Another library treasure: ‘Eleanor: A 200-Mile Walk in Search of England’s Lost Queen’ by Alice Loxton
Have you ever gazed at a picture (or better still, stood in the doorway) of a mediaeval cathedral and wondered “‘How on earth…? How did architects, carpenters and masons design and build such soaring, improbable, beautiful structures…and all without a computer, power tool or motorised crane in sight?
I remember staring up at the awesome Lincoln Cathedral and thinking just that. It’s a truly memorable place, but now I wish I could have read Alice Loxton’s book before I visited, as I missed several interesting historical features there.
Loxton is a British historian, writer and presenter whose latest book Eleanor: A 200-Mile Walk in Search of England’s Lost Queen begins in Lincolnshire, where (in 1290, more than 700 years ago) a little-remembered English queen, Eleanor of Castile, died. In his grief, her husband King Edward I commissioned a series of memorial crosses, to be constructed at each of the places where her body lay on its long journey south to her final resting place in London’s Westminster Abbey.
Of the original twelve, only three still stand, though there are plaques to commemorate the original positions of many of the others. They were works of great beauty, cutting-edge design, a demonstration of a man’s love for his dead wife and created to ensure that she lived on in the collective memory of his kingdom.
Loxton decided to walk the same journey, from Lincoln to London, and write a book about the experience.
The result is a charming, entertaining and informative mix of travel writing, historical narrative and a fascinating hodge-podge of historical tid-bits.
She writes of Queen Eleanor, her life and achievements, saying Today, she’d be winning prizes for Women in Business, photographed in a no-nonsense power suit surrounded by her brood of children. She’d write books like ‘How Women Really Can Have it All.’ Really, a mediaeval queen up there with her better-known namesake Eleanor of Aquitaine, and a woman whose life story shows that women (even so long ago) were far from sidenotes to the story of their husband, father or sons. p11
She also delves into topics including mediaeval death and burial customs; churches and cathedrals and that question of how they were built; money and coins and how they were authorised and made; a history of Jewish people in England; bell ringing; the history of forks (yes, the cutlery kind); how Charing Cross in London got its name (yes, it was the site of an Eleanor Cross); the role of pilgrimage across the ages.
Loxton’s walk is itself a pilgrimage of sorts. She did much of it alone though segments were shared with family or friends. Along the way she met and talked to the kinds of people any pilgrim might have encountered in the thirteenth century: inn-keepers, artisans, shop keepers, religious folk…all of whom shared their knowledge and enthusiasms with her. It’s a picture of a generous country with glimpses of life from long ago. Her own approach is to savour the experiences, mentally (if not physically) slow down and notice all the hidden clues to England of long ago.
Already, it was becoming clear: if you simply take the time to look, our landscape is dotted with these forgotten memorials to the endeavours and sufferings of generations past.
Eleanor p78Eleanor is another of those library treasures I write about sometimes. I was browsing the ‘new books’ display at my local library and this book was face-out on the shelf. I picked it up, thinking it was a story of Eleanor of Aquitaine (a more famous mediaeval queen) but was taken by its premise of walking and retracing such a long-ago journey. I was richly rewarded with an interesting and entertaining read.
And here is a quote that Loxton (I think quite correctly) describes as among the most romantic words ever written; by Edward I about his wife:…whom in life we dearly cherished and in death we cannot cease to love.
Eleanor was published 2025 by Macmillan, an imprint of Pan Macmillan.
A woman’s view: ‘Elizabeth Macarthur’ by Michelle Scott Tucker
If John Macarthur (1767-1834) is known as ‘Father of the Australian Wool Industry’, why is his wife Elizabeth (1766-1850) not known as its ‘Mother’? After all, she spent over a decade managing the family’s extensive farming concerns, while her husband was back in England dealing with both business and legal matters. During that time she dealt with convict workers, monitored the sheep breeding program the couple had instituted at Parramatta and Camden, plus kept the household affairs in order, including caring for their six children.
No small feat, you would think.
Yet until recent years, her husband’s story has been the one taught in schools and told in history books.So I read Michelle Scott Tucker’s biography of this remarkable woman with pleasure and interest. Elizabeth arrived in NSW at a time when the fledgling colony was foundering, on the brink of starvation and failure. She was from a genteel and educated background in Devon, and wrote letters home to friends and family, many of which have survived and give a fascinating insight – a woman’s view – of the beginnings of what became Australia.
This was rare, as were women in those early years of NSW. The colony was heavily male-dominated and those (white) women who were here, were mostly convicts; few wrote letters to give insight into poorer women’s experiences of NSW in those times. Of course, Elizabeth’s own preoccupations tended to center on her own experiences: her family, her faith, her home and beloved garden, the farming concerns, the small settler social circles in which she mixed.
Though she lived at the time and in places where violence between white settlers and Aboriginal people was erupting, she seemed not to spend a lot of time reflecting on the reasons and ramifications of the conflict; nor did she appear to examine the reasons why a penal colony was needed by Britain in the first place. In this, she was not unusual.
She suffered her share of tragedies and setbacks: the death of her firstborn, a baby daughter, on the voyage to Sydney; the loss of other children later; facing those long periods managing on her own so far from home and family; dramas and difficulties affecting her adult children; and especially, watching the decline of her husband’s mental health. His behaviour became more erratic and volatile as he descended into full-blown mania and paranoia, which must have been excrutiating for her to witness.
A point of great interest to me personally was that the Macarthurs began their voyage aboard the ship Neptune – the very same convict transport ship that not one, but two of my own ancestors arrived on. True to form, John fought so bitterly with the ship’s master that they were transferred to another of the Second Fleet ships for the bulk of the journey. I’m pretty sure that the Macarthurs would not have laid eyes on either of my ancestors, both of whom (against all odds) survived the voyage below-decks on the ‘hell-ship’, as the Neptune was later dubbed.
Still, it makes for a fascinating ‘what if?’ scenario: an encounter between the gentrifed couple and the ragged, suffering convict men.
Scott Tucker’s book paints a vivid picture of a full life lived with dignity and verve. It is also a fascinating account of the world the Macarthurs inhabited: a fragile but growing colony ‘at the edge of the world’, as the book’s subtitle suggests.
Elizabeth Macarthur: A Life at the Edge of the World was published in 2018 by Text Publishing Australia.
Excavating a childhood: ‘The Framing’ by Fernanda Dahlstrom
For the first couple of chapters of this memoir, I felt like I was in the centre of an archaeological dig, surrounded by bits of rock and shards of broken pottery, none of which fitted together. The narrative jumps forwards and backwards in time, it is peopled by characters I found hard to sort out with odd nicknames or pseudonyms. None of it made sense.
I almost gave up. But I persevered and I am very glad I did.
I realised that, deliberately or not, the author has told the story of her remarkable, fraught childhood in a way that reflects its chaotic, mixed up nature. Through her writing, she has excavated her early life and especially the relationship with her mother, bit by bit, memory by memory, rather like an archaeological dig. What she found was often a jumbled mess…reaching clarity in adulthood as she worked through the memories, slowly dealing with the legacy of those early years.
By any measure, her trajectory was startling. Her mother Margaret was charged with multiple offences to do with fraud, theft, burglary and even stalking (of Judith Durham of The Seekers), but steadfastly maintained her innocence, insisting that she had been framed by police with a vendetta against her.
So Fernanda spent much of her childhood on the run, moving between states, cities, towns.
Super-bright, she was reading philosophers and literary novels in primary school. She began university study in her mid-teens. She spent chunks of time in boarding houses, living with foster families, even looking after herself in an isolated rural house her mother had built. She organised her own travel by plane, taxis and trains to see her mother during her periods of incarceration.
All this, while believing her mother was innocent and a victim of ‘the system.’
What struck me as especially sad was the chasm that opened up with family members – including grandparents – who could have stepped in to provide a loving, more stable environment for a child.
Her narrative did two things for me. I felt enormous admiration for young Fernanda, for her fierce loyalty to her mother and her resourceful approach to the many challenging situations she found herself in. She certainly presents an argument against the somewhat over-protected bubbles that children tend to live in nowdays, at least in wealthy Western countries.
I also felt enormous sadness for the little girl growing up without the guardrails and stability that we might assume are the birthright of every child.
This excavation of a childhood makes for a gripping narrative that raises many deep questions about who we trust and why; about how the systems set up to protect the vulnerable can harm as well as help; and about how each of us must decide for ourselves the value of our own experience and the things we are told about our past.
The Framing was published in 2026 by Melbourne University Press.
My thanks to the author for a copy of the book to review.The human cost: ‘The Mushroom Tapes’ by Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper & Sarah Krasnostein
The subtitle of this book sums up the authors’ intent: Conversations on a Triple-Murder Trial.
It’s not a blow-by-blow of the whole trial, nor of the crime itself. That sort of true-crime writing is not really my cup of tea, nor is it the kind of approach that the three authors are, rightly, famous for.
Rather, it’s a collaborative exploration of their personal responses to what they see, hear and think during this very famous trial in Victoria’s Gippsland region in 2025.
Especially, it is an examination of the very significant toll on those involved: the human side of the headlines, the speculation, the theories. The crime is only the first part of a process that affects every individual who is somehow connected to a trial like this.
I probably would not have been inclined to read this book, except that the three women who wrote it are authors whose previous works I have admired. They tackle their subjects with respect, humility and a very honest vulnerability. These qualities are reflected in this, a collection of conversations they had together while driving and from to the small town where the trial was held, and in between hearing days.
The result is not a forensic examination of the evidence, or the legal arguments, so much as how all of this made them feel – about the accused, about the victims, about the residents of a little country town that will be forever changed. The legal teams, the journalists covering the trial. The families of the dead.
They debate long and hard about their reasons for wanting to attend and write about this particular trial. Are they, in the end, like those who see it as an opportunity to make a quick buck from a book, podcast or film? Are they just curious sticky-beaks wanting a vicarious glimpse into unimaginable trauma? They share their thoughts about those reasons; here is part of their answer:
Helen: Basically what we’re doing is bearing witness…We’re bearing witness to a rent in the social fabric and how the law is going to deal with it.
Sarah: You can do two things with [evidence in a trial]. You can digest it into content that people come to ogle out of shadenfreude, or you can say ‘Oh God, I know that feeling…I know what shame is, and I know what rage is,and I know what it is to be islolated and desperate.’
ebook pp 23-24 of 249Of course mushrooms feature throughout, death cap mushrooms being the medium by which the killer delivered the poison to her victims. The authors muse on the ways in which mushrooms could be seen as metaphors: for indications of personality, relationships, intent. This book also had me thinking about fungi in general and its place in our environment.
I love the way these women write, and I loved ‘hearing’ their voices throughout this book: unadorned, unedited, honest.
The Mushroom Tapes is unlike any ‘true-crime’ book I’ve come across previously. In their exploration of this particular trial and the crime that brought it about, the authors have much to say about us all.The Mushroom Tapes was published by Text Publishing in 2025
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.
Humble life lessons: ‘Parting Words’ by Benjamin Ferencz
On Ben Ferencz’s website, his last book Parting Words is introduced as follows:
How many people do you know grew up as a poor immigrant in America during the Great Depression, won a scholarship to Harvard Law School, landed on the beaches of Normandy on D Day, were present at the liberation of concentration camps including Buchenwald, Mauthausen and Flossenburg, held leading Nazis to account at the Nuremberg trials and have fought for an International Criminal Court to hold war criminals to account the world over?
https://benferencz.org/books/parting-words-10-little-lessons-for-a-remarkable-life/
Now you know one.
Benjamin Ferencz turned 100 in 2020. In this extraordinary book, he shares his remarkable life story and the nine humble, compelling and life-affirming lessons he’s learned along the way that we can all harness for ourselves.This slender little book tells an amazing story of a truly incredible life, and it offers the gift of the lessons he learned while living it.
A man of humility, humour and wisdom, Ben Ferencz’s achievements belied his small stature and disavantaged background. His life mission was to help create a more peaceful and humane world. Despite endless disheartening news cycles, his optimism and hope never failed him.
Parting Words weaves together stories about his life, family, and work at home in the US and on the world stage, with some of the essential things he learned along the way. What I loved most is that these are not expressed in opaque, philosophical language, but as everyday easily understood phrases, and given alongside the circumstances that led him to this point of view. Some events were prosaic, everyday; others less so (like witnessing the horrors of the Nazi death camps, or helping establish the International Criminal Court.)
His nine key lessons touch on life circumstances, hopes and dreams, education, principles, life trajectories, truth, love, stamina, the future…and include:- You don’t have to follow the crowd
- Learn where you are
- Choose to be good
- The path is always bumpy, never straight
- Always speak your truth, even if no one’s listening
Buy a copy; I promise you will not regret it.
Buy several copies, because I’m pretty sure you will want to press this book into many hands while saying, Read this! In fact, my husband bought an extra copy for our young teen grandson. It makes an ideal gift for a young person embarking on this business of life, and for anyone feeling jaded by theirs, or by the world around them.Parting Words was written with Nadia Khomami and published by Sphere in 2020.
New review series: Library Treasures
What book lover doesn’t also love a library?
Our public libraries are places of connection and learning and offer the precious gift of books at minimal or no cost to the reader.And there is so much to adore about the newer phenomenon of street libraries: sharing, reciprocity and sustainability embodied in a humble cupboard or shelf outside someone’s home, for any and all to borrow from and contribute to.
I use and love both forms of libraries, so I thought it about time that I occasionally write about the treasures I find there.
These will usually be older books rather than new releases – though who knows what I’ll find at my local libraries or street cupboards?
Perhaps someone will be prompted to seek out a book at their local library if it sounds like their cup of tea.
First book off the shelf:
‘The Body: A Guide for Occupants’ by Bill Bryson
I enjoy Bryson’s writing, his quirky dry humour influenced by his birthplace, America, and also Britain where he spent many of his adult years. His travel writing is especially funny and insightful, though in more recent times he has expanded out into many other areas of non-fiction: history and science writing, for example. The Body is a bit of a blend of both.
It’s a big volume: 386 pages, not including notes and index. Bryson’s writing style is engaging, so even for someone like me (generally very much not a reader of science-related topics) it doesn’t feel like a slog.
It’s divided into chapters that traverse the main components of the human body, from our hearts and brains, skeletons, all the chemical wizardry that keeps us ticking along, what and how we eat, speak, see and hear…you get the idea.
The book is also chock full of amazing tidbits that kept me gasping: I didn’t know that!
Turns out there is so much about this body we inhabit from birth to death, that most of us are completely in the dark about.
Just a few examples:
- We all have more than a metre of DNA packed into every cell, and so many cells that put into a single strand, they would stretch ten billion miles to beyond Pluto. Enough to leave the solar system. You are in the most literal sense cosmic. p5
- Studies have shown the astounding (and to be honest, rather shocking) ways in which viruses and bacteria can spread from one human to another. One US study showed that a pretend virus spread from a door handle to an entire office building in just four hours, turning up on virtually every surface. p36
Wash your hands, people! - Motion sickness causes nausea because the body thinks it is being poisoned. p88
As a lifelong travel sickness sufferer, I’m not sure that is reassuring, but still interesting. - Our sense of smell is unbelievably complex, involving huge numbers of chemical compounds and various processes in our brains as well as our noses. p90
- Our kidneys produce a bathtub’s worth of water and salt every day. p155
Don’t forget to hydrate!
And many, many more jaw-dropping, humourous or simply wondrous facts…
Along the way are fascinating stories of how many of these facts were discovered, the personalities (dedicated, obsessive, or sometimes downright weird) of researchers who uncovered them. Some of these made me very glad to be alive now, not in medieaval times or even a century ago.
The final chapter is, of course, about the process of dying, and illustrates how much we still don’t know abut this normal, common, necessary but mysterious process.
All in all, The Body: A Guide for Occupants is an engrossing read, an absolute library treasure.
I’m grateful to my wonderful book group because the reason I borrowed it from my local library is that it is the first book set for our group for 2026. I might not have picked it up, otherwise, but I am very glad I did.The Body: A Guide for Occupants was published by Doubleday (an imprint of Penguin Books) in 2019.
Library photos by Sean Ingram and Rafael Cosquiere at pexels.
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 failed experiement? ‘Republic’ by Alice Hunt
I grew up on tales from Australian and British history and like many history enthusiasts, was especially captivated by the medieaval and Tudor periods in Britain. The Civil War era of the seventeenth century was not of particualr interest – until I listened to the episodes of David Crowther’s excellent History of England podcast series recounting the events leading up to the Civil Wars and the Republican experiment. I realised that the events of this period are actually fascinating, due to the complexities of the political landscape and the radicalism of the debates.
So when I had the opportunity to review Alice Hunt’s new book about this time, I was all in.
Subtitled ‘Britain’s Revolutionary Decade 1649-1660, each chapter takes one year and examines in detail the events, characters, competing ideas of that twelve months. It begins with the execution of King Charles I, so no spoiler there. This event, in itself, was quite extraordinary: the sanctioned killing of an annointed king after a legal process found him guilty of betraying the sacred oaths taken at his coronation, and responsible for the bloody wars that divided the kingdom between ‘Royalists’ and ‘Parliamentarians’.
Then came the events that followed, all quite extraordinary in themselves: the sale of the royal family’s property and goods (a sort of vast garage sale that went on for years); the shocking violence in Ireland under Cromwell’s direction; the attempts at reconciliation between the opposing factions within the nation and within parliament; the various iterations of parliament itself; the moment when parliament offered Cromwell the chance to become king himself…just to name a few.
The author concludes that:
The civil wars did not set out to kill the king and bring down monarchy but, by their end, a republic settlement was not only entertained but also, by some, desired.
Republic p30
There are stories of some of the interesting personalities of the time, some known to me (like Christopher Wren or John Milton) and others not so much (Katherine Jones, Robert Boyle).
Amongst the explosive political and legal events were others that, while not made up of ‘grand gestures’ nevertheless had important and long-standing effects. The readmission of Jewish people to Britain was one such. The beginnings of the Quaker movement another. The rising interest in natural sciences, philosphy, language, clocks, telescopes, horticulture, laying the foundation for modern science as we think of it today. It was during this decde that ideas of representative democracy, closer to the sense we think of it today than the ancient Greek version, were widely written and talked about.
This detailed but accessible book, paints vivid images of the turmoil and chaos of this period, of how the idea of a republic was being worked out on the run.
Understanding this goes some way to modifying the astonishment I might otherwise feel, knowing that at the end of this ‘revolutionary decade’, another Stuart (Charles II) was invited back to take up the British throne once more.
On finishing this book, I did wonder if the current monarch, another Charles, will read it and if so, what he might make of the goings-on of this decade from the past? Are there lessons from these years that speak to the current threats and opportunities for the British monarchy today? Or for those who hope that their country will once again, become a republic?
Republic: Britain’s Revolutionary Decade is published in 2024 by Faber & Faber.
My thanks to the publishers and NetGalley for a review copy.
Sibling trouble: ‘My Father’s Suitcase’ by Mary Garden
I reviewed NZ-born Mary Garden’s biography of her aviator father, Oscar Garden, back in 2021. In it, she referred to the unsettled, troubled family in which she grew up.
My Father’s Suitcase takes this several steps further. It opens with a physical attack on Mary, apparently out of the blue, by her younger sister Anna when they were both in their fifties. We know immediately that things are still not right in the Garden family.
This time the narrative centers on an all-too-common but often overlooked issue: sibling abuse. Another manifestation of the troubling problem of family violence, it has not received the (thankfully increasing) attention that has been directed at intimate partner abuse. But Mary’s story makes clear that the lasting effects of family violence, no matter who is perpetrated by, can be debilitating.
It also raises questions about family inheritances. Are genetics primarily responsible for mental ill health in families? Did a legacy of instability, depression and anxiety originate from Oscar’s bipolar disorder, his emotional repressiveness and oppressive behaviour towards his wife and, to varying degrees, their children?
All of the hallmarks of abuse are outlined in this book: the unpredictability of violent outbursts, gaslighting, a failure to intervene appropriately by those who should do so, scapegoating. And for the victim of the abuse? Shame, depression, guilt.
Having had my own experience of someone who (I’m now certain) suffered from an undiagnosed bipolar disorder, and experiencing many of the hallmarks of an abusive relationship, I felt a great deal of sympathy for the author while reading this book.
There were moments when I was shocked at her own responses to the situations she found herself in, but by her own admission, she too was acting out of a desperate and unstable mental state, the result of an intergenerational trauma that was then (in the mid-twentieth century) unrecognised and rarely, if ever, discussed.
Although much of this story took place in her birthplace of New Zealand, there are striking similarities between that country and Australia in the decades she describes. Conservative, relatively isolated nations, with little understanding and even fewer resources to help people deal with trauma or depression. Mental health services that by the 1990’s relied on programs in the community, leaving many sufferers isolated and uncared for, and their families increasingly desperate. A rejection by the post-war ‘baby boomer’ generation of the values and choices of their elders; a turn towards Eastern spirituality and/or counter culture in a search for something different. Tumultuous times indeed.
This memoir shares questions in common with memoir writing generally: Whose truth is being told? What version of events and people do we receive? Family disputes are always messy and usually damaging. Does it help to air them in public?
I would often answer ‘no’ to this question. But this memoir offers more than one’s person response to events. In her brutal ‘warts and all’ honesty, the author has highlighted some important and timely issues that we all need to understand. And she certainly is not painting an image of herself as a passive victim, acknowledging and questioning as she does her own behaviour and the family legacy of such:
Even though somewhere deep down I knew I was making a fool of myself and behaving erratically, I kept going. In that I was like my father. People had thought he was mad, too, when he flew from England to Australia in his second-hand Gypsy Moth. He did not give up. It was a miracle his little plane did not break down on his 19-day flight. He was determined to survive. Luck was on his shoulder. Luck was on mine also.
My Father’s Suitcase p204When her sister publishes a book about their father’s career hot on the heels of Mary’s own, very successful biography, it raises issues of plagiarism and copyright law, complicated matters which teams of lawyers deal with regularly. Even so, it made me wonder how much plagiarism goes undetected in published works.
This candid account of the ‘weird, crazy Gardens’ is a gripping story that finishes on a hopeful note: of recovery, of different choices leading to better health and a happier life. As such it offers some insight into what people can do to move on from the legacy of mental ill health and family abuse.
My Father’s Suitcase is published by Justitia Books in May 2024. My thanks to the author for a review copy.
