This shorter contribution looks at two recently read novels [birthday gifts in October], and also includes a brief reference to two small booklets principally dealing with the gold rush history of Ballarat [site of the 1854 Eureka Stockade rebellion in Australia].
I recently finished reading ‘The Night Tide’ by Di Morrissey [published 2022], 403 pages – another excellent & interesting novel from this author, most of whose novels I have read and possess. As before, a story that was easy to read [unlike a couple of more serious historical books I’m ploughing through at the moment] and was difficult to put down, as evidenced by the speedy read over two days. And, being set in Australia, while not necessarily parts of the country I was intimately familiar with, her stories so often add a touch of local nostalgia.
From general reviews – After an election upheaval, Dominic Cochrane decides it’s time to leave his twenty-year political staffer career behind. He opts to stay at a friend’s converted waterside boatshed in a quiet bay in a Sydney backwater. The long-time neighbours take Dom into their fold, but his peaceful retreat is quickly upended as he becomes embroiled in a tragic mystery.
As money sharks circle treasured family homes in the secluded community, tensions mount as their way of life is threatened, secrets are exposed and old wounds reopened. Can Dom unravel what really happened so many years ago, or have the secrets been swept away on the dark night tide?
A reflection on DI Morrissey’s inspiration in her words for the book, taken from Channel 9’s ‘A Current Affair’
Pittwater, on Sydney’s northern peninsula, could very well be the prettiest place to call home.
It’s where author Di Morrissey spent her childhood and it’s the inspiration and location of her latest novel, The Night Tide. “I was about four when my mother moved down from the country and the biggest memory probably is that big house up there. That’s Dorothea Mackella’s house, Tarrangaua,” Morrissey told A Current Affair.
With her daughter Gabrielle by her side, Morrissey has returned home for the first time in decades.
“She came out and she caught me looking around the house and she said, ‘what do you think you’re doing?’,” Morrissey recalled about her childhood neighbour, Mackellar.
“And I said quite cleverly, ‘I’m looking for fairies’ and she said, ‘how terribly splendid, I’ll help you look’.
“She said, ‘do you like to read’? and I said, ‘I don’t have many books so I make up my own’ and she said, ‘when you grow up you must put your stories down in books for other people to read’. I thought ‘what a good idea’.”
After a short journey onboard historic Elvina, the same ferry Morrissey once took to school, we arrived at Lovett Bay. Caretaker Gerty was there to greet us and to give us a much-needed push up the steep, dirt road to Tarrangaua. A secluded sandstone retreat among the gum trees is the home of the acclaimed poet and Morrissey’s childhood neighbour, Mackellar. “You couldn’t ‘movie set’ this, you couldn’t make a place up like this, which is why I wanted to use this setting in the book,” Morrissey said while looking out at the view. “I can imagine now how natural it would’ve been to develop all the imagination that you have,” Gabrielle said.
Her first was Heart of Dreaming in 1991 and she’s hardly missed a year since without having a novel published.
But there’s something special, indeed nostalgic, about her latest book.
“The people that lived here – Chips Rafferty’s house was straight over there – Chips was like my godfather, Dorothea Mackellar was living here, George English the composer was over there,” Morrissey said.
“So, I thought everybody did things like this. “You need trees and you need places you can sit and be still and be silent and imagine things. There are too few.”
The book focuses on a mystery and a family tragedy, which unfortunately Morrissey’s encountered herself.
“My father and baby brother drowned off Scotland Island. He had a little water taxi service. Michael fell overboard and my father jumped in after him in his winter clothes,” Morrissey said.
“I never went to the funeral, I never had closure. So to have my daughter here with me today, it’s kind of the closing of one book and opening of another.” With a story as much about family, as it is about place, it’s only fitting that Gabrielle has returned home from the United States to be closer to her mum.
She calls it a perk of COVID-19. “Happy doesn’t even cover it, it just feels like home, it feels right to be raising my kids here,” Gabrielle said.
[Di Morrissey is one of the most successful authors Australia has ever produced. She trained as a journalist, working in the media around the world. Her fascination with different countries; their landscape, their cultural, political and environmental issues, forms the inspiration for her novels. Di is a tireless activist for many causes: opposing large scale development and commercial food chains into Byron Bay NSW, fighting gas and mining intrusion into sacred lands in the Kimberly, and stopping massive and unnecessary power lines intruding into the Manning Valley NSW. Di also established The Golden Land Education Foundation in Myanmar. Di lives in the Manning Valley, NSW].
Another birthday gift in 2022 was – ‘Bodies of Light’ by Jennifer Down, published in 2021,427 pages – as one description put it about this winner of the 2022 Miles Franklin Literary Award, ‘Bodies of Light is Jennifer Down’s third book and her best yet… A brilliant, sharply observed and deeply affecting epic that secures Down’s status as one of the best writers in Australia today. ‘ ‘A remarkably empathic book…a life that the reader cannot deny.’
This was a very confronting book, written in the first person, given the impression it was a direct biography of the writer’s life – it is a story of a life in full – tragedy, heartbreak, sexual abuse, alcohol, drug abuse, the loss of babies, short-lived relationships, and constant reminders of a traumatic past in the absence of family, friends, psychiatric breakdowns – the full gambit of things which can go wrong from a child initially passed through various care and foster homes, most of which were totally inadequate in terms of permanence, safety and life style guidance.
I was attracted to the book from an ABC ‘book review’ program earlier this year, but didn’t really anticipate what I was letting myself into, as far as a view into the life of someone who would face so many obstacles and tragedies in her life.
The following opening three paragraphs from an article in Guardian Australia, from the Australian Book Review sets the scene for the book and what follows, written by Declan Fry, on 1/10/2021 –
“When musician Liz Phair sang her 1991 song, Fuck and Run, I couldn’t help wondering at the irony of her choral lament – “Fuck and run, fuck and run / even when I was 12” – lyrics that claimed something akin to agency in a situation which, read a certain way, could be considered exploitative. In doing so, it becomes a form of self-protection: I did it so you didn’t. Bodies of Light, Jennifer Down’s second novel, is a meditation on what it means to experience this vulnerability. Its narrator, Maggie Sullivan, is institutionalised, caught up in a world of “foster families, group homes and resi units”, of “scheduled mealtimes bathtimes playtimes sleeptimes and joints laced with speed and grilles on windows”. Her father is a drug addict, jailed after injecting and killing one of his friends while Maggie is young; her mother is dead by the time she is two, OD’ing in a public toilet. At the age of 4 she is molested; at the age of 11, she is molested again. Maggie’s voice has the verisimilitude of memoir. When she recalls “showers in the dark and lithium and coppers exploring my arsehole with a five-cent coin and sucking lolly snakes to get the taste of cock out of my mouth”, we credit her bitterly nonchalant sense of shock. Maggie is a person who has learned to be guarded and become adept at making herself as small as possible: “Picture me in that summer slick, newly fifteen and in search of a hollow to fall through.” By the age of 19 she has entered a psych ward (“clinical depression, catatonia, psychosis”); in her 20s, she experiences postnatal depression. We follow her into adulthood and late middle-age, witnessing incidents which will, quite literally, transform her life….”
I have used part of an article from the Sydney Morning Herald [Giselle Au-Nhein Nguyen, Oct 22, 2021] to provide a more concise description of the book, which may either encourage or discourage future readers. In the first part of the book, I was not sure that I was going to want to continue reading, so raw and ‘unpleasant almost’ was the way the story was developing. But despite that feeling, it became difficult to put down, and was read over two or three days. The reviewer writes as follows:
“Bodies of Light is many things at once: a crime novel, a mystery novel, an epic, a testimony. The third book from Jennifer Down is staggering in its scope, encompassing half a century of life lived by its magnetic and mystifying central character, Maggie Sullivan – or Josephine, or Holly, depending on who you’re asking.
The year is 2018 when the Facebook message arrives: “Wondering if you are any relation of Maggie Sullivan (Aussie), she went missing a long time ago.” The sender has seen a viral image, and is struck by how much the woman known as Holly – at this stage living a simple life in the US – looks like someone he lived in foster care with as a child. Panicked, Maggie deletes the message and blocks the sender – and begins, privately, to excavate the life she has deliberately buried.
From the Victorian suburbs and shorelines to Sydney, to New Zealand to the US, the story that follows is a sweeping, breathless saga that charts a life that could be two, or three, or more. Maggie’s life is undoubtedly tragic, beginning with her removal from her family at the age of five and years moving from home to home, frequently enduring horrific abuse at the hands of her guardians.
Down drew inspiration from first-person accounts by residential and out-of-home care leavers to bring this part of the story to life in a realistic way. She does not shy away from the grim realities and failings of the system, or the ways in which girls and women are routinely used and discarded by society, shown through Maggie’s transient, often transactional relationships.
Maggie is a perplexing character, equal parts lucid and foggy. The book shines in the middle section, in which a police investigation takes place regarding a crime that she may or may not have committed. Here, Maggie’s occasional role as an unreliable narrator emerges. Down expertly plays intimate scenes depicting the character’s actions and thoughts against police interview transcripts, and the reader is left with little clarity as to what actually happened.
There are also moments when Maggie herself is unsure whether she has blacked out and forgotten something; after this, the character’s first vanishing act occurs. It’s incredibly clever writing that fortifies Down’s point about the fallibility of trauma-impacted memory – the novel is Maggie’s testament to herself, her mind the only proof she has of her existence at all, yet there are still gaps that cannot be filled, even by herself.
What’s remarkable about the novel is the way in which Down balances this darkness with small moments of beauty, rendering Maggie’s complex, harrowing life with grace, humanity and hope. One particularly memorable scene sees Maggie and her first husband observing the brilliance of bioluminescence at Phillip Island in the dead of night, lending a brief moment of awe and magic to their relationship, dying under the weight of grief’.
Finally, another pair of little booklets, written and produced by Ballarat historical writer, Doug Bradby
[1]: ‘The Astonishing History of Ballarat’ Vol. 2 [1856-1883] by Doug Bradby, pub.2019, 256 pages.
Interesting as always, particularly the references to so many sites around Ballarat – though I did this edition a little over-whelming in respect to the volume of mining and other statistics, much of which because of the detailed involved floated over my head! However, from the back cover – ‘A crucial time in Ballarat’s mining history, 1856 was the year the miners first went ‘below the blue rock’ into the deep leads of Ballarat West. Redan and Sebastopol. There they would find and extract about five million ounces of gold. This incredible achievement took twenty years and would completely transform Ballarat’.
And from Collins Booksellers, Ballarat – ‘It was the men who first went below the blue rock who made the reputation of Ballarat. ”We have shallow sinking, deep sinking, ground sluicing and quartz mining, and we had to learn everything. All this has been taught us by the pick and shovel of the miner. There have been none to help us, and the knowledge we have has been slowly gained and dearly paid for.’ ‘The miners of Ballarat, have, in a few years, changed a wilderness into a great and important centre of wealth and progress.’ It is a wonderful story, worth knowing, worth understanding, and worthy of reflection. The second book in a trilogy exploring Ballarat’s astonishing history.
Written by Doug Bradby. Illustrated by Carson Ellis.
[2] ‘Unsung Heroes: Ballarat’s Bravest Citizens, introduced by Doug Bradby [from the ‘Ten Delightful Tales’ series, published 2022, 32 pages – another short but interesting series of snippets and stories from the early days of life in the Ballart gold fields and beyond Couldn’t find any reviews of this, but most of the ‘stories’ covered involved mine accidents, together with various drowning and water occurrences.
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