‘that is, the simultaneous and recursive synthesis of the acts of reading and writing’ – a term Day attributes to the American poet and critic Jed Rasula.
This is Day’s first book of non-fiction, after five novels and winning the 2020 Patrick White Literary Award for a body of work. I have sought after everything written by him since A Sand Archive (reviewed here). And now we have 25 pieces by him, curated between a single set of covers.
This collection has definitely been coming – of late his book reviews have centred place-literature and notable keywords such as psychogeography. Day has been thinking about the mimetic relationship between his locale and wreading for at least 30 years:
When I was in my early twenties and sitting on that bungalow step [in 1988], a correspondence began to form between the depth of feeling I experienced in the bush and oceanscape around Aireys Inlet, or Mangowak, and the emotional and visual response I was beginning to have to certain works of fiction and poetry.
The genesis of this book arguably goes further back. In the award-winning opener, ‘The Watergaw’, Day traces the arrival of his Irish and Sicilian great-great-grandparents – James and Mary Day, and Antonio Denerio – to the district in the 1840s. This is a pivot he returns to in a number of stories in the book while remaining insistent that this is First People’s land, Gadubanud and Wadawurrung country. Words are Eagles is the resultant admixture of autobiography and postcolonial cultural study: part personal, part linguistic, part locale.
Aireys Inlet, in the Eastern Otways region of southwest Victoria, is Day’s piece of dirt. His first three novels – The Patron Saint of Eels, Ron McCoy’s Sea of Diamonds and The Grand Hotel – are set in Mangowak, a fictional coastal township. They are fabulist, jaunty, and surreal character-driven fictions grounded by their setting. However, the main themes of Words are Eagles – attachment to place and the language of that place – are real-world and include ‘what WH Auden called topophilia – or place-love’.
First Nations’ elders inform us that their language belongs to Country, that language and culture are synonymous. Day uses his study of the endemic Wadawurrung language to show how intervolved it is with place. Day writes from the riverflat of the Painkalac, and reading this collection you feel that he knows his place: ‘Here … where we become the place that we are.’ His writing is indigenous in a literal sense therefore, or autochthonous, a place-word he deploys a couple of times.
Day is a delightful logophile. Neologisms and conjoined and hyphenated words abound without getting prolix. He can bring in subjects – like ‘a biophiliac yearning to somehow sensually match the feeling or physical sensation of the space’; and ‘the still emerging discipline of ecolinguistics’ – and his thinking on the page is clear.
The book is split into three sections: the first is Day’s nature writing (loosely defined); the second his exegesis of his place-writing; and the third related book reviews. The second section is the heartland of Words are Eagles. It comprises four lyrical pieces which, read as a continuum, are an insight into Day’s creative practice, and what he refers to as ‘the “response-ability” of literary forms’. This section can be thought of as the origin stories of his writing: his novels and songs are in perceptual correspondence with the land and sea about him.
‘The Ocean Last Night’ and ‘Otway Taenarum’ are connected essays originally published, a year apart, in Meanjin. They are neatly stitched together in this collection with two others, ‘One True Note?’ and ‘Being There’, essays originally published in the Griffith Review. In ‘The Ocean Last Night’, Day describes a night at the (real) Grand Pacific Hotel at Point Grey (in Lorne) in remembrance of his grandfather’s stay there in 1937. Evocative and sonic, it links three Day generations (grandfather – William, father – Adrian, and son – Gregory) and could be an outtake from his novel The Grand Hotel. Day explains the book’s totemic title in ‘One True Note?’, and it’s also a master key to the importance of Wadawurrung language as a mother tongue. The eagle embodies Indigenous cultural knowledge that is sacred, part of an oral as opposed to a written language. Day posits that it is a first language, and English a second, when he is writing from and about his locale. In a refrain in ‘Otway Taenarum’, he muses, ‘What next? What now? How to write, to sing, to say?’
Day’s two essays for the Nature Conservancy Australia Nature Writing Prize, which begin the first section, are exemplary. ‘The Watergaw’ won in 2021 and ‘Summer on the Painkalac’ was shortlisted in 2019. The first is an all-encompassing father-son-on-a-country-drive story inspired by the poem of the same name by Hugh MacDiarmid. The second is an insouciant situationist joy-to-read, which includes a Descartes joke that is somehow not out of place. Two childhood friends enjoy a reunion swim together, a spot of breaststroke, a dérive up and down their childhood river on New Year’s Eve. The mood is reverent: the great outdoors. Its atmosphere and precision make this a stand-out. Day can be flash with the botanical:
Anyway, today there are no roos down amongst the brookweed tendrils, no threat amongst the palette of glaucous goosefoot and the summer-reddened glasswort. And so we swim smoothly by.
As here, Day’s descriptive writing can be beautifully pointillist, but more than that, oftentimes it seeks to explain its roots – its etymology, its biogeography, its interconnectedness with place. In another story, ‘The Colour of the Ground’, he searches for a Wadawurrung descriptor instead of the English word ‘jarosite’ (a type of mineral). And he has fun in a meta-essay, ‘Moonah Mind’, trying to disentangle his own word choices.
It is evident in the third section that Day also has a knack for multi-book literary criticism. There are superb primers on Patrick Modiano and Colm Tóibín, and in each of them Day synthesises a handful of the author’s novels. ‘Idling in Green Places’ is a way to trace ‘a lineage of Australian nature writing over the last hundred years’: Harry Saddler, Alec Chisholm, George Seddon, and by extension, Tim Flannery. These pieces are emblematic of Day’s wreading choices, as are his poetics. Several Australian poets are reviewed – Judith Beveridge deserves a mention – but Day has an affinity for modern Celts, in particular here for the Orcadian, George Mackay Brown. Brown’s Collected Poems is one of the ‘Mislaid Books of the Sea’ that Day reviews in a brilliant multimodal essay published in Great Ocean Quarterly. It starts with a review of the nineteenth-century American writer Sarah Orne Jewett’s novella The Country of the Pointed Firs, which resonates with Ron McCoy’s Sea of Diamonds: ‘the ideal of a quietist novel perfectly suited to the gentle pathos often found in tiny sea-gazing towns’. Indeed this piece may offer a clue as to how to read Words are Eagles. It reformats a couple of the same stories told elsewhere in the collection; there’s no problem with the repetition of course, one would expect such overlaps, but for some it may be a downside if reading from cover to cover. Alternatively, you could cherrypick, as every piece is a standalone. There are few misfires, but ‘Mere Scenery and Poles of Light’ is long and associative, straining to connect Cézanne, Bach, William Buckley and David Unaipon as walkers (of the Moolacene: Day’s alt-word for the Anthropocene epoch). If you want to quickly get where Day is coming from you could first read ‘Betraying the Loch’, specifically noting:
[Robert] Macfarlane’s point is that language has the power to situate us, to ground us wherever we are and get us noticing the organic world.
The collection ends with a heart-stopping afterword which, suffice to say, involves a platypus. It links to the motif of the eagle, first explained in the author’s foreword. They are poignant bookends.
Taking these writings as a whole, Day seems to be at peace with where he’s at, connected in every sense to the ocean and the land and its first language. This uplifting selection of his non-fiction is further proof that Day is a significant author, and a self-reflective one, deeply respectful of place – ‘this river I call home’ – and the relational nature of language. Words are Eagles (it’s a great title) soars with wit. Day completists and good wreaders will appreciate its erudition and deft humour, whichever way they choose to read it.
Gregory Day Words are Eagles: Selected writings on the nature and language of place Upswell Publishing 2022 PB 320pp $29.99
Paul Anderson is a freelance editor. He was one of the editorial committee for the 2020 UTS writers’ anthology Empty Sky published by Brio Books.
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