Flipping the script: ‘Looking from the North’ by Henry Reynolds
Have you ever seen a map of the world that is not the standard Mercator-type, but which depicts the continents and their positions in a way that is more true to life? If so, you’ll know that slightly unsettling feeling of gazing at a depiction of our planet that just looks weird, or so different to what you are used to, as it challenges deep assumptions about world geography.
Reading Looking from the North felt a bit like that for me. Having been born, raised and educated (and lived the majority of my life) in the southeast of Australia, my ‘take’ on our national story was, I see now, very much from a ‘looking from the south’ perspective. This book shook that up in a mildly unsettling, but also refreshing, way.
Historian Henry Reynolds is known for his truth-telling take on Australia’s national stories, and this book continues in that vein, with his hope that this nuanced view can shift mainstream Australian thinking, to reassess our story of colonisation but also understand our distinctive variant of decolonisation. (p5) He traverses events in Australia from the British act of colonisation in 1788 through to the Uluru Statement from the Heart, and everything in between.
Some of the major themes and events he considers really made me stop and think, including:
- Colonisation happened in two distinct phases, the second of which took place largely in the vast ’empty’ centre and north and played out very differently from the earlier colonisation of the south. Because the British government had handed over control of the new colonies of Queensland (1859) and the Northern Territory (to the colony of South Australia in 1863), moral responsibility to First Nations people therein was also handed over.
This is why the settlement of northern Australia is different. It was an Australian, not a British venture. For better or worse it is our responsiblity. We cannot escape from it or from its latter-day consequences with which we still live. (p15) - ‘Opening up’ land in the north for white settlers carried with it the same devastating consquences for the First Nations there. The hunger of Europeans – for land, gold, ownership – was the same as it had been half a century before, but the way it was assuaged sometimes differed from the south.
In both cases, though, The insouciance of both government and settlers was staggering. So too was their ignorance. They knew so little about the country itself and the people they were so ruthlessly usurping. (p23) - There were killing times (sometimes known as ‘frontier wars’ or appropriately, the ‘Australian wars’) in both north and south, though the environments, the demographics and the trajectories differed. But the litany of resistance, violent reprisals, and hideous atrocities are depressingly similar. In some places peaceful resolution, of sorts, did eventuate, though they tend to be less well-known: The attempt by both settler and First Nations communities to manage the process of reconciliation as the era of open warfare came to an end has rarely been studied by Australian historians. (p39)
- The pastoral industry in the tropical north was completely dependent on the resident First Nations workforce. (p62) Though this fact did not translate into decent payment or working conditions.
- Readers of David Marr’s forensic and harrowing work Killing for Country (2023) (my review) will no doubt agree with Reynold’s view that the story of the Native Police represents one of the most egregious, shameless chapters in the history of Australian colonisation. (p69)
- When Australia became a federated nation, a growing national obsession with racial purity led to the disgracefully long-lived policy of White Australia, under which people of Asian, Pacific Islander, and other ‘non-white’ backgrounds were ruthlessly expelled or barred from the country. This included many who had made their homes and had families in northern centres like Cairns, Darwin, Thursday Island, and Mackay. It also included labourers who had been brought here (some willingly, some less so) in the so-called ‘Blackbirding’ era, to work on sugar plantations. Not surprisingly, the expulsions and bans also had devastating effects on the economies and communities involved.
- This period also coincided with a convenient sort of amnesia about even the recent past, because The new nation hungered for worthy foundation stories to nurture collective pride. Peaceful conquest of country was a far more appealing story than bloody conquest for the land. (pp77-78)
- The White Australia policy did not die a much-deserved death until 1973. By then world opinion on issues of race was shifting and moves in international spaces, such as the United Nations’ International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination (1965) pushed national governments to enact laws to protect citizens from discrimination.
- Meanwhile, the Indigenous land rights movements were gathering force in Australia. A rocky road; but the book outlines the Yirrkala Bark Petitions (discussed in Clare Wright’s wonderful 2024 Naku Dharuk (my review), the Mabo and the Wik cases as significant in the gains made in the second half of the twentieth century.
I have listed so many points here to show just how much Reynolds includes in this book, which is nevertheless a slim and easy-to-read publication. If you enjoy a book that will teach you something new, give a different perspective on familar events, and continue the important work of truth-telling about our nation’s history, you will enjoy Looking from the North.
Looking from the North was published by NewSouth in 2025.
- Colonisation happened in two distinct phases, the second of which took place largely in the vast ’empty’ centre and north and played out very differently from the earlier colonisation of the south. Because the British government had handed over control of the new colonies of Queensland (1859) and the Northern Territory (to the colony of South Australia in 1863), moral responsibility to First Nations people therein was also handed over.
A child, a family, a play: ‘Hamnet’ by Maggie O’Farrell
First published in 2020, this historical novel by award-winning author Maggie O’Farrell is generating a resurgence of interest due to the release of the film adaptation in cinemas. I plan to see it soon and wanted to read the novel first; always my preference if possible, as the original book (in my opinion) always offers a richer, deeper story than a film can tell in its more time-limited format.
I wasn’t disappointed. As you can probably tell from its title, Hamnet is an imagining of the origin story of Shakespeare’s play Hamlet. And what a rich, deep story it is.
The author focuses on the members of the playwright’s family, especially his wife, called Agnes in the book, and their three children, Susanna and twins Judith and Hamnet. Shakespeare himself is, if anything, more of a secondary character, in that while his emotional arc is crucial to the story, he is never named and he comes and goes physically throughout, while the narrative centres on events in his home town and within his birth family and that of his wife.
I’m sure it is no spoiler to say that the crux of the novel is the death of Hamnet, still a child, and the effect this tragedy has on all concerned. The intense grief of the boy’s family, especially his parents and twin, is expressed in different ways by each individual. A family already under pressure, tested to breaking point, despite the deep love that exists there. Will this marriage survive? How does each person cope with the unimaginable but all too common tragedy of a child’s death? These are the questions that run through the book, keeping us engaged and committed.
The author has brought to brilliant life the Tudor-era setting: the sights, smells, daily lives in a quiet town like Stratford-on-Avon and in the busy, overwhelming city of London, where Hamnet’s father goes to pursue his quest for a career in the burgeoning world of Elizabethan theatre. Descriptions are deep, detailed, almost forensic: the journey of a single flea from a far off port, across land and oceans to the home where it bites Judith, resulting in her almost-death from bubonic plague and Hamnet’s subsequent illness, is startling in its specificity.
Within this vivid context the novel’s heart beats: love of a parent for their child, love of a twin for their paired sibling, love of a writer for their craft, love of a couple for their other.
And so a famous play was born: its story of overwhelming, maddening grief, echoing across the centuries to readers and theatre-goers today.
He can manage these: histories and comedies. He can carry on. Only with them can he forget who he is and what has happened. They are safe places to stow his mind (and no one else on stage with him, not one of the other players, his closest friends, will know that he finds himself looking out, every evening, over the watching crowd, in search of a particular face, a boy with a slightly crooked smile and a perpetually surprised expression; he scans the audience minutely, carefully, because he still cannot fathom that his son could have just gone; he must be somewhere; all he has to do is find him).
Hamnet ebook loc 254 of 310Hamnet was published by Tinder Press in 2020. I read the ebook version on Kindle.
The film adaptation is in cinemas as I write.For the adventurous ones: ‘The Cherayroos: Underground Rules’ by S.P.Doran
The Cherayroos: Underground Rules is all about an adventurous explorer from a little community beneath our feet.
Chie lives in CherayrooVille, beneath the WhisperDeep forest. The village is enclosed in the ancient winding roots of the Tree of Solace, where little fluffy creatures with twiggy legs and arms and big, saucer eyes (and very strange noses) dwell happily.
They obey the Rootscript of Rules which define how they are to live, study, and work. The most important one is that they are never to leave the village – which is okay for most, but not for Chie, as he is keen to explore the Above and prove his bravery.
What follows is a series of adventures as Chie sets off to find the way out of CherayrooVille and see what lies Above. He meets other creatures, some helpful, some grumpy and some plain scary, but in the end he realises that, while adventures are exciting, the rules are there to protect him and others, and really, all he had to do was ask to make his dream come true.
This is a lovely book for very early readers or to be read aloud. The text is nice and big, on pages that resemble parchment or an old manuscript, complimenting the detailed, richly coloured illustrations. The chapters are short and the narrative moves along at a brisk pace to keep youngsters involved.
Perhaps in homage to Tolkein, there is a terrific map (reminiscent of The Hobbit) and snippets of Cherayroo words and phrases used, with a glossary at the back. I confess I found these a bit confusing due to them all starting with ‘ch’ – but that’s probably just me. At the back the author has included some interesting questions for children to consider about the story and its world.
The book is all about exploring, being curious and adventurous, and encouraging youngsters to observe and ask questions about the world around them. I admire writers who work to get their ideas out there and I hope this one continues with this world and the characters he has created, in future books.
I could also see a fabulous animated adaption of this story appealing to young fans!The Cherayroos: Underground Rules is available in ebook and print versions on Amazon, and via the author’s website.
My thanks to the author for a review copy.Library treasures: ‘A Waltz for Matilda’ by Jackie French
I’ve had this one on my shelf for several years now, picked up at a street library, and finally had a chance to read it. So glad I did! First published in 2010, it is an imaginative re-telling of the origin story of arguably Australia’s most famous (and certainly beloved) folk song, Waltzing Matilda.
Once a jolly swagman camped by a billabong
Under the shade of a coolabah tree,
And he sang as he watched and waited till his billy boiled
‘You’ll come a’waltzing Matilda with me.’In this story, Matilda is a girl living with her very sick mother in an inner-city slum, working long hours in a jam factory to try to make ends meet. When her mother dies, she is left alone to fend for herself in an unkind world.
She goes in search of her long-lost father, a man her mother described as a ‘golden man’, though the couple had separated years earlier. The quest takes her to a drought-stricken isolated sheep farm on the outskirts of a small town, neighbouring a large run established by a squatter, Mr Drinkwater.
Her father welcomes her into his life but because of the drought, is about to leave his farm and go ‘on the track’ as a swagman, searching for work as he travels. He agrees that Matilda can accompany him, because where else is she to go?
Their journey together is cut short, though. Mr Drinkwater traps her father as they camped by a billabong, with troopers arriving to arrest him on a trumped-up charge of sheep stealing. He drowns (no spoiler here, the song says it all) and Matilda is once again on her own.
She decides to go back to her father’s farm and try to make a go of it, with the help of several others who come to help in honour of her father’s memory. He was a man much admired by the shearers and other workers in the district, because of his activism around shearer’s rights and the movement towards a national federated nation, able to pass laws to protect the rights of the more vulnerable in the community.
As always with a Jackie French novel, the story weaves in several important historical events and themes: the crippling1890s drought and subsequent economic depression; movements for better working conditions, women’s suffrage and temperance; conflict between wealthy squatters and the indigenous people of the land they stole.
It also deals unblinkingly with the racism of the time, the way that the move towards a united nation of Australia was motivated by ideals but also by self -interest and racist attitides, especially towards Aboriginal people and the Chinese. I love how this author does not shy away from the more difficult parts of our nation’s history.
A Waltz for Matilda is a big story, and book one of the ‘Matilda’ series. It’s very readable, with moments of both humour and sadness, and characters you can care about. Matilda is an admirable figure and it is a delight to watch her growth from orphaned girl to capable young woman. Best of all, it’s a wonderful way to introduce some important history to young Australian readers. Perfect for middle grade to young adult readers, this (no longer young) reader recommends it highly!
A Waltz for Matilda was published by Angus & Robertson in 2010.
Unquenchable spirit: ‘Three Minutes for a Dog…My Life in an Iron Lung’ by Paul R Alexander
Imagine being six years old, coming in after a day spent playing outside in the heat of a Texan summer’s day. You are hot, much hotter than normal even on a warm day like this. You have a sudden, terrible headache. Then your neck becomes stiff and painful.
Your mother notices and you see the fear – no, terror – in her face.
It is 1952 and the childhood disease called polio has been stalking the land, including your neighbourhood, striking down children of all ages without warning. You have become its latest victim.
The next two years are a blur of agony, misery and confusion in a hospital ward alongside numberless other polio patients. Because of the damage inflicted by the virus on your little body, you are now almost completely paralysed. Your lungs are unable to function on their own and you now exist in a machine known as an ‘iron lung’ which does the breathing for you. The only part of your body that protrudes from this metal cylinder is your head. An emergency tracheostomy has left you unable to speak, so you can’t call for help or to ask for any of your basic needs to be met. Many times a day you nearly choke to death.
Finally your parents decide to take you home. They do so knowing that you may only have a short time to live, as the doctors have suggested, but they firmly believe that home, with their loving care, is a better place for you. There are too many polio patients in the hospital, too few nursing staff. They worry that you will die there and without their love to surround you, what kind of death would that be?
This is the beginning of Paul Alexander’s memoir of his extraordinary life, published in 2023. Obviously he did not die, or not for a long while. When he finally passed away in 2024, he was the person who’d spent the longest time in an iron lung in the world.
In the book, Paul states that one of the main reasons for writing it was to help the public understand the dangers of polio, which has not (as is commonly thought) been eradicated worldwide. Indeed, given the trend in the USA and other parts of the world against childhood and adult vaccinations that protect against these types of devastating illnesses, it’s easy to understand that impulse. Do we really want to see whole communities live in fear of silent killers like polio once again?
As a six year old Paul did not understand what was happening to him. He could only endure. Gradually he was able to realise that he had to make a plan for his life, to work out what he could control and what he couldn’t.
A care worker encouraged him to try to learn a breathing technique colloquially called ‘frog breathing’ that would allow him to spend time outside of the iron lung, thus enabling him to taste some aspects of a more normal life. It’s hard to do and requires a lot of instruction and practice. To encourage him, she promised that if he could sustain three minutes of frog-breathing on his own, she would give him a puppy. Eventually, he won that puppy – and it later became the evocative title of his book.
Polio robbed this little boy of early schooling, but with the support of his parents he was able to be home-schooled and graduated high school – at a time when formal home schooling and adjustments for students with special needs were pretty much unheard of. He then completed studies at university, finishing up with a law degree and utilising his education in a career in law.
None of this could have happened without the steadfast love and commitment of his remarkable parents. To bring home a child requiring 24-hour care is one thing. However Paul’s medical needs were complex and the machinery that kept him alive even more so. There was a steep learning curve for everyone involved. Paul’s father improvised a communication device using a stick which Paul manipulated in his mouth; later this morphed into a way to write his university work, and later still, he typed his manuscript on a computer with a device that had its origins in his father’s simple idea from decades before.
The book also pays tribute to the many other caregivers and friends that played vital roles in Paul’s life. There is a lost romance which is a sad tale; possibly something the author never truly recovered from.
The writing is laboured at times, sometimes repetitive, not always easy to fall into the narrative. But as a heartfelt and passionate plea for understanding of the lives of others, it’s a story worth paying attention to.
And as an example of an unquenchable human spirit, I can’t think of a better one.
Three Minutes for a Dog…My Life in an Iron Lung was published in 2023 by FriesenPress.
No happy endings: ‘Mercy’ by Emma Woodhouse.
A Newton takes their own life, or that of another.
So says the curse of the Newtons.If you have read some of my other blog posts, you may have realised that I am a bit of a sucker for historical fiction that is inspired by, based on, or closely follows real-life people, places and events. Mercy is one such story, narrating in fictional form the true-crime saga of a working-class English woman who, in the 1840s, was charged with murder.
Her case became the talk of folk in inns and on streets across the land. Did she commit the terrible crime she was accused of? Did she deserve to hang? Or was she a victim of the brutal environment in which she was raised and the inequality between rich and poor?
The notoriety of her name grew as not one, but two juries were unable to deliver a verdict. This was unheard of. It was up to a third and final jury to pass judgement on a woman accused of a most heinous crime imaginable. Would she be found guilty? And what would become of her young daughter, raised in the same harsh milieu as Mercy herself?
The other reason I was drawn to this story? The protagonist’s family name, which I share. While not believing for a moment that my name holds within it a curse as Mercy’s seems to have done (and honestly, given how events played out in her family you can understand how that idea came about), a novel centred around a cursed family name is always a little intruiging…
The author has used historical documents from the archives and old British newspaper reports to skillfully weave a story told from three main points of view: Mercy herself; her daughter Maria; and the local justice of the peace who prosecutes the initial murder case against Mercy. This gives rich detail of the events as they were reported at the time, while also painting a vivid backdrop of the grim environment in which they occurred.
And it is grim. There is little or nothing held back. The story opens with an earlier murder, this one perpetrated by another Newton, Mercy’s cousin John, who beats his pregnant wife to death one stormy evening. It sets the scene and as readers we know that despite an occasional glimmer of hope on the horizon, the future for Mercy and her family is, in reality, nothing but bleak.
For me this bleakness became a little too much and I found the novel hard going because of it, while still admiring the detail and story-telling skill involved. As a tale that paints a realistic picture of how things were for working-class folk in Victorian times, it’s to be commended. Just not an easy read. And don’t expect a happy ending in the usual sense, because for these people they were few and far between.
Mercy is published by Cranthorpe Millner Publishers in July 2025.
My thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for a review copy.
I have a confession to make. I am often not a fan of the big literary prize winners. With a few notable exceptions, they can feel dry, without much of a plot or characters that I can relate to. I know I will ruffle some feathers admitting this and of course everyone comes to their reading experience in a different way with their own expectations.
Orbital by Samantha Harvey was the 2024 Booker Prize winner and was a nominated read for my book group early this year, but I missed that meeting and my turn only just came up on the borrower’s list at my local library this month. But I had heard many positive things about this book and I was keen to try it and form my own view. Unlike many Booker winners, it is a slender book, a novella really, so I was not faced with one of those weighty tomes to wade through. I took a deep breath and began.
In some respects this one lives up to my previous experience of literary prize winners. Here’s how:
- There’s not really a ‘plot’ to speak of. The narrative takes place over a single day, following six astronauts in an international space station as they orbit sixteen times around the earth. Things happen, but they are not events that move the plot forward in the traditional sense of a novel.
- There’s not a lot of character development or movement either. We learn a little about each of the astronauts, who are from six different countries, and something of their lives before embarking on this mission. But that’s kind of it. No great emotional insight to speak of, no huge conflict (inner or interpersonal), no emotional arc over the book’s duration.
- The author has a tendency to say in many words, and sometimes very long sentences, what could perhaps be said in just a few.
Did I grow impatient and annoyed, as I would ordinarily do whilst reading a book like this? No, I did not. I know these characteristics have irritated some readers and I can understand why, but what stood out instead for me about Orbital were these features:
- Exquisite descriptive writing conjuring exactly what the view from a space module’s window must look like at various times of the ‘day’ and ‘night’.
- Startling insights into the regular routine of life on board. I’m sure I’m not the only one to have never considered, for example, that orbiting the earth like this means that the astronauts experience multiple sunrises and sunsets in one 24-hour period. Actually the human construct of time means very little in space. How do astronauts adapt to this?
‘The past comes, the future, the past, the future. It’s always now, it’s never now.’ p76 - Glimpses into the psyche of an astronaut. Either the author interviewed current or past astronauts or else has a vivid imagination and emotional intelligence; either way, she brings the inner world of her characters to life so that readers can understand a little of the ‘push’ and ‘pull’ of space travel: the competing demands of home and space, what feels real and what simply imagined.
- Fascinating facts about the humdrum and ordinary. How do people in space eat, sleep, wash, exercise, spend leisure time? What are their daily chores and responsibilities? How do you exist in such close confines for months at a time with a small group like that, with no outlet or way to be with others or to be truly alone?
- What is it like to do a spacewalk, outside the space station module? Terrifying? Electrifying? Like coming home? Perhaps all of these.
What I most enjoyed about Orbital, though, is the way the author puts into perspective our globe, our earth: our (so far at least) one-and-only home, and the way the astronauts’ feelings gradually change over time about it as they gaze down on it from above:
Before long, for all of them, a desire takes hold…to protect this huge yet tiny earth. This thing of such miraculous and bizarre loveliness. This thing that is, given the poor choice of alternatives, so unmistakenly home…Can humans not find peace with one another? With the earth? It is not a fond wish but a fretful demand. Can we not stop tyrannising and destroying and ransacking and squandering this one thing on which our lives depend? Yet they hear the news and they’ve lived their lives and their hope does not make them naive.
Orbital p73Orbital was published by Penguin Random House UK in 2024
What if kindness? ‘A Different Kind of Power’ by Jacinda Ardern
Just before Jacinda Ardern was sworn in as New Zealand’s 40th Prime Minister in 2017, she was asked by a journalist what was it she wanted to do in the role: the ‘untethered, big-picture stuff.’ Her response was:
‘I want this government to feel different…I want people to feel that it’s open, that it’s listening, and that it’s going to bring kindness back.’In her memoir, A Different Kind of Power, she writes that at that moment she recognised that kindness was the word that encompassed everything that had left an imprint on her, from her childhood, her parents, her community and the people she’d worshipped alongside or worked with, ‘always in the service of something better.’
Some people thought kindness was sentimental, soft. A bit naive, even. I knew this. But I also knew they were wrong. Kindness has a power and strength that almost nothing on this planet has. I’d seen kindness do extraordinary things: I’d seen it give people hope; I’d seen it change minds and transform lives. I wasn’t afraid to say it aloud, and as soon as I did, I was sure: kindness. This would be my guiding principle no matter what lay ahead.
A Different Kind of Power p202I was so pleased to be gifted this book (thank you, Andy!) written by a world leader who showed us all that leadership does not have to be cuthroat, that power does not have to mean ‘power over’ but can mean empowering others, and that kindness can, indeed, be part of the equation.
The narrative encompasses those early influences: her warm loving family and a childhood in small communities; mostly happy memories despite some challenges along the way. A young political awakening because of the sights and sounds of her first childhood community, and a burgeoning awareness of how poverty and other circumstances can push a community and its people into difficulty. Different grandparents and the various lessons absorbed from each.
Initial volunteer political work, education, leading to her first paid roles in the world of politics. Becoming a Member of Parliament (I still can’t get my head around New Zealand’s electoral system, but thank goodness for it, as it allowed Jacinda to take on this role, which ultimately – and to her and others, somewhat unexpectedly – culminated in the Prime Ministerial position.)
She writes about the highlights and lowlights of her time in politics and as PM, which of course you’d expect in a political memoir. If you have followed the news over that period you’d be aware of some of the biggest challenges she faced: the shocking and brutal shootings at a Christchurch mosque in 2019; a volcanic eruption at a major tourist attraction, and of course the Covid global pandemic.
Because of the very personal style of writing about these events, I found myself wondering ‘what would I have done? How would I have reacted?’ What I took from her memories of these times is that the personal, empathetic component of a leader’s response is just as important, if not more so, than the logistical resources and decisions he or she can implement.
The scene inside a crisis centre where she met with victims of the Christchurch attack and their loved ones, is vividly portrayed. She had to balance the need for police and forensic procedures at the crime scene, followed by official identification of the victims, with the urgent need for their families for a quick burial as required by their Muslim faith. Understandably there was grief, anger, and confusion in the room. Knowing how important both empathy and clear communication were at this time, she managed to achieve a calm stillness where minutes before had been a cacophony of noise and distress. She writes: ‘Perhaps even bad news can be better than unanswered questions.’ (p248)
I would agree. I would add: it also depends on how that news is delivered, and by whom.
I especially loved the personal insights she shares along the way of her story: crying in a bathroom stall after an error which saw her chastised as a new staffer in Parliament; feeling that her sensitivity was her ‘tragic flaw’ that would keep her from staying with the political work she loved. Meeting Clarke, her partner; their journey to parenthood to Neve. (The opening scene of the book has to be the best hook ever. I won’t describe it here for fear of a spoiler, but it’s brilliant.) Juggling family and political life.
She describes her decision to leave the Prime Minister’s office and politics, and her reasons why, none of which come as a surprise when thinking about the person she is. I was pleased, though, to read that she has continued her advocacy and her work for hope and kindness since leaving office, through establishing a Field Fellowship for empathetic leadership, academic work at Harvard university, climate action work, and support for the Christchurch Call to Action to eliminate terrorist and extremist content online, among other projects.
At a time when so-called ‘strong men’ seem to hold parts of the global population in their sway, we need more leaders like Jacinda Ardern, not just in politics. It often seems to me that simply increasing the number of women in political or CEO roles does little to change things for the rest of us, if they are operating on the ‘business as usual’ principle. More of the ‘kindness principle’ may help to rectify that.
A Different Kind of Power is published by Penguin Random House in June 2025
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.
