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
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.
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.
Beautiful challenges: ‘Murriyang: song of time’ by Stan Grant
First up: a confession. This is one of the most difficult blog posts I have written about a book. Mostly because I have found it hard to put into words what I think – and more importantly, feel – about this particular book.
It is beautiful.
It is challenging.
It is in turn confronting, comforting, confusing.
I was very keen to read it because:
(1) it is the first publication by Bundyi, the brand-new imprint of Simon & Schuster Publishing. Bundyi is a Wiradjuri word meaning ‘to share with me’ and the imprint is curated by well-known author and Wiradjuri woman Anita Heiss, with the aim of publishing books written, edited and designed by First Nations people. (source: https://www.simonandschuster.com.au/p/Bundyi), and
(2) I’d heard it described as ‘in part, Grant’s response to the Voice referendum‘ and ‘a book for our current moment, and something for the ages.’
Like many Australians, I’d been hurt and disheartened by the ‘no’ result, denying my fellow Australians of First Nation heritage both long-overdue recognition and a legitimate Voice about programs and policies that affect them. I hoped that Stan Grant’s book might offer some healing words.It does, and it goes further.
The author reaches for his spiritual faith – a deeply Christian one – which he ties closely with his indigenous spirituality and deep family connections:
I come from a spiritual people – before anything else, we are a people of the unfathomable and inexplicable, and I love that about us. We have lived here in this Country for as long as human memory, in a state beyond the measurement of time, as close as possible to God. Baiyaame, that’s my people’s name for God: a creator spirit that commands the heavens, who gave us our place and our law…
Nothing of God was strange or unknown to us. We lived here in a thin space between Earth and Heaven – Murriyang – where the mystical realm was a breath or a touch away.Murriyang, pp13-14
Grant seeks to replace his lifelong career of journalism where he covered international and domestic politics, wars, and all the tragedies that humans can bring upon ourselves – with love.
Just love? This is where I struggle. It is such an amorphous concept. What does that mean at an individual level, or for a family, a community, a nation, for nations at war? How do we apply this in today’s world where it is a quality in very short supply?
I won’t pretend to understand the answers to these questions. What I will say is that for me, where the book demonstrates these ideas most clearly is in the more personal parts, which are in the sections interwoven within the main narrative. Titled Babiin (meaning ‘father’ in Grant’s Wiradjuri language) these are short snippets about family, mostly to do with Stan and his father, a Wiradjuri elder and cultural leader with whom he had a sometimes troubled, yet loving relationship. It is here we understand what love can mean: not the gooey silly Hallmark card variety, but the warts-and-all, realistic kind that can endure in families through the hardest of times, as it did in Stan’s.
Within the main narrative the author canvasses a wide range of concepts and ideas, including philosophers ancient and modern, mathematics (‘a source of mystery beyond our supposedly known world’), music (‘the heartbeat of God’), forgiveness, ageing and illness, time, nature and being on Country, memory (‘the delicate aroma of all we have been and of those we have loved’), language.
If that sounds like a shopping list of concepts, it’s not: each of these ideas is beautifully expressed and left me wanting more, even if I sometimes felt as if I could not quite grasp the depth of what was being said.
For me, reading Murriyang felt a little like reading the personal diary of a man who has seen – and experienced – too much suffering. It is a lament, but also a song of joy, if such a thing were possible. He is seeking solace, not in the artificial constructions of politics or society, but in the beauty of ancient spiritual beliefs and in the simplicity of love. The final pages express this beautifully:
I won’t lie; it is confronting watching Dad and Mum enter their final years: I face my mortality. My parents have found peace and acceptance: they are happier now than at any time I can remember.
Their days have a glorious monotony; they grasp for nothing. Whenever I am there, it is the simple things that mean the most: a cup of tea becomes a ritual. Dad is showing me how to live and when my time comes to pass, this is what I will remember.
Murriyang p251Murriyang was published by Bundyi, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, in 2024.
2024: My year in books (and what’s in store for 2025)
In 2024 I participated in three reading challenges again, always a fun way to keep variety in my reading diet. Sometimes the results at the end of a year can be surprising; this is one of those times.
In the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge I undertook to read 15 books of historical fiction – I came in right on target. It is easily my favourite genre of fiction.
For 2025, I will choose that same target in this challenge.
In the Cloak and Dagger Reading Challenge, I chose the ‘Amateur Sleuth’ target of 5-15 books, and hit 14 books, so that’s a giveaway that crime fiction is another favourite of my genres. I’ll go for around that many again this year.The surprise result for me this year was the Non-Fiction Reading Challenge, where I chose a conservative target of ‘nibbler’, aiming for 6 books. Instead I read a whopping 16 non-fiction books in 2024! I’m not sure what that means, but perhaps I should choose a higher target for 2025? Well, I’ll probably aim for ‘nibbler’ again and see how I go.
I have a private challenge of my own, to read more books by First Nations authors, in any genre. In 2024 my reading included 10 works by Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander writers: encompassing fiction, non-fiction, and children’s books. In 2025 I hope to equal or better that number.
As always, I am indebted to publishers, especially HarperCollins, and to NetGalley, for sending advanced copies of books for review. I also thank authors who have approached me asking if I would read and review their work.
I know it can be a scary thing to put your writing out into the world and ask for feedback. I never approach the task of reviewing a book lightly. Someone has put months (usually years) of work into research, drafting, rewriting, redrafting, editing, rewriting, editing again, and again, and again…until the finished product is finally put into their hands. For this reason I treat each and every book with the respect it deserves. And I thank each author and publisher for allowing me the opportunity to read and review their work.
So, on to 2025. I wish all my fellow readers a wonderful bookish year ahead.
Photo by Sumit Mathur at pexels Vivid colonial story: ‘The Governor, His Wife and His Mistress’ by Sue Williams
The third work of Australian historical fiction by Sue Williams, The Governor, His Wife and His Mistress tells the story of the naval officer who became the third governor of the British colony of New South Wales, but also the lesser-known entwined stories of the two women who shared parts of his life.
Williams has done this twice before, with great effect. Elizabeth and Elizabeth focused on the wives of Governor Lachlan Macquarie and John Macarthur. That Bligh Girl introduced Anna Bligh, the daughter of the notorious William Bligh (of ‘Mutiny on the Bounty’ fame) who replaced Gidley King as Governor in 1808.
As with those earlier novels, this new book gives a fabulous insight into the earliest, troubled years of the colony, from the point of view of women. A point of view usually overlooked in official histories of the men who, let’s be honest, made most of the decisions in those times.
Actually, this novel gives a vivid picture of the establishment of two colonies, because Gidley King was sent to put down British roots on Norfolk Island before returning to New South Wales. The author’s research is lightly handled but readers are privy to the many difficulties at both Port Jackson (later Sydney) and the even more remote Norfolk, and the logistical, moral and emotional challenges faced by successive governors.
By most historical accounts, Gidley King was an able and a fair and even handed adminsitrator. It is in his personal affairs that the other side of the man’s character are illuminated.
In this, he was definitely a man of his time and milieu. Men of his rank and situation often thought nothing of taking a convict wife as mistress, especially on the long voyage to the colonies. By the time the transport ships arrived, many had a baby on the way.
This is what happened to Ann Inett, a seamstress who had fallen on hard times when her soldier lover was killed in the Revolutionary War in America, leaving her with two small children to raise alone. One desperate crime sees Ann wrenched from her children, transported to New South Wales on a First Fleet ship, part of the great experiment of setting up a settlement from nothing on the other side of the world. Gidley King invites her to be his housekeeper, attracted by her obliging nature and quiet demeanour and, as they say, ‘one thing leads to another…’ A very common tale, part of Australia’s foundation story.
Dare I say it, more relevant to many modern Australians than the ANZAC story?
Before long, Ann has two young children with him, they are sent to Norfolk Island to endure even harder conditions there, then he is ordered to return to England…what will become of her?
It’s no spoiler to relate the next bit. Gidley King does return to Sydney. He had promised Ann marriage on his return but instead he brings back a wife, who is already expecting a baby!
It is to the author’s credit that she manages to relate this part of the story in a way which made me want to keep reading, rather than throw the book across the room. She took me into Gidley King’s head and his world view. Not a pleasant place, I admit, but it allowed me to see the constraints (as he saw them) on his moral and personal choices. So very different to today’s views. As I often say, people are no different, essentially, but society’s beliefs and expectations certainly change over time.
And as mentioned above, he was among many, many soldiers, sailors and officers who did exactly the same thing back then. Not an excuse. Just background. Captain David Collins, for example, who became the colony’s Judge Advocate, took convict Nancy Yeates, as mistress. She features in this novel too.
The real heroine of this novel, I believe, is the woman Gidley King marries, Anna Josepha. Can you image marrying a man after a very brief courtship, then boarding a ship to sail across the world to a rudimentary outpost of society, arrive heavily pregnant, to be confronted by your new husband’s mistress and his two children with her?
It seems that this quiet, ‘plain’ little woman rose to the occasion magnificently, smoothing what must have been a fraught and humilating situation for all concerned. She built a bridge between herself and Ann, between her husband, his existing children and those she went on to have with him. She took responsibility for the education of his children with Ann (to Ann’s credit also, as this meant losing her children yet again for a time).
And in doing all this, Anna Josepha was Gidley King’s right hand in his role as administrator and as Governor, acting as informal secretary, First Lady, diplomat, helping to sooth fractious tempers and care for her husband when illness took its toll.
An old story, isn’t it? And depressingly common: the faithful, loyal wife or mistress, supporting, helping, building up their menfolk. And then being forgotten in the annals of history.
So it’s wonderful to see their stories being told, both in more recent non-fiction and through the lens of fiction as in this novel.
The Governor, His Wife and His Mistress is published by Allen & Unwin in Janurary 2025.
My thanks to the publishers and to NetGalley for an advanced reading copy to review.
Did you know that in Victorian times, the fear of grave-robbers disturbing the final resting place of a loved one led to a brisk sale in ‘mortsafes’, an iron frame anchored over graves to secure them? And that there was an equally brisk, and to modern eyes very disturbing, trade in the bones and other body parts of non-Europeans, smuggled about the globe and ending up in private collections, museums and scientific institutions?
These are some of the snippets I learned by reading Black Silk and Sympathy.
I love Deborah Challinor’s historical fiction for this reason. She weaves into her stories fascinating insights about the places and periods in which her novels are set – in this case, London and Sydney in the 1860’s. Specifically, it is the world of Victorian undertakers: not usually a topic for a novel, especially one with a female protagonist, but all the more reason to enjoy it.
Tatiana at seventeen has been recently orphaned and makes a decision to leave London – and England – and try her luck in the colony of New South Wales. She is offered work as an undertaker’s assistant by Titus Crowe. It’s an unusual offer, but Crowe is an astute businessman and recognises the attraction of a ‘woman’s touch’ to grieving clients. Echoes of today’s women-operated funeral businesses, I suppose, but truly ground breaking in Victorian-era Sydney.
When Titus dies, Tatty is determined to keep running the business on her own terms. Not unheard of, but unusual for the time, especially in the competitive world of the funeral industry.
Unfortunately for Tatty, the competition is even fiercer than she’d thought, and one rival in particular will stop at nothing to limit her success.
Being a businesswoman in this town, and particularly in your industry, will not be without its challenges. And you will be the only female undertaker in Sydney. To my knowledge there are seven other local undertaking firms apart from yours, all chasing the same profit to be made from funerals. Be prepared.
Black Silk and Sympathy p167She is a formidable adversary though, and through quick thinking and a willingness to take risks, Tatty and her business endure.
Previous books I’d read by this author include the Convict Girls series, and it took me a while to realise that several characters, who felt vaguely familiar, were from those novels, albeit several decades on. It’s always nice to meet old friends from earlier books again.
The author’s background as an historian and researcher show in her impeccable details of the period, including fascinating insights into Victorian mourning customs and funeral practices, and the restrictions on women owning anything of their own once they married. The laws of the time certainly stacked the odds against women having anything like independence; yet there were women like Tatty who did not let that stand in their way. Thankfully we can now read stories about such women and the circumstances in which they lived.
Tatty is a heroine to relate to and I hope to meet her again in the next book of the series.
Black Silk and Sympathy is published by HarperCollins Publishers in April 2024.
My thanks to the publishers for a review copy.
