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  • The Coachbuilder’s Column: Volume 15: Issue 13: 18th August, 2025:  Testimonies of Gaza and October 7th.

    The following essay was taken from a weekly digital newsletter titled ‘The Conversation: Books & Ideas’, and I share it in this Column, simply for the information of readers, as it appeared in that Newsletter at the beginning of July this year. A specific  ‘Friday Essay’ on a broad range of topics is included in ‘The Conversation’ each week, and I felt this was relevant to the times we currently live in.

    From The Conversation, 4th July 2025

    Friday essay: ‘whose agony is greater than mine?’ Testimonies of Gaza and October 7 ask us to recognise shared humanity, by Juliet Rogers, Associate Professor Criminology, The University of Melbourne.

    In 1962, poet and Auschwitz survivor Yehiel Dinur took the stand in Jerusalem in the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. Dinur was a much-anticipated witness, bearing the audience’s hope this man, a poet, would be able to explain – to capture and to transmit – the experience of Auschwitz, and of the Holocaust; that he could speak the unspeakable. Prosecutor Gideon Hausner hoped such a witness might “do justice to the six million personal tragedies”.

    Dinur used the name Katzetnik 135633 in his writings, also translated as “Prisoner 135663”. On the stand, he said: “I believe wholeheartedly that I have to continue to bear this name until the world awakens.”

    Awakening, understanding, empathy and change are the sentiments many survivors hope for, or ask for, during and after periods of trauma. The 20th century saw many of those pleas. The 21st century has done no better at honouring the promise, captured in the title of the 1984 Argentinian commission report on forced disappearances, Nunca Mas: never again. No matter how many such pleas appear before the courts, before the aggressors, before those in solidarity, the horrors of war, torture, starvation and genocide seem to happen again – and again.

    Three recent books from the region where war was been raging since the Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7 2023, and the ensuing war on Gaza, are part of these pleas.

    Review: Eyes on Gaza – Plestia Alaqad (Macmillan), Letters from Gaza – edited by Mohammed Al-Zaqzooq & Mahmoud Alshaer (Penguin), Gates of Gaza – Amir Tibon (Scribe)

    Eyes on Gaza is an on-the-ground account of the death and destruction of the first 45 days of the war by now 23-year-old Palestinian journalist Plestia Alaqad, who moved to Melbourne with her family in November 2023. Letters from Gaza is a collection of 50 stories, poems and fragments from Palestinian writers enduring the past 20 months. And Gates of Gaza is the story of Israeli journalist Amir Tibon, a resident of Nahal Oz, one of the border kibbutz attacked by Hamas on October 7.

    These are all first-person testimonies of experiences of being under attack, though those attacks differ. We might say they fit into the genre adopted in truth commissions, such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa: a response to the nation’s years of living under the apartheid laws, discarded when Nelson Mandela took power in 1994.

    The commission was one effort to heal from this past. But, like the Eichmann trial, it needed stories to explain the histories of violence, and it needed the pain to be voiced to explain its impacts on communities, families and relationships.

    The use of people’s narratives to “bear witness” to the complex layers of legally sanctioned and militarily executed pain, loss and the traumas they can produce, is sometimes effective in helping audiences understand them. The Bringing Them Home Report in 1997 used this form to explain the incidence and impacts of the forced removal of Indigenous children by the Australian state. It was effective as one form of creating a shared reality for all in Australia, who then understood the term “stolen generations” and the pain, loss and genocidal intent to which this phrase refers.

    More recently, the Yoorrook Justice Commission in Victoria, Australia’s first formal truth-telling inquiry into historic and ongoing systemic injustices perpetrated against First Nations Peoples by colonisation, has also brought histories of loss, dispossession and abuse to light, using stories. Stories can make sense of the impact incurred through the intertwined web of policies, statistics, discrimination and quotidian violence at the hands of the state.

    The work of testimony

    The narratives in these books written since October 7 2023 are part of this genre of testimony or storytelling. But at least two of these books are not attempting to explain the past. They might be described better as pleas to stop what the International Court of Justice has called “a plausible genocide” happening in the present.

    They are, in one reading, wishes for the world to understand the experience of pain, rage, loss, fear, distress and defeat that accompanies destruction and unbearable loss. A wish for the world to hear, or perhaps feel, the words on the page – and make the pain stop.

    They wish the world would “awaken” to what is happening right now.

    The dynamic of awakening is the stock in trade of truth commissions. One party testifies or speaks to an experience, and the audience wakes up to what has been happening. As a result, they either change or facilitate change. The truth, captured as testimony, is supposed to set people free. Not just the speaker, but the community of speakers weighed down by history – or by the struggles of the past or the present.

    In legal forms the reason to speak is clear. The reason to speak in literature, biographies and works of nonfiction is less clear. What does the author want from us, the readers? But perhaps more importantly, what can we offer?

    Plestia wants her life back

    Plestia Alaqad is very clear about what she wants in her book, The Eyes of Gaza: A Diary Of Resilience.

    She wants the genocide to stop. She wants a free Palestine. She wants her home and her life back. The stories in this book show readers outside Gaza some of the life and death of those first six and a half weeks.

    Her last entry before she leaves Gaza for Egypt – and then Australia – is dated Day 45. During those 45 days, she puts on a press helmet and jacket, which both give her protection and weigh her down. And then she speaks: to cameras, to followers, to anyone who will listen. Her social media feeds documenting the war gained worldwide attention, her Instagram following rising from around 3,700 to 4.1 million today.

    There are too many deaths to be witnessed – by her and the reader. She describes genocide as an understatement for what is occurring in Gaza: “we lose more people than our hearts can handle”. She has seen so much death, heard so many screams. By day 30, all you can hear is a voice crying for help from under the rubble. You turn your back and walk away, because there’s nothing you can do to help.

    But Plestia’s project is more than documenting death. She is careful to show many aspects of life in Gaza. She shows how Palestinians retain relationships, family and pets. How a young boy just needs his “pot plant” from his destroyed house, under skies filled with drones and bombs. This is a plea for the genocide to stop, but it is also a celebration of being Palestinian. It is an homage to life in Gaza.

    It is also a plea to see Palestinians as more than numbers – and more than how they are depicted by Israel.

    “The world,” she says, “sometimes treats us like terrorists, trying to justify its complacency in allowing us to be massacred. And we know the perception, we read the propaganda just like everyone else. But the reality is that we’re the opposite.”

    She describes gentle moments of love and care between her fellow journalists and the people they interview. The children they bring sweets for, the “bird lady” who renames her tortoise “Plestia” after her. Both Plestia the tortoise and the “bird lady” are now living in a tent. She speaks of the doctors who work tirelessly.in the midst of brutal amputations and unimaginable burns, she recounts the care of a doctor giving cream for a skin rash that has tormented her, diagnosed as a product of her anxiety. Anxiety seems a gentle diagnosis for symptoms produced by witnessing and documenting such brutality.

    Anxiety over her helplessness, perhaps, over the lack of sleep, of nourishing food: dwindling even in those first 45 days. Anxiety seems like a Western preoccupation, from this writing distance. What Plestia experiences seems more like layers of embodied distress. Her empathy allows her to feel, perhaps too much. Empathy can be an enemy.

    Around page 100, she begins to deteriorate. “It’s funny how genocide changes a person,” she writes, describing herself as “Genocide Plestia”. She’s devastated, exhausted. She has lost hope. The journal entries are shorter, more repetitive. They recite her helplessness with what Jacqueline Rose, co-director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, has called the “repetitive thud of referentiality”.

    You feel Plestia’s effort to try to speak with some life in the pages, to use writing as a therapeutic tool. You wish it for her, but she has trouble summoning the energy, the life, any hope. As she poignantly quips: “Fake it till you make it doesn’t work during a Genocide”. What is there to say in such relentless days of loss?

    You want Plestia to get up, you want a happy ending, for a conclusion to the painful story, but the problem is time. The reader’s time, the reality of time since she wrote her book.

    Day 45, her last day in Gaza, is Monday November 20 2023. I read this book in June 2025, 646 days later – and it hasn’t stopped. When Plestia leaves Gaza and finally arrives here in Melbourne, the conditions she describes have been ongoing for more than 20 months. A recently released survey by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research estimates almost 84,000 people died in Gaza between October 2023 and early January 2025, as a result of the war. And that was six months ago.

    50 letters from Gaza

    The numbers are a way of reducing the experience of grief, devastation, loss (and the viewer’s guilt) to simple digits. Digits have no face and no sound. This is helpful to viewers, but it does not do justice to the 84,000, as Gideon Hausner knew well. No one awakens by hearing the numbers. But they matter.

    In Letters from Gaza, psychologist Ahmed Mortaja fears becoming a news story, “a dull number … I don’t want my name and my family name to be reduced to mere numbers, whether odd or even”.

    This book, a fragmented collection of 50 poems, stories and accounts, is devoted to giving life to those numbers. To animating the loss, so readers can apply their own imaginations, so we can understand the incomprehensible. It is a collection of fragments of lives since October 7 2023, squeezed into expressive pages. There is no “letter” more than six pages long. They are backed up against each other, permeating one another.

    Each letter tells a different story and the same story. Each finds a detail that has no language: flowers in a girl’s hair, dreams of careers that will perhaps never be, the sounds of explosions. They are stories of the impossible search for bread, the longing for a bed and a pillow. And, as in Plestia’s account, they evoke the relentless buzz of the drones in the sky in Gaza: everywhere, all day, every day since October 7 2023. Like tinnitus, like torture.

    The book begins with an effort to give names to numbers. On the first page, in the publisher’s note, we read that two of the authors, Sara al-Assar and Basma al-Hor, cannot be contacted. Because of communication lines and constant displacements, the details “may not reflect their current location or circumstances”. Authors may have died or been further displaced. Communication towers are destroyed. Tents are moved as people are moved on. Tents are destroyed.

    In Plestia’s accounts, there are displacements to safe zones that then become unsafe, so they move again and again – until the only choice is tents, often without food or blankets. She describes seeing 33,000 people in a displacement shelter, this number increasing daily. Just as numbers are not people, tents are not homes. In Letters from Gaza, the displaced tents are character, metaphor and reality.

    The stories are different, as are the deaths and losses within them, but these painful accounts help explain each other. The personal stories help animate words like displacement, refugee camp, genocide, so they do not fall into the pile of legal terms disconnected from names.

    But after the United Nations declarations in the opening pages, we hear no more of law – and little of justice. As Palestinian human rights lawyer and founder of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, Raji Sourani said: Gaza is in danger of becoming “the graveyard of international law”. What is left are stories. The short stories, poems and brief accounts are packaged so they do not ask too much of the reader – just enough to provoke tears, and perhaps donations. Many readers will feel some of the helplessness in these pages.

    There are stories of hunger; the loss of grandmothers and children. I cried many times reading this book, but the next story would quickly arrive and sometimes bring relief. There is something sad, but ordinary, about details like a cat who finds a tent too hot. Unlike Plestia’s clear analysis and summation of the genocide in Gaza, the politics of this book are comparably quiet. Not absent, but quiet. The word genocide is mentioned four times, “Holocaust” only once. (I counted.)

    In Letters from Gaza, no one says Israel, only “the occupiers”. Husam Maarouf writes, “we no longer want anything from you […] Only to die in safety.” His entry is dated March 1 2024; he may well be dead. Batool Abu Akleen makes simple requests of the reader (or perhaps of God): “I want a grave, I don’t want my corpse to rot in the open road.” But the book seems to intentionally not accuse. We are told:

    this is not a book about war. It is a book about human souls that strive to avoid being hunted down by war. It is about how innocents are forced to learn how to survive when everything around them is about killing, destruction and death.

    But the accusation is there. How could it not be? Against Israel as occupier and aggressor – and the reader as bystander.

    Accusation sometimes comes embedded in questions. “Is one person’s pain greater than another’s?” asks Gaza poet and teacher Doha Kahlout. This question resonates with one inscribed on the Holocaust Memorial Tree in Hungary: “Whose agony is greater than mine?”

    When comparing agony, only one can live

    Jewish author, philosopher and psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin, writing on Palestine and Israeli peace struggles, cautions against pitting stories from Israel and Palestine against each other, such that “only one can live”. Only one story, one narrative, one version of pain and loss.

    Holding multiple stories of suffering in mind is very difficult: for the survivor, for the listener and even for the psychoanalyst. Many survivors suffer symptoms of trauma that reduce the world to interpretation through their experience of its painful histories.

    In Eyes of Gaza, writing from Melbourne, Plestia shows a moment of this:

    On the train home, I see a lady with a suitcase, and the first thing that I think of is displacement, imagining how everyone in Gaza carries their whole life in their bag […] Then the announcement: Next Stop […] And I’m snapped back into reality.

    In this moment, the suitcase is only read through the lens of the past. It’s what is described colloquially as living in the past – a type of banal flashback, often a symptom of trauma. But when pain colonises bodies and narratives, recognising the pain of others is difficult to see. It may be impossible to see the experiences of the other’s world through any other lens than one’s own pain. Whose agony is greater than mine? is a competitive statement, not a question.

    In the war of greater pain, an Israeli child in fear may be read against a Palestinian child enduring the loss of their limbs and their whole family. Only one (story) can live.

    To hold two competing stories of pain, loss and agony in mind requires a feat of mental health endurance few are capable of: the Nelson Mandelas of this world. Working in the field of transitional justice, I have met a few.

    Most have experienced great loss and know there is no comparison at the level of agony. They resist “the repetitive thud of referentiality” because it drowns out conversation, annihilating curiosity and empathy alike. They know all stories must have their time.

    In October 2023, “liberal” London Jewish journalist and filmmaker Michael Segalov, once a “staunch defender of Israel”, tried to hold competing stories. He wrote about seeing Israel–Palestine through the lens of “fear and trauma – of the Shoah, of the Nakba, of generations now born into perpetual fear”.

    Early Jewish settlers were not “imperial soldiers”, but “a persecuted population failed by global governments pre and post Holocaust”, he points out. But by 1948, the year after the UN resolution that called for Palestine to be divided into Arab and Jewish states, “more than 750,000 Palestinians were made refugees, 15,000 killed”.

    “While these lands might well feel a Jewish ancestral home,” he wrote, “within living memory, it was shared with another people: the majority.” In 1922, in the first census carried out under the British Mandate, the population of Palestine was 763,550: 89% were Arabs and 11% Jewish.

    As Palestinian psychiatrist Eyad El Sarraj stressed while talking with Jessica Benjamin during peace negotiations, we must “stand simultaneously for the recognition of all injuries, while at the same time being clear that one side was coming from the position of Occupied and less powerful, the other Occupying and dominating”. Stories matter, politics matters.

    And some stories take more time than others – some stories are given more time than others. This is a matter of politics and practicality.

    Surviving the October 7 attacks

    Israeli journalist Amir Tibon and his family survived the October 7 attack on Kibbutz Nahal Oz, on the Gaza border; they are now internal refugees in northern Israel. He and his partner settled in Nahal Oz and raised a family. On the morning of October 7, they heard the sounds of the attack and raced to their safe room, spending the next five hours in there trying to keep their children – Galia, 3 years old and Carmel, aged 19 months – quiet.

    In discussing Tibon’s book, Gates of Gaza: a story of betrayal, survival and hope in Israel’s borderlands, I risk comparison and competition. Sometimes stories speak to each other, even when they speak to the silences. I resisted this one’s proximity to the above stories. But that is also to resist reality. It is to resist the importance of difference. All experience is valuable, but sometimes comparison reveals inequality.

    Plestia knows this well. The survivor guilt of which she writes is part of the hierarchy experienced by all survivors of mass violence. That she and her family survived, that she migrated, is to feel guilt for escaping the fate of those who have been starved, tortured, obliterated.

    Yehiel Dinur spoke from this position of guilt on the stand in 1962, saying he was speaking for those who died in Auschwitz. In the face of others’ death, all survivors struggle with justification. Competition is one form of this: Whose agony is greater than mine?

    Tibon was a resident of Nahal Oz, having moved there with his partner because of its beauty, nine years before October 7. He describes it as having “a strong, left-wing, liberal political leaning”, and says residents of the border areas are “some of the strongest advocates of Israeli–Palestinian peace”. He writes that the kibbutz movement has, “for decades”, been in favour of “a compromise that would allow Jews and Arabs to share this land, with agreed-upon borders – borders that, of course, would have to be protected”.

    In the 300-plus pages, Tibon describes the morning of October 7 in detail. The fear of his children and his partner as they stayed quiet in a safe room for some five hours. The sounds of shootings and desperation as he read pleas and accounts from other residents on the community’s WhatsApp group as the attacks unfolded.

    The narrative of that morning is interspersed with accounts from people who survived in his community: his parents, some of those who attended the Nova music festival, and Israeli Defense Force (IDF) soldiers. The narrative moves between that morning and a history of the kibbutz, framed in a history of Israel’s political lurching between right and left – and back again – over the 87 years since its recognition as a nation state by the UN.

    In one reading, this is a history book of 87 years – not just an account of five hours. It is a particular history.

    The narrative of those five hours is intense, peppered with stories of his parents racing from Tel Aviv to the kibbutz. Tibon’s father is a crucial figure in this narrative. A retired IDF general with “more than three decades” in the military, including combat experience, he seemingly has the capacity to assess situations and navigate a war zone with skill. It is his father who finally knocks on the “safe room” door in the afternoon (about halfway through the book). Tibon reports hearing “a strong bang and a familiar voice” from inside.

    The father, we could say, is the embodiment of Tibon’s feelings for – and belief in – a strong, kind Israel. An army general, protective husband and grandfather (in Hebrew, Saba), he is longed for by Tibon’s young children, who “loved their grandparents”, particularly his father, “who pampered and spoiled them at every opportunity”. This grandfather’s presence at the safe-room door allows the family to re-enter the safety of Israel.

    If the father is Israel, the sleeping children are its citizens. Carmel and Galia slept through much of the conflict, barely awakened by gunshots. They were rushed to the safe room the moment the shots were heard.

    Once you know the stories from Letters of Gaza, it is hard not to compare this to the waking of Mohammed Al Zaqzooq’s three boys – Baraa, Jawad and Basil – to the sound of “Huge missiles in large numbers making terrifying sounds” and the need to flee. Not least, because Amir’s children were barely awakened by shots outside. Their safe room kept the noise muffled and the danger at bay. This is not to say their fear won’t impact on their actions later. Transgenerational trauma has a way of influencing the future.

    Mohammed’s children moved quickly, within half an hour, to a refugee camp. At the time of writing, they remain there. His story is five pages long. Amir’s is 300-plus. Amir, an author and award-winning diplomatic correspondent for Haaretz, Israel’s liberal paper of record, has access to a computer, electricity and the security required to think, research and write.

    But why does he write this book? In the acknowledgements, he describes himself as needing to be encouraged, unsure of the worth of telling the story of his five hours in the safe room. But he describes much more than five hours.

    His book is a story of Israel – and particularly, of its informal settlements. In the early 1950s, he writes, 20 young soldiers – ten men and ten women – were taken by bus to this site to settle it. Nahal Oz is so close to Gaza, it has “agricultural lands which literally touch the border fence”. The kibbutzim functioned as a kind of human border, with increased populations: the 20 broke into couples, then families. Within a few years, they had a small farming community, with a person devoted to security.

    Empty land?

    This is not a story of military invasion and colonisation, however. It is a story of settlement on land represented as empty. We know this story well in Australia. In this context, it can be a plea for a recognition of innocence.

    As Amir tells it, there were no Palestinians in the place before: no one was removed or relocated. Only in passing does he mention the Bedouin who passed through the area before.

    In Australia, Irene Watson and Aileen Moreton-Robinson have, in different ways, explained lands do not need to be sites of permanent agriculture to be crucial to the survival of some groups or nations. Borders and settlements can disturb land, law and life regardless of whether houses are demolished or not.

    The beauty of Nahal Oz, Amir writes, was due to its access to water and its site on fertile land, where trees provided shelter and probably food. Its loss was likely no small thing to people who required sustenance and shelter as they moved through. After the settlement, they no longer could.

    After Israel set up its border there, only Israelis could pass through without being subject to the checkpoints that are well documented sites of humiliation and arbitrary punishment for Palestinians.

    By 1997, the walls went up near Nahal Oz. But the walls to shield Nahal Oz from Gaza – and particularly from its people – were not enough. Amir describes the elaborate and extensive tunnels used by Palestinian soldiers to enter Israel (he calls them “terrorists” and “suicide bombers”).

    The tunnels became the problem of Palestinian attacks on Israeli settlers. To deal with this problem, the concrete walls were built, reaching 160 metres underground, preventing any permeation. Then, on October 7, the walls could not provide security. Then, there was only the safe room.

    The safe room is an obvious metaphor in this book. It is Israel under attack. One of these rooms has been built into every house in the kibbutz, so families can be safe from the mortar attacks from Gaza – a regular occurrence since the 1987 Intifada.

    Plestia tells us that the materials for a safe room are not allowed to be brought into Gaza. There are no safe rooms there. Tibon doesn’t mention this; maybe he doesn’t even know this fact, which is its own symptom of the political and social environment in Israel.

    He does describe “the unimaginable destruction that Israel has unleashed on Gaza in the aftermath” of the October 7 attacks. He is critical of this “destruction”, though he does not use the term genocide. (There are those who wait for the International Court of Justice to decide if it was more than “plausible” – and there are those who cannot wait.)

    Tibon is critical of Israel’s right wing, which cultivates war. He wants peace. But peace here is its own violence.

    Like the rhetoric of reconciliation in South Africa, calls for peace can do violence to historical experiences of injustice. There, reconciliation discourse has been criticised, along with its apolitical leanings. Reconciliation in South Africa has largely meant people subject to historical injustices must reconcile themselves to their losses and their reality.

    A story attributed to Father Mxolisi Mapanbani, of Tom and Bernard and the bicycle, has been used many times to critique “reconciliation” rhetoric in South Africa. It is helpful here.

    Tom and Bernard are friends and live opposite each other. One day, Tom stole Bernard’s bicycle. Every day, Bernard saw Tom cycling to school on it. After some time, Tom went up to Bernard and said, “Let us reconcile and put the past behind us.” Bernard said, “Okay, let’s reconcile – what about the bicycle?” “Oh no,” said Tom, “I’m not talking about the bicycle, I’m talking about reconciliation.”

    In the Australian context, after Kevin Rudd’s apology to the stolen generations in 2008, human rights and social justice campaigner Tom Calma described this form of reconciliation as the “unfinished business of justice”.

    The apology might have offered some form of acknowledgement, and gone some way toward creating a shared reality on the injustices of the past, but while justice remains unfinished, many are not at peace.

    Amir wants peace. He doesn’t want to live in a safe house – but he wants his house and his family to live securely in Nahal Oz. He wants Palestinians to be at peace with this reality.

    The word “peace”, like “reconciliation”, does a lot of work to present Tibon on the side of “the good”. Just like, in Letters From Gaza, the relative lack of the word “genocide” keeps the accusation at bay and politics in the background – and it keeps its calls for recognition of suffering at the fore. In this book about “human souls”, the editors call for a recognition of shared humanity.

    Tibon is careful not to group “terrorists” under that name – though he uses a Hebrew word that means exactly that. (Mehablim, he calls the people who attacked Nahal Oz.) Why? Though he writes in English and undoubtably spoke Hebrew throughout the siege, why does he speak of the Palestinian attackers as Mehablim?

    The answer might be found in the fact no Palestinian name, beyond former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, appears in these pages. He has interviewed many people, but none of them are Palestinian. Their narrative remains outside his text.

    We must find the humanity of the Palestinians in other stories.

    If the safe room is a metaphor for Israel, the tent – as described in so many of the stories in Letters from Gaza, and in Plestia’s account of those 45 days – is a metaphor for the lives of Palestinians in Israel, and perhaps the world’s eyes.

    A tent is permeable, fragile, disposable. Bodies within it are subject to displacement, starvation, genocide. Every house in Tibon’s kibbutz has a safe room. There have been at least seven bombings of tent camps in Gaza. How can you not do the maths?

    Stories, awakening and halting the bombs

    Stories demand people are not reduced to mathematics. They place the reader in the scene and plead for identification and understanding. Writing on the Eichmann trial, Holocaust historian and legal scholar Lawrence Douglas describes “the words of the survivors that built a bridge from the accused to the world of ashes”.

    Afrikaaner journalist and poet Antje Krog writes, on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, “In all the stories a landscape is created.”

    But this landscape, if it is to have any effect, must be mapped across previous perceptions. For that, it must do damage to the secure world – the pre-existing imaginative landscape – of the reader or of the listener.

    Moral philosopher Rai Gaita describes remorse as “a dying to the world”: a little death is required of the listener or reader who is implicated as a bystander, encountering the suffering of others. A death of complacency. A small disintegration that may mean our own peaceful worlds are no longer tenable.

    This is why stories, particularly, are mobilised in truth commissions. They animate the impossible numbers – the dry policies and repetitive loss – with scenes of humanity. Testimony – personal stories – link the words (genocide, massacre, terror) to an imagination of a scene, a person, a child or a parent. To people we can identify or empathise with.

    Like the two worlds connected in Ahmed Mortaja’s poem, Hubb and Harb, In Letters from Gaza:

    tonight I will fall asleep telling myself that the noise outside is fireworks, a celebration and nothing more.
    That the frightened screams of children are the gleeful terror of suspense before something long-awaited, like Eid.
    Tonight, I will fall asleep scrolling through the photos on my phone, telling myself that my evening with friends wasn’t that great – really, I was bored – so now I’m skimming through memories to pass the time.

    If empathy were all it took to halt the counting of the 646 days in Gaza, then Letters from Gaza and Eyes on Gaza would achieve their aim. But empathy rarely produces political change.

    Stories – the 50 voices in Letters from Gaza, accounts like Plestia’s – make us cry, perhaps make us donate, but they do not halt the bombs. This, and more, might be what Yehiel Dinur meant when he asked for the world to “awaken”, that it change, that it stop what Tibon calls “the unimaginable destruction”.

    Until then, Dinur pledged to remain Katzetnik 135633. Until then, we will likely only know “Genocide Plestia”: “it’s funny how genocide changes a person”.

  • The Coachbuilder’s Column: Volume 15: Issue 12: 18th August, 2025:  a selection of recent readings

    This contribution looks at a variety of reading genres over recent weeks about which I have made a few personal comments together with the views of an occasional more professional writer.  Books covered in this article are as follows:

    • The Eye of the Storm by Patrick White [1973];
    • The Shortest History of Scandinavia by Mart Kuldkepp [2025];
    • Outback Reunion by Rachel Johns [2024];
    • Under the Greenwood Tree’ by Thomas Hardy [1972]; and,
    • The Shortest History of France’ by Colin Jones [2025]

    28th July

    ‘The Eye of the Storm’ by Patrick White, published in 1973 [of 608 pages].

    This was the 3rd of White’s novels I’ve managed to read – and in truth, all have proved a difficult choice of reading, at times somewhat tedious, and with occasions of long-drawn-out periods of prose. Yet at the same time, in this book as with the others, White’s intuition of life’s realities and human nature, as certainly relevant in his era, kept this reader interested. One frustration to my mind was the ‘annoying’ inclusion of various sections of prose [generally relating to the interpretation of dreams experienced by some the characters] where ‘no punctuation’ at all is used, at one stage near the end of the book, covering nearly two and half pages!!

    I also admit that I inherited this book from my late Mother, after giving it to her as a Christmas gift in December 1973. I wonder if she ever actually got around to reading it?

    Patrick White [1912-1990] was awarded numerous prizes throughout his career as an author and playwright, the most notable of which was the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973 after the publication of ‘The Eye of the Storm’, although he pleaded illness as the reason for not attending to accept the award. The Nobel citation praised him “for an epic and psychological narrative art, which has introduced a new continent into literature”. He was also awarded the Australian of the Year in 1973. In his acceptance speech, he said that Australia Day should be “a day of self-searching rather than trumpet blowing” and that historian Manning Clark, comedian Barry Humphries and communist trade union leader Jack Mundey were more worthy of the award.

    White was also among the first group of the Companions of the Order of Australia in 1975 but he resigned in June 1976 in protest against the dismissal of the Whitlam government in November 1975 by the Governor-General Sir John Kerr and the subsequent reintroduction of knighthoods as part of the order.

    I would imagine that this is not a book that the average modern ‘novel’ reader would take much interest or delight in. ‘The Eye of the Storm’ was apparently written about the meaning of the author’s own mother’s death.

    Wikipedia describes White as an Australian novelist and playwright who explored themes of religious experience, personal identity and the conflict between visionary individuals and a materialistic, conformist society…. developing a complex literary style and a body of work which challenged the dominant realist prose tradition of his home country, and was satirical of Australian society, and sharply divided local critics. That kind of description in 2025 is probably a complete turn-off to the modern novel reader!!

    In short, the novel tells the story of Elizabeth Hunter, the powerful matriarch of her family, who still maintains a destructive iron grip on those who come to say farewell to her in her final moments upon her deathbed.

    From the Patrick White Catalogue

    Plot: In her large Sydney home, Elizabeth Hunter is dying, attended by her longtime German Jewish housekeeper, a succession of hired nurses, and a solicitor with a long memory. Elizabeth is a dominating force who heavily influenced her two children, both of whom have lived in Europe for many years and return to be with their mother. Sir Basil, a famous, womanising actor based in London, is down on his luck financially. His sister Dorothy, the Princess de Lascabanes, has long left her colonial past behind to develop a new identity, and a return to Australia is especially confronting for her. Both siblings hope to reconcile with their past – and perhaps gain something from their mother’s death.

    Elizabeth is plunged into the past, especially memories of her deceased husband Bill, and a revelatory moment on Brumby Island when she came face to face with the eye of a storm, and an incredible sense of calm and meaning like never before. But the past looms large and has space for everyone: Basil, Dorothy, the housekeeper Lotte who survived the Holocaust, the passionately loyal solicitor Arnold Wyburd, and the three nurses who give in to its demands despite their own personal doubts. Each of these figures must reassess their lives in the wake of this startling woman…. Yet her true complexity will never be understood by those closest to her, especially not her children, who have yet to experience anything as transcendent as has she.

    Described as a profound exploration of family dynamics and societal norms, centred around the dying matriarch Elizabeth Hunter and her complex relationships with her children, White dramatizes the universal themes of love, loneliness, old age and death. He reveals the flux of power and dependency, the ultimate nuances of love and hatred that fester beneath the surface of family relationships.

    Writing in literopedia.com in 2024, we read the following.

    “The Eye of the Storm” is a novel written by the Australian author Patrick White, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1973. Published in the same year, the novel is considered one of White’s most significant works and a notable contribution to Australian literature. The narrative is set in post-colonial Australia and revolves around the Vass family, particularly the aging and wealthy matriarch, Elizabeth Hunter.

    The story commences with the death of Elizabeth’s husband, Sir Athol Hunter, bringing the family together for the funeral. As the plot unfolds, it exposes the intricate dynamics within the Vass family, revealing strained relationships, power struggles, and hidden secrets. The title, “The Eye of the Storm,” metaphorically reflects the deceptive calm at the centre of tumultuous family and societal dynamics.

    Key themes explored in the novel include family relationships, social class distinctions, individual identity, and the impact of the past on the present. White’s narrative technique involves shifting perspectives, providing readers with insights into the thoughts and emotions of various characters.

    The plot introduces significant characters such as Basil and Dorothy, Elizabeth’s estranged children, as well as nurses Flora and Nurse Davidson, whose arrival disrupts the family’s established order. The novel masterfully navigates issues of power, control, and the facade of societal respectability.

    White’s exploration of complex characters, coupled with his keen observations on societal norms and human psychology, contributes to the novel’s critical acclaim. “The Eye of the Storm” received the prestigious Miles Franklin Award in 1973 and has since remained an important part of the Australian literary canon.

    The novel has been praised for its intricate narrative structure, rich character development, and exploration of themes that transcend cultural and geographical boundaries. White’s storytelling prowess and his ability to capture the essence of human relationships make “The Eye of the Storm” a timeless work that continues to be studied and appreciated by readers and scholars alike’.

    Whether that ‘description’ would apply to te modern scholar in 2025, I have my doubts.

    2nd August

    A touch of history now  –   ‘The Shortest History of Scandinavia’ by Mart Kuldkepp, published in 2025 by Black Inc [of 258 pages]\  –  an abbreviated history, one of a set of three that I purchased a few weeks ago from Swartz Media.

    This was an interesting read, although at times, I found the various scenarios between the ‘separate’ Scandinavian nations to be a little confusing and difficult to keep track of, and found myself wishing I had an individual history separately of Sweden, Norway, Denmark Finland [even Iceland].. However, as one reviewer noted, the book was ‘the perfect starting point for anyone interested in Scandinavian history’. The fault most likely remained with myself, in that so often [especially of late], while finding the material I’m reading of essential historical interest, my ability to retain much of that information would probably restrict my passing an examination of the facts just read!!  I had previously read [and reviewed in the Coachbuilder’s Column] the book ‘Saga Land’ by Richard Fidler & Kari Gislason’ published in 2017 which dealt with the stories of Iceland from the time of the Vikings

    So, what does this short history cover?  Basically, ‘from the Stone Age to ‘Scandimania’ – a brisk, illuminating journey through 14,000 years of Nordic history’ referencing the five nations mentioned plus Greenland, and the more substantial islands off the Scandinavian coastline.

    As noted in one of the reviews, outsiders have long viewed Scandinavia as special, starting with the ancient Greeks and their myths of ultima Thule, a place ‘where the Sun goes to rest’. Today, we admire Scandinavia for its universal welfare, equality, peacefulness and untouched nature – not to mention its interior design, crime literature and love of all things hygge. Yet Nordic history has had its hardships and dark periods too: pandemics, war, the expansionism of the Viking Age and the eighteenth century, alliances with Nazi Germany in World War II and a eugenics movement in the twentieth century.

    In The Shortest History of Scandinavia, historian Mart Kuldkepp masterfully sketches the outlines of Scandinavia’s rich history – from the first known peoples of the region, who followed the ice sheet north as it retreated at the end of the last Ice Age, to the Scandinavians living in nations that are among the happiest in the world today. The author, Mart Kuldkdepp, is a professor and researcher of Estonian and Nordic history at University College London, where he specialises in the political history of the Baltic and Nordic regions.

    In this short but deeply insightful volume, Kuldkepp illuminates the concept of ‘Nordicness’ – a hard-to-define quality that has nonetheless steered the region to respond to major challenges, actively shaping their history and exerting a considerable influence on European and global history in the process. Throughout their history, there are numerous changes in the relationships and alliances between these nations, and I have to admit that it was the complexity of those alliances which I found hard to kept abreast of at times. Apart from the very early history, and in particular the sections dealing with the Viking and other related invasions of early Britain and continental Europe, I did find the examination of the author’s coverage of the political and economic changes that occurred in the C20th and early C21st centuries of special interest. I’d not also realised the extent of the ‘hold’ or dominance that Russia held over Finland for such a long period in that time, while the supposed ‘neutrality’ of Sweden during WWII and the difficulties faced in trying to ‘satisfy the needs of both sides of the conflict without appearing to favour one over the other, made for interesting reading.

    Throughout the book there are various ‘text boxes’ which often provide a more detailed if not brief analysis of a particular aspect of Scandinavian history, lifestyle, culture and artistic successes referred to only sparsely in the main text.

    Writing in the August 2025 edition of The Australian Book Review, Margaret Clunies Ross notes ‘That important Scandinavian artists, writers and thinkers are largely confined to the text boxes, while associated cultural movements are mentioned briefly, sometimes obscurely, in the main narrative.  One of the important intellectual movements of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Romantic nationalism, is described briefly in Chapter Eleven, but how this movement was enriched by philosophers like Soren Kierkegaard, poets such as Adam Oehlenschlager, and the multifaceted endeavours of  the influential Danish writer N.F.S. Grundtvig is not clearly explained. Hans Christian Anderson, on the other hand, gets both a picture of his statue in Copenhagen and a whole text box to himself”. That criticism may well simply reflect the personal prejudices of the reviewer [who apparently is a Knight of the Icelandic Order of the Falcon] and her desire for specific features to be covered in a book which the author himself admits in his Preface that  ‘It goes without saying that any short history of a whole region must be selective, in terms of what it covers and how it is structured’ and this limitation should be recognised by any reader.  

    I’ll just copy one small section from the closing pages of the book which provides one summary aspect of Scandinavia’s history.

    From pages 234-235.

    ‘It was the Viking Age, with its raids, trade and settler colonialism, that rudely pushed Scandinavia into the centre of European awareness. The pacification of these militant pagans of the north took centuries, and, in the end, the problem did not have a military solution. Instead, gradual and voluntary Christianisation, along with the wealth amassed in the Viking Age, helped to kickstart the successful development of European-style kingdoms in Scandinavia. Going forward, these remained mostly concerned with succession struggles and conflicts with each other, and no longer presented an acute threat to the rich countries of Western Europe.  At the same time, Scandinavia managed to avoid the fate that befell some other parts of the Baltic Sea region, which were targeted by medieval crusades and Christianisation by force, leading to foreign dominance and serfdom of the native population”.

    One aspect revealed in the book which I found disturbing – Sweden during the post-war period, as part of that country’s ambitious social-welfare plans, indulged in a philosophy which led Scandinavia down a darker path   involving forced sterilisations of people seen as not ‘productive enough’, a moral failure largely concealed by the overall success story of the Nordic welfare state’ [p.238].

    4th August

    For something very different – ‘Outback Reunion’ by Rachel Johns, published in 2024 [of 334 pages]. An easily read, relatively light-hearted ‘Australian rural romance’ novel, read over about 24 hours. Another Aussie female author who writes fictional novels about rural life in her country – I think from memory, this is the first of her books I’ve read, simply chosen at random, as after some fairly heavy recent reading, I felt the need for a quick easily digested story, and this took me exactly to that ‘place’!’  Apparently this story is one of series of novels set in the fictional town of Bunyip Bay in Western Australia.

    In basic outline: –

    A moving story of lost love, second chances, and the healing power of truth under the big top in a small town.    They spent one magical night together, but when he woke up she was gone …

    Eight years later, Gabriela Jimenez is hoping a couple of weeks in Bunyip Bay with the Grand Jimenez Family Circus will give her and Luna, her daughter, the chance to reconnect after the tragic death of Luna’s father. The last thing Gabi expects is to run into the man she once knew. Mark Morgan is still as sweet and sexy as she remembers, but Gabi is harbouring guilt and dealing with the grief of her in-laws. She can’t afford to let him get under her skin again.

    After his successful career in AFL was cut short due to a crushing injury, Mark is struggling to readjust to small-town life and working the family farm. As if this isn’t bad enough, his wife’s betrayal means he may never be able to risk his heart to love again. Mark couldn’t be less interested in the circus that has arrived in town … until he discovers that the woman who vanished from his bed all those years ago without saying goodbye is part of it.

    Will a chance meeting lead to something more?

    As described by the publishers and others – The unforgettable, hotly anticipated return to Bunyip Bay from bestselling Australian romance author Rachael Johns.

    So, if it’s the Romance genre your looking for, this is the book for you. I enjoyed the storyline, but generally only turn to this type of fictional story for a bit of occasional light-reading.

    AN EXCERPT: [near the beginning]

    ‘For one crazy moment, she contemplated staying right where she was, never going back to the circus. Maybe there could be something between she and Mark? Could she give up everything she’d ever known and risk a new life?
    But then she glanced around Mark’s bedroom, taking in his footy posters and barbell weights in the corner, remembering what he’d said about not really having time for dating, and she knew staying was an even worse idea than what she’d already done.
    So, for the second time that night, she snuck out on someone sleeping.
    Only this time she wasn’t running away from her life, but back to it’.

    13th August

    A bit of a Hardy classic,  ‘Under the Greenwood Tree’ by Thomas Hardy [first published in 1972, this a 1982 Penguin edition], of 248 pages.   Presumably passed to my mother from her sister, Jean in the 1980s, and subsequently inherited by myself!  One of the small paperbacks I’ve retained from time to time in the car glovebox reading a few pages at a time while waiting for appointments, etc. I decided to remove it from that location, and complete a reading. An interesting little novel, and in some ways, fairly simple in its construction and storyline once the reader manoeuvres their way through C19th English cadences and accents of some of the characters depicted.

    Described as the best-loved, and certainly the happiest of all Hardy’s novels, his second published novel, and a story which led to the writing of a series of ‘Wessex’ novels by Hardy.

    The story is best described as a pastoral romantic novel by Thomas Hardy, that explores themes of love, tradition, and change in a rural English village. An interesting little novel, in some ways, fairly simple in its construction and storyline once the reader manoeuvres their way through C19th English cadences and accents of some of the characters depicted, with their mode of talk, described as being full of observation and humour. It was apparently based upon a vivid and authentic recreation of the author’s own childhood environment, and modelled the villagers in the novel, on people he had known intimately. 

    In basic summary  –  The novel is set in the fictional village of Mellstock and follows the romantic entanglements of Dick Dewy, a church musician, and Fancy Day, a new schoolmistress. The story begins with the Mellstock parish choir, which includes Dick and his family, as they perform during Christmas festivities. Dick falls in love with Fancy at first sight during a schoolhouse performance. However, Fancy has other suitors, including the wealthy farmer Frederic Shiner and the new vicar, Mr. Maybold, who wishes to replace the choir’s traditional music with a mechanical organ.  As the story unfolds, Dick and Fancy become secretly engaged, but complications arise when Fancy’s father initially opposes their union. Eventually, after a series of events, including a proposal from Maybold, Fancy faces a dilemma between love and social status, leading to a poignant conclusion. 

    The novel explores several themes, including:

    Thomas Hardy [1840-1928] was himself actually a struggling provincial architect in the mid-1800s, and he began to write novels [and poetry] in order to make money. This novel set him on the way to making a living. During his ‘literary’ life, he wrote up to 18 novels, numerous short stories, poetry [which was his first love], And in his senior years, some drama productions.

    17th August

    ‘The Shortest History of France’ by Colin Jones, published in 2025, of 260 pages.

    Another relatively easily read book, although, as with the Scandinavia short history, there were many aspects of this reading that I would have liked to explore in more detail and depth, eg, France’s 1789 revolution, or the despised role of the Vichy in France and its collaboration with the NAZIS especially in respect of the Jewish situation, during WWII, or the country’s racism and brutality arising from its colonisation of Algeria,  and participation later in the slave trade in various parts of the globe..

    This short history covers more than two millennia of France’s history from so-called ‘glorious defeat’ in 52BCE to Julius Caesar to what was described as a somewhat unexpected triumph of the 2024 Paris Olympics shortly after a national election.  A ‘melting pot’ of influences from internal conflicts, European neighbours and international circumstances.

    Black Inc, publishers of this book and others in the Shortest History series describe this publication ss follows.

    From Roman conquest to Emmanuel Macron, the Gauls to de Gaulle, trade to war, religion to migration, colonialism to slavery, Joan of Arc to Asterix …

    France is the most popular tourist destination in the world, thanks to its unsurpassed cultural and historical riches. Gothic architecture, Louis XIV opulence, revolutionary spirit, café society, haute cuisine and couture – what could be more quintessentially French?

    Rarely, however, do we think of France as a melting pot, but historian Colin Jones asserts it’s no less a mélange of foreign ingredients than the United States, and by some measures more. As nationalism and anti-immigration rhetoric surge in France (and elsewhere), The Shortest History of France presents a portrait of a nation whose politics and society have always been shaped by global forces.

    Clear-eyed and avoiding traps of national exceptionalism, Jones unfolds France’s first millennium of invasions and subjugation by its neighbours and iterations of the Roman Empire, to the Enlightenment, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and The Paris Agreement. Meanwhile, its darker moments have included overseas colonisation, the Vichy regime and the Algerian War, along with persistent racism, police brutality, and civil unrest.  The Shortest History of France is a dynamic, global story enhanced with touches of cultural radiance – truly a retelling for our times.

    After reading this book, I must admit that my idyllic view of France as a cultural and in some ways ‘peace-loving’ European nation has somewhat been thwarted by many of the events described and covered in this short history, even up to more recent times.

    Barnes & Noble describe the book as – The Shortest History of France reveals a nation whose politics and society have always been shaped by global forces. With up-to-date scholarship that avoids the traps of national exceptionalism, Jones reminds us that it was only after the first millennium of French history—after constant subjugation to the Roman Empire and Germanic tribal forces—that a nation-state began to emerge, while absorbing influences from its European neighbours. Later, the Crusades and subsequent overseas colonization paved the way for cultural exchange with Africa, the Caribbean, East Asia, and elsewhere.  France has been home to the Enlightenment, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the Paris Agreement . . . but also to the Vichy regime, the Algerian War, and persistent racism and civil unrest. By turns serious and spirited, The Shortest History of France is a dynamic, global story for our times.

    Jones himself, as the author, argues that (though his terms aren’t quite so blatant) the French aren’t really French at all. “Scratch a French icon,” he writes about Asterix, “and traces of the wider world are never far beneath the surface.” We are reminded that the cartoon character meant to embody the spirit of the Gaulois resistance was, in fact, created by a Polish Jew.  He also writes at length of the conflicting influences that have shaped France’s hexagonal frontiers and the nation within it. “French borders have always been porous,” Jones writes, suggesting the history of France is truly the history of who most influenced France at any given time. Certainly, this aspect is revealed time and again throughout the book.

    Writing for The Standard.co.uk in March, 2025, William Hosier suggests that ‘Jones’ book should appeal to both philistines and experts: it reads as A History of France for Dummies as well as an encyclopedia of erudition. The tone is journalistic and fancy-free, its author darting nimbly from the Aristotelian influence on medieval universities to the differences between Romanesque and Capetian architectural styles. The style is learned, yet unsnobby: it doesn’t matter how much or little you know about the figures mentioned, since all are described in simple monikers (“leading politician Léon Gambetta”, “statesman Jules Ferry”). A bit repetitive, perhaps: but immeasurably more helpful than the opposite’.

    As for the author, Colin Jones, CBE, FBA, is Emeritus Professor of History at Queen Mary University of London. He is the author and editor of many works on French history, including The Cambridge Illustrated History of France, The Great Nation: France from Louis XV to Napoleon, The Fall of Robespierre: 24 Hours in Revolutionary Paris and a host of others.

    An interesting read, with perhaps the reservations on brevity mentioned above, where more detail and expansion of the subject matter to be searched out through other avenues.

  • The Coachbuilder’s Column: Volume 15: Issue 11: 15th July, 2025:  about the author Graham Greene, letters and novels.

    I’ve just read  ‘Graham Greene: A Life in Letters’ edited by Richard Greene [no relation], published in 2007 [446 pages]………….I’d never read any of Greene’s novels though knew I had one somewhere, eventually tracked it down, a Penguin paperback of The Honorary Consul’, first published in 1973, which I refer to later, as I decided I had to read at least one of his novels.

    As revealed through his letters, his novels were generally based upon people he’d met, or places and international conflicts that he found himself involved in. And as revealed through the letters, a vivid portrait of a fascinating writer, a mercurial man of courage, wit and passion. 

    As Amazon describes it – “One of the undisputed masters of twentieth-century English prose, Graham Greene (1904-1991) wrote tens of thousands of personal letters. This exemplary volume presents a new and engrossing account of his life constructed out of his own words. Impeccably edited by scholar Richard Greene, the letters–including many unavailable even to his official biographer–give a new perspective on a life that combined literary achievement, political action, espionage, travel, and romantic entanglement. The letters describe his travels in such places as Mexico, Vietnam, and Cuba, where he observed the struggles of mankind with a compassionate and truthful eye. Letters to friends such as Evelyn Waugh and Muriel Spark offer a glimpse into the literary culture in which he wrote, while others reveal the agonies of his heart. The sheer range of experience contained in Greene’s correspondence defies comparison”.

    These letters, as published by his namesake, were written over 70 years, from September, 1921 to the 21 March, 1991 [14 days before he died]. As a prolific writer of diaries, personal notes and reflections myself, I guess that was the reason I was attracted to the book. He was not just an author – but a journalist, reporter, investigator, confidante of the famous in both literary and political circles, constantly travelling around the world, usually to political hotspots and war or revolutionary zones in Asia, Central and South America, Africa, Russia and other Communist controlled countries during both the years of World War II, and the subsequent Cold War period, with his life and personal safety often at risk. His letters generally pulled no punches, many of a highly personal and romantic nature.  His correspondence relationship with so many great authors [many of whom I was not familiar with] including in particular that great novelist and diary writer, Evelyn Waugh [whom I always believed was a woman for some reason] provided for me, a fascinating insight into the world of writers, publishing and books in general.

    [Incidentally, I don’t have any of Waugh’s novels, but do have a massive volume of his life’s Diaries, which admittedly, I’ve not yet tried to tackle!!].

    In addition to the actual letters, there are footnotes on most pages. Providing either a brief biography of the person to whom he is writing, or where it was known why he was writing in particular instances. These notes of course do slow down the reading process, but are an invaluable aid to understanding [usually] the purpose of the letter and Greene’s connection with the recipient.

    Grahame Greene himself notes that – There have been a number of Graham Greene biographies, but none has captured his voice, his loves, hates, family and friends–intimate and writerly–or his deep understanding of the world, like this astonishing collection of letters…………………………………………………………………..
    Graham Greene is one of the few modern novelists who can be called great. In the course of his long and eventful life (1904—1991), he wrote tens of thousands of letters to family, friends, writers, publishers and others involved in his various interests and causes. A Life in Letters presents a fresh and engrossing account of his life, career and mind in his own words.

    In summary a comment from Google.books provides another encouraging description of the book  –  ‘In several letters, the individuals, events or places described provide the inspiration for characters, episodes or locations found in his later fiction. The correspondence describes his travels in Mexico, Africa, Malaya, Vietnam, Haiti, Cuba, Sierra Leone, Liberia and other trouble spots, where he observed the struggles of victims and victors with a compassionate and truthful eye. The volume includes a vast number of unpublished letters to authors Evelyn Waugh, Auberon Waugh, Anthony Powell, Edith Sitwell, R.K. Narayan and Muriel Spark, and to other more notorious individuals such as the double-agent Kim Philby. Some of these letters dispute previous assessments of his character, such as his alleged anti-Semitism or obscenity, and he emerges as a man of deep integrity, decency and courage. Others reveal the agonies of his romantic life, especially his relations with his wife, Vivien Greene, and with one of his mistresses, Catherine Walston. The letters can be poignant, despairing, amorous, furious or amusing, but the sheer range of experience contained in them will astound everyone who reads this book.’

    While from the book cover – “When he loved, he loved fervently, but he also struggled  to manage the  unpredictable mood swings, the highs and lows of bipolar disorder that drove him from exalted happiness to despair. Letters to friends like Evelyn Waugh, Muriel Spak, Anthony Powell and R.K. Narayan offer a glimpse 

    into the literary culture in which he wrote. Other letters reveal the agonies of his heart, how his manic depression wreaked havoc on his marriage to Vivien Greene and injured his relations with his mistress Catherine Walston.”

    A book that gives new perspective to a life that combined literary achievement, political action, espionage, travel and romantic entanglement….following him through joy and turmoil, from the gnarled and fissured forests of Indo-China to war-torn Sierra Leone, from the mountains of Switzerland to hotels in Havana and a connection of sorts with leaders like Fidel Castro, and various revolutionary characters from South America.

    The letters also reveal much about his support at times, and other times, conflict with the Catholic Church, and his inter-action with a couple of the Popes of his era, and other religious intermediaries.

    A brief comment on The Honorary Consul by Grahame Greene [published in 1973, of 268 pages [my Penguin edition].  After having read Greene’s letters, I expected his novels to be essentially based on parts of the world he had travelled to, often with the purpose of exploring those areas and lifestyles for incorporation into a planned novel. I wasn’t sure what to expect, not having read him previously.  This story, I found somewhat enjoyable, if at times, realistically unpleasant in terms of the subject matter.

    A gripping tragicomedy of a bungled kidnapping in a provincial Argentinean town, considered to be one of Greene’s finest novels. The story is set in the provincial city of Corrientes, part of the Argentine Littoral, on the shore of the Paraná River. Eduardo Plarr is an unmarried medical doctor of English descent who, as a boy, fled to Buenos Aires with his Paraguayan mother to escape the political turmoil of Paraguay. His English father remained in Paraguay as a political rebel and, aside from a single hand-delivered letter, they never hear from him again. Throughout the novel, there is much reflection by various characters on the absence of ‘father figures’ for numerous reasons. I believe the story is also set on the eve of Argentine’s ‘dirty War’ in the early 1970’s.

    In this provincial Argentinian community, Charley Fortnum – a British consul with dubious authority and a notorious fondness for drink – is kidnapped by rebels in a case of mistaken identity. Fortnum, 61 years old is married to Clara, a young ex-whore from Senora Sanchez’s brothel. The young but world-weary Doctor Eduardo Plarr, is left to pick up the pieces and secure Fortnum’s release, wading through a sea of incompetence and unearthing corruption among authorities and revolutionaries in the process.

    First published in 1973, The Honorary Consul is a British thriller novel, and  was one of Greene’s own favourites of his works and is regarded amongst his finest novels, with Plarr perhaps the most moving and convincing figure in his fiction.  The story is set in an unnamed city in northern Argentina, near the border with Paraguay which can be assumed to be the city of Corrientes.

    In what is described as a ‘perfectly executed narrative’, Greene explores the repercussions of the bungled kidnap, and gives special attention to Dr Plarr whose deficient emotions form the heart of the story.

    While I won’t go into the article itself, a piece written on a site named literarysum/com and titled ‘Unveiling the Layers: A Comprehensive Literary Analysis of The Honorary Consul by Graham Greene’, introduced the subject as follows – ‘The Honorary Consul by Graham Greene is a complex novel that delves into the themes of love, betrayal, and political intrigue. This article provides a comprehensive literary analysis of the novel, exploring its various layers and uncovering the hidden meanings behind its characters and plot. Through a close examination of the novel’s themes, symbolism, and narrative structure, this article aims to provide readers with a deeper understanding of Greene’s masterpiece’ which all indicates we have more than just a ‘British thriller novel’, another indication of Greene’s literary talents.

    As described at the time of publication, by the Daily Mail: ‘The prose is monkishly spare and taut.  The minor characters are brilliantly and sardonically drawn, that ever he has given us’. It sounds as though I made the right choice, in being introduced to Greene’s writings [apart from his letters].

    The book was made into the 1983 film The Honorary Consul (also released as Beyond the Limit), directed by John Mackenzie, with Richard Gere as Plarr and Michael Caine as Fortnum.[3][4] The soundtrack theme was composed by Paul McCartney and performed by John Williams.

  • The Coachbuilder’s Column: Volume 15: Issue 10: 24th June, 2025: some selected reading over recent months

    This contribution looks at a number of books and other publications which I have read and examined over the past two or three months, as listed briefly below.

    • Australian Foreign Affairs, Issue 23 ‘Planet Australia’;Escaping America’s Orbit’.   
    • Quarterly Essay No. 97: ‘Losing It. Can we stop violence against women and children’ [by Jess Hill];
    • Memorial Days’ by Geraldine Brooks [2025]; 
    • The Fallen Woman by Fiona McIntosh [2024];
    • Lyrebird by Jane Caro [2025];
    • The Historian: To you perceptive reader, I bequeath my history,  by Elizabeth Kostova [2005];
    • The Astonishing History of Ballarat, Volume 3: The Story of the Quartz Miners of Ballarat: 1851-1878  by Doug Bradby [2020];
    • Quarterly Essay No. 98 headed ‘Hard New World: Our Post-American Future’ by Hugh White.

    What is Australia’s place in the new global landscape?

    • ‘Until August’ by Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ [2024]; and,
    • ‘Melaleuca’ by Angie Faye Martin [2025].

    14th March

    ‘Australian Foreign Affairs’ publication, Issue 23 titled ‘Planet Australia: Escaping America’s Orbit’.   

    This 23rd issue of Australian Foreign Affairs  [a publication issued three times a year] explored Australia’s changing fortunes as Donald Trump returns to the White House and threatens to dismantle the diplomatic, economic and defence foundations on which Canberra has long built its security and prosperity. It examines the consequences for Australia as some of its most important friends and partners – including India, Indonesia and the United States – shift towards authoritarianism and illiberalism. Featuring special contributions from our three most recent ambassadors to the United States, Planet Australia looks at how Australian leaders and diplomats should deal with Trump and prepare for looming challenges to the alliance, open trade, and a secure and stable Asia.

    Essays included:

    • James Curran explores Australia’s relationship with the US in the age of Trump. He points to the fact that the America Australia has become accustomed to, is changing.
    • Emma Shortis argues that Canberra should be bold as the global order shifts. Among other things, suggests that Trump does not care about Australia, so why should be cosy up to him, it won’t make Australia any safer.
    • Susan Stone analyses Trump’s economic plan and how Australia might benefit, in a fairly detailed analytical approach to that aspect of the economic relationship.
    • Kim Beazley, Joe Hockey and Arthur Sinodinos discuss the diplomatic challenges facing Australia in Washington DC. An interesting set of views from three former ambassadors. From Beazley – “Trump will be more disruptive and les predictable, but Australia is well placed to protect and advance its own interests’.  Hockey: “No matter what, the United States has [historically] had ‘disruptors in chief’ before. It’s institutions and constitution are robust enough to cope with the strain’.  From Sinodinos: “Swlf-reliance is not a code for appeasing China, we have stood up to China in recent years and weathered the trde and economic coercion  that followed – self-reliance also means putting our own house in order [and] in Trump world, the fate of regional groupings hangs in the balance”.

    Other items included a discussion of Kevin Rudd’s recent book ‘On Xi Jinping: How  Xi’s Marxist Nationalism Is Shaping China and the World’  –   worth a read I feel, although as Rudd himself warns, it is ‘a heavy read’ and parts of it have a deep textual analysis which might defeat the ordinary readers [where I might place myself]. The other interesting book review is of ‘Gret Game On: The Contest for Central Asia and Global Supremacy’ by Geoff Raby.  The reviewer suggests that Raby doesn’t cover in much detail the real states of central Asia – Kazakhstan, Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan –  those areas or of interest to myself, I’d like to find a book specifically about their history and people, other than through this publication.

    28th March

    Quarterly Essay No. 97:  ‘Losing It. Can we stop violence against women and children

    What will it take to stop gendered violence?  This was a quite disturbing, and worrying essay, extremely well researched by Jess Hill, author of ‘See What You Made Me Do’

    What went wrong? Australian governments promised to end violence against women and children in a single generation. Instead, it is escalating: men have been murdering women at an increased rate, coercive control and sexual violence is becoming more complex and severe, and we see a marked rise in youth-on-youth sexual assault. Why?

    In Losing It, Jess Hill investigates Australia’s National Plan to End Violence Against Women and Children to find out what’s working and what’s not – and what we can do to turn things around. This compassionate, ground-breaking essay lifts the lid on a national crisis.

    “Over several years I often heard the same misgivings from academics, bureaucrats and frontline workers: many believed the [prevention] strategy … was too abstract and disconnected from the front line; that it did not reach the boys and men it needed to, and at worst was actually promoting backlash. Many were – and still are – afraid to say so openly.” – Jess Hill, Losing It.

    20th April

    Tonight, I finished reading ‘Memorial Days’ by Geraldine Brooks, published in 2025, just 207 pages,  a short easily read personal story full of pathos, unbelievable grief, and a reckoning with the inevitability of loss.

    In 2022. The award winning book ‘Horse’ by Geraldine was published, and I made comment on that book in the Coachbuilder’s Column that year.

    She was partway through the writing of that book, when, on Memorial Day in the USA, May 27, 2019, she received a ‘cold’ phone call from the local hospital, to tell her that her much loved husband, Tony Horwitz, had collapsed and died on the street, far from home, in the middle of his own strenuous book tour. The complex tasks required in the face of such a sudden death left her no time to properly grieve for him. Three years later, still feeling broken and bereft, she booked a flight to Flinders Island off the coast of Tasmania [where she and Tony had spent some together]. There, she pondered the ways other cultures deal with mourning and finally seized the time and space she needed for her own grief. Alone on a rugged stretch of coast, she revisited a 35-year marriage filled with risk, adventure, humour and love.

    ‘Memorial Days’ is Geraldine’s story of the loss of her husband and the immediate months that followed, the eventual publication of ‘Horse’, and her healing period of isolation on Flinders Island. A short book, short chapters, alternating between the immediate weeks following Tony’s death, and her time on Flinders Island.

    If readers feel this story might help with their owe loss of whatever nature, I recommend a read, In the meantime, four short quotations from ‘Memorial Days’.

    • [On Flinders Island] – Two of my friends approach, their faces grave. How an earth did they get here? One gently reaches out and touches my shoulder. ‘You said you wished there had been someone there with you, the last time, so we’ve come here to tell you….An immense dread. I wake up, heart pounding. The nightmare expresses my life’s sudden precarity. I absolutely cannot afford to lose anyone else [p.167-168];
    • Night is an even better time to be out here. If the island’s rocks put me in my place, it’s stars do, too. Nature is a remorseless reminder of human insignificance. Daytime, nighttime – there’s no escape from the realization of how little we matter [p. 191];
    •  I have written this because I needed to do it. Part of the treatment for ‘complicated grief’ is to relive the trauma of the death, returning to the moments again and again, striving each time to recall more detail. That’s what I have tried to do. [p.202];
    •  The time on Flinders Island  allowed me to set down one of the bundles in the baggage of my grief.  It’s the grief I’d been carrying for the life I would have had, the life U=I had counted on having.  It was the life with sunset-facing rocking chairs, growing old with Tony beside me, laughing, arguing over the news, revisiting shared memories, and taking pride as our sons moved confidently into manhood. That life is gone, nothing will get it back. I have accepted that.  I have embarked on making the life I have as vivid and consequential as I can. Do your work, said Bader Ginsburg. So, that is what I do [p. 204];

    23rd April

    ‘The Fallen Woman’ by Fiona McIntosh [published in 2024] of 431 pages  –  an English historical fiction novel set in the English countryside, in a forgotten orchard and beneath the ancient spire of Salisbury Cathedral, basically a heart-wrenching story of family betrayal, loss and tragedy, the love of an unwanted  child, and the potential, almost lost through misunderstanding,  of a new previously undreamed of life, about a woman who finds that in her darkest hour, she can harness her greatest strength. The author, an internationally acclaimed best-selling Australian who roams the world for her writing research, and lives between Adelaide [SA] and Wiltshire, England.  An enjoyable read, away from the more serious deep-thinking non-fiction reads of recent times.

    In basic summary – Botanical artist Jane Saville is devastated when her manipulative mother banishes her to the countryside to protect someone else’s honour. Isolated far from home, she is forced to live an impoverished, secretive life to save the family from public shame.

    Guy Attwood is heir to a fortune, but prefers his quiet passion for rare-apple hunting on behalf of Royal Kew Gardens to building the family’s business empire. He sets out to find a critically endangered apple species that he dreams of gifting and re-naming for his friend, the soon-to-be coronated George V.

    When the paths of these people from two very different worlds collide, Jane begins to hope for a different future, but their new friendship is shattered by jealousy, misunderstanding, duty and treachery. A young boy will inspire Jane to defy the powers working against her and prove she is no woman to be outcast.

    Released into the congested Christmas market for 2025, The Fallen Woman went straight into the National Top 10.  Since then, it has consistently been praised as a favourite – if not THE favourite – of McIntosh’s recent historical novels.  It is Fiona’s 44th title.

    23rd April

    Another light read – ‘Lyrebird’ by Jane Caro [published in 2025], of 360 pages.   A modern crime thriller set within the Maitland – Newcastle – Barrington Tops area of NSW, when an ornithology student comes across a lyrebird in the remote Barrington area which she videos as it projects a variety of mimics, one of which is that of a woman screaming in terror, and realising that the lyrebird does not create its own  sounds but mimics those it hears, takes her video to the police, who after a cursory and ‘scornful’ investigation, drop any subsequent searches etc. Despite support from the newly minted detective, Megan Blaxland, with no missing person reported and no body, her evidence is ridiculed and dismissed. 

    Twenty years later, the remains of a woman are found in the area where the student had claimed the screams had been recorded. As well as an original mystery murder thriller, this novel also considers issues of injustice and prejudice, the slavery of the Asian sex-trade, and the vivid description of a major Australian bush fire in which many of story’s participants get caught up in.

    15th May

    I’ve just completed reading ‘The Historian: To you perceptive reader, I bequeath my history’ written by Elizabeth Kostova [published in 2005], of 642 pages. When I began this book, I wondered if I’d get through it, not quite in the mode of novel I generally prefer – the historical aspect of the novel was quite fascinating, but in my eyes, the unreality of what was been depicted went a bit far! However, the further I read, the more I was drawn in and keen to see the novel’s outcome.

    Bram Stoker wrote the novel ‘Dracula’ in 1897, and this was produced in 1992 as an American Gothic horror film. In 1462, Vlad Dracula returns from a victory in his campaign against the Ottoman Empire to find his beloved wife Elisabeta has committed suicide after his enemies falsely reported his death. A priest of the Romanian Orthodox Church tells him that his wife’s soul is damned to Hell for committing suicide. Enraged, Vlad desecrates the chapel and renounces God, declaring he will rise from the grave to avenge Elisabeta with all the powers of darkness. He then drives his sword into the chapel’s stone cross and drinks the blood that pours from it, becoming a vampire.

    Elizabeth Kostova’s novel is based on that story of Dracula, and the repercussions of his curse on a number of scientists and historians some 500 years later and set principally during the post -WWII period in the Communist controlled countries of eastern Europe at that time. It is a novel that blends fact and fiction to create a compelling story. The novel follows an unnamed narrator who accompanies her father, Paul, on a journey across Europe in the early 1970.

    The San Franciso Chronicle described her novel as – ‘The record-breaking phenomenon from Elizabeth Kostova is a celebrated masterpiece that “refashioned the vampire myth into a compelling contemporary novel, and a late-night page turner’. [Though perhaps not a book to read late at night with just oneself as company ☹].

    The novel is best summed up as follows from Kostova’s website

    Late one night, exploring her father’s library, a young woman finds an ancient book and a cache of yellowing letters. The letters are all addressed to “My dear and unfortunate successor,” and they plunge her into a world she never dreamed of, a labyrinth where the secrets of her father’s past and her mother’s mysterious fate connect to an inconceivable evil hidden in the depths of history.

    The letters provide links to one of the darkest powers that humanity has ever known and to a centuries-long quest to find the source of that darkness and wipe it out. It is a quest for the truth about Vlad the Impaler, the medieval ruler whose barbarous reign formed the basis of the legend of Dracula. Generations of historians have risked their reputations, their sanity, and even their lives to learn the truth about Vlad the Impaler and Dracula. Now one young woman must decide whether to take up this quest herself–to follow her father in a hunt that nearly brought him to ruin years ago, when he was a vibrant young scholar and her mother was still alive.

    What does the legend of Vlad the Impaler have to do with the modern world? Is it possible that the Dracula of myth truly existed and that he has lived on, century after century, pursuing his own unknowable ends? The answers to these questions cross time and borders, as first the father and then the daughter search for clues, from dusty Ivy League libraries to Istanbul, Budapest, and the depths of Eastern Europe. In city after city, in monasteries and archives, in letters and in secret conversations, the horrible truth emerges about Vlad the Impaler’s dark reign and about a time-defying pact that may have kept his awful work alive down through the ages.

    Parsing obscure signs and hidden texts, reading codes worked into the fabric of medieval monastic traditions-and evading the unknown adversaries who will go to any lengths to conceal and protect Vlad’s ancient powers-one woman comes ever closer to the secret of her own past and a confrontation with the very definition of evil. Elizabeth Kostova’s debut novel is an adventure of monumental proportions, a relentless tale that blends fact and fantasy, history and the present, with an assurance that is almost unbearably suspenseful-and utterly unforgettable.

    Looking for reviews of the book, we had both sides of extreme reactions – I’ve chosen one which is basically in tune with how I felt about the story but does also highlight some of the reasons why people did not like the story or writing style. One Book Club member wrote:

    “This is actually the second time I’ve read this book. For a first novel, it is outstanding. I was completely engrossed in the story. I really love history and the whole Dracula lore. I thought it was a great mix of both. It added a lot of suspense that made me read it with the lights on. I think I read it in about four days, I just couldn’t put it down. I will say this though, if you are not really into history or researching, I would skip it. If you are wanting to read it just because it has to do with Dracula, I would pick a much smaller book. However, I just love history and research (duh, I work in a library) so it was right up my alley. Actually, I’m doing a little research on it myself. I did read some of the comments on Amazon.com and wasn’t exactly surprised by the comments. It was either a “love it” or “hate it” book. That is why I throw my caution out there. Basically, people who didn’t enjoy it were out for a Dracula story and thought the history was “a drag”. I’m really into history so I thought it was pretty damn good. I will say I did discover a few historical inaccuracies, but I think I’ll let them fly for now. 😉All in all, a good read, especially for a rainy day.”:

    In sharp contrast, amongst many criticisms, but especially with regard to the ‘letters’ which form the basis of the novel, someone wrote – — “Unbelievably detailed letters! Now I have read a number of great books that use the format of letter writing to convey the plot. But this? Ridiculous. Not only are these letters insanely long, but they are insanely detailed as well, creating yet another reason why the book and the characters are completely unbelievable. If that’s how the author wanted to write this, why did she do the letter thing at all? “

    [I have to admit, that at times, it wasn’t always initially clear who was writing which particular letter, although that was eventually recognisable]

    19th May

    Another fascinating little  touch of Ballarat gold-mining history –  the book was titled ‘The Astonishing History of Ballarat’, Volume 3: The Story of the Quartz Miners of Ballarat: 1851-1878  by local author Doug Bradby, published in 2020, of 266 pages, personally signed by the author.  I have read, quite quickly at the time, many of Doug’s historical little books about Ballarat  –  this one I found to be much more technical, with lots of tables, and statistics, with his usual predominance of quotations of newspaper articles, etc –   which is probably why reading was deferred so any times over recent years [since being given to me at the end of 2021] and diverted to other reading material, finally returning to the book recently

    In 1856, at the height of the alluvial goldrush, Ballarat produced 823,334 ounces of gold. By 1878 the figure was a mere 12,984 ounces. Ballarat was ‘on its last legs’. However, in the Black Hill [near my former Ballarat home], Llanberris [where my Saturdays were spent at the subsequent athletics track in the 1960s], Temperance and Imperial mines, miners had developed efficient ways to find and extract gold from quartz.  Ballarat now had a fighting chance  of surviving.  Thank heavens they persevered, comments Doug Bradby. 

    This Astonishing History of Ballarat, Volume Three tells the story of those undervalued, marginalised miners, who from 1851 to 1878, laid the foundations for Ballarat’s transition from alluvial to quartz mining

    Speaking about his book for the Ballarat Times newspaper in July 2020, Bradby, in an article written by Edwina Williams, said “this period was one of great difficulty for miners trying to make a living in Ballarat, with the press describing the local industry as being “on its last legs.” This is when they know the alluvial gold in the buried rivers will run out and they’ll have to make a painful transition to an industrial, complex quartz mining system,” Bradby said. “They know at some point, they’ll have to go back to finding where the quartz came from, smashing it, and getting the gold out.

    “Ballarat in the 1870s was in diabolical trouble, in a depression. They struggle, and struggle and struggle, and by 1878, they haven’t succeeded, although there’s persistence and resilience from four mines that get better and better.”

    He said the three decades were packed full of conflict.

    There’s a big riot in Lydiard Street South, with thousands of men involved, laws are broken and shafts filled in. Another interesting story is a tar and feathering at the Temperance Mine in Little Bendigo.”

    All volumes of The Astonishing History of Ballarat have been timelessly and whimsically illustrated by Carson Ellis, a former history student of Bradby’s at North Tech.

    “He does a fantastic job. The cartoons bring out the seriousness of the situations, instantaneously and affectively summarising what’s going on,” Bradby said.

    7 June

    Quarterly Essay No. 98 headed ‘Hard New World: Our Post-American Future’ by Hugh White.

    What is Australia’s place in the new global landscape?

    Are we ready for our post-American future? In an era of rising danger for all, and dramatic choices for Australia, Hugh White explores how the world is changing and Australia should respond. We confront the world’s deepest and most dangerous international crisis in generations. The old global order faces direct challenge in three crucial regions, including our own. War has already engulfed Eastern Europe and the Middle East, and the risk in East Asia grows. White explores Australia’s responses to these crisis and lays out, in stark terms, the hard choices ahead and explains how we can make our way in a very different world I must day, those ‘stark terms’  were somewhat unsettling, especially with respect to his warnings about the potential use of nuclear weapons as a ‘last’ or ‘accidental’ resort!

    Under Donald Trump, America’s retreat from global leadership has been swift and erratic. China, Russia and India are on the move. White explains the big strategic trends driving the war in Ukraine, and why America has “lost” Asia. He discusses Albanese Labor’s record and its post-election choices, and why complacency about the American alliance – including AUKUS – is no longer an option. This essential essay urges us to make our way in a hard new world with realism and confidence.

    Hugh White breaks his essay up into a number of scenarios including:

    • American revolution;
    • What happens when America steps back from the role which has defined the global order for over three decades?
    • Putin’s gambit;
    • Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has brought nuclear weapons and the threat of nuclear war back to the central position in international politics that they occupied throughout the cold war;
    • Ukraine’s predicament and the future of Europe;
    • The balance of power in Asia;
    • The end of the world as we know it, yet Australia is not acknowledging that fact:  Australia today faces the biggest shift in our international circumstances since Europeans first settled here in 1788.

    A few quotations from the essay highlighting just a  snippet of  points from White’s ‘warnings’ and possible world scenarios, some of which may seem to some readers to be ‘over the top’ and almost scare-mongering, while writing how he sees it!!!

    [1] “The Canberra establishment is shocked by any suggestion that we should walk away from the ANZUS commitments. They think we can and must depend on America more than ever in today’s hard new world. But that misses the vital point. It is America that is walking away from the commitments it made in very different circumstances seventy-five years ago. That was plain enough under Joe Biden. It is crystal clear today under Trump.”—Hugh White, Hard New World

    [2] “But perhaps the most important reason why America and its allies have for so long downplayed the significance of nuclear weapons is that they raise a very awkward question. Is Washington willing to fight a nuclear war to defend the post-Cold War order, as it had been willing to do to contain the Soviets in the Cold War?  This is a question that no one in Washington wanted to consider too carefully, because they suspected the answer would be ‘no’. Now Putin has forced them to confront it, and Joe Biden gave the answer they all feared. Even before the invasion, he promised that, whatever happened, America would not go to war to defend Ukraine because, as he repeatedly said, ‘We will not fight the third world war in Ukraine’. His meaning was very clear, especially to people like him of the Cold War generation to whom the ‘third world war’ means only one thing – a full-scale nuclear conflict…Was he right to fear this?  Was the risk of nuclear war serios enough to deter Washington and its allies from giving Ukraine the only kind of help that would help it to win……………….US intelligence analysts assessed there was a 50 per cent chance that Putin would authorise the use of tactical nuclear weapons to prevent further losses. Putin certainly spoke as if that was so……But the Biden administration took his threats seriously….They were right to do so. A decision to use nuclear weapons would have been unprecedented, but so were the circumstances…[and from Putin’s viewpoint regarding any hint by to Biden to break his promise]….. would Putin have taken Washington’s threats seriously? Would he really have believed that Biden would risk [losing] New York and Washington  to save Ukraine? Or would he have called Biden’s bluff?”

    [3] and briefly on the Middle East tragedies: “It should not have been hard for the Biden administration to work out a response to the tragedy in Gaza that matched its professed commitment to avowed values and international law. The argument is not, after all, so very complex. Israel has a right to exist within secure and internationally recognised borders. The Palestinians have a right to a state in the West Bank and Gaza. Israel has refused to countenance the establishment of such a state. That does not justify Hama’s crimes on and since 7 October 2023. Equally, those crimes do not justify Israel’s assault on Gaza since then. Both sides are deeply in the wrong………..Upon that basis the Biden administration could have constructed a policy that accorded with its claims to global leadership.  Instead, seemingly from sheer moral and political weakness, it went along with the Netanyahu government’s crimes, tacitly adopting the view so neatly described by Tom Stevenson. ‘Any violence committed by Palestinians justifies all violence by Israel, and no violence committed by Israel justifies any by Palestinians.’ That is the opposite of leadership. Trump’s policies on Gaza are, of course, even worse, but they are less hypocritical. He doesn’t pretend to defend universal values, international law and the old vision of US global leadership.  In this respect the most prodigious liar in the history of US politics is more honest than his opponents”.

    20th June

    Tonight, I did indeed finish reading ‘Until August’ by Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ [published in 2024], just 129 pages   – basically, to my mind, a short romance, described by his son in the Preface as ‘not as polished as his greatest books’, none of which to this point in time, I’d sadly not given myself the opportunity to read.

    The reason for that description – little book published 10 years after the author’s death [in 2014] – in the words of his son again  –  “The memory loss our Father suffered in his final years….the way that loss diminished his ability to write with his customary rigor was a source of desperate frustration for him ….’Until August’ was the fruit of one last effort to carry on against all odds. The process was a race between his artistic perfectionism and his vanishing mental faculties” 

    Not long before his death Gabo’s final judgement ‘This book doesn’t work. It must be destroyed’. The family didn’t destroy it but set it aside, and as his family said “In an act of betrayal, we decided to put his readers’ pleasure ahead of all other considerations…it’s possible Gabo might forgive us’.

    Amongst other plaudits the ‘Guardian’ wrote ‘Few writers can be said to have written books that have changed the whole course of literature. Gabriel Garcia Marquez did just that’.

    So, having read Marquez for the first time, through this little book, I would think that description of his literary skills highly over-inflated.  Quite obviously I need to search out some of his original novels, of which there are at least seventeen which I’m assuming the basis of the ‘Guardians’ assessment related to.

    Until August by the Colombian author and  Nobel Prize Winner   –  romantic, sensual, a profound meditation on freedom, regret and the mysteries of love – you can read it at one sit  –  Goodreads, in describing the book as ‘an unexpected gift from one of the greatest writers the world has ever known’ – summarises the story briefly as “Sitting alone beside the languorous blue waters of the lagoon, Ana Magdalena Bach contemplates the men at the hotel bar. She has been happily married for twenty-seven years and has no reason to escape the life she has made with her husband and children. And yet, every August, she travels by ferry here to the island where her mother is buried, and for one night takes a new lover.  Across sultry Caribbean evenings full of salsa and boleros, lotharios and conmen, Ana journeys further each year into the hinterland of her desire and the fear hidden in her heart”.

    Meanwhile, I believe I have some enthralling explorations of Gabo’s literature ahead of me!

    23rd June.

    ‘Melaleuca’ by Angie Faye Martin, published in 2025, of 419 pages.  I think I saw a review of this book in the Ballarat Courier, made a note if it, and later searched it out.

    Easily read, a basic murder mystery set in in a small rural Australian ‘fictional’ township about 200 kms west of Brisbane on the Sturt Highway, which even came with a sketch map of the town which all of it’s major features as referred to in the book. Perhaps Queensland was an apt selection for this book with it’s strong references to Australia’s Indigenous history at the hands of colonisation, and the injustice and racism typical of Australia in those times, and particularly the early squatters and settlers of Queensland, though the setting is in later generations.  Described by one author as ‘A blistering outback noir that doesn’t flinch away from Australia’s Indigenous history at the hands of colonisation’. Meanwhile, the author herself, as someone who grew up in regional Queensland, the places and people of Angie Faye Martin’s Melaleuca are viscerally recognisable. 

    In summary – A country town, a brutal murder, a shameful past, a reckoning to come… The injustices of the past and dangers of the present envelop Aboriginal policewoman Renee Taylor, when her unwilling return to the small outback town of her childhood plunges her into the investigation of a brutal murder.

    Renee Taylor is planning to stay the minimum amount of time in her remote hometown – only as long as her mum needs her, then she is fleeing back to her real life in Brisbane.

    Seconded to the town’s sleepy police station, Renee is pretty sure work will hold nothing more exciting than delivering speeding tickets. Then a murdered woman is found down by the creek on the outskirts of town.

    Leading the investigation, Renee uncovers a perplexing connection to the disappearance of two young women thirty years earlier. As she delves deeper and the mystery unfurls, intergenerational cruelties, endemic racism, and deep corruption show themselves, even as dark and bitter truths about the town and its inhabitants’ past rise up and threaten to overwhelm the present.  Or as described by another author: ‘Powerful First Nations crime noir that interrogates law enforcement and how it intersects with Indigenous victims’.

    While in reading, one can develop one’s own ideas about who the ‘guilty parties’ are, the eventual unexpected revelations may still come as a surprise, which I guess should be the aim behind an authentic crime novel.  If readers like an easily read mystery with a strong connection to historical injustice and not so past social issues, this is the book for you.

  • The Coachbuilder’s Column: Volume 15: Issue 8: 10th April 2025: the sharing of two opinion pieces -politics and literature.

    In this edition of the Coachbuilder’s Column, I’m wanting a couple of recent articles on two very different subjects – on international politics by former Australian prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull – and a literary article published by the State Library of Victoria concerning a new publication about the life of Australian author, Miles Franklin.

    1. FROM AUSTRALIAN FOREIGN AFFAIRS MONTHLY – VOICES FROM ASIA:  AFA Monthly [12/3/2025] – Voices from Asia  –  ‘What Albanese should do about Trump’ by Malcolm Turnbull

    Every day Australians’ news is dominated by Donald Trump, and every day we are reminded that the United States, under his leadership, is no longer committed to the values that our nations used to share.

    Australians used to fret that the United States would not come to our aid in times of peril. We have always gone to great lengths to remind the Americans of what compliant allies we have been, joining them in every war – even the most ill-conceived, like Vietnam and Iraq.

    But now the United States has a president who does not even pretend to care about alliances. He has threatened to pull out of NATO; he has threatened a NATO ally, Denmark, with sanctions if it does not hand over Greenland; and he has bullied and threatened Canada, a neighbour, calling on it to become the fifty-first American state.

    Trump has always admired Russian president Vladimir Putin. I saw that up close when I was in their company at G20 meetings. But now he has, effectively, switched sides and is doing everything he can to force Ukraine to submit to Russian domination. He humiliated Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office on 28 February, then suspended both military supplies to and intelligence sharing with Ukraine. In doing so, he made it much easier for Putin to kill Ukrainians and much harder for Ukrainians to fight back.

    Trump believes might is right: that American power should be used not to protect ideals such as democracy but simply to extort the best possible deal for itself. The more dependent a country is on the United States, the greater the opportunity for exploitation – as Ukraine, Canada and Denmark can each attest.

    What has been the response of our leaders? In a chorus of bipartisan gaslighting, we are assured that nothing has changed and the US alliance is as strong as ever. Behind the scenes it’s not much better: the consensus decision within government appears to be to hide under the doona, try not to attract the attention of this thin-skinned and vindictive president, and hope that in four years there is a return to normalcy.

    In 2016 Donald Trump did not expect to win and was not prepared to govern. He filled key posts with qualified people, such as Jim Mattis as Secretary of Defense, who sought to steer him towards more conventional policies. This time he is surrounded by people chosen for their loyalty and who share his ‘MAGA’ vision. Moreover, he now controls the Republican Party. There is no reason to assume that at the end of Trump’s second term (assuming he does not try to run for a third), the system will snap back to a conventional style of administration.

    Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, to his credit, has said he is open to Australian troops participating in a peacekeeping force in Ukraine, expressing solidarity with the European initiative led by British prime minister Keir Starmer and French president Emmanuel Macron. This at least represents a subtle divergence from Trump – which is more than can be said for Opposition leader Peter Dutton.

    But neither has acknowledged that Trump’s dramatic foreign-policy shifts have real implications for Australia and raise big questions.

    How should we defend ourselves if we cannot rely on the Americans?

    How should we advance our national interests in a ‘might is right’ world in which the United States’ foreign policy seems more aligned with Russia’s than with ours or our allies’?

    How can we best support friends and allies such as Canada when they are threatened and bullied?

    What are we to do with AUKUS? What is our plan B if, or when, the promised submarines do not turn up?

    In short, how do we stand up for Australia?

    Throughout his time in office, Albanese has been ultra-cautious – an approach that, coupled with his often, underwhelming advocacy, has created the impression that he is weak. To project strength, he needs to have something to say that shows Australia will not be bullied. What should he do?

    First, he should stop the gaslighting. He doesn’t have to criticise Trump or try to change him. But he should at least acknowledge what all of us can see: the United States is no longer committed to its allies, or to our foundational values of democracy and the rule of law. The United States no longer shares our commitment to the international rules-based order, which ensures that the strong cannot simply do as they wish while the weak suffer.

    Second, we need to review every aspect of our alliance with the Americans, and in particular AUKUS. Like the Europeans, we must start to make ourselves self-reliant. Albanese should make it clear that we must prepare to defend this country by ourselves. While we can always hope that the United States and other allies will come to our aid, we cannot assume they will. We should invest more in our defence, focusing on capabilities built in Australia; if that is impossible, we should at least ensure we have absolute sovereign control over them. In other words, they must be deployable without any other country’s consent.

    The government’s claim that the AUKUS submarines (if they ever appear) will be entirely sovereign assets is not credible. The much less complex F-16s operated by Ukraine have been, effectively, disabled by Trump’s withdrawal of technical and intelligence support. Even the United Kingdom’s nuclear fleet, and nuclear deterrent, cannot be operated without US concurrence.

    Third, Albanese should accelerate our advocacy for our values and interests with like-minded middle countries such as the United Kingdom, Japan and Indonesia. The Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership is a good model. But we have to stop seeing our relationships as a series of spokes leading to the hub of Washington DC; rather, they should be a mesh of alignments, especially in our region. That was my agenda as prime minister, but regrettably Scott Morrison reversed this and made Australia far more dependent on America, right at the time it was becoming less dependable. Albanese, fearing a political wedge on national security, adopted Morrison’s policies.

    Will a more independent Australia offend the United States? Will it result in tariffs, or in scornful social media blasts and patronising lectures from J.D. Vance? Well, it might. But what’s the alternative? Trump has made it very clear that the more dependent and vulnerable you are, the more he will exploit you. He is not an altruist. His slogan is ‘America First’.

    Above all we need to have an open and honest conversation about these issues. Right now, too many Australians – and not just politicians – are biting their tongues for fear of incurring the wrath of Trump.

    Immediately following an interview I gave on Bloomberg on Tuesday, Trump posted on Truth Social that I was weak and ineffectual and didn’t know anything about China – among other disparaging comments. He was apparently upset that I had made the obvious point that Trump’s chaotic bullying style of government creates an opportunity for China to be the reverse – consistent where he is erratic, respectful where he is abusive, constructive where he is combative. This would be a change from the approach that China took in the first Trump administration and would cause many countries which are not as closely aligned to the US as Australia is to move closer to China.

    This may be regarded as a penetrating glimpse of the obvious and is something I have said many times before, but Trump apparently saw it and fired back his personal abuse. That was surprising, but less surprising than the reaction from NewsCorp whose publications promptly said I had, by daring to speak my mind, torpedoed any exemption from steel and aluminium tariffs. It was disappointing to see the ABC taking the same line, effectively asking me why I didn’t self-censor for fear of offending the thin-skinned President.

    It’s time for our leaders, and all of us, to put Australia first.

     [Malcolm Turnbull was Prime Minister of Australia from 2015 to 2018].

    • From The Conversation: Books & Ideas, 14th March 2025

    Friday essay: Miles Franklin’s other brilliant career – her year as an undercover servant [by Kerrie Davies – Senior Lecturer, School of the Arts & Media, UNSW Sydney], published 14th March 2025

    In the Miles Franklin archive in the State Library of New South Wales there are two brown, cloth-bound volumes, titled, “When I was Mary-Anne, A Slavey”. The thick, handwritten pages are amended with glued paper inserts copied from the missing diary the author of My Brilliant Career kept for roughly a year between April 1903 and April 1904. In an accompanying summary, on which Franklin based her 1904 letter to the Bulletin about the experience, she wrote:

    Some people wonder what domestic servants have to complain about […] No one could understand the depth of the silent feud between mistress and maid without, in their own person, testing the matter …

    There is a picture of Franklin in the archive too, dressed in her “get up”: a black-and-white tunic and apron, with a lacy parlour cap pinned atop her piled-up brunette hair. The photograph, taken in a studio in Melbourne, is captioned “yr little mary-anne”. She beckons you into her impersonation.

    Along with the letters Franklin wrote or received during the year, the summary and photo authenticate her little known upstairs–downstairs experiment in Sydney and Melbourne, which she details in the manuscript. She cooked in flammable kitchens, plunged her hands into steaming washing up, and swept the dust that scattered behind her employers’ shoes.

    In today’s Instagram culture, it is improbable that a celebrity like Franklin could work incognito and not be recognised. But this was the Edwardian era of the early 1900s, when a photograph was a special occasion and names were known more widely than faces. Franklin loved that a lady she’d once met at a government reception unknowingly flung her coat at her when she opened the door, and that she stoked the fire while guests discussed My Brilliant Career.

    Aged 21, Franklin dazzled Australia with her debut novel. Published in 1901, My Brilliant Career inspired young women to write to her about their own frustrations and dreams. She denied her novel was autobiographical, to little effect. She was compared to novelist Charlotte Bronte and to Marie Bashkirtseff, the Russian–Parisian teen artist who declared in her memoir, “I am my own heroine”.


    Despite Franklin’s later fervent wish that My Brilliant Career’s heroine, Sybylla Melvyn, would be forgotten, the book endured. It became a feminist literary classic, and in 1979 a film, produced by Margaret Fink and directed by Gillian Armstrong. Today, her cultural touchstone continues with her bequest of the Miles Franklin Literary Award and recent stage adaptations of My Brilliant Career. The Stella literary prize is named in her honour, after her first given name, Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin.

    Franklin’s iconic success is, however, misleading. Like many authors, she experienced fame and acclaim, but minimal royalties, in part due to an unfair contract for colonial authors with her Edinburgh publisher, William Blackwood and Sons. Books were also a luxury during the punishing Federation drought, which lasted from 1895 to 1902.

    Franklin could have married. Her grandmother took every opportunity to remind her she was expected to wed. “Have you found anyone you like better than yourself?” she archly asked.

    Instead, she disappeared into undercover journalism.

    Franklin was likely inspired by the “gonzo” women journalists known as “girl stunt reporters”, who disrupted male-dominated journalism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

    To prove their journalistic chops, they risked their safety and health to go undercover and expose factory exploitation and illegal abortion clinics. Most famously, New York reporter Nellie Bly feigned hysteria to gain admission to the city’s public women’s mental health institution for ten days in 1887. Their stories captivated audiences, as much as their daring.

    American journalist Elizabeth Banks transported the trend to London, where she worked as a servant, leaving her poodle, Judge, with a friend. Her reports in “In Cap and Apron” for the Weekly Sun caused a sensation, and Banks’ memoir Autobiography of a Newspaper Girl was reviewed in Australia in late 1902 and early 1903.

    Apart from Catherine Hay Thomson’s investigation of Kew Asylum and Melbourne Hospital in 1886, the “stunt girl reporter” only noticeably appeared in Australia in 1903.

    That year, the fledgling New Idea magazine published a series of undercover articles, including about experiences such as working in a tobacco factory and applying for domestic service at an employment agency. Unlike Franklin, the New Idea journalist stopped there, while Franklin spent a full, gruelling year as a servant.

    The “servant question” was an ideal local investigation. The newly federated Australia was growing due to the wool industry – “on the sheep’s back”. But in the cities, factories were an alternative engine for young women’s employment rather than domestic service. Fretting “mistresses” complained about the dearth of remaining girls available.

    Servants retorted that if they were treated better, perhaps they would stay. One suggested scandalously that mistresses should give references about how they treat servants to prospective hires, pre-dating contemporary suggestions that owners and agencies should prove their fitness as landlords to tenants.

    The debate around “the servant question” exposed Australia’s myth of equality. Franklin’s family was no exception. While drought drove her parents off their farm, Stillwater, to a plot in Penrith (then a rural town outside Sydney), they were cultured and educated. Franklin’s wealthy grandmother ran a station in the Snowy Mountains, on which Franklin based the elegant homestead, Caddagat, in My Brilliant Career. A governess or nurse was acceptable, she wrote in her accompanying summary to her manuscript, but “a servant raised considerable horror among my circle”.

    Franklin was undeterred. As well as a new writing project, she needed money and a roof if she wanted to live in the city rather than at home. Suffragette Rose Scott, who called Franklin her “spirit child”, invited her to stay. But while Franklin appreciated the support, at times Rose was suffocating.

    Revealing the independent streak that would define her life, Franklin wrote, “it was imperative I get work to sustain myself”.

    Franklin’s real servant pseudonym was “Sarah Frankling”, a play on her middle name and her surname. “Mary-Anne”, at the time a well known slang name for servants, was only used for the manuscript, to hide identities.

    Franklin’s live-in domestic servant positions included kitchen maid, parlour maid and “general” servant. She worked in a terrace she dubbed a “cubby house”, an upmarket boarding house, a harbourside villa, a wealthy merchant home, and mansions in Sydney and Melbourne. Franklin stayed a maximum of two months at each post for a year in total, after which she planned to write.

    Senator and High Court judge Richard Edward O’Connor and his large family were her most high-profile employer. Their mansion, Keston, which is close to the prime minister’s Sydney residence, Kirribilli House, and the boarding house around the corner survive, as does the terrace, near Bronte in the city’s eastern suburbs. All are now apartment buildings.

    In the manuscript, Franklin recounts that she rapidly lost weight and felt her spirit become “suppressed” by the monotony and tiring nature of servant work. Depending on the number of staff and her duties, she hand-rolled heavy, wet clothes through a washing mangle; served pre-breakfast tea and toast in bed, which she thought was an obscene indulgence; cooked and served full hot breakfasts and dinners daily; waited on guests in the boarding house’s dining room, nicknamed “the zoo”; cleaned the guest rooms and parlours; and helped at high-society balls. She kept fires burning in winter and sweated through heavy housework and cooking in summer.

    The hours were brutal. She usually woke at dawn, and only finished after the evening dinners were served, or if she was a kitchen maid, after she cleaned the mess away. Not all her employers offered a luxurious whole afternoon off per week. She worked through burns sustained on the job, and was brought to tears by a mistress who ordered her to change her carefully arranged hair. The house’s Irish cook opined that the mistress was threatened by Franklin’s “toy figure” and “fairy face”.

    As the months passed at different employers, fatigue turned to anger, and loneliness to friendships with fellow servants. It is heartening to see a snobby young Franklin mature and change as she rubbed tired elbows with those she previously saw as beneath her status. She cheekily flirted with a lovestruck tradie, just as she traded Shakespearian quips with an intrigued young naval officer staying at the posh boarding house.

    When Scott learned Franklin was working as a servant, she chided her for not refusing the conditions as an example to others. However, Franklin knew any insolence or objection meant instant dismissal, ruining her research and current livelihood.

    Scott also misread Franklin’s long-term goal – writing the servant book. In her diary, Franklin recorded what she could not say out loud. She cynically noted that “to be sensitive would be unfortunate” for a servant. “The maid must not want for pleasure,” Franklin warned, “because she will have no time to gratify it”. Be presentable but not too pretty, she advised; be polite but not so fancy or fussy to refuse tiny, “ill-aired” servant quarters next to the laundry.

    The servant year confirmed her lifelong views of marriage as stifling. Echoing My Brilliant Career, Franklin vented her feminist frustration in the diary entries. She wrote of the terrace’s “Mistress”: “sooth, when a woman of ordinary intelligence gives the whole of her time, brain and energy to the running of a miniature establishment”.

    As for the husband, an irritated Franklin wrote that he was “boss of his own backyard and lord of his little suburban dining room”.

    Biographies of Miles Franklin have largely followed the traditional “cradle to grave” of her life, in which the critical servant year has been brushed over like a quick sweep of the biographical floor. One of Franklin’s first biographers, Marjorie Barnard, dismissed Mary-Anne as of little interest.

    Jill Roe, author of the epic biography Stella Miles Franklin, read the existing Mary-Anne draft manuscript, describing it in her book as Franklin’s “social experiment”. Yet even Roe is succinct about Mary-Anne, compared to other years in Franklin’s eventful life. Roe lists Franklin’s known servant employers, admires her pluck and commiserates over it not being published due to concerns she had defamed her employers. (Franklin’s pseudonyms for her employers were chiffon thin, so easily identifiable.)

    There were other intractable problems too with the manuscript, though Franklin may have edited another draft before submitting it for publication. The existing draft is overlong, unwieldy and inconsistent in its point of view. Franklin switches between “I” and later, “Mary-Anne”, as if she fully collapses into her servant life.

    Despite her failure to find a publisher for her manuscript, Franklin continued her journalism. She began writing for the Sydney Morning Herald, which suited her fast writing style, and helped her earn money with a pen.

    In 1908, Franklin joined the women’s trade union movement and advocated for working women, all the while working on her own novel, writing and resisting the status quo of the Edwardian era. She finally returned to literary acclaim with the award-winning All That Swagger in 1936, a colonial saga of a pioneering family, and another historical series she wrote under the pseudonym “Brent of Bin Bin”.

    Upon her death in 1954, tributes reported that “Australian literature lost one of its great figures”.

    Franklin’s investigation of the servant question now seems quaint. Appliances have changed from washing mangles and melting iceboxes to sleek stainless steel and glossy white machines that beep and hum in the background.

    Yet demand for service remains. “Servants” are still in our lives; they just answer to an app rather than a bell. They clean our houses while we are out, or they are chefs on call who cook meals delivered by mobile waiters on electric bikes and scooters who brave traffic as they dash to door to door. Uber and Dido chauffeurs compete to pick us up from wherever we happen to be.

    The exploitation remains, too. At the extreme, the Sri Lankan Embassy in Canberra has been ordered to pay $117,000 in back wages to its domestic servant, paid 90 cents an hour. More broadly, Fair Work last year moved to protect gig workers in the share economy, recognising its endemic lack of rights and risks.

    Since Franklin’s Mary-Anne, low-wage service work has been revisited periodically by writers interested in social justice. In 1933, inspired by Jack London, George Orwell chronicled the months he spent impoverished and doing menial jobs in Down and Out in Paris and London.

    In 2001, Barbara Ehrenreich published the acclaimed Nickel and Dimed, about working and living on minimum wage. Elisabeth Wynhausen wrote an Australian version, Dirt Cheap: Life at the wrong end of the job market in 2005. Alexandrea J. Ravenelle brought the history full circle in 2019 with her collected stories of 80 gig economy workers in her book, Hustle and Gig. All these authors had similar conclusions to Franklin: low-wage service work is grinding and exploitative.

    At its core, the servant question hasn’t changed at all since Franklin’s investigation over a hundred years ago.

    Miles Franklin Undercover by Kerrie Davies is published by Allen & Unwin

  • The Coachbuilder’s Column: Volume 15: Issue 7: 12th March 2025: Comment on ‘Boy Swallows Universe’ by Trent Dalton, published in 2018

    Overnight, I finished reading ‘Boy Swallows Universe’ by Trent Dalton, my edition published in 2024, of 500 pages – I had read various reviews, mostly favourable, about this book, but for some reason it didn’t appeal to me, perhaps the title alone suggested something for much younger readers. Anyway, the other day in my favourite book shop, there it was on the shelf at a reasonable price, and curiosity got the better of me. This was intended as a brief posting, but for those who read through, I apologise for it’s unintended length 😊

    Right at the beginning, praise for the book from at least four sources was encouragement enough for me to proceed!

    • From The Sydney Morning Herald: ‘The best Australian novel I have read in more than a decade….’

    • From The Guardian: ‘One of the best Australian novels I’ve ever read’;

    • Goodreads writes “““A story of brotherhood, true love and the most unlikely of friendships, Boy Swallows Universe will be the most heartbreaking, joyous and exhilarating novel you will read all year. Trent Dalton writes for the award-winning The Weekend Australian Magazine”. , and,

    • The Washington Post ‘Hypnotizes you with wonder, and then hammers you with heartbreak’,

    At about page 60, I was beginning to doubt the sanity of those reviews – crude people, language, violence, criminal association, drugs – by then I’d decided I was not enjoying this story, not the kind of novel I get much pleasure from in my vintage years – but, going back to the SMH review where I read on “The last 100 pages of Boy Swallows Universe propel you like an express train to a conclusion that is profound and complex and unashamedly commercial…A rollicking ride, rich in philosophy, wit, truth and pathos’.

    So, with 440 pages to go, and deciding not to ignore a world of favourable reviews, I read on. And yes, it was all of those descriptions above – reminded me, near the end, of some of the Stephen King or Dean Koontz novels that I read three or four decades ago. And yes again, difficult to put aside over the last 100, even 200 pages. I won’t reveal the plot here [that will appear in a future Coschbuilder’s Column], but one interesting method used by the author – the numerous chapters throughout the book all begin with the word ‘Boy’, for example, Boy writes words; Boy loses luck; Boy stirs monster; Boy sees vision; Boy bites spider; and so on, with one exception, the final chapter – Girl saves boy!

    Wikipedia describes the book as Dalton’s semi-autobiographical coming-of-age novel, and if you read his reasons for writing the book, below, you will understand why.

    There is a movie version which I’ve not seen [would have had no appeal prior to reading the book] so some readers may be quite familiar with the storyline I’ve not illustrated here.

    And a brief summary to wet the reading appetite:

    An utterly wonderful novel of love, crime, magic, fate and coming of age, set in Brisbane’s violent working-class suburban fringe – Brisbane, 1983: A lost father, a mute brother, a mum in jail, a heroin dealer for a stepfather and a notorious crim for a babysitter. It’s not as if Eli’s life isn’t complicated enough already. He’s just trying to follow his heart, learning what it takes to be a good man, but life just keeps throwing obstacles in the way – not least of which is Tytus Broz, legendary Brisbane drug dealer.

    But Eli’s life is about to get a whole lot more serious. He’s about to fall in love. And, oh yeah, he has to break into Boggo Road Gaol on Christmas Day, to save his mum.

    Meanwhile, amongst the many Reviews I came across of this book, I decided to share just one with the readers – written in 2019, by a reviewer named Theresa Smith, who at the beginning, expresses similar doubts about the book, in the manner in which I began this contribution!!

    Smith writes:

    I wasn’t going to read this book on account of all the hype. But then I thought I’d better read it after all, because of, well, you know, all the hype. I’ve been burned by hyped up books in the past, the type of burns you never recover from – eg. Girl on the Train; I’m still scarred. I was most definitely not burned by this one though. Boy Swallows Universe more than lives up to all of its hype. It surpasses it and then some. It’s wholly unique, filled with so much about so many things. Could I be more vague? I’ll try my best to tell you why I loved this book so much without giving anything away because the less you know going in, the better.

    Is it a true story? Bits and pieces, no doubt. Many who have heard Trent Dalton speak since its publication have heard a lot about what’s true and what’s not. I haven’t heard anything; I live in the back of beyond where no one comes to speak about anything and then of course I wasn’t planning on reading it, so I deliberately didn’t read any articles either. Until last week when I read this really beautiful piece on the Booktopia blog written by Trent himself called, ‘Why I Wrote Boy Swallows Universe.’ After reading this article, I immediately unearthed my copy from my mountainous tbr, which instantly gives me away, because despite deciding not to read it, I had a copy on hand – because sometimes I like to challenge myself and buy a book I’m not intending to read just to see how long I can hold out. But this article was so moving, it reached me, and I knew I needed to read the book. Cut through the hype and judge for myself. Lucky I had that copy! (I held out for about eight months, by the way). It’s important to not get too caught up in what’s true in the book and what’s not. It’s a work of fiction, inspired largely by the author’s early life, but it’s not an autobiography. This separation of the author from the work enabled me to fully appreciate what Trent has done. I’ve read a few reviews that seemed to have trouble with this separation, even going so far as to call it Trent’s life story; autobiographical fiction (no such thing exists) that was too far-fetched to be believed. This is a work of fiction. That it’s heavily inspired by Trent’s early life certainly enhances it, but it doesn’t define it.

    Anyone who grew up rough will find the familiar within these pages. For those who didn’t, the book may or may not work for you, it probably all depends on how you approach it and what your tolerance levels for the nastier side of life are. For me, reading Boy Swallows Universe was a deeply personal journey back into my own early life; the good, and the not so good. I related to the story, as well as to Eli and Gus, on so many levels. The story was in turn blisteringly funny and achingly sad. It’s ultimately an adventure, a crime story, a family drama, solid gold Aussie, and in essence, it really reminded me of the Australian film, Two Hands, with its coming of age/standing at a crossroads vibe. Anyone who grew up in the 1980s, that tragic yet golden heyday, will be immersed in the nostalgic atmosphere. While I wouldn’t touch one now with a barge pole, back in the day, a devon and sauce sandwich always hit the spot. And those KT26’s; oh my goodness, we were all wearing them while walking around in the blazing sun without hats on sucking on Sunny Boys. And 80s TV shows. All those great shows Eli and Gus were growing up to. Kids today are learning their values from American MA15+ rated video games instead of cheesy, yet wholesome, American PG rated family sitcoms. The tragedy is very real. The 1980s just springs to life in this book. It’s a brilliant trip down memory lane; but it was also a difficult one. Because there are other parts of the 1980s that weren’t so great: domestic violence was nobody’s business, you probably asked for it; child protection was of little importance; welfare was rife in certain parts of Australia and for some, the dole was a career goal; QLD didn’t even sell mid-strength beer until later in the decade, exacerbating the violence that stemmed from pay day binge drinking; having a mental illness meant you were crazy and thus judged and ostracised accordingly; weapons were frequently brought to school and used in the playground; smoking was cool, those who didn’t do it were not; the police were not to be trusted, at least, not by the people in my neighbourhood. Nostalgia can work both ways, and it does so very well in this book.

    Ultimately, I took away a lot from reading Boy Swallows Universe, but there are a few things, take home messages I suppose, for want of a different way of putting it, that I particularly appreciated:

    1. At some point, everyone is faced with a choice: go this way, the same as everyone around me, or go that way, forge a new path. The cycle can be broken. You can go your own way. It’s not easy, but it is possible.

    2. Love is messy, particularly when it comes to family. You can hate what someone does, but still love them fiercely. You can be deeply ashamed of your family, but still love them wholly.

    3. There are shades of grey in all of us. Good people can do bad things. Bad people can do good things. Sometimes it’s not about the labels, but more about the moment of action.

    4. People make mistakes. People can be bad parents but still love their kids.

    5. Forgiveness can be as much for yourself as for the person you are forgiving.

    Trent Dalton’s reasons for writing the novel – it’s lengthy but I’ve decided to copy his comments in full to conclude this contribution.

    Dalton wrote:

    About three summers ago on a blazing hot Boxing Day in South-east Queensland I was standing at the back of a small blue Holden Barina with my mum. The boot hatchback door was up and I was helping my mum load a bunch of Christmas gifts and cooking equipment into her car. We’d all just enjoyed a good family catch-up in a shared Bribie Island holiday unit, one of those nice peaceful Christmases where nobody argues about who was supposed to make the coleslaw, and my mum was distracted for a moment by my daughter – she must have been about seven then – doing one of her impromptu interpretive dances through an avenue of coastal paperbark trees. I followed her eyes and was, naturally, also quickly ensnared in this vision… my girl’s hair blowing in the wind, her bare feet making ballet leaps between those trees, a stick in her hand acting as a wand…

    Then out of nowhere and for no apparent reason – not moving her eyes for a second away from my daughter – Mum said something beautiful. ‘I wouldn’t change any of it,’ Mum said. It sounds cheesy, I know, but that’s what she said. ‘I wouldn’t change any of it. If I had to go through it all again to get to this, I would do it. I wouldn’t change any of it.’

    I’m a journalist who has written thousands of words about the most harrowing stories about Australian life in the suburbs… tragedy, violence, trauma, upheaval, betrayal, death, destruction, families, abandonment, drugs, crime, hope and healing, no hope, no healing … and I’m often reminded by my gut that kicks from the inside sometimes how my own mother’s life story remains the most harrowing story I’ve ever had the strange and often unsettling honour of being a significant part of.

    She’s the one. ‘Who’s the most interesting person you’ve ever spoken to?’ people ask. Nah, not the Dalai Lama, nah, not John Howard or Bob Hawke or Priscilla flipping Presley or Heath Ledger or Matt Damon. Nah, it’s my Mum, by a damn sight. You’ll know why, when you read the book.

    Though to be honest, the book doesn’t say a tenth of what’s she’s been through and, in turn, my admiration for her, for coming out the other side of those things, for getting to the point one day three summers ago where she’s looking at her granddaughter dancing and she comes to the realisation that it was all heading somewhere – all the pain, all the social suffering, all the madness, all the longing, all the loss, all those bad choices and all those good choices – they were all leading to a girl she loves more than life itself dancing between some swaying trees. So that’s where the book started, by that boot of mum’s Holden Barina. It took a year to write between the hours of 8pm and 10pm after work, and it took my whole life to write. The research was really remembrance. Remembering all those years when the world around my small family crumbled. When people we loved were being taken away. When things we thought true were being turned false. Heads were being slammed into fibro walls. Dangerous people were knocking on doors at daytime. And when that world of ours crumbled – the world of prisons and small-time suburban crime – and my brothers and I went to live with my father who I never knew, that world we knew was replaced with a new world of a Brisbane Housing Commission cluster swirling with a hundred social issues – alcoholism, unemployment, domestic violence, generational social curses – all of which I would later write about as a journalist.

    All of me is in here. Everything I’ve ever seen. Everything I’ve ever done. Every girl I ever kissed on a wagged school day, every punch I ever threw, every tooth I ever lost in a Housing Commission street scrap and every flawed, conflicted, sometimes even dangerous Queenslander I’ve ever come across, as the son of two of the most incredible and beautiful and sometimes troubled parents a kid could ever be born to.

    The key characters all draw on the people I love most in the world. The most beautiful and complex people I’ve ever known, and I never even had to walk out the door of my house to find them. I just wanted to give the world a story. To turn all these crazy and sad and tragic and beautiful things I’ve seen into a crazy, sad, tragic and beautiful story.

    Love, above all else, is threaded through this novel. I wanted to write about how it is possible to love someone who has killed. How it is possible to love someone who has hurt you deeply. How love is the closest thing we have to the truly profound. The kid in the book is feeling love like he’s feeling the edge of the universe, and it’s so big and beyond him he can only see it in colours and explosions in the cosmos. He can explain those things he sees in his mind – even the things he might hear in his head – with about as much clarity as anyone can truly give the mysteries of true love. He can only feel these things.

    Ultimately, it’s a love story.

    All I think I’ve done as a journalist over 17 years, if I’m being really honest with myself, is process all the baggage of my life through the stories of thousands of Australians who tell me their deepest darkest secrets in the sacred spaces of their living rooms, and I take these secrets and turn them as respectfully as possible into magazine stories, and these stories help me learn and know and sometimes even heal … Boy Swallows Universe is me taking all my own secrets this time and turning them as respectfully as possible into a novel.

    This book is for the never believers and the believers and the dreamers. This book is for anyone around the world who has been 13 years old. This book is for a generation of Australians who were promised by their parents they would be told all the answers as soon as they were old enough. Well, now you’re old enough.

    Here are my answers:

    1. Every lost soul can be found again. Fates can be changed. Bad can become good.

    2. True love conquers all.

    3. There is a fine line between magic and madness and all should be encouraged in moderation.

    4. Australian suburbia is a dark and brutal place.

    5. Australian suburbia is a beautiful and magical place.

    6. Home is always the first and final poem.

    In conclusion, two quotations direct from the book where in [1],  the boys’ father is arguing against the fear that his boys are going to be taking away from him, and [2] the reaction of the non-speaking brother to school room teasing

    [1] ‘You think you’re serving your profession so nobly, so compassionately,’ Dad says. ‘You’ll take those boys from me and you’ll split ‘em up and you’ll strip ‘em bare of the only thing that keeps ‘em going, each other, and you’ll tell your friends over a bottle of chardonnay from Margaret River how you saved two boys from their monster dad who nearly killed them once and they’ll bounce from foster home to foster home until they find each other again at the gate of your house with a can of petrol and they’ll thank you for sticking your nose into our business as they’re burning your house down.

    [2] ‘Every now and then some unfortunate kid in August’s class makes fun of August and his refusal to speak. His reaction is always the same: he walks up to that month’s particularly foul-mouthed bully who is dangerously unaware of August’s hidden streak of psychopathic rage and, blessed by his inability to explain his actions, he simply attacks the boy’s unblemished jaw, nose and ribs with one of three sixteen-punch boxing combinations my mum’s long-time boyfriend, Lyle, has tirelessly taught us both across endless winter weekends with an old brown leather punching bag in the backyard shed. Lyle doesn’t believe in much, but he believes in the circumstance-shifting power of a broken nose.’

  • The Coachbuilder’s Column: Volume 15: Issue 6: 26th February 2025:  ‘the belburd’ by Nardi Simpson, a 2024 release

    I purchased this book from QBD in Melton a few days ago – “The Belburd’ by Nardi Simpson, published in 2024, of 310 pages, a very different piece of reading in terms of my reading diet!

    Described in a way which was unlikely to attract me to this book initially – as a lyrical and masterfully woven novel about women, creation, belonging and the precious fragility of a life – yet something about the promotional material written about it and the author herself prompted a purchase a few days ago when I was seeking out something lighter. Yes, it was that, read in a few hours over a couple of days, though still not sure if I can say I actually enjoyed it!!
    Another description applied to this book – ‘the belburd is a powerful story that shows us we are all connected from before we began to long after we begin again’.
    Let’s examine the basic storyline first – Ginny Dilboong is a young poet, fierce and deadly. She’s making sense of the world and her place in it, grappling with love, family and the spaces in which to create her art. Like powerful women before her, Ginny hugs the edges of waterways, and though she is a daughter of Country, the place that shapes her is not hers. Determined and brave, Ginny seeks to protect the truth of others while learning her own. The question is how? And, all the while, others are watching. Some old, some new. They are the sound of the belburd as it echoes through the world; the sound of cars and trucks and trains. They are in trees and paper and the shape of ideas. They are the builder and the built. Everything, even Ginny, is because of them.

    What does that actually tell us? As a young Indigenous poet, Ginny writes her poems, then sprinkles the paper on which they are written with water [from a bottle she usually carries with her or from any other sources of dampness she can find at the time] and then buries the poem on which they are written in soil or under a rock etc – and those various locations are her publishing house, which off the cuff when asked, she called ‘Dreamtime Books’.
    The second ‘description’ mentioned above – well that forms the basis of the other part of this story which are supposedly connected – yet I found it difficult to describe both that connection, and the actual nature of that other part of the book? Books + Publishing says – ‘’The most beautiful montage of life and death . . . The Belburd will leave you with a lasting appreciation of place, nature and life itself’ – while other promotors, book sellers, etc write – ‘The Belburd is a powerful story that shows us we are all connected from before we began to long after we begin again’.

    I found a review in the Arts Hub internet site summary to be the best way to place the foregoing into some kind of perspective: From November 2024. Barrina South writes:
    “The Belburd is the long-awaited second novel for celebrated Yuwaalaraay author and musician, Nardi Simpson. The novel explores what it means to belong, and is told through two story threads that loop and twist throughout. The first thread is when we are introduced to Ginny, an inner Sydney Blak poet. The second is a more universal story exploring life – from birth to death.
    Ginny’s story focuses on what it is to connect with Country that isn’t yours, how to navigate life after a broken relationship, plus the day-to-day challenges of being Blak. Her narrative also touches on the deep sadness Aboriginal people feel when we witness the impact of the urban sprawl on Country and the cultural responsibility to take care of it.
    The second story focuses on Sprite, an egg, who is waiting to be placed by Eel Mother, to be born. Sprite’s wish eventually comes true and, when transplanted, Sprite spends the gestation period pondering on what both birth and life will be like.
    Sprite and Ginny share a common story – to become what they want to be and to feel a sense of belonging.
    Simpson is a lyrical, magical weaver of words who encourages the reader to read with not only their eyes, but with their whole body. This is evident when introduced to Eel Mother. The visceral imagery of this character will make you feel as though you too are safe and protected in her folds, cradled on the moving currents and captivated by her shimmering colours.
    In part three, ‘The Ground’ contrasts with the world of Sprite and Eel Mother, moving as it does, to the New South Wales colony and into the present. It is in this section we learn the fate of Dilboong (the Eora word for Manorina melanophrys – the bellbird) and that of her mother, Barangaroo. Here the reader reflects on the impact of building a city like Sydney, which causes injuries and wounds to Country, disrupting a sense of place.
    [South has a couple of criticisms too, which I had to agree in particular with the connection factor]
    There were times reading The Belburd where I didn’t feel sufficiently guided by the author through complex themes with confidence. By the end the two stories felt jarring, unravelling from each other. The novel would have also benefited from the inclusion of images of Dilboong, and both Barangaroo and Bennelong, two seminal figures in the history of the NSW colony, and one of the first black love stories of modern Australia. A map to point out key places mentioned in the stories also would have been useful, especially for those not familiar with Sydney.
    A slightly more revealing review comes from ‘Readings’ Teddy Peak where he writes:
    “The Belburd is a story of The Dreaming and of dreaming, of creation and of motherhood. Nardi Simpson weaves together two threads of experience: the story of Ginny, a blak poet recovering from loss, who is trying to contend with poetry, publishing, storytelling and tradition; and, second, of being and non-being, the experiences from before you’re born and after you die. Here, Simpson’s focus is both universal and localised, considering the infinite nature of being, both within and outside a human life.
    Despite this metaphysicality, The Belburd is deeply grounded, deeply relatable. Ginny lives on Gadigal land, a familiar landscape with familiar people. She goes to poetry readings and is affronted by university students who tell her to post the event on social media for likes, she goes to garage sales and meets her neighbours for the first time after years of living next to each other, she goes to her local café and simplifies her name for the barista.
    The other being, whom we know as ‘Sprite’ and as ‘Splat’ and a series of other names, also has universal experiences, even if they are not ones we remember – Sprite waits with the ‘Eel mother’ to be conceived, then spends months in their mother’s uterus imagining what it will be like to be born. Both Sprite and Ginny are trying to become people, become themselves, unbecome the parts of themselves they do not like.
    With a lyrical mastery only further cultivated since her debut, Song of the Crocodile, Simpson finds the sublime in the quotidian, elevating experiences (as base as being born or dying, as complex as grief or motherhood) to an art form. She shows that life is a series of becomings, experienced by humans and animals and the world alike – we all become together”
    To me, a final intriguing end to the second aspect of the story – the ‘baby’ Sprite describes her experience as she is born [and borne] through her mother’s birth canal – which sequence we return to a few months later, where Sprite [and also her mother it seems] has died, and she now describes that phase of death as her body disintegrates into ash and nothingness, in the soil of her grave, intermingles with various insects, and then various building materials etc, as a bridge is constructed over the river in which we first met her – reading from page 295 in Chapter 41:

    “The me that was fashioned into an arch is so deep a grey that I appear black. My darkness sparkles with winks of silver, as if a million stars are trapped inside my colour. And of course they are. Stars and paint and melted rock and rust. I am all of it. Stardust and steel……Being made into a bridge and painstakingly pierced together over the great waterway means I can see it all. I look through my foundations and cradle time in my hands. Just as I easily peer into future sunrises. My view from here is endless………………All I loved are in my breath and I am in theirs. When they eat at their fires, I am with them in the flames and the smouldering coals that embrace them. I am in the water they drink and the words they speak, and the dreams they make at night. And not just theirs. I am in everything, old and new. I am the sound of the belburd as it rings through the world. I am the cars and trucks and trains. I am the birds with jet engines. I am trams and sand that has been heated into the glass of your windows and computer screens and mobile phones. I am the concrete and metal of all the new pathways, bridges and overpasses, tunnels and causeways, and I am the rock that is moved and sold to make them. I am in trees and paper and the shape of ideas. I am words and ink and have been waiting so that you should know. No longer am I a sprite. Or a spit or splat. Or a scatter of ash. I am heiress. Your mistress. The builder and built. Everything you have and see in this place is because of me. I am the universe, the belburd. Everything, even you, is because of me”.

    As Books + Publishing states “The Belburd will leave you with a lasting appreciation of place, nature and life itself: – I’m still struggling to get my head around that!!
    .

  • The Coachbuilder’s Column: Volume 15: Issue 5: 18th February 2025:  some comments on Peter FitzSimons’ new book ‘The Legend of Albert Jacka’.

    As has been his practice over recent years, this author has produced another non-fiction contribution to the world of books and literature.  ‘The Legend of Albert Jacka’ by Peter FitzSimons, published in 2024, of 463 pages, including some substantial section of Notes, References, etc. This book is the story of the first Australian soldier to be awarded the VC [Victoria Cross] in World War One – that award arising from his actions in Gallipoli, and later earning many accolades for his efforts on the various battlefields of France, actions which in the opinion of many [but not his seniors] should have earned him further VC’s.

    As with past contributions from FitzSimons, I found this a fascinating historical depiction of those years, though written in his inevitable style of the novel format. I must admit however, that after having already read many depictions of some of those crucial battles on the Western front in France during WWI, and now moving through  FitzSimons’ vivid up-front descriptions of those campaigns which cost so many thousands of lives, often with little reward for these human tragedies, many of which could have been avoided with more competent British leadership, I’m thinking I might desist from reading about that war for the time being. Though it does seem to have been a favoured topic for the author over recent years!!

    From the broadly accepted summary of the book, we read thus:

    ‘Our heroes can come from the most ordinary of places. As a shy lad growing up in country Victoria, no one in the district had any idea the man Albert Jacka would become.
    Albert ‘Bert’ Jacka was 21 when Britain declared war on Germany in August 1914. Bert soon enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force and the young private was assigned to 14th Battalion D Company. By the time they shipped out to Egypt he’d been made a Lance Corporal.
    On 26 April 1915, 14th Battalion landed at Gallipoli under the command of Brigadier General Monash’s 4th Infantry Brigade. It was here, on 20 May, that Lance Corporal Albert Jacka proved he was ‘the bravest of the brave’. The Turks were gaining ground with a full-scale frontal attack and as his comrades lay dead or dying in the trenches around him, Jacka single-handedly held off the enemy onslaught. The Turks retreated.
    Jacka’s extraordinary efforts saw him awarded the Victoria Cross, the first for an Australian soldier in World War I. He was a national hero, but Jacka’s wartime exploits had him moving on to France, where he battled the Germans at Pozières, earning a Military Cross for what historian Charles Bean called ‘the most dramatic and effective act of individual audacity in the history of the AIF’. Then at Bullecourt, his efforts would again turn the tide against the enemy. There would be more accolades and adventures before a sniper’s bullet and then gassing at Villers-Bretonneux sent Bert home’.

    And that ‘war injury’ in particular the gas injury which basically ended Jacka’s service in the field, though didn’t stop him from seeing out the war in other relevant areas, would see him return to Australia, but be dead by the age of 39 years.

    As for the horror and human waste of that time – well FitzSimons warns readers right at the beginning of this book as he introduces as to Jacka  “Starting out on this book, I already had a fair idea  of the sheer horror he had endured and triumphed over, given the books I had done  on Gallipoli, and the battles of Fromelles and Pozieres, together with the battles of Villers-Bretonneux and Hamel. It was fascinating to research and write as I kept discovering detail that put flesh on the bones of the story and showed it in all its gory glory, its wonder, its desperation and inspiration…………Allow me to say how much I came to like and admire Jacka the deeper I went – and how amazed I was that he managed to survive, given the risks he took and the furious fire he faced. He was an extraordinary soldier……”

    Meanwhile, the author and Jacka himself, back in Australia at war’s end, didn’t forget that other famous Australian military leader, Sir John Monash. While it is suggested in many quarters that Jacka did not receive additional awards of recognition for his courage and achievements under fire because he had so often being too ‘outspoken’ against some of his superiors; similarly with Monash, upon returning to Australia, he was overlooked for many roles that it was felt he had earned, and again some quarters would suggest that his Jewish background was used against him.   As FitzSimons put it  – “Jacka is dismayed at the lack of acclaim for the man who had saved more lives than any other Australian officer. Monash gained the eternal respect of his men simply by caring for them, and pursuing tactics that did not involve thoughtless slaughter as a starting point’ [page 380].

    About Jacka, FitzSimons writes: “Happily, as I uncovered ever more about what he had accomplished, and how he had not only overcome amazing odds in battle to triumph, but also against efforts that were made against his attempts to rise in a system ill-disposed to allow a man with strong opinions on how things should be run on the battlefield to prosper” [page xiv]’

    Jacka had a very similar attitude to those he served with and as a leader in the 14th Battalion  –  this attitude is perhaps reflected in the post-War years by  the following description by FitzSimons.

    [page 379] – ‘Activities with the RSL inevitably bring Jacka back into contact with Sir John Monash, which includes the two of them marching side by side every year in the annual Anzac Day marches down Collins Street. [In strict contrast to Jacko’s growing closeness to Monash is his public disdain for the likes of General James McCay, the Butcher of Fromelles as he is known, who had not only ordered his men over the top in that disastrous battle, but refused a truce with the Germans the following day that might have saved hundreds of Australian lives. When the two find themselves on the same stage for a fundraiser for the RSL, Jacka refuses to shake McCay’s hand].’

    Of course there is both praise and ridicule of FitzSimon’s books,  some of the latter quite harsh, for eg, two very contrasting opinions I noted recently among a series of reviews on the Goodreads website.

    [1] – Peter Fitzsimons is just so good at identifying a great story, especially his books covering Australians at war, and delivering an offering that can’t be put down, brings tears to your eyes, intense pride and raises the hairs on the back of your neck. Usually simultaneously.

    [2] – Sadly, a worthy subject and a life worth knowing has been let down by a writer who delights in mangling puns and similar juvenile comic effects. Rather than a proper biography it reads as an overblown piece from a weekend tabloid.

    The latter writer also points out numerous factual errors that appear in Jacka – whether they can be totally blamed on the author, or more correctly on the editor/publisher, etc, remains at issue.

    In a recent review within the November 2024 edition of the Australian Book Review, Robin Gerster reviews Peter Stanley’s book ‘Beyond the Broken Years: Australian military history in 1000 books’.  Speaking of FitzSimons, he writes “One theme, however binds the discussion: [t]he chasm between the more astringent academic approach and the bombastic nationalism of popular writers’. Stanley is disdainful of the so-called ‘storians’, the term coined by the ubiquitous Peter FitzSimons, whose steady stream of bloated blockbusters, including Kokoda [2004], Tobruk [2006], and Gallipoli [2014], pursues a familiar nationalist itinerary. FitzSimons seeks to put the ‘story’ in war history, by writing it in the manner of a novelist and taking liberties with mere facts. That may be all right if you are Leo Tolstoy. FitzSimons is an obvious target of derision; that his brick-size books [and here’s the rub] sell so well is a trickier issue to consider”.

    I guess I am one of those buyers who deserves to be a target of derision, based on Stanley’s viewpoint. So be it – while occasionally FitzSimon’s style of writing may seem a bit over-cooked, for myself, the stories depicted are a source of education which perhaps I find an easier way to ‘learn’ about events in preference to ploughing through a detailed historical analysis, which incidentally, I still do from time to time. Those of you who have read some of my past book reviews will note the range and variety of ‘historical novels’ I read ‘because’ they usually educate the reader about historical events, albeit written in the ‘manner of a novelist’ as described by Stanley.

    In any case as with all genres of books – the worth of a book on any subject is in the eyes of the reader.  Despite the criticism, I recommend ‘The Legend of Albert Jacka’ by Peter FitzSimons, and form your own opinion.

    As for Jacka, we conclude with the words of Charles Bean [famed journalist, and later the Official Australian Historian who was embedded with the AIF during WWI] when he wrote:

    ‘Jacka should have come out of the war the most decorated man in the A.I.F. One does not usually comment on the giving of decorations, but this was an instance in which something obviously went wrong. Everyone who knows the facts, knows that Jacka earned the Victoria Cross three times’

  • Introductory greetings to billsspacebooksand comment

    As can be seen from past postings from an earlier wordpress account, the postings that will appear on my page will relate to but not be restricted to the following. If any readers would like to get some idea of what I’ve written about in the past – well there are a number of years of contributions now imported to this site, as is perhaps indicated by the heading of my most recent contribution, dated 31 January 2025 – the Coachbuilder’s Column Vol 15 Issue 5, with the 15 representing the 15th year of contributions. In any case, the following is a brief summary of what you can generally expect!! 🙂

    1. Regular reviews of books and/or articles I have read, incorporating my opinion and the reviews of more professional commentators, as acknowledged; in recent years, this area has been the prime focus of my contributions, I’m an avid book reader on a wide variety of book genres, and I like to share the nature of what I’ve read for all so interested.
    2. Comments of my own or shared from writers on a range of social, political and environment issues, at all times, hopefully attempting to incorporate both viewpoints of an issue in question.
    3. Comment on items of a specific ‘Australian’ related nature be that society, sport, music, art and so on.
    4. I always welcome feedback on my contributions, though generally prefer not to get bogged down into ‘aggressive’ debate on a subject – happy to share different opinions, and leave it at that.

    I’m currently working on my first contribution under my new blog setup. Happy to hear from anyone.

    Bill.

    Incidentally, my home is the township of Sunbury, which is about 40 kms northwest of Victoria’s capital city Melbourne, in the State of Victoria, Australia.

  • The Coachbuilder’s Column: Volume 15: Issue 4:  some early reading in the opening month of 2025.

    This selection includes the following publications.

    • ‘The Life and Times of King George VI’ [1895-1952] [pub. 1950s], and, Royalty Annual, No. 5 [pub circa 1956/57];
    • Watsonia: A Writing Life by Don Watson [2020];
    • The Ghosts of August, by Peter Watt [2024]; and,
    • On the Beach’ by Nevil Shute [1957].

    January

    This month, a couple of royalty books that have been sitting on my book shelves for decades, so I finally decided to have a proper read,  whilst trying to maintain a touch of fitness on the exercise bike!!

    ‘The Life and Times of King George VI’ [1895-1952], 160 pages, and up to 200 black & white photographs, set up and printed in Australia by The Herald and Weekly Times Ltd. The year of publication is uncertain, although I’m assuming it was in the middle to late 1950’s following the King’s death and the succession of Queen Elizabeth, his eldest daughter to the throne.

    I can’t recall how I came across this book which I’ve had in my possession for many years. I can only assume it was passed down to me at some stage by my grandmother prior to her death in 1980.  The book was actually a gift to one of the sisters of her father – Mrs Alice Rodgers [nee Jenkin] from a Howard Reed. Alice died at the age of 96 years, in 1969, so obviously she received the book most likely in the 1950s/1960s period.  I’ve been unable to find reference to this precise book on the internet, but basically, it is described as a pictorial record of the years of one who was a much-loved monarch in his time.  Within the 160 pages, every phase of the King’s life over 56 momentous years, is mirrored with nearly 200 vivid, photographs which were supplemented  by descriptive captions. One Internet Archive I came across, which appears to have the same ‘Appreciation’ of 6 pages at the beginning of the book, suggest it was published in 1946, which cannot of course be correct, with the King’s death and funeral in 1952 fully covered. I was not yet 6 years of age at that time, and cannot admit to any recalled knowledge of those events.

    In any case after the section entitled ‘An Appreciation’ written by a Malcom Thomson, the book is then introduced by a tribute by the then Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, The Rt Hon. Winston S. Churchill, O.M, C.H., M.P.

    The book cover leaflet provides the following description.

    ‘Here are scenes from King George’s childhood and early manhood, his years as Duke of York, world traveller, sportsman, devoted husband and father, happy Royal family pictures, memories of the funeral of King George V, the Coronation, Royal tour of Canada and USA, the war years, visits to blitzed cities, visits to war zones, Victory celebrations, Royal tour of South Africa, Princess Elizabeth’s wedding, Royal Silver Wedding, the Royal grandchildren, opening of the Festival of Britain. Finally, there are the impressive scenes of the lying in State and of the Royal funeral, including some of the most remarkable camera studies of our day. It is, in truth, a book to treasure for a lifetime’.

    So this book has lasted in my possession for a large part of my lifetime, and I can only hope that someone following me will regard it in that way, basically as a family treasure. I have a few books of that nature, including of course the Family Bible passed down through my grandmother’s family, and I do admittedly have concerns as to what will become of that and others of similar nature!!

    Royalty Annual No. 5:  published in 1957:  a gift from my father’s sister back in the 1950’s or thereabouts, the British Royal family of that time being much more highly regarded than is the case in 2024.  This was apparently the 5th such annual published since the start of the reign of Queen Elizabeth II in February 1952, basically a summary of royal occasions, family life etc during that period of around July 1955 to June 1956, filled with news about the British royal family, Queen Elizabeth, in particular, and the first chapter is titled, “Christmas at Sandringham. 

    The copy I have consist of 128 pages, with an original dust jacket, which is slightly damaged, though otherwise, the book is in good condition, the cover printed in Red cloth material with gilt lettering. It contains black and white photographic plates, and has detailed summaries of the many Royal activities, ceremonies, family lives and individuals over the period referred to. It was written and produced by Godfrey Talbot and Wynford Vaughan Thomas and printed by London Andrews Dakers Ltd. This particular edition is currently available on many of the relevant sites for around $AUS42.00.

    Amongst some of the topics covered are:

    • Homes and hobbies and historic public engagements of the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh and their relatives;
    • Tour of Nigeria & other travels;
    • Royal theatre-going, film and book tastes, and fashions;
    • The great houses of Windsor, Osborne and Sandringham;
    • Princess Margaret;
    • Trooping the Colour;
    • Royal Wales;
    • Educating Prince Charles;
    • Queen and Parliament;
    • Europe’s Royal families;
    • Her Majesty’s horses;
    • A Royal Duke at home; and so much more.

    The introductory paragraph on page 3 reads as follows.

    “Our fifth Royalty Annual appears in the fifth year of the reign of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second. In our first edition we reflected the confidence of the nation that our new Sovereign would maintain the tradition of devoted service to the State which was the driving force in the life of her father, King George VI. The whole world now knows how nobly the nation’s hopes have been fulfilled. Her Majesty has not been content merely to continue in the paths already laid down for her – admirable though they be.  She has struck out on her own policy and made a fresh appraisal of the relationship between the Crown and the People……She has travelled more widely and more swiftly than any other ruler in our history. She has put the stamp of her own vigorous personality on the new Elizabethan Age. That age now appears as one of speedy and exciting social and constitutional change….:

    22nd January

    ‘Watsonia: A Writing Life’ by Don Watson [published in 2020 a Black Inc pub], 561 pages.

    This book was a collection of essays, columns, op-eds, and occasional addresses by Don Watson, basically over the 40 years from 1980. Indeed, a wide Range of topics and subject matters included in quite an extensive collection. I purchased the book recently from a second-hand bookshop in Daylesford, Central Victoria.

    As Black Inc relate:

    Watsonia gathers the fruits of a writing life. It covers everything from Australian humour to America gone berserk; from Don Bradman to Oscar Wilde; from birds and horses to history and politics. Wherever Don Watson turns his incisive gaze, the results are as illuminating as they are enjoyable.

    Watsonia displays the many sides of Don Watson: historian, speechwriter, social critic, humourist, biographer and lover of nature and sports. Replete with wit, wisdom and diverse pleasures, this comprehensive collection includes a wide-ranging introduction by the author and several previously unpublished pieces. No other writer has journeyed further into the soul of Australia and returned to tell the tale.

    Rather ironic that one of the major articles [in fact a Quarterly Essay contribution] dealing with politics in the USA was discussing the pre-election campaigning for the 2016 election [Trump versus Hilary Clinton], ironic because we have just seen Trump re-elected, in 2025.

    The collection also included a very interesting piece about the US writer, Mark Twain.

    Artfully arranged, Watsonia showcases the many sides of Don Watson- historian, speechwriter, commentator, humourist, nature writer and biographer. It also features, as mentioned,  several previously unpublished lectures and a wide-ranging introduction by the author. This comprehensive anthology – replete with wit, wisdom and diverse pleasures – is essential reading [for a small minority I guess, I thoroughly enjoyed the variety of subjects in any case!!]

    Don Watson is the author of many acclaimed books, including Caledonia Australia, Recollections of a Bleeding Heart, American Journeys, The Bush, Watsonia and The Story of Australia.

    28th January 2025

    ‘The Ghosts of August’ by Peter Watt, published in 2024, 401 pages, another great contribution from Watt, at times a very moving and almost, emotional piece of reading! This was another inspiring and fast-moving contribution by Watt who has been publishing since about 1999, and who personally signed for me, one of his releases in 2008 at the Sunbury Library. The story [an ongoing one of the generations of the Steele family] is centred around the years of World War I, an historical novel, with fictional characters in the main, involved in factual events.

    Watt reminds us that while most attention on WWI for Australia revolves around Gallipoli or the Charge of the Light Horse Brigade at Beersheba, he, through his novels draws attention to events generally overlooked or forgotten aspects of our military history.  As he writes in his notes for example “…most are ignorant that a mere matter of weeks after war was declared in August 1914, we also undertook a coastal landing to our north. It was not a campaign on behalf of the British Empire but a pre-emptive  strike to defend our own eastern shores against the possibility of a German naval bombardment, as outlined in a prewar operational plan by the German Imperial Navy…..I have attempted to briefly describe what might be considered a skirmish, but it did cost the lives of Australian soldiers and sailors and the loss of an Australian submarine, the AE1, which was only recently discovered with its crew still entombed”.

    And further he writes: “An overlooked campaign fought in the deserts of Egypt and Palestine by the Australian Light Horse in company with the New Zealand Mounted Infantry and the British Yeomanry mounted troopers was critical to the eventual victory by the Allied forces, and yet most Australians only know about a charge at Beersheba”.

    Certainly, this book reminds us of the horrors of war as fought at Gallipoli, the western front, and in the deserts, and often doesn’t make for pleasant reading, as I guess the truth seldom does!. Peter Watt, amongst other sources, uses the direct experiences of Australian author Ion Idriess [whose many books I inherited from my late father] where Idriess recorded his personal experiences at Gallipoli and Palestine in his book ‘The Desert Column’, and Watt uses these experiences as told through the lives of his fictional characters.  Incidentally, Ion Idriess was wounded twice, once at Gallipoli and again in Palestine before he was discharged after the war.

    30th January

    Probably, as an after-thought, I should have avoided doing so, but I followed Watt’s book up with a quick read of Nevil Shute’s 1957 classic ‘On the Beach’ [a paperback edition by Pan Books of 267 pages] which was subsequently made into a movie in 1959, principally centred in Melbourne, and starring Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire and Anthony Perkins and directed by Stanley Kramer.

    Basically, as per the novel, in 1964, World War III has devastated the Northern Hemisphere, killing all humans there. Air currents are slowly carrying the radio-active fallout to the Southern Hemisphere where the occupants of Melbourne, Australia, will be the last major city on Earth to perish. The story covers the final few months in the lives of five people in particular as the final weeks and days are counted down. As suggested, in retrospect, in view of current world conflicts, etc, it might have been wiser to put this book aside, as the very nature of the topic was somewhat depressing, though not unexpected as I have watched the movie on a few occasions.

    A Wikipedia summary of the ‘film’ plot [in which there are subtle differences to the book, and my bracketed comments refer to some of those discrepancies] – however, this summary is a fairly succinct outline of the story, so I’ve copied that  version here.

    The American nuclear submarine USS Sawfish, commanded by Capt. Dwight Towers, arrives in Melbourne and is placed under Royal Australian Navy command. Peter Holmes, a young Australian Naval officer with a wife and infant child, is assigned to be Towers’ liaison. Holmes invites Towers to his home for a party, where Towers meets Julian Osborn, a depressive nuclear scientist who helped build the bombs, and Moira Davidson, a lonely alcoholic with whom Towers develops a tentative attraction. Although Davidson falls in love with Towers, he finds himself unable to return her feelings, because he can’t bring himself to admit his wife and children in the United States are dead.

    Meanwhile, a new scientific theory postulates that radiation levels in the Northern Hemisphere might have fallen faster than anticipated, suggesting radiation may disperse before reaching the Southern Hemisphere, or at least leaving Antarctica habitable [this theory is quickly discounted as misleading in the book version]. Soon after, the Australians also detect an incomprehensible continuous Morse code signal coming from the West Coast of the United States, where there should be nobody alive to send it. Towers is ordered to take the Sawfish, with Peter and Julian, to investigate.

    Arriving at Point Barrow, Alaska, the sub crew discovers that the radiation levels are not only highly lethal but higher than in the mid-Pacific Ocean, meaning the dispersal theory is incorrect. There will be no salvation from the radiation. Stopping next in San Francisco, Sawfish finds the city devoid of life. A crew member with family in the city deserts and swims ashore, so he can die at home.

    The submarine next stops at a refinery near San Diego, which has been pinpointed as the source of the mysterious Morse signals. A crew member discovers the power source is still running on automatic control. Nearby, a telegraph key has become entangled in a window shade’s pull cord and a half-full Coca-Cola bottle, and is being randomly pulled by an ocean breeze, causing the radio signals.

    Sawfish returns to Australia to await the inevitable. Towers is reunited with Davidson at her father’s farm. He learns that all US Navy personnel in Brisbane are dead and he has been given command of all remaining US Naval forces. Osborn, having bought the fastest Ferrari in Australia, wins the Australian Grand Prix [during the final weekend as the radiation begins to infiltrate the Melbourne area] in which many racers, with nothing left to lose, die in fiery crashes.

    Fulfilling Towers’ wish, Davidson has used her connections to get the trout season opened early. Towers and Davidson go on a fishing trip to the country. As drunken revelers sing “Waltzing Matilda” in the hotel bar, Towers and Davidson make love in their room [a bit of film levity here, with the book revealing no true intimacy between the two, as Towers remains true to his US family to the end , intending to ‘return home, and having purchased gifts for his wife and children with the support of Davidson]. ’Returning to Melbourne, Towers learns the first of his crew members has radiation sickness. There is little time left. Towers takes a vote among his crew [some of whom] decide they want to ‘ return to the United States’ to die. Osborn shuts himself in a garage with his Ferrari and starts the engine, to end his life by carbon monoxide poisoning. Others queue to receive government-issued suicide pills. Before they take their pills, Peter and Mary reminisce about the day they met, “on the beach.”

    Towers says farewell to Davidson at the docks. Choosing duty over love, he takes the Sawfish back to sea. Heartbroken, Davidson watches from a cliff as the Sawfish submerges. It is implied that Towers and Davidson ended their lives shortly afterward, although their deaths are not depicted onscreen. [In fact, Towers intends to sink Sawfish in Bass Strait just beyond the Heads, taking himself and his willing crew members down with the ship, while Davidson has driven at breakneck speed to reach the clifftops at Barwon Heads so that she can ‘be with Towers’ and ‘die with him’  – he had earlier refused her request to go with him on the Sawfish because it was against naval regulations]. 

    Within a few days, the streets of Melbourne are empty, silent, desolate and without any sign of motor vehicles, animal or human life.  A Salvation Army street banner, seen several times before in the film, reads: “There is still time .. Brother”.

    [Bill Kirk 31/1/2025]