David Foster (novelist)

Foster, David (c) photograph by Zoe Foster

David Manning Foster (born 15 May 1944) is an Australian novelist. He is one of the most adventurous writers of his generation, publishing a range of satires and considerations of the decline of Western civilization. He has also published short stories, poetry and essays, and several of his radio plays have been produced.

Life

He was born in Sydney and spent his early years in Katoomba, the largest town in the Blue Mountains.^[1][2] His parents, George and Hazel (née Manning) Foster were vaudeville and radio performers who separated before his birth, and he was raised, in his early years, by his mother and his maternal grandparents. In 1950, he spent six months in Katoomba hospital recovering from poliomyelitis, a disease that left him with a slight limp. His mother married a bank officer and Foster attended high schools in Sydney (Fort Street High School), Armidale and Orange as the family moved from city to country towns.^[3] At Orange High School he began playing drums professionally in a jazz dance band. He began studies at the University of Sydney in Arts in 1961, leaving them after a year to work and travel.^[4] He returned to the University of Sydney the next year, changing studies to Chemistry. In 1964 he married his Orange High School girlfriend, Robin Bowers. They had three children, Samantha (born 1968), Natalie (1969) and Seth (1973).^[5] Foster worked part-time as a musician and as an engineer at Marrickville Council while he completed his degree. He was awarded the University Medal for Inorganic Chemistry in 1967 and moved to Canberra for a PhD (1970) at the Australian National University. At the end of this degree, he went to Philadelphia to pursue postdoctoral studies at the Institute for Cancer Research, the University of Pennsylvania. During this time he began to write his first novellas, later published in North South West (1973). Back in Sydney in 1972, he worked as a Research Officer in the Department of Medicine, University of Sydney, before abandoning science for a career as a novelist. Since then he has supported himself and his family by various work as a pool attendant, musician, postman, truck driver, martial arts instructor and trawler fisherman^[6]

After the publication of North South West by Macmillan, Foster was awarded an Australia Council Fellowship. In 1974 he left his wife and family to live with Gerda Busch, the singer in the Canberra jazz band where he played drums. They moved to the country town of Bundanoon, where they married and had three children, Antigone (1975), Levi (1976) and Zöe (1980).^[5] Foster worked as a postman at Bundanoon for many years, and his Dog Rock novels provide a comic version of the town.

Writing

Foster’s first collection of novellas was well-received, and his first novel, The Pure Land (1974) won the inaugural The Age Book of the Year prize. The novel is strongly autobiographical as it traces the experiences of the young scientist Danny Harris in America and Australia. At the end of the novel, Danny has abandoned science and appears to be inventing the novel in which he is a character. His grandfather, Albert Manwaring, has left his life as a photographer in Katoomba to seek success and, finally, spiritual purity in America; Danny, born in America, reverses the journey to find a Pure Land in Australia. The novel satirises both the grasping materialism of America and the backward colonialism of Australia. This novel was followed by another collection of stories Escape to Reality (1977) which pursued Foster’s interest in masculine irresponsibility and the paradoxes of science and art. With a fellow scientist at the Australian National University, called ‘D.K. Lyall’ (Des Kirk), Foster published The Empathy Experiment (1977), a strange exploration of paranoia in the context of scientific experiments in empathy.

A 1978 Marten Bequest enabled Foster to travel to Scotland to research Moonlite (1981), his acclaimed satire on colonialism, which places the experiences of Scottish islanders during the clearances of the nineteenth century in paradoxical comparison with the colonising of Australia at the same time. Plumbum (1983) uses Foster’s experience in jazz bands to satirise the contemporary Western adulation of rock musicians, contrasting this fervour with the various religions of Bangkok and India. The Adventures of Christian Rosy Cross (1985) is a burlesque historical satire on the paradoxes of religious belief following the picaresque adventures of Christian as he searches for the philosopher’s stone. Dog Rock: a Postal Pastoral (1985) offers a more benign comedy as Foster examines the trivia of an Australian country town like Bundanoon. A second Dog Rock novel, The Pale Blue Crochet Coathanger Cover (1988) continues this nostalgic view of a disappearing rural life with particular reference to the misuse of animals. Testostero (1987), inspired by a residence in Venice in 1984, uses the convention of the separated twins to satirise the cultural differences between Britain and Australia, with a third possibility represented by Italy. Among its many allusions and parodies, the novel invokes the traditions of Carnivale and Carlo Goldoni’s play,The Venetian Twins.

After the Australian Bicentennial celebrations of 1988 Foster published his own satire of the state of contemporary Australia in Mates of Mars (1991). The novel follows a group of martial arts enthusiasts as they travel from Sydney to the Northern Territory and encounter a spiritualism that challenges their various beliefs and attitudes. The characters represent a multicultural Australia, and demonstrate the novel’s premise that ‘Australians are not just members of the internal proletariat of...Western Christian Civilisation ( a civilisation now decrepit, that can never take Colonials seriously) but also, in certain key aspects chiefly, but not exclusively, economic, barbarian members of the external proletariat of the Sinic Mahayana Buddhist Civilisation, in its Westernised Japanese/Korean/Colonial Chinese branch, on the southernmost march of that civilisation'.^[7]

Foster used the support of an Australian government Creative Fellowship awarded in 1991 (a ‘Keating’ award) to research his monumental The Glade Within the Grove (1996). Narrated by the postman of Dog Rock, D’Arcy D’Oliveres, this novel examines the destruction of the native forests of Australia and the decline of Christianity in the context of pre-Christian religious beliefs. Set mainly in the ‘revolutionary’ year of 1968, the novel speculates about a group of hippies who set up a commune in the South Eastern forests of Australia. The novel’s accompanying poem,The Ballad of Erinungerah, claims to be the work of a child of the commune and describes the visit of the goddess, Brigid, and her demand that the men castrate themselves. The novel celebrates the forests in lyrical descriptions, satirises the stupidity of the communards and translates snatches of classic texts into Australian vernacular. It is celebratory, satirical and elegiac. Later, Foster published under his own name an essay ‘On Castration’ in Heat magazine, that incorporated part of the novel as it argued that male sexuality is a destructive force that needs to be controlled.^[8] This obsession is evident in all Foster’s work after Mates of Mars. His novel In the New Country offers a comic and despairing view of the decline of rural life in Australia, comparing it to the corresponding decline of spirituality in the Old Country of Ireland. The Land Where Stories End is a fairytale about a woodcutter in Ireland who goes on an impossible quest for spiritual purity.

In 2009 Foster published Sons of the Rumour, his most ambitious and original novel to date. Modelled on the structure of the One Thousand and One Nights, it changes the storyteller’s role from Shahrazad to a group of men travelling through the 7th century city of Merv. Richard Burton's Arabian Nights are transformed into Iranian days. Foster creates a comic structure for the stories with his rather Australian bickering couple the Shah and Shahrazad, but the stories are imaginative adventures, sometimes puzzling, sometimes grotesque and often wondrous. For example, ‘The Mine in the Moon’ imagines a world without women, where boys grow up without maternal comfort; ‘The Tears of the Fish’ describes an orgy and castration ritual; 'The Gilt Felt Yurt' measures the loss of freedom in the creation of civilization and settlement. In the course of the stories the Shah undergoes an education in spiritualism and sexual understanding. A final section of the novel moves to the present day where a modern man undergoes a visionary experience in Ireland. Reviewing the novel for Australian Book Review, James Ley concluded, 'There is simply no one remotely like him in contemporary Australian fiction. He is so far ahead of everyone else that it's not funny. Except that it is funny--very, very funny'.^[9]

Awards

• 1974: The Age Book of the Year Book of the Year and Imaginative Writing Award for The Pure Land
• 1981: National Book Council Book of the Year for Moonlite
• 1991: Australian Government Creative Fellowship (Keating)
• 1997: Miles Franklin Award for The Glade Within the Grove (It was translated into German)
• 1999: Courier-Mail Book of the Year for In the New Country
• 2010: Patrick White Award

Selected works

Novels

• North South West (1973) [3 novellas]
• The Pure Land (1974)
• The Empathy Experiment co-authored with D.K.Lyall (1977)
• Moonlite (1981)
• Plumbum (1983)
• Dog Rock: A Postal Pastoral (1985)
• The Adventures of Christian Rosy Cross (1986)
• Testostero (1987)
• The Pale Blue Crochet Coathanger Cover (1988)
• Hitting the Wall (Penguin, 1989) [2 novellas]
• Mates of Mars (Penguin, 1991)
• The Glade Within the Grove (Vintage, 1996)
• In the New Country (Fourth Estate, 1999)
• The Land Where Stories End (Duffy & Snellgrove, 2002)
• Sons of the Rumour (Picador, 2009)

Poetry

• The Fleeing Atalanta (Maximus, 1975)
• The Ballad of Erinungarah (Vintage, 1997)

Non-fiction

• Studs and Nogs: Essays 1987-98 (Vintage, 1999)
• A Year of Slow Food with Gerda Foster (Duffy & Snellgrove, 2002)

Notes

1. ^ Williams, M. (2000). "Guide to the Papers of David Foster". Australian Defence Force Academy Library. http://www.lib.adfa.edu.au/speccoll/finding_aids/foster_david.html. Retrieved 2007-05-11. 
2. ^ >Lever, Susan (2008.). "David Foster: The Satirist of Australia". Cambria Press, Youngstown, N.Y. pp.9-13.. http://www.cambriapress.com/cambriapress.cfm?template=4&bid=178. 
3. ^ 'David Foster' compiled by Annabel Frost. Australian Country Style (March 1996). pp.18, 20.
4. ^ Foster, David. 'Aggression in Sleepy Hollow' Australian Book Review 65 (October 1984). pp.9-10.
5. ^ ^{a b} Lever, Susan. 'David Foster'. Australian Writers: 1950-1975. Dictionary of Literary Biography. vol. 289. pp.79-80.
6. ^ Foster, David. 'Like Spinoza the Philosopher' Toads: Australian Writers: Other Work, Other Lives. Ed. Andrew Sant. Sydney, Allen & Unwin, 1992. pp.72-84.
7. ^ Mates of Mars. Introduction. Penguin, 1991.
8. ^ 'On Castration' Heat 4 (1997) pp. 7-19. Reprinted as 'Castration' in Studs and Nogs Random House, Sydney, 1999, pp.117-129.
9. ^ [1] James Ley. 'A town called Merv' Australian Book Review November 2009 p.16

References

• Helen Daniel. 'The Alchemy of the Lie: David Foster', in her Liars: Australian New Novelists Penguin, Melbourne, 1988 pp.77-104.
• Ken Gelder. 'The "Self-contradictory" Fiction of David Foster' in Aspects of Australian Fiction, edited by Alan Brissenden, University of Western Australia Press, Perth, 1990 pp.149-159.
• Stephen Harris. 'David Foster's Moonlite: Re-viewing History as Satirical Fable--Towards a Post-Colonial Past' Westerly 42.1 (1997) pp.71-88.
• Marilla North.'Postman's Knock: Is David Foster a Clever Dick--or What?' Meanjin 56.3/4 (1997) pp. 686-696.
• Andrew Riemer. 'Bare Breeched Brethren: the Novels of David Foster' Southerly 47.2 (1987) pp.126-144.
• Narelle Shaw. 'The Postman's Grand Narrative: Postmodernism and David Foster's The Glade Within the Grove' Journal of Commonwealth Literature 34.1 (1999) pp.45-64.

External links

• Brief Biography & about some of the novels
• David Foster discusses The Land Where Stories End
• Critical study Susan Lever's critical study David Foster: Satirist of Australia (Cambria, 2008)
• [2] Susan Lever ‘Displaced from the Sacred Sites: David Foster’s In the New Country and The Land Where Stories End ’ JASAL 8, 2008.
• [3] Susan Lever 'A Masculine Crisis: David Foster's Mates of Mars ' in her Real Relations: The Feminist Politics of Form in Australian Fiction Halstead Press, Sydney, 2000, pp.120-130.

Persondata
Name	Foster, David
Alternative names
Short description	Contemporary Australian novelist
Date of birth	15 May 1944
Place of birth	Katoomba, New South Wales, Australia
Date of death
Place of death