Weasel words of past & present: ‘Unsettled’ by Kate Grenville
I had been waiting for this book, from the moment I first heard about it.
Kate Grenville’s earlier work, The Secret River (published 2005) has become something of an Australian classic. It’s fictionalised account of her ancestor Solomon Wiseman’s life as a convict, then a wealthy settler on the Hawkesbury River sparked discussion of the realities of the interface between white and black histories of this country.
Since then she has written several other works of historical fiction, and some non-fiction, inspired by or about the lives of her ancestors and their times.
Now she has turned her sharp analysis to the question of ‘What does it mean to be on land that was taken from other people? Now that we know how the taking was done, what do we do with that knowledge?’
Subtitled ‘A journey through time and place’, Unsettled is her account of a pilgrimage of sorts, in which she travels through the places of significance in her family stories, passed on to her by her mother. She is searching for the hidden side of those stories, the people deliberately or carelessly written out of history: the First Peoples with whom her ancestors would have interacted.
In my research and writing about my own family history I have struggled with these questions and the silences of the past. What part did my ancestors play in the dispossession of the First Nations of this land? Were they perpetrators of any of the many acts of violence towards Aboriginal people that took place in colonial and later times? How would I feel if I discovered evidence of this? What would I do with that knowledge?
Like Ms Grenville, I came to the conclusion that all of my ancestors were, in some capacity, complicit in the long act of dispossession since 1788. Many (like the convicts sent here on the transport ships from England and Ireland) unwillingly so. Others (like Grenville, I have ancestors who ‘took up’ land as squatters, benefiting enormously from what was essentially a free-for-all land grab in the early years of white settlement) did so very willingly indeed. Later generations lived (as I do today) in country that was stolen, unceded land.
It is a difficult truth to stare in the face and one that, for generations, white Australians preferred not to see.
Hence the weasel words used to describe the acts of stealing land and the people who stole it (taking up land, opening it up, squatting, land grants, settlers, pioneers, explorers) and ones that were used about the people from whom the land was stolen (blacks, savages, nomads, going walkabout, as examples.) The latter demonstrated a supreme lack of understanding of the subtle and sophisticated worldview and culture of the First Peoples, while the former justified the wholesale robbery of the land and all it contained by the invading colonists.
This book is all about seeing things differently:
Now that I think about it. That’s the thing – I’m thinking about things differently now, rather than sliding along on the well-lubricated surface of unremarkable words. Thinking in a way that allows a whole other story to be glimpsed. No, not even a story, just a suggestion of a suspicion, embedded so far below the surface it’s easy to pooh-pooh it as ridiculous.
Unsettled p35This is a very personal journey and a very personal story. But Grenville’s skill as a storyteller weaves a tale that is both individual and general to all Australians. While imparting her unique responses to the places she visits, the experiences she has on her travels and what she finds in her research, the questions she poses are for us all to consider.
Her comments about the popularity of family history resonate with me, and I think are meaningful on a bigger scale as well:
we…need to be asking questions about our forebears. Not to reassure ourselves, and not to make any claims for ourselves, but to learn how we really fit – and the ways we don’t fit – into the story of being here.
Unsettled p206I could not agree more.
Here is Kate Grenville discussing the impulse that set her on the journey of exploration that resulted in Unsettled.
Unsettled was published by Black Inc Books in 2025
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.
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
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.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.
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.
The spaces between: ‘In the Margins’ by Gail Holmes
Australian writer Gail Holmes’ debut novel is inspired by a real woman who lived in seventeenth-century England, a time when bitter Civil Wars transitioned into Puritan religious and social intolerance.
Frances Wolfreston is a rector’s wife and as part of her role assisting her husband in his parish duties, the laws of the time require her to record the names of those who do not attend weekly church service. This sits uneasily with her, especially after her own mother is imprisoned for the crime of praying in the old, Catholic, manner. Frances is torn between her duty to her mother, to her husband and her young sons, to the church and the new government, and to those vulnerable souls in her community who need more care.
She is also a collector and lover of books, something her mother passed on to her, and an unusual pursuit at a time when the literacy rate amongst women was very low.
As I often do when reading a novel based on or inspired by a real person or event, I went straight to the author’s note to see which bits of the story were from the historical record. I was delighted to learn that one of the ways historians have learned about the real Frances was her habit of inscribing her name in her books. Something many of us do today without much thought, but as the author points out, a subtly powerful gesture at a time when married women had almost no property rights of their own.
After years of researching and writing about women in my own family history, I am very attuned to the challenges of ‘finding’ women in historical documents, confined as many were to birth, marriage, and death records, and largely absent elsewhere.
So a novel woven around the life of a real woman who lived over 370 years ago about whom sparse records exist is both a stretch and an invitation – and the author has taken up the latter with enthusiasm and sensitivity.
This is a story about the tragedy of intolerance in all its guises (and let’s not kid outselves it went out with the Puritans). It’s also about the oppression of women in small ways and large – it touches chillingly on the witch trials of the seventeenth century – and the persecution of anyone deemed ‘different’.
But it’s also about the small acts of kindness and even of defiance that can glue families and communities together: the seemingly insignificant things done or words spoken, often by women and sometimes by men, too, that can make a difference in one life or many.
‘We are like the spaces between the words of a book. The words are what people see, what they argue over, fight wars over, swoon over, collect. Yet without the spaces between, there is nothing at all. We are the spaces, Mrs Edwards.’
‘Yet you want to teach all these common children to read those very words.’
‘If you can read the words, you can begin to see the spaces.’
In the Margins pp 273-274In the Margins was published by Ultimo Press in 2024.
My thanks to the author for a copy to review.
