Speaking is Burke’s third book. Her first book, Australian Women Artists 1840–1940 is one of the most significant contributions to art and social history in this country. Joy Hester is a fascinating study of a woman, an artist, and an era. I first read Speaking when it appeared at the end of 1984 and was happy to include it in a survey for the ABC’s First Edition of five significant novels that had appeared during that year. Its history of not being reviewed in ABR is a long and complicated one, with a Waiting for Godot quality about it. Of course, Godot never turned up. But she does in ABR. Having offered this review, I turned to reading Speaking with a strong sense of trepidation. What if my joy in reading it first time round was too much influenced by my euphoria in managing Christmas presents with only a little more than I could afford, in getting ABR to press with only mousey traumas. It is with great pleasure, and great relief, that I can say eighteen months later that not only is Speaking as good as I first thought it was, it is much better. The fact that this novel has been so little noticed raises a series of questions, from our reception of work from small publishing houses that can’t afford media hype to how comfortable we are with women writers who dare to speak out.

Speaking is a novel of the war of words. Lily Wolfe returns to Melbourne and meets up with Kate, Beth, Madeleine, and Pook and tries to reconstruct herself as the famous Lily Wolfe, student activist of the early 1970s. The Vietnam war had been her war and, with peace, she lost her sense of purpose, her sense of herself. Almost unnoticed by her as she searches for revolution, the most important revolution of our era – the women’s movement – passes her by. She finds herself, some new direction, in the land rights movement. Her four friends go through their own private revolutions, which are part of a larger social revolution. The five women talk and talk. Lily tries to find the words to rebuild herself of the past, her friends fight for the words to make themselves now. Burke offers a subtle and complex portrait of five individuals trying to find the words to find themselves.

This is a large and passionate novel, better and more important than lllywhacker, because Burke writes with more social and psychological insight, with more subtlety, with more complexity. On one level, this is a novel about the women’s movement. It is also part of that movement and one of its most important documents. But I don’t want to make the novel sound propagandist in any simplistic sense. I don’t want to put it in no man’s land (I use the words advisedly). It demands a large readership, simply because it is such a good novel. It seems to me that Burke has dared a large scale and brought it off. Not with flags waving but with colours flying. In general, for all the present richness of Australian fiction, writers have honed down their skills too far to the smallness of life, to the renovated terraces of Balmain and Parkville, to the small, precise emotions. Peter Carey’s strength is that he has gone beyond this, with superb inventiveness. His weakness is that he doesn’t have a great deal to say, especially about women. Burke’s strength is that she has a great deal to say, about both women and men.

Having pointed to Burke’s skill in painting a large canvas, I must emphasise how good she is at the little things. At the words and things that make up life. On how some kids like their Vegemite spread thin, others like it thick. Burke summarises the problems of a divided family: ‘Cass remembered fights where words came like hammers. She was glad they were over even if it meant the complications of two houses, two sets of toys and books, and handkerchiefs lost in between.’ After the breakup of her marriage, Pook has an affair in which ‘sex was the consolation prize’. ‘I’m living on the edge,’ she said, and for a while smoked unfiltered French cigarettes.’ In London, Lily lives on junk food and ‘forgets what vegetables look like unless a pea floats out from a pastie’. Burke’s language lives in both the small and the large things. Few writers have written about sexuality with such insight.

Most impressively, Burke has created five women who desperately, movingly attempt to create themselves, to talk themselves into individual being. Each has an individual voice. Beth has become a successful arts bureaucrat. She has struggled to present her lesbianism comfortably to an uncomfortable world. With a finely nuanced comic sadness, Burke describes a family holiday at Rosebud during which Beth attempts to contrive ‘a feminist dimension to the conversation to make it bearable’. ‘She gave her mother The Female Eunuch but she did not read it.’ Out in the suburbs, Kate has to cope with her doctor husband Fred, her children, and Malvern. In another sadly funny scene, Fred, incompetent in his incomprehension, asks rhetorically ‘Isn’t that what every artist wants? His own studio?’ Fred is locked, smiling kindly, in his own studio of incomprehension. Up in Canberra, Madeleine learns about power in a man’s world, only to find that going to bed with Minister Bob Smackett is a way to power but not to herself. Pook struggles with words, in her poetry, in her attempt to talk Lily back from her past into the present. Each voice is individual, each person lives in the words in which she attempts to find herself.

Janine Burke has written a novel of considerable significance. No, that’s wrong. Great significance. This is a book peopled with words. It is also a joy to read. And reread.