Books and reading
Island life: ‘Spirit of the Crocodile’ by Aaron Fa’Aoso & Michelle Scott Tucker with Lyn White
A middle-grade story about a youngster growing up on Saibai Island in the Torres Strait, this well-told yarn skilfully introduces aspects of daily life and the unique Torres Strait culture in a lively and relateable way.
Ezra is twelve, and he and his best mate Mason love their life on Saibai, where they fish, go to school, play sport, learn Island dance and song, and try (sometimes unsuccessfully) to stay out of trouble.
But the school year is drawing to a close and next year they must leave Saibai and travel to Thursday Island, where the nearest high school is located. This means being away from home and family for much of the year. While Mason is keen for the adventure, Ezra is not so sure. Why can’t everything just stay as it is?
Then trouble arrives with a dangerous, out-of-season storm combined with a surprise high tide that hits the island. It poses a threat to everything Ezra holds dear – his home, even his loved ones. And he and Mason are called on to help out in the emergency. Can Ezra measure up to the expectations? It’s a scary time and even the adults around him are troubled by this disaster. Is this another result of climate change, along with the rising sea waters that may eventually swallow their beloved island?
The story opens with the excitement of a crocodile spotted on the island’s jetty. The crocodile is the totem of Ezra’s clan – Koedal – and as the novel progresses, he draws strength from the knowledge that his totem animal represents ancient power and toughness.
Readers will learn much about aspects of Torres Strait culture and traditions: food, dance, ceremony, the importance of family and community connections and ties that keep individuals strong. It’s fantastic to see a book for younger readers that focuses on a First Nations community about whom many Australians might know relatively little.
My one disappointment is that there is minimal language other than English used in the narrative. As most people in the Torres Strait speak at least two, if not three, languages fluently, it would have been a great opportunity to introduce more words from Torres Strait Creole and the Saibai language of Kala Kawa Ya.
I have a personal interest in this book and its subject matter: I spent some time on Saibai back in the 1980s and my son is a member of the Koedal clan through his father’s people. So naturally I was interested in the portrayal of the island life today and from a youngster’s perspective.
I found Ezra’s character entirely relateable to any twelve-year-old facing the challenges of growing into the teenage years, facing major change, family complications, and environmental challenges.
He makes mistakes, but by the end of the novel he has learnt some valuable lessons about himself and importantly about others and his community. He learns that it feels good to be involved and to work with others to help make things right again after the storm. He also learns that the right thing to do is usually pretty obvious.
Spirit of the Crocodile is published by Allen & Unwin in 2025.
I have a confession to make. I am often not a fan of the big literary prize winners. With a few notable exceptions, they can feel dry, without much of a plot or characters that I can relate to. I know I will ruffle some feathers admitting this and of course everyone comes to their reading experience in a different way with their own expectations.
Orbital by Samantha Harvey was the 2024 Booker Prize winner and was a nominated read for my book group early this year, but I missed that meeting and my turn only just came up on the borrower’s list at my local library this month. But I had heard many positive things about this book and I was keen to try it and form my own view. Unlike many Booker winners, it is a slender book, a novella really, so I was not faced with one of those weighty tomes to wade through. I took a deep breath and began.
In some respects this one lives up to my previous experience of literary prize winners. Here’s how:
- There’s not really a ‘plot’ to speak of. The narrative takes place over a single day, following six astronauts in an international space station as they orbit sixteen times around the earth. Things happen, but they are not events that move the plot forward in the traditional sense of a novel.
- There’s not a lot of character development or movement either. We learn a little about each of the astronauts, who are from six different countries, and something of their lives before embarking on this mission. But that’s kind of it. No great emotional insight to speak of, no huge conflict (inner or interpersonal), no emotional arc over the book’s duration.
- The author has a tendency to say in many words, and sometimes very long sentences, what could perhaps be said in just a few.
Did I grow impatient and annoyed, as I would ordinarily do whilst reading a book like this? No, I did not. I know these characteristics have irritated some readers and I can understand why, but what stood out instead for me about Orbital were these features:
- Exquisite descriptive writing conjuring exactly what the view from a space module’s window must look like at various times of the ‘day’ and ‘night’.
- Startling insights into the regular routine of life on board. I’m sure I’m not the only one to have never considered, for example, that orbiting the earth like this means that the astronauts experience multiple sunrises and sunsets in one 24-hour period. Actually the human construct of time means very little in space. How do astronauts adapt to this?
‘The past comes, the future, the past, the future. It’s always now, it’s never now.’ p76 - Glimpses into the psyche of an astronaut. Either the author interviewed current or past astronauts or else has a vivid imagination and emotional intelligence; either way, she brings the inner world of her characters to life so that readers can understand a little of the ‘push’ and ‘pull’ of space travel: the competing demands of home and space, what feels real and what simply imagined.
- Fascinating facts about the humdrum and ordinary. How do people in space eat, sleep, wash, exercise, spend leisure time? What are their daily chores and responsibilities? How do you exist in such close confines for months at a time with a small group like that, with no outlet or way to be with others or to be truly alone?
- What is it like to do a spacewalk, outside the space station module? Terrifying? Electrifying? Like coming home? Perhaps all of these.
What I most enjoyed about Orbital, though, is the way the author puts into perspective our globe, our earth: our (so far at least) one-and-only home, and the way the astronauts’ feelings gradually change over time about it as they gaze down on it from above:
Before long, for all of them, a desire takes hold…to protect this huge yet tiny earth. This thing of such miraculous and bizarre loveliness. This thing that is, given the poor choice of alternatives, so unmistakenly home…Can humans not find peace with one another? With the earth? It is not a fond wish but a fretful demand. Can we not stop tyrannising and destroying and ransacking and squandering this one thing on which our lives depend? Yet they hear the news and they’ve lived their lives and their hope does not make them naive.
Orbital p73Orbital was published by Penguin Random House UK in 2024
A nod to the gothic: ‘The Midnight Estate’ by Kelly Rimmer
I’m a bit of a sucker for ‘book within a book’ stories. Done well, they can have you intruiged from the moment you realise there is a connection between the two seemingly unrelated narratives. Think Magpie Murders which added a delightful dual-timeline component as well as two murder mysteries to solve.
Australian author Kelly Rimmer writes excellent historical fiction, often weaving together legacies from the Second World War with modern-day protagonists in very moving ways. The Midnight Estate is a little different, although here, too, past events cast long shadows over the present.
Fiona Winslow moves back to country NSW after an emotionally exhausting year, planning on restoring the crumbling mansion that belonged to her beloved uncle and was once home to herself, her mother and her cousin. Since her uncle’s death it has stood empty and neglected and she is faced with a mammoth task, not helped by inexplicable opposition by her mother towards her plans – and rumours in the town that the house is haunted.
While cleaning and sorting her uncle’s old furniture and belongings, she comes across a box of books, sent by the publishers to her uncle, who had been a famous award-winning writer. As she begins to read The Midnight Estate, Fiona is puzzled, then intruiged by apparent similarities between her family’s story and the novel’s. Her uncle’s name is not on the book, but who wrote it? And why do some of the characters resemble people she knows?
The old mansion house, while a beautiful haven for Fiona as a child, begins to feel less welcoming, as she begins to piece together parts of a family story that go back a generation. There are dark secrets that must be uncovered before Fiona can reconcile what she thought she knew about herself and her family with what she learns, and finally feel that she has come home at last.
There are enough creaks in the night for The Midnight Estate to feel like an old-fashioned gothic mystery. However, the novel’s theme deals with an enduring and contemporary issue, that of coercive control and intimate partner violence; skillfully done and very believable.
The Midnight Estate is published by Hachette in July 2025.
My thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for a review copy.
Keeping it real for kids: New picture book releases from HarperCollins
Andrew Daddo’s Grandpa’s Guide to Happiness follows on from the earlier Grandma’s Guide to Happiness, another in a recent trend of books for children celebrating the special role that grandparents can play in youngsters’ lives. The grandpa here knows that it’s the simple things that make life worth living: keeping busy, tinkering in the shed, enjoying time outdoors, playing music and games (even if you’re not very good at either), spending time making happy memories. Celebrating ‘a job well done. Or done well. Or just done’ with a cup of tea and maybe cake.
There are some chuckle-worthy moments, including the twosome on Grandpa’s motorbike, wearing helmets but no other safety gear, accompanied by the text:
‘I love my Grandpa’s old motorbike, with the special spot just for me.
When he gets it going, he reckons we’ll ride it for real.’
It was then I noticed that the illustration showed the bike chocked up on bricks. Cute.The illustrations reflects Christopher Nielsen’s passion for mid-century culture and design and add another level of humour to the story.
Worst Farmer Ever is written by Pat Cummins with Michael Wagner, Cummins possibly better known as captain of the Australian cricket team. A cricketing theme does sneak in at the end, so no surprises there. It’s a cute story of Farmer Pat who, with son Albie, goes about their farm spotting problems that must be fixed: a hole in the fence of the cow paddock, a leaking water trough, apples being eaten by birds.
Pat has what we might call creative solutions to these problems, much to Albie’s delighted admiration. But while the text tells one story, little eyes will enjoy seeing the real results of Farmer Pat’s ‘fixes’ in the clever illustrations by Louis Shea.
The Amazing True Story of How Babies Are Made by Fiona Katauskas is not a new book, but a special updated release to celebrate the 10th anniversary of its publication.
WIth cartoon-like (but accurate) illustrations and plain, factual text perfect for younger children, the whole story of human reproduction is told: from the physical differences between baby boys and girls, changes during puberty, sex and the fertilisation of egg and sperm, pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding.
It’s an inclusive telling which also explains multiple births, IVF, caesarian births, etc.
Along with the frank and honest narration there are touches of humour especially in the illustrations.
This one is a perennial; it deserves to stay on the shelves for a very long time.
All of these titles are being released by HarperCollins Children’s Books in July 2025.
My thanks to the publishers for copies to review.What if kindness? ‘A Different Kind of Power’ by Jacinda Ardern
Just before Jacinda Ardern was sworn in as New Zealand’s 40th Prime Minister in 2017, she was asked by a journalist what was it she wanted to do in the role: the ‘untethered, big-picture stuff.’ Her response was:
‘I want this government to feel different…I want people to feel that it’s open, that it’s listening, and that it’s going to bring kindness back.’In her memoir, A Different Kind of Power, she writes that at that moment she recognised that kindness was the word that encompassed everything that had left an imprint on her, from her childhood, her parents, her community and the people she’d worshipped alongside or worked with, ‘always in the service of something better.’
Some people thought kindness was sentimental, soft. A bit naive, even. I knew this. But I also knew they were wrong. Kindness has a power and strength that almost nothing on this planet has. I’d seen kindness do extraordinary things: I’d seen it give people hope; I’d seen it change minds and transform lives. I wasn’t afraid to say it aloud, and as soon as I did, I was sure: kindness. This would be my guiding principle no matter what lay ahead.
A Different Kind of Power p202I was so pleased to be gifted this book (thank you, Andy!) written by a world leader who showed us all that leadership does not have to be cuthroat, that power does not have to mean ‘power over’ but can mean empowering others, and that kindness can, indeed, be part of the equation.
The narrative encompasses those early influences: her warm loving family and a childhood in small communities; mostly happy memories despite some challenges along the way. A young political awakening because of the sights and sounds of her first childhood community, and a burgeoning awareness of how poverty and other circumstances can push a community and its people into difficulty. Different grandparents and the various lessons absorbed from each.
Initial volunteer political work, education, leading to her first paid roles in the world of politics. Becoming a Member of Parliament (I still can’t get my head around New Zealand’s electoral system, but thank goodness for it, as it allowed Jacinda to take on this role, which ultimately – and to her and others, somewhat unexpectedly – culminated in the Prime Ministerial position.)
She writes about the highlights and lowlights of her time in politics and as PM, which of course you’d expect in a political memoir. If you have followed the news over that period you’d be aware of some of the biggest challenges she faced: the shocking and brutal shootings at a Christchurch mosque in 2019; a volcanic eruption at a major tourist attraction, and of course the Covid global pandemic.
Because of the very personal style of writing about these events, I found myself wondering ‘what would I have done? How would I have reacted?’ What I took from her memories of these times is that the personal, empathetic component of a leader’s response is just as important, if not more so, than the logistical resources and decisions he or she can implement.
The scene inside a crisis centre where she met with victims of the Christchurch attack and their loved ones, is vividly portrayed. She had to balance the need for police and forensic procedures at the crime scene, followed by official identification of the victims, with the urgent need for their families for a quick burial as required by their Muslim faith. Understandably there was grief, anger, and confusion in the room. Knowing how important both empathy and clear communication were at this time, she managed to achieve a calm stillness where minutes before had been a cacophony of noise and distress. She writes: ‘Perhaps even bad news can be better than unanswered questions.’ (p248)
I would agree. I would add: it also depends on how that news is delivered, and by whom.
I especially loved the personal insights she shares along the way of her story: crying in a bathroom stall after an error which saw her chastised as a new staffer in Parliament; feeling that her sensitivity was her ‘tragic flaw’ that would keep her from staying with the political work she loved. Meeting Clarke, her partner; their journey to parenthood to Neve. (The opening scene of the book has to be the best hook ever. I won’t describe it here for fear of a spoiler, but it’s brilliant.) Juggling family and political life.
She describes her decision to leave the Prime Minister’s office and politics, and her reasons why, none of which come as a surprise when thinking about the person she is. I was pleased, though, to read that she has continued her advocacy and her work for hope and kindness since leaving office, through establishing a Field Fellowship for empathetic leadership, academic work at Harvard university, climate action work, and support for the Christchurch Call to Action to eliminate terrorist and extremist content online, among other projects.
At a time when so-called ‘strong men’ seem to hold parts of the global population in their sway, we need more leaders like Jacinda Ardern, not just in politics. It often seems to me that simply increasing the number of women in political or CEO roles does little to change things for the rest of us, if they are operating on the ‘business as usual’ principle. More of the ‘kindness principle’ may help to rectify that.
A Different Kind of Power is published by Penguin Random House in June 2025
Bringing history to life: ‘Free’ by Meg Keneally
Meg Keneally’s first stand-alone historical fiction Fled (published 2019) was inspired by the true story of Mary Bryant, a First Fleet convict who effected a daring escape from Sydney by boat. This was followed up by The Wreck (2020) which featured events that followed on from the notorious Peterloo Massacre in England, and introduced readers to Mary Thistle – a character inspired by another amazing historical figure, Mary Reibey. It is Molly Thistle who is at the centre of Fled.
The novel opens with young Molly, living in poverty with her grandmother in England. When she is sent to work as a scullery maid in a wealthy household and find herself bullied and compromised by the master’s valet, she sees no option but to escape. But she does it on horseback – on the master’s valuable mare, and dressed as a boy.
This part of the story echoes something of the origins of Mary Reibey, who was arrested at a very young age for horse theft (and also while dressed as a boy.)
From here Molly experiences all of the horrors of the British ‘justice’ system of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The courts where the poor had no voice. The appalling overcrowded gaols where men, women and children were thrown together, and survival of the fittest was the only rule that mattered. Molly quickly learns the rules, adapts – and survives.
On arrival in Sydney Town Molly is rowed upriver to the Parramatta Female Factory – another gaol for female convicts, which also served as a workhouse, maternity hospital and a ‘marriage market’ (where free settlers and emancipists could come in search of a wife.) I enjoyed the scenes here, as the author, like myself, has an ancestor who was an inmate of the Female Factory. Ms Keneally is a Patron of the Friends of Parramatta Female Factory and gives great support to their work.
Molly’s fortunes take a turn for the better when she marries Angus Thistle, a free settler whom she met on the transport ship. For many convict women, marriage was often the way to a better future, although to the small colonial society at the time, taking a convict wife was still frowned upon. A mistress? Perfectly acceptable and very common for military officers, free settlers and emancipists. Even a governor. Having a wife and family back in Britain was no impediment for a man taking a convict women to his bed and fathering a whole new gaggle of children in the colony. But marrying her? That was often seen as a step too far.
Molly was no simpering, decorative accessory to Angus. She works just as hard as he. Early in their marriage they build a wattle-and-daub hut together on the banks of the Hawkesbury, the wilder reaches of the colony, where the river bursts its banks and destroys farms and homes with unpredictable ferocity. Molly experiences this.
She also learns about the ferocity of the so-called ‘frontier wars’ between the original people of the region, fighting to protect their land and livlihood, and the invaders, determined to make the place theirs. Some of the stories turn her stomach with their cruelty and make her look at her fellow settlers with new, jaundiced eyes. She befriends an Aboriginal woman with a baby, just like Molly’s own new baby, and finds the stories even harder to stomach, begging Angus to move them back into Sydney to live, away from the violence.
So they do, and their family grows along with their fortunes, as Angus and Molly’s trading and ship building business flourishes. If you visit Sydney today and walk along Circular Quay to where the old warehouses are, you might imagine Molly visiting their warehouse, admiring the many different goods that Angus brings home from his voyages to far-off places. Goods that the settler communities – those with money to pay – crave: Indian muslin, tea from China, spices, wooden furniture, fine china and glassware, tobacco, the latest fashions from London…
It is Molly’s business acumen, organisational and financial skills that allows their commercial interests to prosper despite ruthless competition from other traders in the colony.
The novel includes references to the many characters and events that made Australia’s early colonial years so colourful: a succession of Governors, a military coup, corrupt officers and venal landowners, a hypocritical churchman, all fictionalised but easily identified. This is perhaps one of my hesitations about the novel. On the one hand I do understand that peopling the story with a fictionalised version of historical figures gives the author more room to play, so to speak, to move people and events around to suit the narrative; on the other hand I think it can add richness and depth to the story to have these people live in their own skin.
Anyway, that is a minor point and each writer of historical fiction makes their own judgement about this when it comes to the story they want to write.
And the story of Molly Thistle is a beauty, as is the story of the woman she was inspired by – Mary Reibey. As I wrote in my review of Grantlee Kieza’s terrific biography of the real Mary, The Remarkable Mrs Reibey, there are some overlaps between her story and that of my own convict ancestor, Jane Longhurst, another early colonial woman who survived the convict years to become a wealthy and successful businesswoman, in a place and time when being both a woman and an ex-convict should not have allowed it.
Meg Keneally has brought Mary’s world to us in a different form, through another woman’s story. As I often say, the early history of modern Australia is quite an extraordinary one, much more interesting than I remember from my school history lessons! Stories like this help to bring our true history to life.
Free was published by Echo Publishing in 2024.
Founding documents: ‘Naku Dharuk: The Bark Petitions’ by Clare Wright
I was very excited to be gifted this big, fat book last Christmas (thank you, Anita!) However, I put it aside for several months because I wanted to be able to give it the attention it was due.
When I finally picked it up I knew I was in for another of historian and writer Clare Wright’s thoroughly researched and compelling stories of Australian history. This is the third in her ‘Australian democracy’ trilogy. The first two (The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka and You Daughters of Freedom) tell two earlier foundation stories of modern Australia – the role played by women in the Eureka rebellion on the Victorian goldfields in the mid-19th century, and later, the trailblazing fight for the vote by Australian women.
The Bark Petitions is both a smaller and a much bigger story. Smaller, because of its location. Bigger, because the repercussions of the events echo to this day.
They centre around a group of people from Yirrkala, on the Gove Peninsula in Australia’s far north who, when confronted in 1963 with the takeover and likely desecration of their Country, their sacred lands and their livelihood by a proposed French-owned bauxite mine, presented a unique petition to Federal Parliament – on four exquisite traditional paintings by tribal elders on bark.
Back in the mid 1980s I briefly visited Yirrkala in Arnhem Land, as part of my work for the then Federal Department of Aboriginal Affairs. At the time I had never heard of the Bark Petitions. No one in the Department in Darwin where I was based, or at Nhulunbuy, the township at Yirrkala I visited, mentioned them. I learned from Wright’s book that Nhulunbuy was established because of the mine, only thirteen or so years before my visit. Looking back, I am amazed at my ignorance then.
The book relates how the Yolŋu people of Yirrkala, who had lived on their ancestral land for thousands of years, that land having been (under white man’s law) legally reserved for them in 1931, suddenly found themselves forced to defend that same land against commercial interests and mining activity authorised by the Federal government. There was no consultation. No accurate information provided to them. The first the Yirrkala people knew of the imminent threat to their land was the appearance of white survey pegs across a paddock. The leases to a foreign owned mining corporation were announced by then Prime Minister Menzies in a press statement.
Wright describes the cast of characters that populated this story. As with any drama there were protagonists and antagonists; not always neatly lined up along race lines. The Yirrkala Methodist Mission had brought together a number of Yolŋu clan groups who now needed to unite in a struggle to save their land. In this they had some allies from staff within the Mission, particularly Edgar Wells, the Mission Superintendant who early on took on a whistleblower role, to the detriment of his own career and physical and mental health; and his wife Ann, who wrote about much that she observed during that fateful year.
Actually I was surprised to learn that the official policy of the Methodist missions was not assimilation, which was government policy at the time. Methodist missions aimed to equip residents with literacy and other skills needed for survival in the modern world while encouraging the continued use of traditional language and customary practices.
Non-indigenous characters in the story who appear less…sympathetic, let’s say…are those from the halls of Parliament, or heads of government departments in Sydney, Darwin or Canberra. Paul Hasluck, then Minister for Territories, stood out for me as someone who did not cover himself in glory at this time. Perhaps unfair to single him out from a crowd of fellow politicians (and also bureaucrats) for whom political and commercial priorities rode roughshod over indigenous rights; but my heart sank when I remembered that he went on to become Australia’s Governor General just six years later.
There were others, such as Kim Beazley Snr, who was the Member for Fremantle and planted a seed which led to the idea of the petitions being presented in the form they took, and later with Gordon Bryant (Member for Wills) led a debate in Parliament which put forward new principles when considering rights of Aboriginal people: native title; self-determination; consultation. These had been pretty much absent until now (certainly at Yirrkala) but would become part of official policy in future years.
There is so much to admire in Clare Wright’s book. The forensic detail in which she describes events as they took place, from various perspectives – a testament to the thoroughness of her research, involving exhaustive trawls through the official archives, but also deep dives into private journals, letters and also interviews with the families and individuals of many of the people involved.
If there are ‘sides’ in this historical drama the author makes no apology about where she stands. Having lived for a time amongst the community at Yirrkala, her emotional loyalties are clear. Her descriptions, and those of mission staff at the time, of the way Yolŋu conducted their own internal discussions and decision making processes, based on lore and law from time immemorial, are vivid, as are the significance of the Bark Petitions themselves, the processes by which they were created and the ‘momentous double act of diplomacy’ they represented. (p346)
From the Yolŋu : we offer you this gift. Our knowledge. Our stories. Our symbols…Every bark painting…depicted food or a place where food could be found. This food, these places, mirrored the clan identifications that established the right to gather...Together, told in art, the symbols required neighbouring clans to seek permission to enter other than their own privileged food resource area. Established entitlement. Marked the boundaries…
So: we offer you this gift. This gift of our knowledge. The key to our mind maps.
What we ask in return: your respect. This is this second act of diplomacy…
The printed words – the petition – are what you require. In your language and ours. Dharuk.
The paintings that frame the words – the bark – this is what we require. Naku.
Diplomacy, not assimilation. Two sovereign nations, testing the boundaries.
Naku Dharuk. Bark Petitions.
The Bark Petitions pp348-349It is probably no spoiler to say that the original petitions were rejected by Parliament, and that the bauxite mine went ahead. I knew that, but it still felt like a punch to the belly when I read the actual words of parliamentarians as they attempted to undermine the significance – indeed, the integrity – of the petitions when they were first presented. Paul Hasluck was a main player here. A tried and true tactic, to shoot the messenger and/or the message. Divisive, dirty politics for divisive, dirty gains.
Australia saw it again in 2023 with the defeat of the referendum aimed at establishing an Indigenous Voice to Parliament.
Eighty years after the Bark Petitions, their message has still not been properly heard.
Nevertheless, Clare Wright has made a compelling argument that the Petitions from 1963 represent an important step towards legal recognition of First Nations land rights in this country; but also that they ‘constitute nothing less than the third pillar of a trinity of material objects that, read together, along a historical, political and cultural continuum, constitute Australia’s founding documents.’ (p552)
The others are the Eureka Flag of 1854 and the Women’s Suffrage Banner of the early 1900s.Flag. Banner. Bark.
Each of these declamatory objects speaks back to power, a creative act of resistance to a perceived political injustice. Each makes a claim for inclusion in the dominant power structures: first of the colonies, then of the nation of Australia.
The Bark Petitions p554Naku Dharuk: The Bark Petitions is a hefty book. At 573 pages, it’s not a quick read. But I am very glad I allowed myself the time to read it from cover to cover, absorbing the detail, the characters, the setting, and the aspects of Yolŋu culture and language included throughout. I feel richer for it. I am certain Australia is, and I thank Ms. Wright for bringing us this work. I can’t wait to see which significant event or period in our collective history the author will tackle next.
Naku Dharuk: The Bark Petitions was published by Text Publishing Australia in 2024
A gift: ‘Memorial Days’ by Geraldine Brooks’
I am a long-time admirer of Geraldine Brooks and have read pretty much everything she has written, at least in book form. Australian-born, raised in the suburbs of Sydney, she has worked in the US and been a journalist in war zones around the world. For thirty years she was happily married to American writer Tony Horwitz and they raised two sons at Martha’s Vineyard, an island in the US state of Massachusetts.
Until the day in 2019 when out of the blue, she received a phone call from a harried doctor in a Washington DC hospital, informing her that Tony had collapsed on a street in that city and was dead.
This terrible moment opens the book and from there she recounts the moments, days, weeks and months that follow, as she tries to gather her ragged thoughts and emotions and do what needs to be done. Tony had been on a national tour promoting his latest book and his schedule had been tight. Geraldine herself was struggling to finish her own book (later the award winning novel, Horse.) One son was overseas and the youngest, still at high school, was also a journey away from home and from her.
Instead of giving herself over to the overwhelm of her grief, she instead faced long to-do lists, administrative tasks and the needs of others, all requiring her attention.
In our culture, this is what death demands. We do not have grieving rituals or customs that allow the bereaved to withdraw from worldly matters in order to process emotional ones. We are expected to fill out forms, remember what government or other agencies to notify, plan a funeral and/or wake or memorial service, greet well-wishers with appropriate words and behaviours, continue to pay utility bills on time, and carry on with the minutia of daily life, and very often, hold down a job, attend study, and otherwise continue as before.
For three years the author did exactly this. At great cost.
Then she booked herself on a plane to Australia, specifically to Flinders Island, a small and somewhat remote island off the coast of Tasmania, where she had spent time before meeting and marrying Tony – and where she had once imagined living a different sort of life. She went there to be alone, and to do the work that needed doing to properly grieve.
Memorial Days’ narrative alternates between the period after Tony’s death, and the time spent on Flinders Island. The prose is sparse, beautiful, very personal, full of the insights allowed to surface once the space and quiet was made for them to do so. Also full of lovely memories of her years with Tony – bittersweet, some of them, as you’d expect. And, perhaps also to be expected, regrets and even remonstrances: why hadn’t she picked up the signs of his ill health before they’d killed him? Why hadn’t she insisted on him visiting his cardiologist earlier?
Flinders Island, with its own tragic history of the abuses suffered by the Aboriginal people taken there during colonial times, serves as a stark if beautiful backdrop for the thinking, remembering, grieving needed to be done.
If the book sounds grim, or too sad – it isn’t. It is sombre, of course, but so sweetly written that it feels something like a conversation with a friend. As a friend would do, the author leaves readers with some hard-learned lessons at the end of the book; things she’d had no idea of until faced with the realities of the ‘time after’ a sudden death of a loved one; lessons that we could all benefit from .
A gift to us from a gifted author.
Memorial Days was published by Hachette Australia in 2025.
This story of a death is the story that dominates my life. Here I have retold it, rethought it. But I can’t change it. Tony is dead. Present tense. He will be dead, in the present, in my present, for as long as I am alive. I cannot change that story. I can only change myself.
Write the truest thing you know, said old man Hemingway.
Dear reader, this is it.Memorial Days, p207
Book or movie? How about both?
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan was a book mentioned to me by no less than three people in the space of as many months. They extolled its virtues: a tiny book that speaks so much in its brevity; leaves you thinking about it long after you close the cover, etc… I borrowed a copy and immediately I saw what they meant.
It is, indeed, a slim volume at just 110 pages. Published in 2021, it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize the following year. It’s one of those books where much of the ‘action’ is interior, inside the main character’s head. In this case, the head of Bill Furlong, father of five in a small Irish town in 1985.
He’s the town’s coal and timber merchant and his days consist of work – loading up pallets of wood and bags of coal, driving his small truck to deliver them to the homes and businesses that rely on his wares to keep warm through the bleak Irish winters – then home to scrb the black coal dust from his hands and eat a meal in the tiny kitchen with his wife Eileen and their five daughters.
He’s a good family man, quietly spoken and thoughtful. Occasionally he finds himself wondering ‘is this all there is?’ when he contemplates life’s purpose. But he knows he and his family are more fortunate than many, they have a loving home and food on the table.
Still, he is troubled by flashbacks to his childhood, so different to that of his daughters. Raised by an unmarried mother who died when he was just a young lad, he was lucky to be allowed to stay on at the home where his mother had been employed by a wealthy woman. A woman with more enlightened views on unmarried mothers, he realises now, as an adult. The other figure in his childhood was Ned, also an employee on the property, a man whom Bill looked up to and admired. Bill never knew who his father was: no one talked about things like that.
His quiet, predictable routine is severely disrupted when, while delivering coal to the Catholic convent, he stumbles across a teenaged girl locked in the coal shed. The nuns insist it was an accident that she was caught there overnight – on a freezing night in the lead up to Christmas – but Bill is not convinced.
So begins a period in which this quiet man wrestles with his conscience. The convent and the nuns who run it wield a power over the town: the neighbouring school, which Bill’s daughters attend, the choir, so much of the residents’ welfare seems to be inextricably linked to the church. As the publican says to Bill:
”Tis no business of mine, as I’ve said, but surely you must know these nuns have a finger in every pie.’ (p94)Bill realises that the entire town, his wife included, are complicit in what might be going on behind the heavy doors and walls of the convent. Turning a blind eye allows whatever cruelities and neglect to continue. And, as this story is about the horrors perpetuated by what became known as the ‘Magdalene Laundries’ of Irish Catholic convents, there were cruelties and neglect aplenty – from the 1920s right through to the 1990s, according to the film’s dedication. Horrific stuff.
So, this brings me to the film adaptation of this wonderful little book. I was keen to see the movie for several reasons.
One, because the two leading stars are Cillian Murphy of Peaky Blinders and Oppenheimer fame (and frankly he is such a compelling actor I think I would pay money to watch him watching paint dry!); the other is Emily Watson who is one of my favourite British actors. Although when I realised she was playing the clever, cold nun at the head of the convent I was at first horrified – but she is such a consummate actor that even her normally sweet face was transformed into something else entirely.
Two, I was curious to see how the filmakers would transfer a novel like this to the screen. How to portray Bill’s inner struggle when the raw material of the book is a tiny setting, a few days, a handful of characters?
The answer, for me, was – brilliantly. The director Tim Mielants and cinematographer Frank van den Eeden capture the bleak grey of the Irish town in winter, the way the townsfolk ‘unhappily endured the weather‘ (p1), the routines of everyday life. There’s a scene in which the camera pans over Bill’s face – beautifully half lit by a street light as he sits in his darkened house, alone in the deep of night – and we can almost see the thoughts move across his face.
Best of all, for me, was the choice of scriptwriter Enda Walsh and director to keep faithfully to Claire Keegan’s ending. It is a somewhat ambiguous climax: Bill has acted in accordance with his own moral certainty, we know it is the right thing for the young woman he rescues from the convent, but the book’s readers (and film’s audience) cannot be certain of the reception she’ll receive from Bill’s family and, indeed, the rest of the town. We hope, but we cannot be sure.
Some viewers at the cinema I attended apparently thought the film ‘too grim’ (accordingly to the cinema proprietor) but I was glad that the film reproduced the intent and tone of Keegan’s ‘perfect little book’ in the way that it did.
So, while I am sometimes disappointed in film adaptations of books that I have loved, this time I can honestly say: read the book AND see the film. Both well worth it.
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan was published by Faber & Faber in 2021.
The film adaptation , a joint production by Artists Equity & Big Things Productions, was released in 2024.
Final in a terrific series: ‘Ming and Maria Explore the Universe’ by Jackie French
In her wonderful Girls who Changed the World series, Australian author Jackie French set out to introduce middle grade readers to women whose achievements have been overlooked, obscured or forgotten by traditional historical accounts. My review of the first in the series is here.
The novels employ a mix of historical and speculative fiction as the central character, Ming Qong, is transported by Herstory (History’s sister) back to various historical periods, where she meets a different character from history and participates in ground-breaking events of that time.
In this, the fifth and final in the series, Ming is sent to Nantucket Island in 1836, where she meets the members of the Society of Friends (or Quaker) community who settled there. This time, Herstory has promised Ming that she will meet her mother, who disappeared from her life soon after she and her twin brother Tuan were born.
On the island Ming meets an elderly widow and a wealthy newcomer to the island, and is left guessing about her mother’s identity. In the meantime, though, she is thrilled to also connect with a teenaged Maria Mitchell, who she knows from her history lessons will go on to become a scientist and astronomer esteemed around the world.
On Nantucket Maria has established her own school which she conducts in a way that excites a love of learning and exploration on the part of every pupil there, and Ming joins her one snowy night to look at the stars through a telescope at Maria’s home. Although the equipment is much more rudimentary than that which Ming herself has used in her own time, the thrill of sharing that moment with a young woman who will one day be such a luminary in astronomy is a wonderful experience.
The novel ends with Ming learning the identity of her mother – from a very unexpected source.
As always with any Jackie French historical fiction, this one is well researched and conjures the setting of both place and time with a light touch. The addition of time travel adds another layer of interest and thoughtfulness in this excellent series. Highly recommended for middle grade readers.
Ming and Maria Explore the Universe is published by Angus & Robinson, an imprint of HarperCollins Children’s Books, in April 2025.
My thanks to the publishers for a review copy.
