Australian authors Nicholas Jose and Michelle de Kretser, who were in Shanghai for the city's first mini literary festival, explore the questions of what it means to be an Australian writer today, writes Zhao Feifei.

　　What could Nicholas Jose and Michelle de Kretser possibly have in common? Jose writes stories set in Shanghai, China and Australia's far-north aboriginal communities. De Kretser's first novel was a romance set in the 18th-century France; her second is a mystery in the 1930s Ceylon (modern-day Sri Lanka).

　　The answer came at a panel on contemporary Australian literature, organized by the Australian Consulate General to Shanghai: Both Jose and de Kretser are Australian writers. Jose, a 52-year-old writer who speaks flawless Chinese, raised the thorny question of defining Australian literature: "Australia recently signed free trade agreements with the United States, and there was a lot of concerns during that negotiation about how Australian culture would be affected. "To answer that, we would have to answer what Australian culture is, and what's its subset -- Australian literature?"

　　A loaded question. Jose began answering it by reading out a list of novels, which included the most celebrated novels in the English-speaking world over the last year. The list began with Booker Prize winner "Vernon God Little: A 21st Century Comedy in the Presence of Death," by D.B.C. Pierre, and continued with "The Great Fire," a novel by Shirley Hazzard, which won the National Book Critics' Circle Award last year, J.M. Coetzee's "Elizabeth Costello," which won the 2003 Nobel Prize for Literature, "The Bride Stripped Bare" by Anonymous, a huge international best-seller, and Michelle de Kretser's "The Hamilton Case" which won the 2004 Commonwealth Writers Prize Best Book Award. "What do those international successes have in common?" asked Jose at the forum, who now is the Sydney president of the international writers' association PEN.

　　"They're all written by Australian writers in some sense or other. Hazzard is an Australian expatriate in New York; Coetzee is a South African with Australian citizenship; Pierre was born in Australia to English parents and raised among American expats in Mexico; Anonymous is actually Australian novelist Nikki Gemmell; and De Kretser emigrated to Australia at 14 years old. "These books in one way are Australian, but in other way, the origins of them are not Australian.

　　What they all are are global English novels, and they have a dual identity in some ways," he added. Jose has a long, deep relationship with China. His grandfather was born in China, and his great-grand-father was a missionary to China in the 1890s. It was this family link and the letters and diaries of his great-grand-father that inspired Jose's novel, "Avenue of Eternal Peace" which was published in 1989. Back in Australia, he studied Chinese as a hobby. He taught at the Beijing Foreign Languages University and at the East China Normal University in Shanghai from 1986. In 1987 he served as Cultural Counselor at the Australian Embassy in Beijing. "I was actually in a hospital in Shanghai when the job offer came," he recalls.

　　"I had been burning the candle at both ends, teaching writing and spending a lot of time on my bicycle exploring Shanghai. I got the job because of my interest in Australian studies in China and a lot of work that I had done during those years."

　　Jose says that he was inspired by China in two different ways. The nation itself inspired him to write about it, which resulted in the novel "The Red Thread." But it was also China that enabled him to look at his own country from a different perspective, which yielded the memoir, "Black Sheep."

　　An ambitious undertaking, "The Red Thread" picks up where the classic Chinese literary work "Six Records of a Floating Life" leaves off. This modern text weaves an imaginative and compelling tale, with a cast of characters that faithfully parallel the lives of those in the autobiographical account of the life of the 19th-century poet and painter Shen Fu. The title itself pays homage to a passage in the original text that recounts the myth of the "old man of the moon" who, in Chinese folklore, is believed to arrange marriages using a red silk cord to bind the hearts and souls of man and woman together.

　　The story of "The Red Thread" begins in an upscale auction house in Shanghai, where an up-and-coming young art appraiser, Shen Fuling, is approached by a collectibles dealer to consign the original manuscripts of "Six Records of a Floating Life" for auction. Shen begins reading the ancient documents and soon becomes enthralled by the story of Shen Fu and his beloved wife, Chen Yun.

　　He meets a waifish young artist, Ruth Garrett, who wanders into the auction hall. As the story unfolds, while reading the manuscripts together, Shen and Garrett simultaneously relive the history of Shen Fu and Chen, with similar settings and circumstances. Despite its reliance on "Six Records of a Floating Life" for the plot, "The Red Thread" stands on its own as a work of contemporary fiction. The story is embellished and supported with abundant excerpts from the original text, thus allowing the readers to appreciate it without having to read the tale upon which it is based. "Black Sheep" sets out to discover Roger Jose, a distant relative of Jose, and his life in a remote aboriginal community on Australia's farthest shore, reading world literature and evolving his own radical philosophy. Roger Jose's motto, still pinned up in Borroloola, was "Man's greatness is the fewness of his need." De Kretser, on the other hand, has no Chinese connection whatsoever -- this is her first trip.

　　She proclaims herself enchanted with Shanghai, saying she can feel the magic, despite having been here for only two days. A former Lonely Planet editor, she loves to seeking out the old part of the city. She went to antique street, Dongtai Road, where she puttered around for half a day. "People who live in the city are caught up with their lives and what's happening contemporarily. But for tourists, it is the charm of the old. A lady was selling fresh bean curd from a cart on Dongtai Road. It's so lovely," she says. De Kretser just won the 2004 Commonwealth Writers Prize Best Book Award for "The Hamilton Case," narrowly beating New Zealand writer Maurice Gee's entry "The Scornful Moon." The winner, a mixture of murder mystery and family saga, draws readers into a tale of intrigue and loss set in Ceylon during the 1930s. It is the story of Sam Obeysekere, an embittered lawyer whose admiration for all things English extends even to English murderers, whose crimes, he believes, come slowly to fruition, cunningly plotted over weeks and months.

　　The Hamilton Case of the title is a "White Mischief" murder scandal that shakes the upper class of the island society, and cleverly demonstrates the effects of colonialism and addresses questions of identity for both the individuals and the country on the brink of nationhood. Obeysekere's involvement in the case makes his name, but paradoxically ensures that he will never achieve his ambitions. "I always try to avoid banality, but unfortunately the only way to avoid it is to work hard. I rewrite sentences obsessively," she explains. "There are three complete drafts for `The Hamilton Case' and about 50 rewrites for every chapter."

　　With the publication of the book, de Kretser has confirmed her reputation as a novelist of breadth and verve, with a capacity for storytelling about complex worlds that are beyond, and yet part of, the Australian experience. "Is this an Australian novel? I think my book is concerned with philosophical and intellectual questions that all came out of my education in Australia, all the readings and thinking I've done.

　　If I stayed in Sri Lanka, as a girl, I would not have the educational opportunities that I had in Australia, and although my novel is not about Australia, to me it's very Australian. It was produced by the fact that I've lived in Australia." Works by Nicholas Jose: "Black Sheep" (2003) "The Red Thread" (2000) "The Custodians" (1997) "The Rose Crossing" (1994) "Avenue of Eternal Peace" (1989) "Paper Nautilus" (1987) "Rowena's Field" (1984) "The Possession of Amber" (1980) "Feathers or Lead" (1986) He co-translated "The Finish Line" by Sang Ye (1994) and "The Ape Herd" by Mang Ke (included in Poems for the Millennium, 1998). Works by Michelle de Kretser: "The Hamilton Case" (2003) "The Rose Grower" (1999)