Bitin' Back, by Vivienne Cleven

A twenty-one-year-old Aboriginal man wakes one morning and tells his mother he has become a woman.

All hell has broken loose in the rural town of Mandamooka. Single Aboriginal mother Mavis Dooley’s adult son, Nevil, wakes one morning and declares himself a woman. And not just any woman, he now insists on being known as Jean Rhys, the British author of Wide Sargasso Sea. Poor Mavis is thrown for a six. Has Nevil addled his brains with too many trashy American talk shows? When his Uncle Booty finds out that Nevil has taken to not only a new name, but wearing dresses and lipstick, he decides it’s time to toughen the boy up with a bit of extreme sport. The big worry is that Nevil has gone gay, but he calmly tells everyone he isn’t. Mavis does all she can to keep Nevil’s new identity under wraps, but this is difficult when nosey neighbour Mrs Warby is always peering over the fence, standing on her kero tin and asking far too many questions. Finally there is the local footy team, the Blackouts. Nevil is their star player, and they are trying to get him into practice for a big upcoming game.

If all of that were not enough, there is trouble at the local Bingo Hall where Mavis’s rival, Dotty Reedman, is making her life hell. Dotty is a nasty piece of work, accusing Mavis of cheating, competing for her romantic interest, Terry Thompson, and generally causing mayhem in Mandamooka society. It’s all too much for one woman to bear and Mavis fears that she might be losing her marbles. 

Bitin’ Back was Kamilaroi author Vivienne Cleven’s first novel, published in 2001. It’s been re-printed several times since then and is now part of the First Nations Classics series, by University of Queensland Press. The novel is narrated by Mavis in her own burly, broad accent, which propels the story at a great clip. She is incredibly funny, with a Chaucerian kind of energy. Mavis’s character also has touches of Nelly Dean, the redoubtable servant in Wuthering Heights who must singlehandedly battle chaos on every front. The novel’s strong comic aspects, however, act as a relief to the story’s alarming violence. It’s made clear that any divergence from the path expected of Mandamooka’s citizens - gender conformity, for one - will result in beatings and ostracism. Yet for all that Bitin’ Back feels like an affectionate, if unvarnished portrait of rural Queensland. 

In the end, the reasons for Nevil’s adoption of the Jean Rhys persona are explained, and all ends well. Bitin’ Back sometimes reads as a caricature of a novel - a mixture of the brutally real and the clearly absurd. Some aspects of the plot are far-fetched, requiring a suspension of disbelief, and near the end the threads of the story are stretched almost to breaking point. But that is only a minor quibble. Overwhelmingly Bitin’ Back is a great triumph, a success carried by the great Mavis Dooley, a true original in Australian literature. 

Bitin' Back, by Vivienne Cleven. Published by University of Queensland Press

JULY24