Books and reading
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.OMG: what a woman! ‘Annette Kellerman: Australian Mermaid’ by Grantlee Kieza
Have you heard of Annette Kellerman? I knew a few things about her: that in the early 1900s she had broken swimming records, amazed and shocked with her one-piece swimsuits (very risque for the times), and wowed with her high-diving acts.
But this new biography by Grantlee Kieza introduced me to so much more about this truly astounding Australian woman.
For example:
- She began life as a sickly, weak child, with lower limbs deformed by rickets, the horrible disease that ravaged many children then. Swimming was her way out of a life of disability but to begin with, she was terrified of the water! From this dubious start she went on to outswim male record holders and compete with leading swimmers on attempts to cross the English Channel, among other gruelling marathon events.
- She grew up in a family where entertainment and performance were givens; her mother an accomplished musician of French background who demonstrated ‘chutzpah’ from an early age; her father also a talented musician.
- These entertainment genes led her into a career in vaudeville, where she showed off her ballet skills along with her diving prowess (diving from heights into glass tanks, for example), later adding juggling diablo, high wire walking and other accomplishments to her repertoire. For a time she was the biggest name on the New York vaudeville scene.
- As well as her incredible swimming career, she became a star of Hollywood, creating and appearing in sell-out and critically acclaimed silent movies. Through these efforts she became one of the highest paid movie stars in the world, mixing with some of the household names of Hollywood (Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Mae West, to name just a few).
- Alongside all of this activity she advocated strongly for women’s health and fitness, promoting excercise and healthy diet as the key to happiness and beauty. Keep in mind that this was at a time when women were discouraged from swimming and taking part in active sport of any kind, and the typical feminine outfit included whalebone corsets and multiple layers of petticoats.
‘Swimwear’ consisted of long bloomers, a full dress and other covers that impeded movement. So when Annette adopted what was essentially the same swimsuit as men were wearing (a one piece that covered from shoulders to knee but not much else) which then got shorter and more revealing over the years, you can imagine the amazement it generated! She was absolutely a trailblazer and never stopped in her public advocacy for woman’s participation in physical activity, especially swimming, which she regarded as the ‘perfect exercise’.
I have a few more OMG facts for you. I know some people who admire modern-day actors who do their own stunts on movie sets. Well, let me tell you – those actors have nothing – NOTHING – on this woman from Australia who, in the early years of movie making, not only did all her own stunts but – given the deplorable lack of safety standards on workplaces then – did so with no regard to her own safety.
She dived into a pool full of live Jamaican crocodiles. She survived a perilous cascade down a 60 foot waterfall with her hands tied behind her back. She leaped into the ocean from a high wire suspended from a 30 metre structure called the Tower of Kives and Swords over treacherous rocks . All done without a single double, dummy or safety net. Most, if not all, of these hair raising stunts were her own ideas.
Tom C et al, eat your collective hearts out.
Another way in which she beat today’s performers at their own game, decades before they’d even been born, is the way in which Annette kept her performances fresh – ‘reinventing’ herself, if you will. As she grew older and long-distance swimming lost its charm, she switched focus to her stage acts. In the 1920s she toured Great Britain and Europe giving lectures on health and fitness – in German, Swedish and Dutch. Later still, her lifelong love of dance and ballet training saw her perform the Dying Swan dance alongside world famous Anna Pavlova.
Was there nothing this woman couldn’t do?
I should point out that along with Annette’s own personal drive and quest to learn and achieve, her success was assisted by the unwavering support of her father Fred. Despite his own uncertain health, he accompanied his teenaged daughter to England in 1905 in a bid to launch her international swimming career, and he stayed with her, managing her affairs through thick and thin even as his health failed.
And her later manager and eventual husband, Jimmie Sullivan, was another stalwart supporter, though her impulsive ideas and fearlessness must have driven him to the edge of a nervous breakdown on many an occasion.
Annette was often promoted as the ‘Perfect Woman’ (by which was meant her bodily proportions, not her character) and the front and back cover photos of this book do capture the incredible combination of strength, grace and joy which she possessed.
There is a very funny anecdote concerning an Ohio husband and wife brought before the courts soon after the release of one of Annette’s more famously provocative films involving sheer (invisible or perhaps non-existent) costumes. The husband made the mistake of seeing the film three times in three days and compounded his error by remarking to his wife each night what a ‘pretty form’ Annette Kellerman had.
The couple ended up in front of the magistrate, he sporting bandages on his head and she explaining why she had wielded a potato masher at her husband!After such an active life in the public eye, Annette and Jimmie retired to the Gold Coast in Queensland in the 1960s, then a sleepy coastal backwater. After Jimmie died she continued the fundraising work she had always done, though ‘many of those who attended the events knew her only as the nice little old lady from Labrador, rather than a woman who was once one of the most famous and daring entertainers in the world.’ (p295)
In a very fitting end to a life that revolved around water, Annette’s ashes were scattered by her beloved sister from a small plane over the waters of the Coral Sea.
As always with Grantlee Kieza’s books, Annette Kellerman: Australian Mermaid is a thoroughly researched and engagingly written biography about an Australian figure of note. I had so many ‘OMG’ moments reading this book, that by the end I had to admit that what I’d thought I knew about Annette Kellerman had been a drop in the proverbial ocean – or swimming pool.
Annette Kellerman: Australian Mermaid was published by HarperCollins in April 2025.
My thanks to the publishers for a review copy.
- She began life as a sickly, weak child, with lower limbs deformed by rickets, the horrible disease that ravaged many children then. Swimming was her way out of a life of disability but to begin with, she was terrified of the water! From this dubious start she went on to outswim male record holders and compete with leading swimmers on attempts to cross the English Channel, among other gruelling marathon events.
Country, language, love, wonder: new picture books to enjoy.
This is another ‘picture book bounty’ post, with four picture book arrivals to share.
I have introduced Gumbaynggirr artist Melissa Greenwood’s work in earlier posts with her beautiful books in which her First Nations language sits side by side with English as she writes and paints about the world. Darruyay Yilaaming Marraala, Buwaarr (Welcome to the World, Little Baby) is just as lovely and also a little different: it is presented as a baby book, in which proud parents, grandparents, aunties, uncles or other important adults in a child’s life can record features of the birth, special memories, family, Country, relationships, and baby’s developmental milestones. It’s designed for First Nations families but not exclusively so. A very welcome addition to a tradition of baby books.
Published by ABC Books imprint of HarperCollins in March 2025.All the Ways Mum will be there for You by Sarah Ayoub is another celebration of love between parent and child. This one features an array of mums and kids going about busy days and evenings, sharing adventures, quiet times, special moments together. The vibrant colourful illustrations by Kate Moon add to the scenes and little ones can put their own imaginative minds to work as they turn the pages.
Published by HarperCollins Australia & NZ in February 2025.The World Needs the Wonder You See by Joanna Gaines is a reminder to us all, young and old alike, to slow down and take notice of the world around us – something we often forget to do in the busyness of the modern world. It’s a North American setting so Aussie kids will see bunnies, foxes and squirrels cavorting in meadows and forests, with a fair bit of anthropomorphism going on, but it makes for a magical world that young kids will relate to, perhaps akin to the world of Winnie the Pooh and the Hundred Acre Wood. Julianna Swaney’s illustrations provide detail and variety to engross small viewers.
Published by Tommy Nelson in the US, an imprint of HarperCollins, in January 2025.Finally, Learning Country: A First Nations Journey Around Australia’s Traditional Place Names by Ryhia Dank, takes small readers to some well-known places in Australia, describing them by their traditional names and the stories told by the Old People. We visit Boigu in the Torres Strait, Canberra, Meeanjin (Brisbane), Narrm (Melbourne), Boorloo (Perth), among others. Ryhia is a Gudanji/Wakaja artist from the Gulf of Carpentaria and has illustrated the book with vibrant contemporary artworks that bring to life the stories she has chosen to tell about the traditional names of Australia.
Published by HarperCollins Australia & NZ in June 2025.My thanks to the publishers for copies of these books to review.
Welcome back Cormac Reilly: ‘The Unquiet Grave’ by Dervla McTiernan
Have you heard of the Irish bog bodies? Gruesome topic, I know, but fascinating in its own way. The peat bogs occasionally reveal bodies of people who have died long ago, corpses preserved in the special environment in which they fell. Some of them thousands of years old, bearing signs of strange ritual torture or sacrificial customs from long ago.
This is the setting of the opening scene of Irish-Australian Dervla McTiernan’s new mystery novel. A body is discovered in a Galway bog. There are ritualistic mutilations on the body, just like those from ancient times. But on closer inspection it is not an historic corpse, but the body of the local teacher, a man who went missing two years earlier.
The investigation is led by Cormac Reilly, a welcome return to the pages after some stand-alone works by McTiernan set in the US (What Happened to Nina? and The Murder Rule) I’ve read those novels and they are good, but I do think her books set in Ireland are the stronger for the brilliant settings and the fully fleshed out characters who inhabit them, Cormac in particular.
He is a good detective with a strong moral compass which in earlier books has led him into difficulties with colleagues and ‘the system’ and in this novel he confronts new dilemmas. Not least of which is being asked by his ex-partner Emma to help her find her missing husband Finn, who has disappeared while on a work trip in Paris. It’s a distraction that Cormac really doesn’t need but he is a generous man and still genuinely cares about Emma and so he becomes involved, against his better judgement.
Complicating matters further are other new murder cases to solve, possibly connected to the first, possibly ‘copycat’ cases, possibly completely coincidental. It’s up to Cormac and his team to figure out if there are connections or – worst case scenario – a serial killer at large.
The cases are eventually solved but for Cormac and his partner Peter, the moral questions to do with the application of the law and justice are then front and centre. Does arresting the person who commits a crime really serve justice in this case?
As in the best crime and mystery fiction, this novel leaves you with much to think about even after the case is solved and the last page turned.
The Unquiet Grave is published by HarperCollins in April 2024.
My thanks to the publishers for a review copy.
Twisty mystery: ‘The Ledge’ by Christian White
I picked up White’s latest mystery novel with great relief. Why? I had just ploughed through a tome-like, rather tedious and repetitive 444 page novel which I was extremely glad to have finished – one of those irritating books that are just intruiging enough to keep you wanting to know how it all pans out but makes you really, really wish you’d picked up the skill of speed-reading somewhere along the way.
Anyway.
I had read Christian Whilte’s best-selling The Wife and the Widow so I knew The Ledge would be one of those books that would keep me turning the page without a yawn or a desire for speed-reading skills. And there would be a super twist.
I was not wrong.
The novel centres around four teenaged friends, one of whom goes missing in 1999. Fast forward and the remaining three are now in adulthood, grown apart but harbouring a heavy secret and a pact of silence about events that took place back when they were in high school.
When human remains are found in the bushland beneath a high rocky outcrop – the ledge of the title – things start to unravel and the burden of the secrets they carry becomes unbearable.
White’s signature twisty ending is there – a dramatic one that had me almost spluttering ‘wait, what?…’ as I rifled back through pages to see if I’d missed something. Still not sure if I buy the twist but that’s OK, I often don’t in novels of this kind. Twists are fun and keep you reading but for me, never the main point of the novel.
Though I read this quickly, it’s not a trivial murder mystery, as I think it does deal with issues other than a simple ‘who done it?’
There is a deeper theme in this one, I think. It is really a coming of age story, about masculinity, adulthood, friendship and loyalty, small towns and the strengths and hurts they can bestow on their inhabitants.
The Ledge was published by Affirm Press in 2024
Simplicity & austerity: ‘Stone Yard Devotional’ by Charlotte Wood
For some reason, I had resisted picking up a copy of Charlotte Wood’s 2024 Booker Prize-shortlisted novel, though I had read and admired her earlier works such as The Weekend and The Natural Way of Things.
A contemplative work, about a middle-aged woman seeking solace in a religious community on the sparse Monaro Plains of southeastern NSW? It sounded too quiet, too contemplative, too…austere.
It is indeed all of those things.
The setting, after all, hardly invites images of lush rolling pastures. The Monaro, frequently drought-affected, frost-bitten in winter, is a harsh environment at the best of times. The region has its own appeal but it is definitely an austere kind of beauty.
And the retreat at which the unnamed narrator arrives at the novel’s opening is an unembellished place where routine and simplicity prevail.
The reader is privy to the inner life of the narrator so that we experience these details through her eyes and live the day-to-day there with her.
Her reasons for being there are just hinted at. Difficulties in her marriage. Burnout from a demanding job in the not-for-profit environmental sector, facing down environmental crises on a daily basis. Overwhelm from the modern world’s too-busy pace.
Understandable that she should want to escape all that for a while.
It would be a spoiler, actually, to say much more about what happens during her time there.
Except that the little religious backwater is in reality both a haven from and a microcosm of the outside world. The narrator has plenty of time to examine her own impulses and reactions to the daily irritations and petty doings of the community; but there are broader themes at play here too.
Memories of shameful episodes from childhood.
An unsolved crime from years before.
Is it possible to both admire and dislike someone?
Environmental impacts at the local level.
Faith and prayer.Our Simone once took me to task over my ‘sneering’ about prayer. My notion of prayer was juvenile: forget this telephone line to God bullshit, she snapped, hot with impatience. It wasn’t even about God, she said, which I thought must surely be blasphemous. Praying was a way to interrupt your own habitual thinking, she told me. It’s admitting yourself into otherness, cracking open your prejudices. It’s not chitchat; it’s hard labour.
Stone Yard Devotional ebookp170 of 308The novel is full of snippets of insights, of struggle, of contradictions, as the narrator tries to square her very humanness with the experience of living in a community dedicated to the religious. In the end, I suppose, what we see is the very humanity of organised religion. It is, after all, a very human construct and endeavour.
So despite my earlier resistance, I was pleased to read this book and to give myself over to the very interior nature of its story. From a novel told from within one one person’s head and within such a small setting, it has some big ideas to think about.
Stone Yard Devotional was published by Allen & Unwin in 2024
Women’s wartime legacies: ‘The Surgeon of Royaumont’ by Susan Neuhaus
I had not long finished reading and writing about another book on WWI (Soldiers Don’t Go Mad) when this new release landed on my ‘to be read’ pile. A novel, rather than non-fiction, it also deals with the dark legacies of war: the devastating injuries inflicted on young bodies which doctors and surgeons must try to repair.
Susan Neuhaus is herself a surgeon and an ex-army officer and she has chosen to tell the story of some of the trail-blazing women who undertook this challenging task during that earlier war.
It almost beggars belief, given how stretched the Allied armed services were then for trained and competent medical practitioners who could serve where needed, that attempts by qualified and experienced female doctors to enlist were refused. More than a dozen such women attempted and failed in Australia, but Australian women did serve as doctors overseas, most paying their own way and working in various hospitals in Britain, France, Belgium, Malta, or Turkey, among others. They did not wear the uniform of the Australian services, nor are they remembered on Australia’s memorials for those who served in the nation’s conflicts.
This novel has gone some way to bring to light their existence through a story that weaves fictional characters, events and places with real historical ones, and the author has done a fine job in doing so.
We meet Clara, a proud medical graduate working in a Sydney hospital, with dreams of becoming a surgeon. When war breaks out she wants to ‘do her bit’ but ambition also plays a part in what she does next. Defying her family’s wishes, she heads to Europe where she begins work at a hospital in France that is operated and managed entirely by women, not far from the Western Front where her fiance is also working as an Army doctor.
On arrival she is almost immediately confronted by the realities of warfare and the realisation that as a woman, she faces more hurdles than the male colleagues she left behind in Sydney. This, and her impetuous nature, lead her to some unwise choices, but she is lucky to be guided by the level-headed and incredibly dedicated and more experienced head of the Royaumont Abbey Hospital where Clara is sent.
Readers are not spared the detail of the some of the injuries confronting the surgeons and nursing staff as they work to repair shattered bodies. The contributions of other women, such as the voluntary aid detatchment who so often brought comfort and reassurance to the injured, are depicted as well.
Clara makes mistakes, some of them with grave consequences, and struggles with her own conflicts both internal and with others; all the while holding her dream of becoming an Army surgeon close to her heart.
Her year at Royaumont Abbey is intense, exhausting, and exacting at a personal and professional level. When she leaves to embark on her next challenge, she has learnt much and developed in ways that are surprising to her.
The ending is unusual for a novel of this kind and possibly more realistic for it.
Clara, the times and surrounds in which we meet her, are all presented in a way that makes her a totally believable character as she interacts with the real historical figures who also people the story. She is flawed in ways the modern reader can relate to, while we also admire the guts and determination of women like her who forged new pathways at some of history’s most difficult moments. They not only made a difference in their own time, but also opened doors for those women following them.
The Surgeon of Royaumont is published by HQ Fiction in April 2025.
My thanks to the publisher for a review copy.
