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In this contribution, I make reference to a number of books and publications read over recent weeks

• ‘7 ½’ by Christos Tsiolkas;
• ‘Philanthropy in Ballarat by Doug Bradby;
• ‘The New Kingdom’ by Wilbur Smith;
• The Accidental Prime Minister [by Annika Smethurst;
•  The Game [by Sean Kelly].;
• ‘A Narrative of Denial: Australia and the Indonesian Violation of East Timor’  by Peter Job;
• ‘The Wimmera: A journey through Western Victoria’;
•  “Corporal Hitler’s Pistol’ by Tom Keneally,
• Australian Foreign Affairs, Issue 14: The Taiwan Choice.

7 ½  by Christos Tsiolkas

Published in 2021, 344 pages:  early on in this book, I felt as though I didn’t wish to keep reading  – there seemed to be so much emphasise on the subjects of body odours, under-arm smells, and vivid depictions of sex between men in particular, and constant references to the male anatomy  –  I just felt the whole tone of the author’s writings to be distasteful and over-done.

And yet the praise for the book from people like Helen Garner and Charlotte Wood, established writers in their own way, were full of flowing praise –  ‘so personal, so delicate, so true’ –  ‘a scorching, mythic work with a heart of the sweetest intimacy’.   I came to realise there was much more to the book than that which  I personally found distasteful  –  as also noted on the back cover  ‘ “A breathtaking audacious novel….about finding joy and beauty in a raging and punitive world, about the refractions of memory and time and, most subversive of all, about the mystery of art and its creation’ – on that aspect, so much outstanding references to art and music, nature and birds, the ocean.

So yes, those latter aspects did come to dominate and depict the storyline, and while the subject matter which had initially annoyed this reader, continued to ‘intrude’ from time to time, I had to admit in the end, I enjoyed the book, and found so many of the writer’s reflections on art, music, and nature quite exhilarating

As ‘Google Books’ notes – “An audacious and transformative novel about the past, the present and the power of writing and imagination from the award-winning author of Damascus and The Slap. Art is not only about rage and justice and politics. It is also about pleasure and joy; it is also about beauty”

[Occasionally, as noted previously, the writer’s idea of ‘beauty’ didn’t always quite align with mine!].

Meanwhile, a Goodreads summary tells us that “A man arrives at a house on the coast to write a book. Separated from his lover and family and friends, he finds the solitude he craves in the pyrotechnic beauty of nature, just as the world he has shut out is experiencing a cataclysmic shift. The preoccupations that have galvanised him and his work fall away, and he becomes lost in memory and beauty …  He also begins to tell us a story … A retired porn star is made an offer he can’t refuse for the sake of his family and future. So he returns to the world he fled years before, all too aware of the danger of opening the door to past temptations and long-buried desires. Can he resist the oblivion and bliss they promise?”

One reviewer, Maks Sipowicz writes as follows:

In his latest novel, 7½, Christos Tsiolkas declares that he is tired of the lofty ambitions many novelists hold of writing about things such as politics, sexuality, race, history, gender, morality, or the future. ‘All of them now bore me,’ he writes. Instead, his goal is to write about beauty. 

7½ blends three stories. The first is about Tsiolkas himself, reflecting on the process of writing, the things that drive and motivate his interests, and his exhaustion with the political thinking permeating every aspect of art (as he sees it). The second is about younger versions of himself, in a series of vignettes about his youth, his coming to discover his sexuality and realising the beauty and sensitivity to be found in the pursuit and satisfaction of desire. The third, and most important, about a retired bisexual porn actor, who returns to Los Angeles from his home in regional Australia at the behest of an ageing fan wishing to experience in person the desire the actor inflamed in him from the screen.

These three intertwining stories amount to a reflection on desire and on finding beauty in oneself and other people. I found the passages about young Tsiolkas to be particularly engrossing, as the author recounted with love for his past self the key moments that made him. Altogether, the three stories are evocative of the strength of nascent feeling, the kind that comes with the passage from youth into adulthood when every emotion is felt much more keenly than later in adulthood. The blend of autofiction with pure imagination is very effective in this. His experience is informed by both the experience he brings back from memory, of his early youth and the discovery of his desires and the pleasures that come from their satisfaction, and by the story he invents of the porn actor. In turn, the story he invents is informed by the author’s memory, as he consciously places people and sensations from himself into his fiction. 

In trying to write about beauty, Tsiolkas’ strategy of cycling through the three storylines is an effective device for avoiding bland platitude. Instead of merely pointing to beautiful things, such as a young boy’s early desires, a middle-aged man’s love of his wife, or his own experience of beauty in nature, Tsiolkas builds a contrast between the beautiful and the ugly and shocks us into accepting that the two are not mutually exclusive. He reminds us that beauty is to be found in unexpected places. In this, I found 7½ to be a novel encouraging of quiet reflection which can spur the reader into reflecting on their own memories and finding beauty therein.”

A novel well worth a read, particularly if you are more tolerant of some the areas [which in the end, formed a minor part of the book] which  I found a little distasteful.    

‘Philanthropy in Ballarat: Irrespective of Creed, Country or Colour’ by Doug Bradby.

Something very different to Tsiolkas, and a brief read  –  part of a series of historical booklets about the City of Ballarat by this author.

As noted in the booklet, there has always been poverty in Ballarat and there has always been those who strive to relieve the suffering of those in need’  Reading this booklet, I was particularly interested in the reference to  the ‘opposition’ expressed and enacted against the  Salvation Army bands marching in the streets of Ballarat in it’s earlier years, and some female members being actually jailed for doing so. Not so philanthropic, certainly on the part of the Mayor of the day who seem to be the main instigator because a ‘licence ‘ to ‘march’ hadn’t been obtained!!  [p.30/31].;

‘The New Kingdom’  by Wilbur Smith [published in 2021]., 407 pages.

 Another enthralling novel by Smith, full of the usual mix of historical fiction, war, love, betrayal, bloodthirsty descriptions, and so on. Historical fiction has always being one of  the Coachbuilder’s favoured genres of writing, the opportunity to learn new aspects of history, whilst recognising of course that this has been interpreted through fictional families and storylines.

Born in 1933, we sadly lost Wilbur Smith, aged 88 years in November 2021, and this was one of his final books, published in the year of his death. Born in Zambia, he was a British-South African novelist specialising in historical fiction about international involvement in Southern Africa across four centuries, seen from the viewpoints of both black and white families. By the time of his death in 2021 he had published 49 books [most of which I have purchased and read since 1973] and had sold more than 140 million copies.

Let’s just incorporate one summary/review of the book, this time from QBD Books  –  “A brand-new Egyptian novel from the master of adventure fiction, Wilbur Smith.  In the heart of Egypt under the watchful eye of the gods a new power is rising  In the city of Lahun, Hui lives an enchanted life. The favoured son of a doting father, and ruler-in-waiting of the great city, his fate is set. But behind the beautiful facades a sinister evil is plotting. Craving power and embittered by jealousy, Hui’s stepmother, the great sorceress Isetnofret, and Hui’s own brother Qen, orchestrate the downfall of Hui’s father, condemning Hui and seizing power in the city.
Cast out and alone, Hui finds himself a captive of a skilled and powerful army of outlaws, the Hyksos. Determined to seek vengeance for the death of his father and rescue his sister, Ipwet, Hui swears his allegiance to these enemies of Egypt. Through them he learns the art of war, learning how to fight and becoming an envied charioteer.  But soon Hui finds himself in an even greater battle – one for the very heart of Egypt itself. As the pieces fall into place and the Gods themselves join the fray, Hui finds himself fighting alongside the Egyptian General Tanus and renowned Mage, Taita. Now Hui must choose his path – will he be a hero in the old world, or a master in a new kingdom?”.

Another great read from Smith –  though he, as always, never ‘draws back’ from his vivid descriptions of violence, bloodshed, sex, and love, all combined with brilliant interpretations of history, whether imagined or real.

Recently, I completed reading the two recent Scott Morrison biographies [both published in 2021], the second one, finished reading within 36 hours of it’s purchase.! 

• The Accidental Prime Minister [by Annika Smethurst], and,
• The Game [by Sean Kelly].

Two very differently formatted books – the former, going through Morrison’s life in typical   chronological order with strong emphasise on recent years, while the second, described as a Portrait, consisting of various chapters under a range of titles, with no specific chronological approach attempted.

Two interesting brief descriptions by prominent female journalists are highlighted on the cover jackets of each book:  Smethurst’s book is described by Laura Tingle as “A penetrating study of relentless ambition and making ‘ordinary’ the new political norm, none of it edifying, all of it essential reading’”  while Kelly’s book is described by Niki Savva as “Engrossing, illuminating and often disquieting”.

Two very apt descriptions, because yes, I did find much of the material not particularly admirable!  In both cases, I found these books an ‘easy read’, in comparison, for eg, to the average lengthy and detailed political biography, and not because of paucity of material, but simply the style of authorship, which kept you interested and keen to continue reading.

‘The Accidental Prime Minister’ certainly doesn’t lack detail, and in typical bio fashion traces Morrison’s life through that of his parents and earlier generations to himself.  It relates, through the various ‘life stage’ chapters the growth and development of his particular personality traits, his search for power,  and how this growth related to his involvement with work colleagues in his early years, and with the various prime ministers, and other politicians that preceded him leading up to his involvement in politics before actually entering the field as a member of parliament. There’s a full reflection of his times, in particular, as Immigration Minister, before moving into the social welfare area [perhaps a welcome attempt to soften the impression of  ‘hardness’ created in his previous role], and then onto the Treasurer, and finally, the rise to the position of Prime Minister.  Throughout these stages, the use and development of the various ‘traits’ with which he is so often identified today, are revealed and demonstrated.

‘The Game’ especially provides some interesting perspectives on the man, and in many ways, reflect much of the ‘tone’ of Kelly’s writing. Three examples of many throughout the book, I copy below, and quite obviously, it needs be understood that these should really be read within the overall context of the chapter or section of the book from which they are taken.

• From pps 248-249, we read  “By this point in Morrison’s prime ministership, a set of recurring traits is clearly visible. There is the dependence on tactics, a sense that politics is a game to be won.  There is an overreliance on cheery platitudes in the place of serious thought.  There is the inability to see out from his own narrow view of the world, his tendency to focus on those that remind him of himself, and the defensiveness that arises when he is asked to do otherwise. Most importantly, there is a stubborn, reality-denying belief that everything will turn out well”.
• Earlier, on page 91 – “If you throw yourself into a performance, then you can, at least temporarily, come to believe that the performance is real. This does not require delusion. You know that you have said something, but, at the same time, you believe that you never said such a thing. There are two frames, and you are capable of existing in both at once: the frame in which the world is as you say it is, because you are the prime minister, and the frame in which facts dominate. Morrison’s particular skill is to toggle back and forth between these frames as necessary, to believe whichever needs to be believed.”
• Finally, on page 102: “He never feels, in himself, insincere or untruthful, because he always means exactly what he says; it is just that he means it only in the moment he is saying it. Past and future disappear”.

I guess we can say that those sort of quotations give some kind of authenticity to the way that much of Australia over the past couple of years in particular, view the Prime Minister, either fairly, or not!   I’ve selected one particular review, from many, in each case, to perhaps provide an indication of what the ‘professional’ critics feel about the writings in these two books, and whether those comments reflect in broad terms the feelings of the general populace.

Michael Rowland, writing for the ABC [on the Smethurst book]:

Much has been made of how Scott Morrison unexpectedly became Prime Minister at the end of that week of Liberal Party turmoil in August 2018.

How he was, just like Australian Olympic skater Steven Bradbury, the last man standing in a contest that had seen the other competitors fall over before the finish line.

But, as political journalist Annika Smethurst notes in her absorbing biography of Morrison, The Accidental Prime Minister, that would be to overlook a few things.

Just like the surprise gold medallist in the 2002 Winter Olympics, the man from The Shire had spent many years preparing to be in a position to succeed when his competitors tumbled.

Smethurst’s book is an uncompromising account of Morrison’s life, and how he amassed steadfast allies and bitter enemies in equal measure along his path to the top job.

here are friends who talk about the loveable suburban dad; a man lacking in pretense who has an innate understanding of how “ordinary” Australians think.

Then there are the political colleagues who take aim at the ruthlessness and scheming they insist marked his rise in Canberra.

In the words of one unnamed minister quoted in the book, Scott Morrison is “volatile, sly and untrustworthy”.

The book takes a look at what was a faltering start to Morrison’s professional life.

Armed with a science degree from the University of New South Wales, the young graduate and devout Christian dreamt of a life studying theology, but ended up in a string of corporate jobs in both Australia and New Zealand.

A successful stint as state director of the NSW Liberal Party was followed by a not-so-glorious period as managing director of Tourism Australia, a body funded by the federal government.

methurst charts the tumultuous events that led to Morrison’s sacking by the Tourism Australia board halfway through his three-year contract.

“He really didn’t see it, and he was gutted,” says one of his friends.

An assertive Morrison had a tense relationship with then tourism minister Fran Bailey and it is clear the bad blood continues to flow nearly 20 years later.

Bitterness also marked Morrison’s entry into Parliament in 2007.

We are taken back to the extremely unpleasant Liberal preselection contest for the safe seat of Cook, based around Cronulla in Sydney’s south.

Amid a flurry of damaging allegations thrown around by all sides, Morrison was defeated in the first round of voting.

The successful candidate, Michael Towke, was subsequently dumped by the party’s state executive, with Morrison triumphant in the second ballot.

Smethurst then proceeds to chart what she describes as a “relentless pursuit of power” that took Morrison all the way from the backbench to The Lodge.

Not formally aligned with any particular Liberal Party faction, Morrison always favoured pragmatism over ideology as he climbed through the ranks.

But underlying it all was a ruthless streak that sometimes got him into trouble.

Like the time when, as the opposition’s immigration spokesman in 2010, he attacked the then Labor government for flying detainees from Christmas Island to Sydney for the funerals of family members who had died in the sinking of a boat packed with asylum seekers.

Smethurst says the “heartless misstep” nearly cost him his job.

There were also questions over how Morrison reconciled this hard-line stance in opposition, and later as immigration minister, with his Christian faith.

We learn, through confidants, how Morrison first raised the idea of getting rid of Tony Abbott within 12 months of the Coalition’s 2013 election win, and how he clashed with Treasurer Joe Hockey.

One long-serving Liberal minister describes Morrison as a “predator intent on dominance”.

Morrison threw his support behind Malcolm Turnbull because it would give him the best chance of taking over from Hockey and move him “one step closer to the prime ministership”.

The 2015 leadership change duly installed Morrison as treasurer.

e was viewed by colleagues as a hard worker and a strong communicator, but before long frustrations were building within Turnbull’s office about Morrison frontrunning economic policy through the media, primarily the News Corp tabloids.

In that frantic final week of Turnbull’s prime ministership, Morrison publicly supported his leader, while keeping a close eye on the shifting numbers in the party room.

This relentless ambition had finally secured Morrison the ultimate political prize.

As have many of his internal Liberal opponents, the Bill Shorten-led Labor party fatally underestimated Morrison in the 2019 election, handing the Coalition another term in office.

Smethurst rounds out the book with a critical look at the past two years.

She identifies a tendency by Morrison to blame-shift when he’s under pressure, from his initial mishandling of the Black Summer bushfire crisis to the trouble-plagued COVID vaccine rollout.

Smethurst – who has worked with News Corp and now the Nine newspapers — also gives us some revealing insights into Morrison’s working relationships with women.

She says a “common sentiment expressed by female colleagues was that they felt excluded, overlooked and even ignored while Morrison was in the room”.

One female Coalition frontbencher goes as far as describing the Prime Minister as a “deeply ingrained chauvinist”.

At the same time, Morrison is credited with having a Herculean work ethic, and possessing a deep understanding of what gets through to mainstream Australians.

At critical points in his political career, he has made his own luck.

Reading Smethurst’s exhaustive biography gives you a much better insight into a man whose ascendancy appears to be anything but accidental.

From ‘The Conversation’ on ‘The Game’; [by William West]

“How can you tell if a politician is lying?” It is a favourite joke of my grandfather’s, and the punchline is all too obvious: “His mouth will be moving.”

The joke gives succinct expression to a cynicism that has shaped Australian politics since the introduction of self-government in the 1850s. The implication, of both the joke and the culture informing it, is that the politician’s lies reflect solely on their kind and reveal nothing about the rest of us.

In his newly published profile of Prime Minister Scott Morrison, Sean Kelly flips this way of thinking on its head. The Game offers many powerful and revealing insights into Morrison’s career and the tricky political tactics that have characterised it. But the most important revelations in this book are about the society that created our prime minister, and the structures and cultures that facilitated his path to the Lodge.

Kelly explains, for example, that Morrison worked hard to be a “blank canvas” in the public eye until perhaps 2015, at which point he became the more recognisable suburban “good bloke down the road”.

This persona, replete with the “ScoMo” nickname, has characterised his public performances ever since. But the performance only matters because it finds in the Australian community “a willing audience” who, recently at least, like to have what novelist E.M. Forster called “flat characters” (or instantly recognisable “types”) in their newspapers and their parliaments.

Formerly a self-described “spin doctor” for both Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, Kelly studies Morrison’s public persona not just with the eye of a Canberra insider, but also with the lens of a cultural critic. In this “land of extremes”, he says, Australians are

always splitting ourselves in two, then ignoring the half that discomfits us.

For Kelly, this mentality explains why the so-called “quiet Australians” have indulged “the game” that Morrison plays, while the others have rejected him entirely (“I am completely different”).

Given Kelly’s Labor connections, cynics might expect a partisan hit-job on the prime minister. This portrait is no hit-job, but it is, unsurprisingly, unflattering.

Kelly gives Morrison the benefit of the doubt with respect to the early stages of the pandemic, “a situation unlike anything those involved had dealt with before”. There is recognition, too, of the burdens that Jenny Morrison and her daughters have borne in service of public life. But the portrait of Morrison himself is a study of duplicity and hollowness.

There are criticisms of Morrison’s more tone-deaf and morally dubious performances, none more so than the forced handshakes with reluctant bushfire survivors and firefighters during that black summer of 2019-20.

But the most important conclusion about Morrison in this book relates to the way he thinks. Kelly suggests Morrison’s mind does not think in narratives, but only in images or snapshots (think of the punchline of the tourism ad he commissioned, “Where the bloody hell are ya?”). This, Kelly reasons, is why he can say one thing with such apparent conviction today, and the opposite with equal fervour tomorrow.

For a public figure, this inconsistency would be impossible “if it were not a central aspect of their experience of the world”. The psychological analysis here is sweeping, its inferences devastating.

There are many praiseworthy qualities in Kelly’s study. Serious issues, from asylum-seeker policy to the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccine roll-out, are given ample coverage. But this is no traditional biography, and these debates are not its central concern.

The main subject of this book is the performance of politics itself, and the narratives that mediate the public’s relationship with its representatives. The idea of “performance” seems resurgent in political theory and history, and its capacity for revelation is rich.

In some ways, Kelly’s book builds on an older tradition of political profiles that took performance as their main subject. Graham Little’s Strong Leadership (1988) and Judith Brett’s Robert Menzies’ Forgotten People (1992) stand tall in that tradition, using psychosocial theory to unpack the hearts and minds of Australian liberals from Menzies to Malcolm Fraser. Don Watson’s Recollections of a Bleeding Heart (2002) is equally important, part-memoir, part-meditation and part-psychological study of Paul Keating as prime minister, written from the intimate perspective of a prime ministerial speechwriter.

In each case, the biographer’s goal was to explain not just who the prime minister was, but how their way of thinking engaged with the world around them.

Kelly does not try to discover the “real” Scott Morrison, a task rendered almost impossible by the vacuousness of the prime minister’s performances and the role of the media in presenting him to us.

Instead, he evokes the divided community to whom Morrison performs, and the social and cultural processes that allow those performances to take place and, at least sometimes, hit their mark. Kelly’s method is to home in on public speech, its sounds and cadences, as well as the often elusive messages and impressions that Morrison seeks to convey with his words.

The chief limitation of The Game is that, relying largely on public material, it cannot take us into the institutions that empower Morrison, other than the media.

We don’t learn much about the Prime Minister’s Office, other than that it failed to respond to Brittany Higgins’s alleged rape in Parliament House in an appropriate fashion.

Parliament itself is a stage here, but scarcely recognisable as an institution that makes laws. The public service is invisible. National Cabinet is, according to Kelly, little more than an “aesthetic change” from the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) that preceded it.

It says something about the condition of contemporary politics that it is hard to say whether these absences are a flaw in the author’s approach, or inevitable given the style of leadership it so astutely anatomises.

In the end, The Game invites us to look toward the next election. That poll will, Kelly implies, reveal something more of ourselves, or at least those “quiet” Australians who are supposed to have voted for Morrison in 2019. Like most of us, Kelly is unsure who will have the last laugh.

 ‘A Narrative of Denial: Australia and the Indonesian Violation of East Timor’  by Peter Job [published in 2021 by Melbourne University Press, 356 pages, including pps 278-356 consisting of Notes, Index, etc]

I had  been trying to get through this book for some weeks  –  it made for very disturbing reading about the attitudes and approaches towards East Timor by both the Whitlam and Fraser governments , and while the subject was not new to me, I have to admit to being quite shocked at the described ‘denial’ tactics of both governments.   Long-time friend Ruth really brought this to our attention at the local Uniting Church  in the late 1990’s  with a series of  passionate and usually emotional calls for the people of East Timor to be assisted, and this was almost  two decades after the events depicted in this book. From that passion, arose a ‘Social Justice Group’ at that particular church which operated through the early 2000’s, placing particular emphasise on Indigenous and refugee issues and needs.  As is revealed in this book, the Indonesian invasion of East Timor in 1975 led to a prolonged conflict, severe human rights abuses and a large loss of life. 

The book was extremely detailed, almost [probably was] with seemingly every speech by politicians, the media, and others on the subject, throughout the period in question  included throughout the various chapters  – especially 1975-1983, and because of that detail, I found it difficult to read a great deal at one time – the word extensive study below is a very apt description  –  . the trend and theme of Australia’s approach was repeated time and again with little change in ‘official’ policy during that period. The book demonstrates how the Australian government used the guise of national interest to forge a false account of the Indonesian invasion of East Timor. In today’s world, the Chinese for eg, would counter Australian criticism of China’s human rights record, with the claim that Canberra tends to ignore human rights abuses in countries Australia wants to get on with. Its approach towards Indonesia’s treatment of West Papuans and East Timorese is an example.  And during the period of this book’s time line, one of the threats used by the Indonesian authorities, was that  if Australia didn’t bring those protesting and publishing adverse criticisms of Indonesia’s actions into line,  it would be to point at the international level, to Australia’s long-term treatment of it’s own Indigenous populations. The same kind of accusation could be used in respect to modern Australia’s  government treatment of refugees!

From the book ‘jacket’ we read:

“What role did Australia play in the Indonesian occupation of East Timor?  From 1975 to 1983 the Indonesian military’s campaign of ‘encirclement and annihilation’ destroyed rural food resources, creating the famine  that took most of the lives during the occupation. The Australian governments of Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser presented themselves as advocates for human rights and the international rule of law, while viewing relations with Indonesia as key to their foreign policy objectives. These positions came into conflict due to the Indonesian invasion of  East Timor.  Based upon an extensive study of Australian foreign affairs archives, as well as interviews, ‘a Narrative of Denial’ demonstrates how the Australian Government responded to the conflict by propagating  versions of events that denied the reality of the catastrophe occurring in East Timor. It worked to protect the Suharto regime internationally, allowing it to continue  its repression relatively unhindered. This remarkable story will unsettle existing perceptions of how Australia operates in world affairs.”

I thought I might quote a few comments from parts of the book, in particular the concluding chapter, which sums up the  separate conclusions inserted at the end of each chapter throughout the book. By necessity, these are just isolated selections which however are supported within the body of the book and through extensive research and voluminous ‘notes’. The author himself [Peter Job] was involved in the East Timor support movement during the Indonesian occupation, including working on the radio link to Fretilin in 1978 [radio links of this sort were regularly closed by the government for fear, that the ‘wrong’  messages and impressions were given to the Australian people through such ‘propaganda broadcasts – in the same way that the various support groups – including some of the government’s own members –  were attacked as preaching ‘subversion’ against the government policy and were creating adversity with respect to Australia’s desire to maintain a  good relationship with Indonesia.

As mentioned somewhere in the book, the crisis in East Timor generated with the Australian public, a far less degree of support or protest  [much less so in fact] than for example, the Vietnam War, or the Indigenous marches for Reconciliation, etc, because the broader public were constantly assured through government policy and pronouncements that there ‘was nothing to see here’, and the problems of a small backward nation were being humanely treated through the intervention of Indonesia!  But as indicated, the word ‘humane’ was a long way from the truth.  One of the constant arguments put up by the Fraser Government was that East Timor was a poor, backward country, which needed the ‘humane’ assistance of Indonesia to help its people, and that Indonesia should be praised for the humanity of its resettlement policies following the displacement of thousands of the Timorese due to ‘supposed’ civil war, a level of unrest that had forced Indonesia to ‘reluctantly’ move into East Timor to restore order!!!

Some quotations from ‘A Narrative of Denial’

In the meantime, a few selected quotations from Job’s writings.

• “Key to this narrative was the claim that the invasion was an irreversible matter of the past that Australia had objected to but was powerless to change. This produced the contention that the interests of the Timorese people were best suited by the Australian Government working with a fundamentally well-intentioned Indonesian regime that had reluctantly intervened in a destabilising situation  allegedly brought about by circumstances beyond it’s control”. [p.140];
• East Timor was never an issue of the first order  for much of the Parliamentary Labor Party [during the Fraser years] or for a great deal of the activist left. The lack of interest by most sections of Australian society, allowed the government to proceed with it’s agenda with some success” [p.141];
• [At the United Nations] the interests of the Suharto regime were central.  Australia lobbied for the interests of the Indonesian  Government  from the invasion onwards, with the long-term aim of removing the issue from the UN agenda and achieving international acceptance of incorporation. As in the domestic arena, this required the propagation of a ‘narrative of denial’ concerning the events that had led to the Indonesian invasion and the ongoing situation’:[p.173];
•   “The attacks on James Dunn, ACFOA and other Timor activists by pro-Suharto journalists and academics  furthered the government’s efforts to depict them as marginalised  radicals, using hearsay, anonymous sources and unverified claims in support of an irresponsible ideologically based campaign against the Indonesian  Government.  Gough Whitlam, a former prime minister of a Labor government and a respected figure to many on the left of politics the world over, abetted this further.  His energetic, unrestrained and aggressive lobbying  on behalf of the Suharto regime and his denigration of individuals and organisations  attempting to bring the real situation to the  world’s attention bolstered the Fraser  Government’s ability to position its narrative  as the responsible one. It also created mistrust concerning the veracity of information deriving from Timorese Catholic sources, whence a great deal of the evidence about the situation in the territory was coming.” [p.264];
• “As the testimony of DFA officials at the Senate inquiry demonstrated, the propagation of the government narrative did not require a sophisticated understanding  of the situation,  particularly concerning the humanitarian plight  of the Timorese people.  On the contrary, it required purposely ignoring available evidence.” [p.264];
• “ The Whitlam Government’s denial of what it knew  regarding the deaths of the Balibo Five and its consequent failure to protest would have sent a strong message to the hardliners  within the Suharto regime that Australia would not prove a substantial impediment to any course of action it might choose”. [p.268-69];
• “Good relations with the pro-Western  and anti-communist Suharto regime were therefore important to the Fraser government’s  concept of the Australian national interest. The welfare of the Timorese people, in contrast,  was never a substantial consideration.  It was during the Fraser years that the majority of those who died in East Timor due to the occupation lost their lives. Despite the extent of the crisis, however, East Timor never became an issue of major importance to the majority of Australians, nor did it spawn a movement comparable to the Vietnam War protests or even the anti-apartheid campaign. Nevertheless, with evidence of the humanitarian crisis emanating from East Timor on a regular basis, the work of the smallish but energetic solidarity movement, the Timor parliamentary lobby, ACGOA, James Dunn and others was successful  in keeping the issue in the public eye to a reasonable extent for most of the Fraser years.” [p.269-270];
•  “Australian policy was impaled on the hook of the relationship with Suharto’s New Order, unwilling to move beyond its vision of the Australian national interest or the primacy the relationship with the regime played in it. So fearful was it of offending the Suharto regime that, regardless of the evidence, the Fraser Government proved incapable of attempting tosteer Indonesia away from its course of action  or itself from its support for it.”;
• As Foreign Minister, Andrew Peacock was a forceful supporter of the government’s policy.. in October 1976, he told parliament that “the political reality was that it did not serve Australia’s interests to place itself on a massive collision course with Indonesia.” [p.124] and “Peacock assured Mochtar in December 1979 that his government shared the Indonesian Government’s concerns regarding ‘sensational and distorted’ media reports about East Timor and wanted to work with it to improve its image in Australia”. [p.239]; and,
• “However, Australian policy during the years 1974 to 1983 ultimately proved neither pragmatic or realist. Even judged by their own policy goals the contention espoused by both Whitlam and Fraser that they were acting in the Australian national interest proved incorrect…..The efforts by successive Australian governments  to protect the Suharto regime on the Timor issue culminated ultimately  in the INTERFET intervention and the strained relations with Indonesia that accompanied it………….Australian policy failure, however, went far deeper than this. It was a failure due to the immense suffering it caused to the people of East Timor. More than a failure of policy goals, it weas a failure of conception, morality and ethics, and of fundamental human rights. Policy failed as these matters did not even figure in Australian calculations of the national interest or foreign policy goals. An Australian foreign policy built upon an elite, hard-nosed and supposedly realistic approach to the national interest ultimately proved neither realistic nor viable, and for the people of East Timor it resulted in catastrophe……The people of East Timor were regarded as dispensable. It was this that had the direst consequences, and it was this that was the real policy failure.” [p.274-75].

 ‘The Wimmera: A journey through Western Victoria’ published in 2021, 232 pages [a Coffee Table boo

Some fascinating descriptions of the old towns and their origins in the Wimmera district of western Victoria, so sad that in many cases, these towns have all but disappeared with maybe a few residents remaining, and very few of the original buildings.  Interesting that many of the towns came to life and really developed when the railway lines connected them up with other areas, but similarly, they gradually ‘died’ as the railways were discontinued.  Some of my family ancestors lived in many of these areas, and I’d like to do another  road trip to explore them before it’s too late.

This book was a ‘companion to  ‘The Mallee’  basically the area in western Victoria, more or less to the north of the Wimmera region.

 “Corporal Hitler’s Pistol’ by Tom Keneally, published in 2021, 335 pages.

 This story was a bit slow to get into initially, and I didn’t feel as though I was going to get much from this book.   But, as I read on, the storyline developed and the various family scenarios began to create some interest.  I guess we can call it ‘historical fiction’ although perhaps more on the fiction side, as compared for eg, with the books of Peter Fitzsimons.  I did get through the story in speedier fashion than some of the Keneally books I’ve laboured through in the past.  I found the references to the ongoing Irish problems of the time of special interest, as I did the reflection, of rural Australia’s continuing negative attitude [in the 1930s] to the Aboriginal inhabitants on the outskirts of country towns, etc.

Susan Wyndham, writing in the Guardian Australian in September 2021 provides a succinct review of Keneally’s book which I’ve taken the liberty of copying below.

‘When Tom Keneally chose the loaded title Corporal Hitler’s Pistol, he would have been well aware of Chekhov’s advice to writers that if a gun appears in the first act it must be fired in the second. Indeed, he fires his fictional pistol several times to dramatic effect in his 35th novel, a compelling blend of historical crime thriller and intricate portrait of an Australian rural community. The gun has been lurking in Keneally’s imagination since the first act of his own life. His father, serving in the Middle East during the second world war, sent home souvenirs including a German Luger holster (not the pistol itself), which Keneally can still show visitors.

Nazi Germany and the world wars have inspired many of his rich narratives, most famously the Booker prize winner Schindler’s Ark. Corporal Hitler’s Pistol sits in the unstable peace between wars, when post-traumatic pain collided with the Great Depression and escalating tensions. The Japanese occupation of Manchuria leads a young man to speculate: “I hope I am wrong. But could we be seeing the opening to a second Great War?”

The action is focused in 1933, two years before Keneally’s birth, in the north-coast New South Wales town of Kempsey, where he spent his early childhood. He draws on experience and folklore, such as an old German-Australian said to possess a pistol that had belonged to Hitler.

His familiarity with the town makes Kempsey crackle with commerce, gossip and class divisions from the opening pages. Well-to-do Flo Honeywood walks through the streets, glimpsing other characters, and steeling herself to confront her husband, the respected master builder, about an Aboriginal boy from the camp outside town who looks just like him.

Always a first-rate storyteller of a traditional kind, Keneally displays his mastery of narrative technique in a series of cinematic set pieces that propel the story forward while intimately developing the characters. Some take place in the Victoria Theatre, the centre of social life, where Hollywood movies add glamour and dreams to ordinary existences.

Young Gertie Webber speaks with actorly exaggeration, and her brother Christian imagines dressing his mother “in the manner of Marlene Dietrich in Shanghai Express”. The Victoria simmers with the novel’s repressed eroticism. At a screening of Tabu, “Harper Quinlan, the projectionist, said you could hear the boys’ fly buttons popping all over the cinema”.

Chicken Dalton, the “effeminate and stylish” pianist who accompanies the Saturday night pictures, is the most theatrical of a lively ensemble. He sounds like a Dickensian dandy but is based on a real resident of the time and represents Keneally’s homage to the gay men of his youth.

“Kempsey’s pansy” finds sexual company with closeted homosexuals whose secrets are bound to blow up. Keneally inhabits gay, female and Indigenous characters with confidence and complexity, all of them observed in convincing detail from their fashion to their fears and desires.

A glimmer of social change begins with Flo Honeywood’s rebellion against her husband, which brings her into unexpected connections with Chicken and with the Aboriginal boy, Eddie Kelly. Her meeting with a group of Thunguddi women in Tsiros’s Refreshment Rooms is a finely drawn microcosm of multiracial Australia. But the might of power and prejudice lie waiting for vulnerable transgressors.

In the other main storyline, Bert Webber, a Lutheran dairy farmer, breaks down on seeing a newsreel about the new German Chancellor, “the man with the stupidly economical moustache”. Despite his German forebears, Bert fought with an Australian battalion in France and watched his friend shot dead by a “skinny, droop-moustached” German. The encounter will haunt him and the course of history.

While Bert relives his horror under electroconvulsive therapy and mesmerism, his unhappy wife, Anna, fills the void with one of the novel’s steamy sexual affairs. Further intrigue emerges with the mysterious past of Johnny Costigan, the Irishman who manages the Webber farm.

Keneally’s prose is robust (and sometimes humorous) with the language of Catholicism learned as a young man: “That sainted and cursed gun … equivalent of the nails that tore Christ’s hands.” “The hallway [of the convent] smelt of polish and virginity, and Flo thought it not a bad smell.” And in a sexual communion, “there was gravidness and erections to be attended to”.

Flashbacks to trench warfare in 1916 and to the Irish Civil War in 1922 dramatise the ambiguities of conflict. At times Keneally the historian is so keen to share his knowledge that he nudges aside Keneally the novelist and the pace slows. Yet these dark events are essential to understanding later motives.

Keneally deftly plaits together his disparate strands, far too canny to create predictable outcomes. Nothing goes as planned, even for those with noble intentions, keeping the plot taut right to the end. Corporal Hitler’s Pistol manages to be a rollicking, optimistic entertainment while mourning the human tragedies that shaped the 20th century and beyond’.

Meanwhile, a general reviewer, simply by the name of Des, provided an interesting summary of the story which generally allied with my feelings when he wrote:

‘Corporal Hitler’s Pistol is an engaging novel that tantalisingly plays with the notion that a pistol supposedly used by Adolf Hitler, is the cause of intrigue and drama in the regional town of Kempsey in the 1930s. Thomas Keneally creates characters with separate yet connected stories that are linked by an unknown historical event: the use of Hitler’s pistol from WWI. He relates these stories quite independently, yet engaging the reader with the circumstances as to how the themes ultimately bind together.  Little is presented about Hitler except for detail to give historical authenticity of his being.  The setting of Kempsey is indicative of Australia of the 1930s and illustrates parochialism, sectarianism, misogyny, social stratification, racism and homophobia. I did enjoy Tom Keneally’s use of Australian idioms and slang so typical of the time.  Woven into the story are unresolved issues around Irish nationalism, Irish Civil War and WWI trauma which played out among the protagonists.
I enjoyed the richness, suspense and anticipation in the novel even though I needed some time to digest all that was read.  Thomas Keneally brought the novel alive with the outstanding character development and unfolding stories. At times the storyline became very difficult to follow, however the interest level was maintained and the ending was compelling which gave me an enriching reading experience’.

Australian Foreign Affairs Bulletin, Issue 14:  The Taiwan Choice: Showdown in Asia.

The fourteenth issue of Australian Foreign Affairs examines the rising tensions over the future of Taiwan as China’s pursuit of “unification” pits it against the United States and US allies such as Australia. The Taiwan Choice looks at the growing risk of a catastrophic war and the outlook for Australia as it faces a strategic choice that could reshape its future in Asia.  “Whether or not America chooses to fight, a crisis over Taiwan would most likely see its position destroyed. This is the real flaw in America’s position, and Australia’s.” writes  Hugh White. His and other contributing essays examined the following aspects, and most of them did not provide very comforting reading, particularly if we give much credence to the kind of scenarios depicted in the Taylor quote, below.

• Hugh White reveals why war over Taiwan is the gravest danger Australia has faced. 
• Linda Jakobson probes how Xi Jinping views Taiwan in an age of Chinese assertiveness.
• Brendan Taylor examines what a conflict over Taiwan might look like. 

Quote:  “A full-blown conflict over Taiwan could make living through the COVID-19 pandemic seem like a cakewalk. It would very likely be the most devastating war in history, drawing the world’s major powers into their first nuclear exchange. Hundreds of millions could perish, both from the fighting itself and from the sickening after-effects of radiation. Even a limited nuclear conflict would be an environmental nightmare, with soot from incinerated cities shutting out the sun’s rays, depleting food supplies and plunging the planet into a prolonged famine. Life for Australians would be forever changed. Such a catastrophe looms closer than we think. If it eventuates, those left behind after Asia’s atomic mushroom clouds have settled will wish that we had fought with every fibre of our being to prevent it.

• Yu-Jie Chen explores the Taiwanese view of autonomy, independence and China. 
• Stephen Dziedzic considers whether a generational divide is fuelling Australia’s intensifying China debate. 
• William Stoltz examines how Canberra can combat malware and cyberaggression. 
• Cait Storr writes on the geopolitical space race and the likelihood of nuclear war. 

Our nation celebrates Australia Day on the 26^th January each year, being the date in 1788 that European settlement first commenced with the arrival of the First Fleet [of convicts] in Sydney, NSW. Over recent years in particular, there has been much debate over whether that date is now the appropriate date for such a recognition., principally in view of the fact, that upon their arrival, the new ‘settlers’ found an Indigenous population which had been in Australia for up to 60,000 years.  To many, the day has been referred to as ‘Invasion Day’, and the celebration of 26^th January is not inclusive of all peoples in this country.  Many will argue to the contrary, however, be that as it may,  just like the eventual creation of a Republic, I think there will eventually  be a change of date, which will hopefully be considered a more inclusive date selection by all.

Meanwhile, thirty-two inspirational Australians were named as the national finalists for the Australian of the Year Awards, with the winners announced in Canberra on the evening of 25^th January.  Looking at past results, and current nominations, it would be difficult to argue that inclusiveness is not a consideration.

The National Australia Day Council describes the Australian of the Year as a program by the Council each year to celebrate the achievements and contributions of eminent Australians by profiling leading citizens who are role models for us all. They inspire us through their achievements and challenge us to make our own contribution to creating an inclusive, harmonious and more resilient Australia. The Awards honour an exceptional and diverse group of highly respected Australians who ignite discussion and change on issues of national importance.

Each of the national finalists have been nominated for an Australian of the Year Award by the National Australia Day Council, through each of the States and Territories, due to their impact and achievement in a range of sectors.  These sectors include science and medicine, social and community projects, human rights advocacy, social entrepreneurship, sustainability and contributions to the pandemic response.

Each State and Territory award recipient was announced at local ceremonies. These Australians are now in consideration for the 2022 overall Australian of the Year Awards.

Currently, the selection committees refer to three main criteria when considering nominees:

• Demonstrated excellence in their field; 
• Significant contribution to the Australian community and nation; and.
• An inspirational role model for the Australian community.

In addition, a fourth award, the Local Hero award acknowledges a significant contribution at local community level.

These were the thirty-two nominations from the respective States and Territories.

2022 AUSTRALIAN OF THE YEAR

ACT Australian of the Year: Patrick (Patty) Mills. Basketball player and Indigenous rights advocate.

NSW Australian of the Year: Professor Veena Sahajwalla. Founding Director of the Centre for Sustainable Materials Research and Technology at the University of New South Wales.

NT Australian of the Year: Leanne Liddle. Director of the Aboriginal Justice Unit.

Queensland Australian of the Year: Sue and Lloyd Clarke. Founders of Small Steps 4 Hannah.

SA Australian of the Year: Professor Helen Marshall. Vaccination researcher.

Tasmania Australian of the Year: Craig Leeson. Documentary filmmaker and journalist.

Victoria Australian of the Year: Dylan Alcott OAM. Athlete, paralympian, philanthropist, media commentator and advocate.

WA Australian of the Year: Paul Litherland. Cyber safety educator and campaigner.

2022 SENIOR AUSTRALIAN OF THE YEAR

ACT Senior Australian of the Year: Valmai Dempsey. Volunteer at St John Ambulance.

NSW Senior Australian of the Year: Abla Kadous. President of the Islamic Women’s Welfare Association.

NT Senior Australian of the Year: Robyne Burridge OAM. Disability services advocate and Founder of Focus-A-Bility.

Queensland Senior Australian of the Year: Dr Colin Dillon AM APM. Australia’s first Indigenous police officer.

SA Senior Australian of the Year:  Mark Le Messurier. Educator, counsellor and author.

Tasmania Senior Australian of the Year: Bruce French AO. Agricultural scientist and Founder of Food Plants International.

Victoria Senior Australian of the Year: Gaye Hamilton. Deputy Chancellor of Victoria University.

WA Senior Australian of the Year: Janice Standen. President of Grandparents Rearing Grandchildren WA.

2022 YOUNG AUSTRALIAN OF THE YEAR

ACT Young Australian of the Year: Sean Dondas. Former Board Director at CanTeen.

NSW Young Australian of the Year: Dr Daniel Nour. Founder of Street Side Medics.

NT Young Australian of the Year: Sizolwenkosi Fuyana. Businesswoman, podcaster and youth advocate.

Queensland Young Australians of the Year: Dr Tahnee Bridson. Founder of Hand-n-Hand Peer Support.

SA Young Australian of the Year: Dr Trudy Lin. Special Needs Dentistry consultant at Adelaide Dental Hospital.

Tasmania Young Australian of the Year: Kaytlyn Johnson. Youth leader and singer-songwriter.

Victoria Young Australian of the Year: Ahmed Hassan. Co-founder and executive director of Youth Activating Youth.

WA Young Australian of the Year: Kendall Whyte. Founder and CEO of the Blue Tree project.

2022 AUSTRALIA’S LOCAL HERO

ACT Local Hero: Luke Ferguson. Youth support worker at The Woden School.

NSW Local Hero: Shanna Whan. Founder and CEO of Sober in the Country.

NT Local Hero: Rebecca Forrest. Event organiser and fundraiser.

Queensland Local Hero: Saba Abraham. Community leader, founder and Manager of social enterprise Mu’ooz Restaurant & Catering.

SA Local Hero: Monique Bareham. President of Lymphoedema Association SA Inc.

Tasmania Local Hero: Kimberley (Kim) Smith APM.Community volunteer with the Rotary Club of Sullivans Cove.

Victoria Local Hero: Leo op den Brouw. Volunteer with the Mallacoota State Emergency Service.

WA Local Hero: Craig Hollywood. Founder and CEO of Short Back & Sidewalks.

Listening to the stories of each of the above-named, at the Award ceremony, one can imagine a very difficult choice from a broad range of inspirational and dedicated human beings. However, as with everything, there has to be a winner, and on this occasion, the respective Winners this year from the foregoing lists were:

2022 Australian of the Year

Dylan Alcott OAM

Athlete, paralympian, philanthropist, media commentator and advocate

VICSTATE RECIPIENTAUSTRALIAN OF THE YEAR2022

As a teenager, Dylan Alcott hated being in a wheelchair because he didn’t see anyone like him in mainstream media. Then sport changed everything.

A gold medal at the Paralympic Games in wheelchair basketball preceded three more in Paralympic competition after a cross-code switch to tennis. Now, with 23 quad wheelchair Grand Slam titles and a Newcombe Medal, Dylan Alcott recently became the first male in history, in any form of tennis, to win the Golden Slam.

Amid his training and competition load as a world-class athlete, Dylan notes that his most profound impact has come from beyond the field of play. He founded the Dylan Alcott Foundation to provide scholarships and grant funding to marginalised Australians with a disability.

He also authored his best-selling autobiography, Able, and co-founded Get Skilled Access. Further, Dylan’s AbilityFest is Australia’s first and only inclusive, fully accessible music festival. In realising his childhood dream, Dylan holds several high-profile media roles spanning TV, radio and podcasting.

A passionate ‘off the cuff’ speech by Dylan, who earlier in the afternoon, at completing a successful semi final match at the Australian Open, modestly stated that ‘I’m just making up the numbers in Canberra tonight’.

2022 Senior Australian of the Year

Valmai Dempsey

Volunteer at St John Ambulance

SENIOR AUSTRALIAN OF THE YEAR2022

Starting as a cadet volunteer while still in primary school, for more than 50 years Valmai (Val) Dempsey has dedicated her life to St John Ambulance. She’s one of the Australian Capital Territory’s longest-serving volunteers and, year after year, she still dedicates more hours than any other volunteer.

In 2020, Val faced her biggest challenge yet as a St John Ambulance volunteer – first with the ‘Black Summer’ bushfires, followed by the COVID-19 pandemic. In response, she led 40 fellow volunteers as they supported fire-affected communities during the emergency that stretched over many weeks.

Then when the pandemic hit, Val displayed unwavering commitment to the St John team, despite heavy impacts on team morale. Without hesitation, she personally contacted every volunteer to check they were ‘doing OK’ in terms of welfare, mental health and morale.

It is these tireless commitments to St John that has led many in the community to know her lovingly as ‘Aunty Val’.

This lady is a passionate advocate for all learner drivers to be required to undertake a first aid course prior to being granted a licence..  At accident scenes, that attribute for a first on the scene bystander, can make the difference between life and death.  Powerful inspiration.

2022 Young Australian of the Year

Dr Daniel Nour

Founder of Street Side Medics

YOUNG AUSTRALIAN OF THE YEAR2022

Identifying a gap in the healthcare of vulnerable people in New South Wales, Dr Daniel Nour founded Street Side Medics in August 2020. It’s a not-for-profit, GP-led mobile medical service for people experiencing homelessness.

With 145 volunteers, and four clinics across New South Wales, Street Side Medics has changed the lives of more than 300 patients. It has treated many communicable and non-communicable illnesses, dealt with neglected medical needs, and detected conditions that would otherwise have gone unnoticed. This includes diabetes, thyroid disorders, hepatitis C, HIV, heart disease and cancer.

Despite working full time at Royal North Shore Hospital, Daniel has rarely missed a clinic across the four sites since Street Side Medics launched. He volunteers his afternoons to ensure the clinics are run smoothly and patients are receiving the care they deserve.

With his leadership and social consciousness, Daniel is committed to making a real difference to the lives of many Australians. He’s also making significant improvements to society.

A truly dedicated volunteer in this service basically directed at the homeless

2022 Australia’s Local Hero

Shanna Whan

Founder and CEO of Sober in the Country

LOCAL HERO2022

Shanna Whan is single-handedly creating radical social impact and change around how we discuss and use alcohol in rural Australia.

When Shanna almost lost her life to alcohol addiction in 2015, giving up drinking was just the start. What began as volunteer work to help others locally, evolved into a grassroots charity called Sober in the Country (SITC) which now has a national reach and offers peer support, powerful broadscale advocacy and education.

Shanna donated about 20,000 hours to the cause and now travels on invitation as the spokesperson for SITC. She has appeared on multiple major national media platforms, in person, in paddocks and at conferences.

She courageously shared her harrowing journey to sobriety on Australian Story in 2019. Now, through the national charity, she is amplifying the essential, life-saving message and charity campaign that it is always “OK to say no” to booze.

A passionate and emotional  acceptance speech.

Over the past 22 months, we have watched the daily count of COVID deaths and infections world-wide, while here in Australia in recent weeks, there has been a sudden surge of infections nationwide to levels of infection we’ve not seen before.. In all that time, pushed to the background of our thinking [though not for those personally affected] is the daily scourge of road deaths and associated trauma. This area is the brief subject of my final ‘Coachbuilder’s Column’ for 2021.

A major factor in trying to combat the national road toll, and to determine precise action needed,  appears to be a lack of action in co-ordinating data collected, and this is illustrated below in reports by various road accident authorities around Australia – in particular, the lack of data reported as compared with the last two years of reporting on COVID statistics.

Writing in the Victorian tabloid newspaper [Herald Sun] just prior to Christmas, the Editorial  was headed ‘Road trauma warning’ ………….”Victoria has an enviable reputation for road safety reforms over the decades, and generally has among the lowest per capita road deaths in the world. So the news that Victoria was the deadliest state for road trauma in November – with the number of fatal crashes  rising by 80% – is a real concern. Federal Transport data show that 27 people died on our roads compared with 15 at the same time last year. By contrast, Queensland and NSW both dropped from 24 deaths in November 2020, to 21 this year. ….The alarming figures come as Victoria’s top traffic cop warns of a ‘perfect storm’ of increased crash risk amid young drivers getting behind the wheel after all the lockdowns  In today’s Herald Sun, Road Policing Command assistant commissioner Glenn Weir says the problem is compounded  due to the inexperience of newly licensed drivers, and a surge of young people rushing to get their licenses.  The state government move to deploy a series of ‘pause stops’ on key regional arterial roads over Christmas to counter the expected spike in road trauma is welcome. Drivers must take extra special care during the holiday season”.

Two days after Christmas, we learnt that six lives had been lost on Victorian roads since Christmas Eve, and those six lives convert into tragic trauma for so many associated family and friends, and all the other financial costs associated with such losses.

As Glenn Weir stated after that news – “For most of us, this is an exciting time of the year with holidays and festive cheer in full swing…While we’re asking everyone to slow down, not drink or take drugs and drive, and avoid distractions like mobile phones, rest assured police will also be doing our bit and ramping up enforcement on Victorian roads”.  The general warning was to be well rested before driving – with many holiday makers taking summer trips for the first time in two years.  Traffic data reveals that 16-20 per cent of fatalities on the state’s roads were attributed to drowsy driving  –  so current advice is “If you find yourself day-dreaming, missing exits or drifting from your lane, take a break and consider a 15-minute powernap. There are plenty of places to stop all throughout the state, take your time so you can get to your destination safely”.

Always good advice, and yet so often, it is ignored in so many little ways, with one simple second of inattention meaning a lifetime of misery for many, the end of a life for others.

In 1969, the year my father died after an avoidable car accident, there were 3,502 Victorians killed on our roads, which represented .286% of a population of 100,000.  In 2018, that figure had dropped to 1,135 [or .046% of a population of 100,000].  It was from those 1969 figures that essentially saw the beginning of major road safety campaigns here in Victoria,  aimed particularly at drink driving, and the wearing of seat belts [perhaps the latter may have made a difference in my father’s case?].

‘

Sadly, those statistics seem to be on the increase again On the national front, despite COVID lockdowns, road fatalities rose this year.  As reported by political reporter, Jake Evans on the 20 December, experts fear a new road toll plan isn’t going to work.  He noted that COVID lockdowns have brought scenes of empty motorways and desolate streets but road deaths actually rose this year. There were 1,126 people who died on Australia’s roads in the past 12 months, a 1.4 per cent increase on the year before.  The country’s top motoring and health bodies say a new federal plan to lower the road toll needs a total rework if there is any chance of the government meeting its goal to reduce road deaths to zero by 2050.   National motoring bodies, road trauma organisations and expert health practitioners have written to Infrastructure and Transport Minister Barnaby Joyce asking the government to go back to the drawing board with its 10-year road safety strategy, which is due to be released before the end of the year.

One of the biggest issues, according to the country’s peak motoring body the Australian Automobile Association (AAA), is a “shambolic” approach to collecting information on road deaths, which remains patchy and often missing details.  AAA managing director Michael Bradley said COVID had proven states had the ability to collect detailed information on road safety — but that isn’t being done.  “It’s almost non-existent: you can go to any news website today and you will see how many people in your state have COVID, you can learn about their gender, you know about whether or not they’re in hospital, whether or not they’re on ventilators, you know the proportion of people by local government area who are vaccinated,” he said.  “This is done daily — and yet we can’t tell you how many people are seriously injured in car crashes. There is no national dataset.”

Dr John Crozier, a trauma surgeon who was hand-picked by former minister Darren Chester to lead the government’s review into the past decade’s road safety strategy, has backed the call for the upcoming plan to be overhauled.  Dr Crozier said some safety data, including data on serious injuries, lags by as much as four years.  “Four years in the past data does not helpfully inform modern contemporary road safety practice,” he said.  “We’ve got to do a lot better than that in this upcoming decade.”  The government’s road safety strategy lists improving data as a priority, as it did in 2011, but does not detail how that will be done.  Mr Bradley said the upcoming plan is set to repeat the same mistakes of the last decade unless new rules are introduced to force states to improve their data collection.  “We’re concerned that you’ve got another strategy that says governments are going to do the same thing they signed up to last time,” he said.  “There’s no consequence associated with people signing up to say they’re going to do these things, but they never follow through.   “What we’re looking for is some mechanism that compels states and territories to come to the table and change what they do.”

The AAA said based on recent trends, only NSW and the Northern Territory were on track to meet the government’s target of halving the road toll by the end of the decade.  In fact, while the total road toll has fallen since 2010, motorcyclist deaths have seen almost no improvement in the past decade and cyclist deaths have risen over that time.  Meanwhile, state data that does exist on injuries suggest the number of people hospitalised from road accidents has been rising by about 3 per cent each year since 2013, according to the Department of Infrastructure.  Dr Crozier, who is also the chair of the Royal Australian College of Surgeons’ road trauma committee, said about 100 people were hospitalised each day by road crashes, costing the country $30 billion each year.  “We’ve had a silent epidemic on our roads, that’s seen more people killed [than COVID], seen many, many more seriously injured and hospitalised by road crash, but we’re not anywhere near as aware of that silent epidemic which is the day-to-day reality on our roads,” he said.  “We have many of the solutions, we have many of the ‘vaccines’ on our roads that would deliver fewer crashes … but we’re prevented from the effective implementation of a number of these proven ‘vaccines’ for road safety.”

A year-end plea to family, friends and general readers: please stay safe on our roads in 2022, and avoid the unnecessary personal trauma and tragedy which arises from accidents that in the main just should not happen. Don’t become a statistic, as my father did in 1969.

This entry refers to two very important recent books of direct relevance to Australia’s history, both past, and present. In each case, I have briefly referred to my basically ‘non-professional’ reflection of these books, and then submitted a selected overall summary and review in each case by a professional journalist, which I believe provides a concise description of what you are getting !!

At the end of November, 2021, I finished reading Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers: The Dark Emu Debate  by Peter Sutton & Keryn Walshe: pub. 2021; 288 pages.  

Now prior to reading this book, I had previously read [and reviewed] two of the principal books referred to by Sutton and Walshe, which through their research and studies have been much discredited, in particular Dark Emu..

In the case of Bill Ramage’s  [The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia], I would write in 2013 that   ‘Very interesting,  but difficult at times to read with a lot of seemingly repetitive material, however a perspective of the Aboriginal treatment of  this country that should be learnt and respected’…….and from the book jacket –  ‘Across Australia, early Europeans commented again and again that the land looked like a park. With extensive grassy patches and pathways, open woodlands and abundant wildlife, it evoked a country estate in England. Bill Gamage has discovered this was because Aboriginal people managed the land in a far more systematic and scientific fashion  than we have ever realised…..Once Aboriginal people were no longer able to tend their country [with the arrival of the white man] it became overgrown and vulnerable to the largely damaging bushfires we now experience’.

Bruce Pascoe’s ‘Dark Emu’ went much further, in fact too far, as far as Sutton and Walshe are concerned, yet I mistakenly, in retrospect, gave Pascoe a little too much leeway. In that case I wrote :in 2020  ‘An inspiring read, leaving much to reflect upon…In Dark Emu [first published in 2014, revised edition in 2018], Pascoe examines the journals and diaries of early explorers such as Charles Sturt and Thomas Mitchell and early settlers in Australia, ‘finding evidence’ in their accounts of existing agriculture, ,engineering and building, including stone houses, weirs, sluices and fish traps, and also game management..   This evidence of occupation challenges the traditional views about pre-colonial Australia^, and “Terra Nullius”, and were the type of findings that  were likely to quickly ‘upset’  people like Andrew Bolt, amongst others!!  I believe ‘Dark Emu’ should be essential reading for all with a genuine interest in the true stories of our nation’s history.  Bill Gammage’s earlier publication ‘The Biggest Estate on Earth’ should also be read in conjunction with Pascoe’s book.  Pascoe also attributes a major influence on his book to the historian, and independent scholar Rupert Gerritsen, who in 2008 published   ‘Australia and the Origins of Agriculture’, which argued that Aboriginal people were agriculturalists as much as hunter-gatherers. Gerritsen died in 2013, and Pascoe cites him as a scholar who languished in obscurity because his theories contradicted the mainstream view.  Possibly, Pascoe’s book is likely to have a similar affect on those of the Australian populace who simply don’t want to be told that what they have  always been taught to believe may not be ‘accurate’, and that, as Pascoe writes in his introductory comments ‘not only that the frontier war had been misrepresented in what we had been taught in school,  but also that the economy and culture of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people had been grossly undervalued……so very distinct from ‘the primitive hunter-gatherer lifestyle we had been told was the simple lot of Australia’s First People’.

Well. In this 2021 publication [by Sutton and Walshe], I finished the book feeling that I had been truly ‘hoodwinked’ by Pascoe’s many exaggerated claims and theories based on flinty evidence and ‘selected’ sources emphasised  to suit his purpose. In many ways, while constantly attacking Pascoe for his incorrect assessment of the real facts – as these two highly respected scientists and authors write ‘We contend that Pascoe is broadly wrong, both about what Australians have been told of pre-conquest Aboriginal society, and about the nature of that society itself’.  They devote 288 pages, including an extensive Notes and References section of 66 pages, in support of their material [Pascoe 29 pages] That material was extremely detailed, constantly referring back to Pascoe’s surmising with proven scientific, archaeological and spoken and written records of the Indigenous people themselves. I actually found the extent of the detail of evidence provided as almost painful, so precise and far-ranging it went.

Whilst it fair enough that different versions of a story need to be looked at, I felt disappointed that some sectors of the country’s Education system, have since promoted Pascoe’s book as the ‘Bible’  of Aboriginal ‘history’ in Australia, in the absence of the kind of scientific and anthropological analysis that Sutton and Walshe provide us with, with their central question in writing the book being to ask why Australians  have been so receptive  to the notion that farming represents an advance from hunting and gathering – there is a middle ground which they explore and examine thoroughly

The following review provides a much more substantial assessment of the book than I can manage, and I include it, to encourage readers.

From ‘The Conversation’ by Christine Judith Nicholls 14/6/2021

Eminent Australian anthropologist Peter Sutton and respected field archaeologist Keryn Walshe have co-authored a meticulously researched new book, Farmers or Hunter-gatherers? The Dark Emu Debate. It’s set to become the definitive critique of Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu: Black Seeds — Agriculture or Accident?

First published in 2014, Pascoe’s Dark Emu has spawned numerous derivatives. Pascoe contends that in pre-contact times, Australian Aboriginal people weren’t “mere” hunter-gatherers, but agriculturalists. Descriptors like “simple” or “mere” are anathema to people like me who’ve lived long-term with hunter-gatherers.

For many Australians, Pascoe’s book is a “must-read”, speaking truth to power. For such readers, Dark Emu seems a breakthrough text. Not so, in Sutton and Walshe’s estimation. Nor mine.

Underpinning Dark Emu is the author’s rhetorical purpose. This proselytising is partly achieved by painstaking “massaging” of his sources, a practice forensically examined by Walshe and Sutton. It has led to converts to Pascoe’s dubious proposition. But this willingness to accept Pascoe’s argument reveals a systemic area of failure in the Australian education system.

On the basis of long-term research and observation, Sutton and Walshe portray classical Australian Aboriginal people as highly successful hunter-gatherers and fishers. They strongly repudiate racist notions of Aboriginal hunter-gatherers as living in a primitive state.

In their book, they assert there was and is nothing “simple” or “primitive” about hunter-gatherer-fishers’ labour practices. This complexity was, and in many cases, still is, underpinned by high levels of spiritual/cultural belief.

Not agriculturalists

As Sutton attests, seeds were and are occasionally deliberately scattered. But in classical Aboriginal societies they were never planted nor watered for agricultural purposes. Such aforementioned rituals are collectively called “increase ceremonies”. Sutton’s alternative term, “maintenance ceremonies”, invokes spiritual propagation as opposed to oversupply.

Their objective was continuing subsistence. Australia’s hunter-gatherer-fishers left an extremely light carbon footprint — the diametric opposite of many contemporary agricultural/industrial practices. A  photo [depicted in the book]  taken in 1932 or earlier, shows Pilbara people throwing yelka (nutgrass) — not threshing or scattering seeds.

Pascoe’s sources and approach

Pascoe draws on records of explorers and early colonists, also citing recent works, including Bill Gammage’s The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines made Australia. Dark Emu leans most heavily on the work of the late historian/ethnographer Rupert Gerritsen.

Counter-intuitively, Pascoe mainly cites non-Aboriginal sources. There is no real “voice” given to the few remaining people who lived traditional lives as youngsters, or are cited in books or articles.

While some have described Dark Emu as fabrication, Sutton and Walshe are more measured. They methodically show that in Dark Emu, Pascoe has removed significant passages from publications that contradict his major objectives. This boosts his contention that all along Aboriginal people were farmers and/or aquaculturalists.

One example concerns Pascoe’s quoting of the journal entries of the explorer Charles Sturt. Sutton writes:

Sturt is quoted [by Pascoe] on his party’s discovery of a large well and ‘village’ of 19 huts somewhere north of Lake Torrens in South Australia.

This “village” concept arose from colonial records, and is still sometimes used in recent articles.

Pascoe’s edit of Sturt’s original 1849 text breathes oxygen into Dark Emu’s polemical edge. It’s misleading at best. For Sturt’s diary reveals Aboriginal people didn’t live in “houses” in any single site all year round.

Such accounts destabilise Pascoe’s argument, reinforced by ethnographic, colonial, and archaeological records.

Hunter-gatherers did alter the country in significant ways — most Australians know about the ancient practice of firing the country, recently discussed in depth owing to our increasingly devastating bush-fires. This involved ecological agency and prowess. But expert fire-burning isn’t an agricultural practice, as Pascoe avers.

Misidentification of implements

In a key chapter, Walshe homes in on Pascoe’s mis-interpretations of hunter-gatherer implements, which he labels “agricultural” tools. For instance, Pascoe misconstrues grooved “Bogan Picks” as heavy stones used for agricultural activity.

Walshe disputes Pascoe’s claim, stating that, “with their adze-shaped end and grooved midline for hafting, they were likely used in a similar way to stone axes.”

Wooden digging sticks were also used for breaking up the earth to extract yams when in season, among various other purposes — not for “tilling” or “ploughing” the soil in preparation for planting seeds.

Language used by early colonists and explorers — words like “village” and “picks” — befuddles readers. British colonists’ monolingualism meant they used English words, often imposed arbitrarily, to name never-before-seen hunter-gatherer implements. For example, “Bogan Pick” references the nearby Bogan River.

Hunter-gatherer mobility and stasis

Sutton expertly summarises the experience of escaped convict, William Buckley, who spent 32 years travelling around country with the Wathawurrung people in Central Victoria.

Over time, Buckley became fluent in the language of his Wathawurrung hosts. Later, his oral account of the hunter-gatherer group’s approximate lengths of mobility and stasis at numerous sites was transcribed. It’s a unique document covering a significant timespan.

This account reinforces earlier chapters in Dark Emu Debate. Sutton and Walshe make it crystal clear that Aboriginal people weren’t “simple nomads” wandering around randomly, opportunistically searching for food and water. They knew their country intimately.

Rather, hunter-gatherers engaged in purposeful travel to sites with which they familiar and able to source seasonally available food, water and shelter at variable times of year.

Another conspicuous weakness in Dark Emu’s approach, pinpointed by Sutton and Walshe, is Pascoe’s penchant for choosing exceptions to the general rule, implying that these atypical practices were widespread or universal. It’s another strategy to consolidate his argument but involves eliding vital information.

Pre-contact aquaculture

Pascoe offers two examples of “aquacultural” practice, one in Brewarrina (NSW) in the bed streams of the Barwon River, and the other in Lake Condah, in south-western Victoria.

He seizes on rock use in the Brewarrina fishery and Lake Condah’s fish and seasonal eel trapping as “proof” of Aboriginal people’s aqua/agricultural prowess — giving the impression they created these complex hydrological systems from scratch.

But Sutton writes, “The fish traps of Brewarrina … were not claimed as the ingenious works of human beings, but … regarded as having been put there in the Dreaming, by Dreamings.” Both he and Walshe readily acknowledge the fact that Aboriginal people use/d their human agency to create modifications. It’s not an either/or matter.

However, a chapter written by Walshe throws light on the seismic activity that forged Lake Condah’s unique terrain and waterways. This area, she writes, is part of

a volcanic system … last active … 9,000 years ago, with a major eruption much earlier, about 37,000 thousand years ago, causing a massive lava flow across the pre-existing drainage system.

The natural tilt southwards, she explains, facilitated “naturally formed ancient river channels … to reach the Southern Ocean”.

This enabled migratory fish to spawn. Fish, and at certain times of year, eels, swam through both fresh and salty water — making for ease of catching. Local Aboriginal people moved the heavy stones into semi-circular formations to enable netting, spearing or grabbing by hand, possibly creating further semi-captivity of these food staples.

In this way, hunter-gatherers consistently and constantly “value-added” to, or enhanced, nature’s creation.

Not a bunfight

Pascoe’s skilful editing of his sources involves conscious, deliberate intervention. Does he hope Dark Emu will convince people to change their belief in the noxious evolutionary ladder, once uniformly, but still sometimes, applied to different groups of homo sapiens?

Or was his book written to prove Aboriginal people were/are more like Europeans, which could perhaps lead to much needed progress on reconciliation? Perhaps that accounts for its rapturous reception by many Australians, especially the young.

Why not simply celebrate the long-term achievements of hunter-gatherers?

Hunter-gatherers worked in concert with the natural world, not against it as most humans do today, resulting in insoluble difficulties such as overcrowding, pandemics and toxic agricultural and aquacultural practices. Survival depends on this. For eons, it ensured the continuity and the continuing existence of Australia’s hunter-gatherer people and their culture.

Farmers or Hunter Gatherers? The Dark Emu Debate needs to be read carefully, keeping an open mind. The book’s focus is on both material and spiritual economies and their misrepresentation. Despite racist commentary from some, this isn’t an exclusively right or left-wing issue or a bunfight.

Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu will continue to be granted recognition, if not immortality. But Sutton and Walshe’s Dark Emu Debate will undoubtedly be acclaimed. As a critique of Pascoe’s book, it’s just about perfect — a volume with the twin virtues of rigour and readability.

Late in December, 2021, I also finished reading ‘Escape From Manus: The untold true story” by Jaivet Ealom; published in 2021; 347 pages.  A very disturbing read, which despite denials from some quarters, needs to be read and believed, as it confirms so many of the reports and feedback that have been denied by successive governments for almost two decades. It is a story that reflects very poorly on Australia’s so-called humanitarian policies towards refugees. If it wasn’t already shattered, this book certainly added to my personal disillusionment of government [Liberal in particular] policies and attitudes to the whole question of refugees and asylum seekers in our modern Australian society where all forms of empathy have been diluted by the forceful impressions ‘conned’ onto the population by pronouncements of government, and especially a succession of Immigration Ministers, with Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton being prime suspects in the enforcement of such harsh policies..

This book is a powerful account of how one man escaped the prison of Manus Island. A true story of bravery and resilience.  It’s the awe-inspiring story of the only person to successfully escape from Australia’s notorious offshore detention centre on Manus Island.
In 2013 Jaivet Ealom fled Myanmar’s brutal regime and anti-Muslim persecution,  and boarded a boat of asylum seekers bound for Australia. Instead of receiving refuge, he was transported  from Christmas Island, to Australia’s infamous Manus Regional Processing Centre.
Blistering hot days on the island turned into weeks, then years until, finally, facing either jail in Papua New Guinea or being returned to almost certain death in Myanmar, he took matters into his own hands. Drawing inspiration from the hit show Prison Break, Jaivet meticulously planned his escape. He made it out alive but was stateless, with no ID or passport. While the nightmare of Manus was behind him, his true escape to freedom had only just begun.
How Jaivet made it to sanctuary in Canada in a six-month-long odyssey by foot, boat, car and plane is miraculous. His story will astonish, anger and inspire you. It will make you reassess what it means to give refuge and redefine what can be achieved by one man determined to beat the odds.

From ABC Radio National, we learn that we’ve all heard stories of great escapes — soldiers cutting the wire or tunnelling under the fence of POW camps, and spies assuming new identities to evade the security services on their trail.  Here, we meet someone who’s done almost all of that.’  While Manus closed in late 2017, it was not before Jaivet’s audacious, and at times, distressing flight.  These days, Jaivet resides in Canada, where he has become a prominent spokesman for the Rohingya community. He is studying at Toronto University and works for a company that providers software to non-profit organisations.

Again, I include one specific review of the book which explains the content and the story.

From The Guardian [Australia], as reviewed by Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore, on 2 July, 2021

In 2013, when Jaivet Ealom sat squeezed in a boat with other asylum seekers, he prayed, not for the first time, for an easy death. They were far from shore off the coast of Indonesia, the vessel was sinking, and Ealom could not swim. Fishermen from a nearby island came to the rescue, hauling each passenger from the half-submerged vessel. Ealom was saved. But during the chaos, a small baby fell into the ocean. “It never resurfaced,” remembers Ealom. “[The mother] just screamed from the bottom of her lungs. It was traumatising.”

The event was just one of the horrors that Ealom faced in his long route to freedom: from persecution as a Rohingya Muslim in his homeland Myanmar, to three and a half years internment in Manus Island,  to his time living in a homeless shelter in Toronto, where he eventually settled.

Now Ealom’s book, Escape from Manus, tells the story of his journey. In particular, his six-month odyssey to flee the offshore detention centre using tricks he had learned from the TV series Prison Break, which involved, among other things, studying his guards’ movements and faking his identity.

Escape from Manus begins, though, in Myanmar, where Ealom was born a decade after the ruling military junta spearheaded increasingly barbaric controls over the country’s stateless Muslim minority.

“They were burning down whole entire villages, whole entire neighbourhoods,” recalls the 28-year-old University of Toronto student when we speak on the phone. “That was when we collectively decided in the family that those who could leave, should.”

Ealom fled to Jakarta before deciding he would try to make it to Australia. But, as he was at sea, the then prime minister Kevin Rudd declared that any asylum seekers arriving by boat without a visa would never be settled in the country. Ealom was detained first on Christmas Island, then on Manus.

The conditions on Manus were as bad as Myanmar. Ealom lived in a cramped modified shipping container, which roasted in the oppressive heat. His rancid food was filled with debris, including stones and human teeth. Locals attacked the compound, thinking that the asylum seekers were terrorists; they shot at his accommodation, leaving bullet holes in the walls, and forcing inmates to shelter behind their mattresses.

As he writes: “The prison looked and felt like the scene of a horror movie about a perverse site for human experimentation; a floodlit laboratory in the middle of nowhere.”

Worse than the physical discomfort, Ealom says, was the emotional strain: “In Burma the torture was physical: you only feel it when you are being tortured, you only suffer when you are being chased. But in Manus it was psychological, the torture is with you 24/7.”

The stress of indefinite detention, with no end in sight, led to a rash of asylum seekers trying to take their own lives, including Ealom. “There wasn’t even a private place to commit suicide,” he says, bitterly.

In 2017, Ealom decided, once again, he must flee. He had been served paperwork stating that he would either be returned to Myanmar – and, he feared, death or incarceration – or sent to prison in Papua New Guinea. The news was a wake-up call. He escaped Manus in May, in part by using tricks from Prison Break, including tracking his guards’ schedules. Then, slipping away at an opportune moment, he boarded a plane to Port Moresby.

Helping him were people working within the system. “There were good people among the guards,” he says. “Some didn’t realise it was this torture camp that they were signing up for.”

The Manus Island detention centre was found to be illegal by the PNG Supreme Court   in 2016 and forcibly shut in violent confrontation a year later. The detained men were moved to other centres in Manus province or to Port Moresby. In 2021, about 130 men remain held   in the PNG capital.

From Port Moresby, Ealom made his way to the Solomon Islands. There, in order to get a Solomon Islands passport, he spent months perfecting how to pass as a local, from learning Pijin, the local language, to chewing betel nuts, which stained his teeth a deep crimson.

Travel document in hand, using the last of his money, he bought a ticket to Toronto.

Ealom arrived on Christmas Eve 2018, with only a light jacket for warmth. He sought asylum and, after a stint sleeping on a homeless shelter floor, was finally granted refugee status.

“I didn’t know a single person here,” he says. “I didn’t have any idea two days prior where Canada was. It was the only place I could buy with the money and the only place with relatively easy visa requirements. I just took a leap of faith.”

It worked.

Proficient in English, Ealom is now finishing his degree and works at NeedsList, which matches the needs of victims of humanitarian crises with help using special software.

The aid sector “is always top to bottom”, he says. “It needs to be bottom up: we [should] identify what is needed on the ground so there is less waste.”

As for returning home to Myanmar, “given the Rohingya situation … is not going to get any better soon, I don’t see any opportunity,” he says. Plus, after all the years of waiting and frustration, of pain and plotting his escape, “I am satisfied with the life I am building in Canada.”

A small selection on this occasion, as follows:

• The Astonishing History of Ballarat: Vol. 1: 1851-1855 [Doug Bradby];
• ‘Sturt Street’ Ballarat’s Grand Boulevard, a credit to the city” [Doug Bradby];
• Australian Foreign Affairs, Issue 13; and,
•  ‘Falling Man’ [Don Delillo]

‘The Astonishing History of Ballarat: Volume 1: 1851-1855; by Doug  Bradby, published in 2018; 180 pages;  This was a fascinating little read in which the author draws on various newspaper reports, correspondence, etc, to bring a more intimate depiction of the early years of Ballarat, and the conditions under which the early gold diggers [later, miners] endured in those first few years after the gold discoveries.

From  Collins Booksellers, we read:  – “In 1851, Ballarat was a tranquil and beautiful valley. By 1855, it had become the thriving centre of the world’s largest alluvial goldfield. But how did such a feat occur when at the beginning, diggers had little or no knowledge of where to look for gold or how to extract it from the gravel and quartz? From finding specimens of gold at Poverty Point and Golden Point, to sinking 60-metre shafts through wet and dangerous earth, this book reveals the journey undertaken by the diggers as they mastered the complex Ballarat East goldfield in the exciting years of 1851-55. It was an astonishing intellectual and physical achievement. The diggers of Ballarat extracted an astonishing two million ounces of gold, and Ballarat would never be the same again.”

The author introduces each chapter with

• [1] a list  of intriguing questions examined in the chapter, and
• [2] the cast of characters referred to in the chapter.

 Many of the chapters end with a ‘Report Card’ on the progressive state of Ballarat at that time. Briefly, each chapter covers in broad terms the following topics, generally expressed in ac somewhat amusing fashion:

Chapter 1. 1848-50. The Discovery of Gold in the Port Phillip District.  How a shepherd found Victoria’s first gold but failed to produce a goldrush.
Chapter 2. The Discovery of Gold in Victoria. How a publican, a squatter, some more shepherds, a doctor, and an ex mailman, found the gold that produced the Victorian goldrush.
Chapter 3. The Discovery of Gold at Ballarat.  How the Ballarat gold field was discovered by Thomas Hiscock at Buninyong, and by old John Dunlop and young James Regan at Poverty Point, and by Old Tom Brown of Connor’s Party at Golden Point.
Chapter 4. The Genesis of Ballarat. How the diggers arrived, mined, lived, and governed themselves at Ballarat.
Chapter 5. The Exodus from Ballarat. Why the diggers left Ballarat when they had found less than 1% of Ballarat’s gold.
Chapter 6. The Monster Nuggets. Why Sarah Sands from Ballarat was introduced to Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle.
Chapter 7. Settling Down on Ballarat. How and why some diggers settled permanently at Ballarat as miners.
Chapter 8: Mining in the year of Eureka.  How the miners tackled the problems of shepherding and the mining consequences of the Eureka Stockade.
Chapter 9. The Gravel Pits. How the miners of Ballarat Flat learnt to work ‘in the water.’
Chapter10. Towards the Tableland. What the miners did when they hit a ‘wall of rock.’

‘Sturt Street’ Ballarat’s Grand Boulevard, a credit to the city”  by Doug Bradby, published in 2021, 32 pages.  Another fascinating look at a part of my ‘home town’ and one aspect of it’s history – some more interesting stories about the origins of Sturt Street, how it and the grid of streets around it were planned as they were [a sharp contrast to the eastern goldfield areas of the town], and the interesting stories of gold leads and sunken rivers under many parts of the central CBD area, and around the Sturt/Lydiard Streets intersection in particular.

The October 2021 edition of the  Australian Foreign Affairs [Issue 13] titled ‘India Rising’ Asia’s huge question, presented a number of essays dealing with subjects such as

• our next great and powerful friend?, based on an assumption that Australia can no longer depend on traditional allies such as the UK or the USA, but has become  part of a new polar arrangement;
• past reflections on reactions to Indians in Australia, as both  migrants and studentshere; and
• the views of Australia and India toward each other.

In essence, these and other examine the future of India, described as a rising giant whose unsteady growth and unpredictable political turns raise questions about its role and power in Asia. It  explores the challenge for Australia as it seeks to improve its faltering ties with the world’s largest democracy, a nation whose ascent – if achieved – could reshape the regional order.

This Issue also included a rather interesting historical perspective of former Prime Minister, Paul Keating [and his government’s ] interactions with Indonesia during the 1990’s, and the effect of those relationships, in particular on the tragedy, and future of ‘East Timor’

Finally, a comment on  ‘Falling Man’ by Don DeLillo, published in 2007, 246 pages  –  I had previously read  ‘Mao II’  by this author, and I should have taken heed of my brief comments about that earlier book before deciding to [purchase this one!!

About Mao II I wrote [back in March 1993] that “A lot different  to what I expected with the terrorist issue almost on the periphery of the story. At times difficult to follow the wanderings of the mind as portrayed through the writer, at other times,  very real and down-to-earth description of everyday events. A brilliant description of the funeral of Ayatollah Khamenei and of other events of that era  – described as the ‘cutting edge of modern fiction’!!”

In Falling Man –   which deals with the aftermath of 9/11 and it’s affect on a group of individuals, with again, the event itself – the falling of the towers, and the lives and feelings of the terrorists involved leading up to the event –  very much on the periphery of the book contents. To be honest, I found those aspects of the book the most interesting, while the lives and activities of the selected individuals, post 9/11 somewhat mundane. True, I guess the writer was using those characters as examples of the thousands of lives affected in many ways by the attack on the twin towers –  but personally,  as I read through it, I could feel myself thinking thoughts to the affect of ‘get on with it’ and ‘why do we have to be plagued with this rubbish’  –  the constant references to the poker games a prime example  that  ‘got up my goat’!!

Yet I imagine that the term ‘the cutting edge of literature’ would perhaps rightly be applied again in this case by true modern literary critics  – I bow to their professional qualities and viewpoints –  but the nature of that ‘literature’ just simply didn’t appeal to this reader. With the exception perhaps of the final few pages –  which actually got to the moment of impact and the ‘imaginary’ [though no doubt  real] scenarios that followed, as those in the Towers attempted their escape downwards, whether that was via the stairwells, or jumping to their inevitable deaths from the windows – the basis of the title ‘Falling Man’!!

At the time of this book’s publication [2007], DeLillo had published some 13 novels and 3 plays, so obviously his style of writing appeals to many.

However, to give readers the opportunity to determine the book’s value for themselves, the following is the basic description of the book as used in the promotion of it by various book sellers, and on the book’s jacket  –

“There is September 11 and then there are the days after, and finally the years. Falling Man is a magnificent, essential novel about the event that defines turn-of-the-century America. It begins in the smoke and ash of the burning towers and tracks the aftermath of this global tremor in the intimate lives of a few people.
First there is Keith, walking out of the rubble into a life that he’d always imagined belonged to everyone but him. Then Lianne, his estranged wife, memory-haunted, trying to reconcile two versions of the same shadowy man. And their small son Justin, standing at the window, scanning the sky for more planes.  These are lives choreographed by loss, grief and the enormous force of history”

And from  at least one professional reviewer, we read [appropriately enough] from the New York Times [27/5/2007] by Frank Rich

No matter where you stood in the city, the air was thick after the towers fell: literally thick with the soot and stench of incinerated flesh that turned terror into a condition as inescapable as the weather. All bets were off. New Yorkers who always know where they’re going didn’t know where to go. Cab drivers named Muhammad were now feared as the enemy within; strangers on the street were improbably embraced like family under a canopy of fliers for the missing. Such, for a while anyway, was the “new normal,” though the old normal began to reassert itself almost as soon as that facile catchphrase was coined. Today 9/11 carries so many burdens — of interpretation, of sentimentality, of politics, of war — that sometimes it’s hard to find the rubble of the actual event beneath the layers of edifice we’ve built on top of it. (Or built on top of all of it except ground zero.)

In his new novel, Don DeLillo shoves us back into the day itself in his first sentence: “It was not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near night.” He resurrects that world as it was, bottling the mortal dread, high anxiety and mass confusion that seem so distant now. Though the sensibility and prose are echt DeLillo, “Falling Man” is not necessarily the 9/11 novel you’d expect from the author of panoramic novels that probe the atomic age (“Underworld”) and the Kennedy assassination (“Libra”) on the broadest imaginable canvas, intermingling historical characters with fictional creations. With the exception of Mohamed Atta, who slips into the crevices of “Falling Man” as an almost spectral presence, DeLillo mentions none of the other boldface names of 9/11, not even the mayor. Instead of unfurling an epic, DeLillo usually keeps the focus on an extended family of middle-class Manhattanites. If “Underworld” took its cues from the kinetic cinema of Eisenstein, “Falling Man,” up until its remarkable final sequence, is all oblique silences and enigmatic close-ups reminiscent of the domestic anomie of the New Wave. In DeLillo’s hands, this is not at all limiting or prosaic. There’s a method to the Resnais-like fogginess. The cumulative effect is devastating, as DeLillo in exquisite increments lowers the reader into an inexorable rendezvous with raw terror.  Humor is not this novel’s calling card………………. The narrative ends in the rubble and it is left to us to create the counternarrative,” DeLillo wrote. “People running for their lives are part of the story that is left to us” because “they take us beyond the hard numbers of dead and missing and give us a glimpse of elevated being.” An event like 9/11 cannot be bent to “the mercies of analogy or simile.” Primal terror — “the cellphones, the lost shoes, the handkerchiefs mashed in the faces of running men and women” — has to take precedence over politics, history and religion. “There is something empty in the sky,” he wrote. “The writer tries to give memory, tenderness and meaning to all that howling space.”

This commentary refers to three very different books, though with a strong emphasis on history.

• ‘The Keeper of Miracles’ [Phillip Maisel];
• ‘Pride of Place: Exploring the Grimwade Collection’; and,
• Famous Visitors: To A Famous City, by Doug Bradby.

‘The Keeper of Miracles’ The memoir of a Holocaust survivor keeping alive the stories of his generation” by Phillip Maisel, published in 2020, 214 pages.  This was a  confronting book, but something that it is important, that current and future generations should not be allowed to forget.

Prior to writing this commentary, I posted a selection of quotations from the book, for the interest of my readers, as follows;

Some quotations to reflect upon:.

• ‘My job was to carry bags of cement and rails across to the site where they were building a narrow-gauge railway…The bags weighed twenty kilograms each, and I was already so weak from hunger I could barely lift them. If I were to stumble or fall, I would be shot on sight’.
• ‘More than three-quarters of a century after the Holocaust, the suffering of loved ones haunts me far more than the suffering I personally experienced’.
• ‘To have children  is the greatest joy a person can experience in life, and this fact is not lost on any survivor of the Holocaust. Hitler, and the hatred he inspired, tried to murder me and everyone like me.  He failed, and when I brought a child into the world, it was the only sensible   countermeasure to that kind of hatred. Love……To hold my daughters in my arms the day they were born.  To walk them to school on their first day, to walk them down the aisle on their wedding day. These moments are wonderful in the life of any parent, but imagine how precious they are to us survivors. When we were starving, freezing, and being tortured for no reason beyond hatred and prejudice, who could have imagined that life could be so good?’
• ‘But our suffering does not have to be in vain. The world must learn not to succumb to fear and hatred, not to allow cynical propagandists to commit atrocities in the name of belief…….I hope that now, my story will become part of yours. This is my greatest wish: to educate, to give people the tools they need to walk away from hatred.’

The only written response I received to these quotations stated that  “It’s a pity the author’s and his countrymen’s self-pity doesn’t extend to their near neighbours”

I was not 100% certain what the writer was getting at, and I didn’t ask –  I assume it was a reference to the current State of Israel and that nation’s attitude to it’s Palestinian ‘neighbours’ – that, if the case, I had some agreement with. However the words suggesting self-pity by the author – well I felt that was an offense to all current survivors to suggest they were indulging in self-pity – the aim of the book was to remind the world and future generations of the  unthinkable stories of triumph and tragedy, cruelty and hope – to demonstrate the cathartic power of storytelling, and to never underestimate the impact of human kindness balanced against human cruelties.  And to compare these survivors of Hitler’s hatred with the leaders of the current Israel nation is completely an unnecessary comparison – none of those leaders were likely even alive during World War II, and they would probably have almost as little true understanding of what happened, as we here on the other side of the world do..

Putting that aside, for or more than 30 years, Phillip Maisel worked selflessly to record the harrowing stories of Holocaust survivors.  Volunteering at Melbourne’s Jewish Holocaust Centre, Phillip listened tirelessly to their memories, preserved their voices and proven, and  time and time again, revealed just how healing storytelling can be. Each testimony of survival is a miracle in itself – earning Phillip the nickname ‘the Keeper of Miracles’.  But, for Phillip, confronting and overcoming trauma is also personal. A Holocaust survivor himself, he, too, has unthinkable stories of triumph and tragedy, cruelty and hope……………………………………

Published as Phillip turns 99, he said   ‘This is my responsibility and my privilege: to be custodian of their memories, to be able to pass their stories on to the next generation – for me, this will be the greatest miracle of all”.

From the Epilogue to his book, Maisel writes:

:It is important to remember that when we talk about the Holocaust, it is not only the history of what happened to the Jews. There were millions of victims from other religions, ethnic groups and minorities. It is their history too, all of the victims, as well as the history of the perpetrators and the collaborators. Each of their stories becomes a part of mine” [p. 209]

 ‘Pride Of Place’: Exploring the Grimwade Collection, edited by Alisa Bunbury: published in 2020:  Copy No. 193; 282 pages, my attention  initially drawn to the book from a review in the August issue  of Australian Book Review.  Russell Grimwade was born in 1879, less than fifty years after Europeans first settled in what was to become Victoria. His father was one half of the highly successful chemical and drug company Felton and Grimwade, formed in 1867.

This was another highly interesting ‘Coffee Table’ style book full of early Australian [European] history covering a whole range of genres – I guess like myself [though on a much smaller and cheaper scale] Grimwade was a collector with a broad spectrum of interests. Throughout the book, I continued to go back to my own situation, especially in relation to my own extensive book collection, and my thoughts about how I wanted to preserve that collection, beyond my passing!

Of special interest  to me were the sections relating to the early settlement years and beyond of Melbourne and district, and some of the early photos, eg, the 1855 depiction of ‘The City of Melbourne’, a hand-coloured etching and engraving painting [p.129] –  created less than twelve months after my Australian ancestors were married in the top end of Bourke Street, shown on the extreme right-hand side of the picture.

I was also interested in the descriptions and comments about the Victorian Black Thursday fires of 6 February, 1851 ‘which burnt perhaps one quarter of the nascent colony of Victoria’ [p.194-195]. The Suttie side of the family were up in the Boort area at the time and had recollections of that time.   Meanwhile, the artist, William Strutt [whose work is referred to at various stages in describing the Grimwade Collection] was quoted as recalling those fires  –  “ The heat had become so terrific early in the day that one felt almost unable  to move. At the breakfast table…was melted into oil, and bread…turned to rusk…Everything felt hot to the touch, even the window panes in the shade…The sun looked red all day, almost as blood, and the sky the colour of mahogany. We felt in town that something terrible [with the immense volumes of smoke] must be going on up country and sure enough messenger after messenger came flocking in with tales of distress and horror” [p.194].

The book also includes references and collections relating to Cook’s journals of his three voyages, accounts of early European discoveries, and the exploration and settlement of the Australian continent, and the early years of Victoria’s settlement and development.

In any case, the variety of interests which formed the basis of Grimwade’s collection was best described in an article from the Melbourne University Press, of 1^st December 2020. [and also reprinted in The Australian Arts Review of the 4^th February, 2021]:

‘The Russell and Mab Grimwade Bequest comprises a rich and sometimes unexpected variety of art, books and objects. A scientist, businessman and philanthropist, Sir Russell had wide-ranging interests embracing industry, history and botany. In all of these he was strongly supported by his wife Mab. The core of the bequest is Russell’s collection of visual and textual material, which provides a perspective on the European exploration of the Pacific and the British colonisation and settlement of Australia. His keen interest resulted in an extensive body of prints, drawings, watercolours and books, as well as oil paintings, decorative arts and personal records. These are jointly housed by the University of Melbourne’s Ian Potter Museum of Art, Special Collections (Library) and University Archives. Pride of Place is the first publication to explore the diversity of this remarkable collection. In this beautifully illustrated book, numerous experts share their interpretations of its highlights, responding to past historical attitudes and offering twenty-first century insights.

From the ‘Australian Book Review’ [ABR], August 2021:, the reviewer notes that   “Pride of Place describes in detail a selection of the outstanding collection of Australian books, paintings, photographs, and prints that Russell and Mabel Grimwade donated to the University of Melbourne. The main focus is on Russell, but they were clearly a team with shared interests in Australian native trees and plants and the European history of Australia”.

Most likely, Grimwade’s passion behind the development of his subsequent collection, was partially as a consequence of the fact that his talents and interests were so wide. As noted in the ABR review, ‘He served on numerous educational and cultural committees, travelled widely, and was a skilful amateur photographer. An early conservationist, he campaigned for the preservation of Australian forests. Using native  timbers, he  was a skilled wood worker and cabinet-maker..”  All of these things, and much more, including a strong interest in the botanical exploration of Australia from initial settlement years, are revealed through the descriptions of his collections.  The text, which accompanies all of the varied illustrations, describes the various items within the context of their time, and how these can be used by historians and scholars today.  And while it was not part of the University collection, Grimwade was responsible for the purchase of, and transfer to Australia of ‘Captain Cook’s Cottage’, now located in the Fitzroy Gardens, in Melbourne. The ABR does query the suspect link between Cook and Victoria – the cottage had belonged to his parents, and there is no evidence that Cook actually lived there?   There are various references to Cook’s voyages and findings, in the book, and the ABR suggests that Grimwade’s interest in the cottage  had to do with his collecting philosophy, his civic-minded philanthropy, and the general public consensus on what an historical monument was, something that is much contested today’.

As for the Editor, Alisa Bunbury has been Grimwade Collection Curator at the University of Melbourne since 2017. Prior to this she was Curator of Prints and Drawings at the National Gallery of Victoria and the Art Gallery of South Australia for many years. She has researched and curated exhibitions on numerous topics and now specialises in Australian colonial art. She also undertakes independent work and has received fellowships from State Library Victoria and the National Library of Australia.

Another valuable addition to my literary collection.

Famous Visitors : To A Famous City, edited by Doug Bradby, published in 2021, 32 pages.  This is another in the small historical series ‘Ten Delightful Tales’, with a new little edition coming out every two months. This little booklet talks  about a number of prominent persons who visited the city of Ballarat, in Victoria, from the times it was a gold  mining town of muck and mullock [early 1850s] to  the modern ‘Garden City’ of grandeur and beauty. An intriguing little publication, although I did note that a couple of the personalities mentioned didn’t ‘actually get to Ballarat’ but they were there ‘by association’ and the intention of a visit was there!!

I thought the following description published in the 25^th October edition of the ‘Golden Plains Times’, and written by Edwina Williams, does the best justice in describing this booklet.

‘Famous Visitors to a Famous City looks at the interesting people who historically took a trip to Ballarat in the 19th and 20th centuries, including Charles Kingsford Smith, ‘Wizard’ Stone, Agnes Grace, Sir John Monash, Robert Baden-Powell, Sir Douglas Mawson and Henry Parkes.

Bradby said the latest volume of his series is less analytical, and full of “gorgeous stories” that emphasise the joys of community life, and “mutual backslapping.”

“We said they were terrific, they said Ballarat was terrific, both sides were genuine, and everyone had a lovely day,” he said.

“Travel was risky, expensive and time consuming. If you were a visitor, there was something different about you; money and time.

“Visitors’ journeys were much the same, up Sturt Street, around the lake, to a few mines, and back to Craig’s Royal Hotel for dinner.”

Bradby said the most popular visitor was operatic soprano Dame Nellie Melba, who sang the city’s praises, and was “adored and loved” by the Ballarat people.

“She loved the South Street competitions, which were nationally important. They’d run into trouble financially… so she put on a concert, raising £800.

“She was brilliant with the press, saying ‘a day in Ballarat is the finest tonic in the world’,” Bradby said.

Captain John Bulwer Godfrey and his crew visited Ballarat during the gold rush, after a 77-day on-water journey from London via the ‘great circle route,’ past Antarctica.

The captain described the busy mining hub as an ‘ant heap.’

“He gave Ballarat the greatest possible compliment. He said, ‘this is more exciting than The Great Exhibition of London’,” Bradby said.

Prime Minister Joseph Cook stayed at Craig’s in August of 1917. It was in the hotel dining room on the evening of 2 August that he realised the magnitude of the upcoming First World War, and that Australia’s involvement was unavoidable.

Katie Gold, a stewardess on the Titanic, arrived in Ballarat three months after the liner sank, to be with her uncles.

She was the last woman to be rescued from the ship, finding safety in the final lifeboat, number 11.’

At the beginning of October this year, I completed a read of the ‘Selected Writings of Inga Clendinnen, edited by James Boyce [published 2021; 392 pages].  I’d not previously read anything of this historian and writer and after reading this publication, regretted that fact.

My attention was drawn to the book by a review [written by Tom Griffiths] which appeared in the June 2021 issue of the Australian Book Review.  Griffith is Emeritus Professor of History at the Australian National University and Chair of the Editorial Board of the Australian Dictionary of Biography.  Griffith’s introduction and the topics covered in the selection drew this reader right in.  He wrote: 

‘It is wonderful to immerse oneself for days in the precise, elegant, passionate words of historian Inga Clendinnen (1934–2016), as this welcome collection of her writings enables one to do. Clendinnen’s distinctive voice comes through: warm, confidential, witty, and driven by a fierce intelligence. All her major writings are here – essays, articles, lectures, memoirs, and extracts from her books – deftly selected by James Boyce, a historian thirty years younger than Clendinnen and himself a highly original thinker and writer. As Boyce observes in his perceptive introduction, ‘Clendinnen’s subject was nothing less than human consciousness’.

I obviously didn’t take that quotation in completely, as it wasn’t until after I’d finished the book, that I realised Inga was no longer with us, having died in 2016!

As for the subject nature of her writings in the selection [of which there are various topics included] those which attracted me initially related to the early encounters of Australia’s Indigenous people’s  with the authorities [and convicts mainly] who arrived on the First Fleet in 1788;  the early European conquests and encounters with the Mesoamerican Aztecs, early Mexican ‘natives’, and the crisis of those times in the Yucatin; and thirdly, her writings on Nazi Germany, especially in relation to the purpose of, and operations of the Nazi concentration and death camps.

Clendinnen has been described as one of Australia’s greatest writers and thinkers, an internationally celebrated historian and highly original thinker, who through her writings, and lectures, compelled readers or listeners to re-examine accepted histories from new angles, and that aim quickly becomes evident in the subjects mentioned above. Her writing has been described by numerous reviewers and book publishers in terms of an ‘attractive conversational style, with Clendinnen treating her readers as confidants, even collaborators, as she muses over historical dilemmas’.  And as she worked through those ‘dilemmas’, she addressed her readers or listeners as equals, as though they were working with her to solve and explain the mysteries of the past. In one of Clendinnen’s own statements, she’s quoted – “I … think my readers are as enthralled by the tough issues as I am,” she writes. “ ‘Popular history’ need not mean – must not mean – dumbed-down history.”

Having said that, I must admit that at times ‘she lost me’  – she was moving too fast, or perhaps introducing so many different and varied ideas in a short space, that I occasionally had difficulty keeping up with her’!  Though that is more likely a refection on myself, rather than Inga’s style of communication!

Clendinnen’s work focused on social history, and the history of cultural encounters. She was considered an authority on Aztec civilisation and pre-Columbian ritual human sacrifice.  She also wrote on the Holocaust, and on first contacts between Indigenous Australians and white explorers. Interestingly, she didn’t learn to read until she was 8 years old, and also came to writing late.  After years of successful academic studies,  Clendinnen would hold  the post of senior tutor of History at the University of Melbourne from 1955 to 1968, was a lecturer at La Trobe University from 1969 to 1982, and was then a senior lecturer in History until 1989.. She was forced to curtail her academic activities after contracting hepatitis in 1991, and began working on her memoir, Tiger’s Eye, which focused on issues of illness and death.

In his review, James Boyce wrote that Clendinnen’s ‘ability to write serious history for a general readership was unrivalled in this country … Her writings are an enduring testament to the truth that while we might “live within the narrow moving band of time we call the present … the secret engine of our present is our past, with its plastic memories, its malleable moralities, its wreathing dreams of desirable futures”.’ 

A comment from the Sydney Morning Herald, in May 2021 noted that  “ At first glance, Inga Clendinnen’s career as a historian is disorientatingly diverse. Having distinguished herself as a specialist in Meso-American studies, she shifted her focus to Australian history, her personal experience of illness, and then to the Holocaust. This selection of her writings [by James Boyce]  captures the underlying principles that were constants in all her work –  the importance of emotion, imagination and ethics in illuminating the past, and the belief that history can be conducive to “civic virtue”. The opening piece is a dazzling master class in her method. We are invited to witness an encounter between a pregnant Indigenous woman and a group of French explorers on a beach in 1801, and to enter into the colliding realities and worldviews that still reverberate in our understanding of ourselves as Australians.

On that latter instance, the explorers meant nor did any harm to the woman [or so they believed] who had been deserted by her countrymen when the explorers arrived –  they examined her, realising she was pregnant, and attempted to give her presents, afterwards, reporting back to France on the innocence of their encounter with the woman, who when they realised how frightened and crying she was, took leave of her, and watched as she crawled back into the bush, leaving behind the gifts they’d attempted to give to her. Clendinnen asks us to consider the following:

‘What is terrifying is that we do not know, even as we watch her press herself into the sand, as we watch her crawling away. We see her body, but we do not see her mind. What did she think was happening as she felt the hands of these very material apparitions? What did she think was happening to the child in her belly, the child she was desperately trying to protect from their sight and touch? And later, when she crept back to her people, how was she received? Was she received at all? Was she shunned? Was she killed? They would have been watching what happened. They would have seen her hanging in those strange bleached hands. What did they think had happened to the child in her belly?  Did they decide to kill it, too?  And the man who fled in terror, abandoning his pregnant woman to the strangers. Where would he find his manhood now?  We don’t know the answer to any of these questions.  All we do know is that no harm was intended, and that harm was almost certainly done…..We don’t know the woman’s story at all…” [p.16-17].

That’s a brief example of Clendinnen’s questioning of history – some other areas covered in this selection include:

• Why did a group of Indigenous people suddenly spear Governor Phillip, a man with whom some of them were on decidedly friendly terms?
• How was Cortés able to conquer Mexico so quickly with only a handful of soldiers?
• What motivated the Auschwitz SS to conduct elaborate parade drills with inmates they’d already reduced to living skeletons?
• She also examines from a personal perspective,  her own illness and liver transplant [in the early 1990s],  both before, during and post-surgery, and the trauma of organ transplants waiting lists  in general from the recipient’s experience.  Griffiths notes that at that time that ‘As she lay in a noisy shared hospital ward waiting for a liver transplant, her writing became a desperate means of escape and survival, a kind of private therapy. From that traumatic transformation, she unfolded herself from a chrysalis into a new state of being’.

Incidentally, when Clendinnen became the recipient of a liver transplant, she expressed great faith in the fact that in Australia “it’s strictly democratic … you can’t buy your way into the queue.”  She had to wait for that liver like any other potential recipient!

I include here another quotation from the selected writings. In a house in Elsternwick, Melbourne, there is [or was] a constructed model of the Treblinka Nazi camp. This camp, described by one observer as ‘Nazism in full flower’ had a short life – one of four Nazi camps exclusively dedicated to ‘murder’. It was the last to be built, the first to be closed, and afterwards was completely ‘obliterated’, the earth ploughed and a farm house built on the site.  ‘Treblinka received its first transport [from the Warsaw ghetto] on 23 July, 1942 and its last in October of 1943. In its brief life of fourteen months, the Treblinka camp processed 900,000 living bodies into smoke, grease and ashes’ [p. 246].

In her usual style of questioning, Clendinnen writes:

‘What the model shows most clearly is how easy mass murder is when emptied of human scruple and emotion. Except for the jocular attempts to deceive the more gullible among its victims [the arch above the station entrance read ‘Rehabilitation and Work-Camp for Jews’], Treblinka might as well have been an abattoir. 

Chaim Sztajer’s model reveals only externals.  It cannot show us the horror behind wood and metal; what happened inside the trains, what happened inside the buildings. Deportees were brought to the camp in sealed trains, Western Jews typically in ‘normal’ if overcrowded carriages, easterners crammed into cattle trucks with the doors nailed shut and every residual aperture stuffed with barbed wire. They were given no food or water for the duration of the passage, there were no sanitary provisions, and these trains, with nil priority on the track, travelled slowly.  The journey from Warsaw, normally a two-hour trip, could take up to twelve hours when the cargo was Jews and the destination Treblinka. We do not see what happened inside the trains.  We do not see the frantic haste of the team of work-Jews scouring those incoming cars of the filth of their human cargo to make way for the next set. [The camp siding could only take twenty cars at a time: most trains pulled sixty].

The model shows us a token litter of clothing and possessions in the sorting yard.  We do not see the mountains of clothing and boots, blankets and foodstuffs which rose up with the arrival of the richest trains.  We do not see the desperate intricacy of the lives lived inside the oblong wooden boxes labelled ‘Living Quarters for Work-Jews’, or the very different lives lived within the boxes named ‘For Ukrainian Guards’ and ‘SS”.  We do not see inside the undressing barracks – the bewilderment, the humiliation of nakedness, the mounting dread. We do not see the numb waiting inside the gas chambers, or the clambering, choking, panic.  We do not hear the screams..’ [p.248-49].

One could go on with that and/or the other subjects which Clendinnen peruses – the Sydney Morning Herald described her as  “both a moralist with an intense psychological feeling for the inflections of cruelty and the reality of human suffering and someone who saw something like the artistic impulse as central to every human and social enigma. To read her is to encounter an intelligence, at once impassioned and fierce, which is a bit like a great critic who has somehow, as if in a dream, found that no book or painting, but the world itself, is her text”.

In her lengthy treatises on the Mesoamerican explorations, she takes us not only into the motivations of the Spanish ‘invaders’, but examines the historical conflicts and cruelties and sacrificial practices between and within the Aztec and native Mexican peoples of those lands –   comparing the incomprehensible refusal of the Aztecs to accept defeat, while in contrast, the native Mexicans accepted dominance and suppression by the Europeans as a normal course of their life cycle –  admittedly, that’s a very basic and simple description of Clendinnen’s long discourses on those subjects!

 Griffiths reminds us that  Clendinnen inducted her readers into the wonders of historical thinking. He also suggests that “There are also clear correspondences between her studies of the Aztec Empire’s confronting culture of human sacrifice and her reflections on the horrors of the Holocaust. Clendinnen constantly fought against the sickening of curiosity and imagination  in the face of bureaucratic brutality and systematic murder. Empathy and intuition failed her as a means of accessing such past experiences”.

While much of what Clendinnen writes [as far as this selection indicates] could be described  as horror stories, which in many cases they are at different levels,  I believe it’s clear that a more precise reading, particularly of her books,  are worth following through on. Apart from various essays and articles, those books are:

• Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatán, 1517-1570 (1987)
• Aztecs: An Interpretation (1991)
• Reading the Holocaust (1998)
• True Stories (1999)
• Tiger’s Eye: A Memoir (2000)
• Dancing with Strangers: Europeans and Australians at First Contact (2003)
• True Stories: History, Politics, Aboriginality (2008) (2nd ed.)
• The Cost of Courage in Aztec Society: Essays on Mesoamerican Society and Culture (2010)

This Issue covers a number of books [24 in total] that the writer read over the period November 2020 to early July, 2021, and generally consists of brief comments on the book in question by myself, followed by a selection of professional and other reviews from various sources, all of which are acknowledged.  Books covered are listed below in order to enable readers to select those which may be of interest to them.

Books reviewed and referred to in the following order,  are:

• Chalet Monet by Richard Boyngne;
• Picturing the Pacific: Joseph Banks and the Shipboard Artists of Cook and Flinders’ by James Taylor;
• ‘The Queen’s Tiger’ by Peter Watt;
• ‘The Queen’s Captain’ by Peter Watt, 
• ‘Looking for Rose Paterson: How Family Bush Life Nurtured Banjo the Poet’  by Jennifer Gall, 
• ‘Merry Christmas: From Historic Ballarat, by Doug Bradley;
• The Golden Maze: A Biography of Prague’ by Richard Fidler;
• ‘The Stationery Shop of Tehran’ by Marjan Kamali:;
• ‘The Awakening: The Dragon Heart Legacy’  by Nora Roberts,
•  ‘How I Clawed My Way To The Middle’ by John Wood.,
• ‘A Passionate life’ by Ita Buttrose’;
• ‘Sea of Dangers: Captain Cook and His Rivals’ by Geoffrey Blainey
• Persuasion’  by Jane Austin’;
• ‘Story of Ireland: In search of a New National Memory’ by Neil Hegarty’,
•  ‘Lydiard Street: The Goldfield Grandeur of Ballarat [Doug Bradley],
• ‘Eucalyptus’ by Murray Bail
• ‘The Saddler Boys’ by Fiona Palmer,
• Writers on Writers: Thomas Keneally by Stan Grant;
• ‘Ten Delightful Tales: Lake Wendouree: ‘Pleasing to the Eye, Satisfying to the Soul’, introduced by Doug Bradby’;
• ‘The Reformation in England’ Vol 2  by J.H.Merle d’Aubigne,
• ‘The Tavern on Maple Street’ by Sharon Owens,
• ‘Breaker Morant’ by Peter FitzSimons
• ‘New Guinea: Nature and Culture of Earth’s Grandest Island by Bruce M. Beehier, photography by Tim Laman,
• ‘The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet’ by Colleen McCullough,

15^th November 2020

 ‘Chalet Monet’, an intriguing beautiful book about the home of the late Joan Sutherland, and Richard Boyngne   [delivered from Angus & Robertson on 11^th November, the cost of which partially contributed via birthday gift from Heather]. A magnificent addition to one’s library shelves, written by a man who loved his wife, and after her passing, has grown to love the beautiful home, which he proudly shares with the world.  A book, essentially a ‘coffee table’ book, beautifully put together – called ‘Chalet Monet’, featuring written and pictorial descriptions of the home in Switzerland of the late Dame Joan Sutherland and Richard Bonynge [who still lives there].  It is a treasure of a book –  and I’m already worrying about what will happen to it ‘after I’m gone’ 

After reading it, I don’t feel so bad about having prints. paintings and bookshelves around the walls here – in the Bonynge home of 3 or more stories, every wall space, nook and cranny is covered with paintings, photographs, statues, and myriad collections of figurines, etc,  He has collected objects of historic and artistic value from around the world, not just from exclusive sellers, but op shops, auctions, and so on. Joan Sutherland was not such a collector, but she obviously tolerated her husband’s ‘hobby’ when he wasn’t making and creating music and musicians. As you probably have gathered, I consider this book a prized possession!!

14th December, 2020

‘Picturing the Pacific:Joseph Banks and the Shipboard Artists of Cook and Flinders’ by James Taylor, published in  2018, 255 pages.

I found this a fascinating book from the view of the various paintings, etc, but it was not an easily read book – factual, but very detailed, with long references to many artists, shipping identities, and persons of the times  –  fascinating history, but too much detail and names, etc, to fully take in a complete knowledge of the contents. Nevertheless, a worthy addition to my art & history collection, and pleased that I’d made the purchase.

From Booktopia:

For over 50 years between the 1760s and the early 19th century, the pioneers who sailed from Europe to explore the Pacific brought back glimpses of this new world in the form of oil paintings, watercolours and drawings – a sensational view of a part of the world few would ever see. Today these works represent a fascinating and inspiring perspective from the frontier of discovery.
It was Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society, who popularised the placement of professional artists on British ships of exploration. They captured striking and memorable images of everything they encountered- exotic landscapes, beautiful flora and fauna, as well as remarkable portraits of indigenous peoples. These earliest views of the Pacific, particularly Australia, were designed to promote the new world as enticing, to make it seem familiar, to encourage further exploration and, ultimately, British settlement……………………………………………………………………………
Drawing on both private and public collections from around the world, this lavish book collects together oil paintings, watercolours, drawings, prints and other documents from those voyages, and presents a unique glimpse into an age where science and art became irrevocably intwined. 
About the Author:  Dr James Taylor, FRSA studied at the Universities of St Andrews, Manchester and Sussex. He is an accredited lecturer for the National Association of Fine and Decorative Arts; a former curator of paintings, drawings and prints, organiser of exhibitions and galleries and corporate membership manager at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich; and Victorian paintings specialist with Phillips Fine Art Auctioneers. He is an avid collector of artist-drawn picture postcards.

30th December, 2020

 ‘The Queen’s Tiger’ by Peter Watt, published in 2019; 360 pages

Another great read by this historical novelist –  this was Book 2 of 3 – it was a pity that it was so long ago since I read Book 1 as it took a while to pick up the threads of the current storyline and characters from the first book which I’d thoroughly enjoyed.

• ‘One of Australia’s best historical fiction authors’ Canberra Weekly; Peter Watt brings to the fore all the passion, adventure and white-knuckle battle scenes that made his beloved Duffy and Macintosh novels so popular. It is 1857. Colonial India is a simmering volcano of nationalism about to erupt.
• Peter Watt brings to the fore all the passion, adventure and white-knuckle battle scenes that made his beloved Duffy and Macintosh novels so popular.  It is 1857. Colonial India is a simmering volcano of nationalism about to erupt. Army surgeon Peter Campbell and his wife Alice, in India on their honeymoon, have no idea that they are about to be swept up in the chaos.  Ian Steele, known to all as Captain Samuel Forbes, is fighting for Queen and country in Persia. A world away, the real Samuel Forbes is planning to return to London – with potentially disastrous consequences for Samuel and Ian both.  Then Ian is posted to India, but not before a brief return to England and a reunion with the woman he loves. In India he renews his friendship with Peter Campbell, and discovers that Alice has taken on a most unlikely role. Together they face the enemy and the terrible deprivations and savagery of war – and then Ian receives news from London that crushes all his hopes…

2^nd January, 2021

 ‘The Queen’s Captain’ by Peter Watt,  published in 2020; 358 pages……Another thoroughly interesting and entertaining read, with a strong historical flavour as are all of Watt’s novels  [all of which I now possess and have read].  While his stories are not quite in the same category as those of Peter Fitzsimons or his fellow Australian author Tom Keneally  –  fictionized accounts of precise historical individuals or events –  I find their connection to historical events of the past, particularly involving Australia’s history, to be a strong incentive for me to want to learn more about that specific historical occasion, not always pleasant reading about the brutality of wars, or early British settlement, but nevertheless, always a worthwhile read.

From Booktopia:  In October 1863, Ian Steele, having taken on the identity of Captain Samuel Forbes, is fighting the Pashtun on the north-west frontier in India. Half a world away, the real Samuel Forbes is a lieutenant in the 3rd New York Volunteers and is facing the Confederates at the Battle of Mission Ridge in Tennessee. Neither is aware their lives will change beyond recognition in the year to come.
In London, Ella, the love of Ian’s life, is unhappily married to Count Nikolai Kasatkin. As their relationship sours further, she tries to reclaim the son she and Ian share, but Nikolai makes a move that sees the boy sent far from Ella’s reach………………………………………
As 1864 dawns, Ian is posted to the battlefields of the Waikato in New Zealand, where he comes face to face with an old nemesis. As the ten-year agreement between Steele and Forbes nears its end, their foe is desperate to catch them out and cruel all their hopes for the future..

10^th January, 2021

This morning  I finished reading one of Heather’s Christmas presents  –  ‘Looking for Rose Paterson: How Family Bush Life Nurtured Banjo the Poet’  by Jennifer Gall,  published by the National Library in 2017; 200 pages

An interesting book, and a particular interest to me –  the areas relating to life in the rural areas during the 1800s of women in particular. Some interesting quotations, which I would use in my James Kennedy Kirk family file  –  had myself wondering if Jane Agnes Suttie had similar experiences.

From Goodreads.

Rose was the mother of famous Australian poet Banjo Paterson (known as Barty as a boy) and, yet, very little has been written about her. As wife of pastoral station manager Andrew Bogle Paterson, Rose’s married life was lived under straitened financial circumstances, something that a woman of her class would not have expected. At Illalong station, near Yass, in New South Wales, Rose was isolated—geographically and socially. Andrew was frequently away, leaving Rose to manage on her own in their dilapidated slab house, often with no domestic help and often in harsh weather conditions. Her existence was punctuated by multiple pregnancies and childbirth, organising her seven children and their education and labouring over the never-ending chores. Looking for Rose Paterson places Rose within the broader context of Australian life in the 1870s and the 1880s, enabling us to develop an appreciation of her struggles and joys all the more.
Rose was a prolific letter writer and through the letters that have survived—a series to her sister Nora between 1873 and 1888—life in nineteenth-century rural Australia comes alive. We get to know Rose and come to understand the environment that shaped her son, Banjo, and influenced his development as a balladeer. 

From Booktopia.

Rose was the mother of famous Australian poet Banjo Paterson (known as Barty as a boy) and, yet, very little has been written about her. As wife of pastoral station manager Andrew Bogle Paterson, Rose’s married life was lived under straitened financial circumstances, something that a woman of her class would not have expected. At Illalong station, near Yass, in New South Wales, Rose was isolated-geographically and socially. Andrew was frequently away, leaving Rose to manage on her own in their dilapidated slab house, often with no domestic help and often in harsh weather conditions.
Her existence was punctuated by multiple pregnancies and childbirth, organising her seven children and their education and labouring over the never-ending chores. Looking for Rose Paterson places Rose within the broader context of Australian life in the 1870s and the 1880s, enabling us to develop an appreciation of her struggles and joys all the more.

Rose was a prolific letter writer and through the letters that have survived-a series to her sister Nora between 1873 and 1888-life in nineteenth-century rural Australia comes alive. We get to know Rose and come to understand the environment that shaped her son, Banjo, and influenced his development as a balladeer.

21^st January, 2021

Later this afternoon, I read ‘Merry Christmas: From Historic Ballarat, by Doug Bradley, just 28 pages –  another of the little gifts Heather gave me last Monday.

31^st January, 2021

This morning, before I went into town, I finished reding ‘The Golden Maze: A Biography of Prague’ by Richard Fidler, published in 2020, 580 pages.

This covers roughly the timeline period from c. 500BC  to 2011. An intriguing book, perhaps the earlier decades a little more difficult to follow as compared with the events of the 16^th and 20^th centuries, but in total, a story of domination, subjugation, apparent freedom, quickly reversed as new ‘rulers’ moved in. I guess I found the period  representing my own lifetime from post-World War II the most interesting, and also most disturbing  –  certainly from the 1960s, I would have read generally about the political events from that part of the world, but blindly, or sadly, didn’t really take in the true significance of what was happening. Like so many other parts of the world, here in the comfort and relative safety of Australia, on the other side of world,  we could really live in the shoes of this case, the people of Czechoslovakia [now two nations] and have any real understanding of what was happening in countries like that.

So this book was a real education and a wake-up call – and as I have said on previous reviews, created the desire to learn more about the histories, long past and more recent, of many countries and cities around the world. I wish I’d generated that kind of desire 50 years ago  –  I fear now, I’m running out of time to learn all that I would like to digest!!

From Booktopia: – book summary

Beloved ABC broadcaster and bestselling author of Ghost Empire and Saga Land, Richard Fidler is back with a personally curated history of the magical city that is Prague.
In 1989, Richard Fidler was living in London as part of the provocative Australian comedy trio The Doug Anthony All Stars when revolution broke out across Europe. Excited by this galvanising historic, human, moment, he travelled to Prague, where a decrepit police state was being overthrown by crowds of ecstatic citizens. His experience of the Velvet Revolution never let go of him.
Thirty years later Fidler returns to Prague to uncover the glorious and grotesque history of Europe’s most instagrammed and uncanny city: a jumble of gothic towers, baroque palaces and zig-zag lanes that has survived plagues, pogroms, Nazi terror and Soviet tanks. Founded in the ninth Century, Prague gave the world the golem, the robot, and the world’s biggest statue of Stalin, a behemoth that killed almost everyone who touched it.
Fidler tells the story of the reclusive emperor who brought the world’s most brilliant minds to Prague Castle to uncover the occult secrets of the universe. He explores the Black Palace, the wartime headquarters of the Nazi SS, and he meets victims of the communist secret police. Reaching back into Prague’s mythic past, he finds the city’s founder, the pagan priestess Libussa who prophesised: I see a city whose glory will touch the stars.
Following the story of Prague from its origins in medieval darkness to its uncertain present, Fidler does what he does so well – curates an absolutely engaging and compelling history of a place. You will learn things you never knew, with a tour guide who is erudite, inquisitive, and the best storyteller you could have as your companion.
About the Author,  Richard Fidler presents ‘Conversations with Richard Fidler’, an in-depth, up-close-and-personal interview program broadcast across Australia on ABC Radio. It is one of the most popular podcasts in Australia, with over five million downloaded programs every month. Richard is the author of the bestselling book Ghost Empire.

A couple of  individual reviews of the book.

• ][1]  Richard Fidler doesn’t write the history of particular eras – he writes histories of places. He has a way of giving life and humanity to these histories which can often be missing, with locations becoming characters with their own struggles and triumphs across time.
  The Golden Maze, his third such novel following Ghost Empire (Istanbul) and Sagaland (Iceland), focuses on making the Czech capital of Prague a living, breathing entity. He takes us from the city’s mythological birth, to the darkness of Medieval Europe, through to its countless occupations. He sets up the foundations of city, then populates it with the stories of a colourful array of historical figures, those who by turns are hapless, dedicated, cruel and revolutionary. Bohemian heroes from Jan Hus, Saint/Kings Wenceslas and Kafka are balanced with the stories of outsiders like Einstein and Ginsberg being charmed by its mystery.
  Fidler aims to show how the Czech people have suffered countless tyrannies due their unique geographical and cultural location among ‘greater’ powers – the struggles of the Reformation, the at times tyrannical Hapsburg rule in Holy Roman Empire, the sharp cruelty Nazi occupation, and the crushing totalitarian rule of the Soviets – they’ve seen it all, yet are never at the centre of historical discussion due to being a so-called ‘minor’ player in world events. This book shows that every little act can be revolutionary, no matter how much history may ignore it.
  If nothing else, I can say that with The Golden Maze, Fidler has completed his trifecta of deeply engaging and personal historical accounts.[Nick]
• [2] ‘I see a great city. Its glory will touch the stars.’
  Richard Fidler’s first experience of Prague was in 1989, during the Velvet Revolution. Thirty years later, he returned to uncover and write the history of this fascinating city.
  I have never visited Prague, and while I know aspects of its history, there were gaping holes in my knowledge. I read about Libussa, who prophesied a great city. I read about kings and emperors, triumphs, and tragedies. I explored gothic towers and baroque palaces, remembered the history of the Winter King and Winter Queen of Bohemia. I learned that Prague gave the world both the golem and the robot, as well as the world’s biggest statue of Stalin (now destroyed).
  The first half (roughly) of the book takes us from pre-history, through medieval times, to 1935. A mixed and rich history, with highlights of culture and science. There were also two denefestrations (in 1419 and 1618), plague as well as periods of both religious tolerance and unrest. I was interested in the history of the Jewish Renaissance in Prague during the sixteenth century.
  The second half of the book focusses on the turmoil of the twentieth century, from when Czechoslovakia ceased to exist, to the present. From the terror of the Nazis, the control by the Soviet, the Velvet Revolution and an uncertain future.
  There are almost forty pages of bibliography and endnotes for those readers who, having read this book, want more information.
  A fascinating biography of a city. [Jennifer Cameron-Smith]

The book was reviewed by Christopher Menz, in the October 2020 edition of the ‘Australian Book Review’  That review began with   –  “On May Day 1955, two years after his death, a colossal memorial to Joseph Stalin was unveiled on a prominent site north of central. Towering above the city and containing 14,000 tons of granite, it was the largest statue of the dictator ever created. Stalin was depicted at the head of a representative group of citizens, dubbed by some as a bread queue. Otakar Švec, a prominent Czech sculptor, had won the commission in 1949. After the work’s stressful gestation, he killed himself shortly before the work was unveiled; there had been constant interference and police surveillance, and his wife committed suicide in 1954.”

1^st February, 2021

The Stationery Shop of Tehran’ by Marjan Kamali: published in 2019,  312 pages.  A country in turmoil. A love story just beginning.  Another of my personal favourite genres – historical fiction –  and while basically a non-fiction novel, the story of life in Iran around 1953 and beyond was yet another historical education in events of my lifetime in a part of the world far removed from life here in Australia.

From Goodreads review

• A poignant, heartfelt new novel by the award-nominated author of Together Tea that explores loss, reconciliation, and the quirks of fate.
  Roya, a dreamy, idealistic teenager living amid the political upheaval of 1953 Tehran, finds a literary oasis in kindly Mr. Fakhri’s neighborhood stationery shop, stocked with books and pens and bottles of jewel-colored ink.
  Then Mr. Fakhri, with a keen instinct for a budding romance, introduces Roya to his other favorite customer—handsome Bahman, who has a burning passion for justice and a love for Rumi’s poetry—and she loses her heart at once. Their romance blossoms, and the little stationery shop remains their favorite place in all of Tehran.
  A few short months later, on the eve of their marriage, Roya agrees to meet Bahman at the town square when violence erupts—a result of the coup d’etat that forever changes their country’s future. In the chaos, Bahman never shows. For weeks, Roya tries desperately to contact him, but her efforts are fruitless. With a sorrowful heart, she moves on—to college in California, to another man, to a life in New England—until, more than sixty years later, an accident of fate leads her back to Bahman and offers her a chance to ask him the questions that have haunted her for more than half a century: Why did you leave? Where did you go? How is it that you were able to forget me?

From Simon & Schuster

• 1953, Tehran. Roya loves nothing better than to while away the hours in the local stationery shop run by Mr. Fakhri. The store, stocked with fountain pens, shiny ink bottles, and thick pads of writing paper, also carries translations of literature from all over the world. And when Mr. Fakhri introduces her to his other favorite customer — handsome Bahman, with his burning passion for justice and a shared love for Rumi’s poetry — Roya loses her heart at once. But around them, life in Tehran is changing.
  On the eve of their marriage, Roya heads to the town square to meet with Bahman. Suddenly, shockingly, violence erupts: a coup d’etat that forever changes their country’s future. Bahman never arrives.  Roya must piece her life back together. Her parents, wanting her to be safe, enroll her in college in California, where she meets and marries another man. But, nearly sixty years later, an accident of fate finally brings her the answer she has always wanted to know – Why did you leave? Where did you go? How is it that you were able to forget me?
  Marjan Kamali’s beautiful novel, set in a country poised for democracy but destroyed by political upheaval, explores issues that have never been more timely, of immigration and cultural assimilation, of the quirks of fate. And its ending will break readers’ hearts.
  ‘Kamali paints an evocative portrait of 1950s Iran and its political upheaval, and she cleverly writes the heartbreak of Roya and Bahman’s romance to mirror the tragic recent history of their country. Simultaneously briskly paced and deeply moving, this will appeal to fans of Khaled Hosseini and should find a wide audience’
• ‘Evocative, devastating, and hauntingly beautiful … explores love’s power to transcend time and distance, and the ways fate can tear people apart and bring them back together. This book broke my heart again and again’
  Whitney Scharer, author of THE AGE OF LIGHT
• ‘What a pleasure — a novel that is all at once masterfully plotted, beautifully written, and populated by characters who are arresting, lovable and so real’
  Elinor Lipman, author of TURPENTINE LANE;
•  ‘A beautiful and sensitive novel that I loved from the first page’
  Alyson Richman, international bestselling author of THE LOST WIFE
• ‘A beautifully immersive tale … brings to life a lost and complex world and the captivating characters who once called it home’Jasmin Darznik, New York Times bestselling author of THE GOOD DAUGHTER and SONG OF A CAPTIVE BIRD
• ‘A sweeping romantic tale of thwarted love’
  KIRKUS REVIEWS
• ‘The unfurling stories  … will stun readers as the aromas of Persian cooking wafting throughout convince us that love can last a lifetime. For those who enjoy getting caught up in romance while discovering unfamiliar history of another country’
  LIBRARY JOURNAL
• ‘Grab your tissues… Set among the political upheaval of 1950s Tehran, The Stationery Shop follows teenager Roya as she discovers the power of love, loss, and then, decades later, fate.
  BOSTON MAGAZINE
• ‘A tender story of enduring love.’
  MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNE
• ‘I! Am! Obsessed! With! This! Book!’
  COSMOPOLITAN.COM
• Meanwhile, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald in 2019, Kerryn Goldsworthy writes

In mid-20th century Tehran, two teenagers meet in a stationery shop and fall in love. Roya and Bahman are both under the covert protection of the shop owner, and with his help they get to the point where they are engaged to be married. But the shop owner has secrets of his own, and between the opposition of Bahman’s unstable mother and the increasing political unrest in the country, the relationship is struggling. This well-plotted story shows how many different forces can combine to thwart individual desires and plans. Most contemporary Westerners’ knowledge of Iran probably doesn’t go back much further than the Islamic Revolution of 1979. But almost all of this novel is set in Tehran in 1953, and the insight it provides into modern Iranian history will give readers a new perspective into the backstory of a country that is once again in the news.

The Author:  Marjan Kamali, born in Turkey to Iranian parents, spent her childhood in Kenya, Germany, Turkey, Iran, and the United States. She holds degrees from UC Berkeley, Columbia University, and New York University. Her work has also been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and published in two anthologies: Tremors and Let Me Tell You Where I’ve Been. An excerpt from The Stationery Shop was published in Solstice Literary Magazine and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her debut novel Together Tea was a Massachusetts Book Award Finalist, an NPR WBUR Good Read, and a Target Emerging Author Selection. Marjan lives with her husband and two children in the Boston area.

12^th February, 2021

‘The Awakening: The Dragon Heart Legacy’  by Nora Roberts, published in 2020, 435 pages.  I bought this book at QBD on the 3^rd December, not sure what to expect but the promotion attracted me I think, not having read any of her books previously. As I got to the end of  the story, I realised that this was the first of a Trilogy –  which at the finish, I’d wondered, as it didn’t really end, with a clear ending. Whether I will follow through and read subsequent sequences, I’m not sure –  I enjoyed the storyline, but, not so much, the degree of magic and fantasy that dominated much of it. The author is described as ‘worldwide bestseller, a tale of adventure, magic and finding your home’  –  the ‘magic’ part I was not so keen on.

Booktopia comment: 

• The bestselling author of the epic Chronicles of The One trilogy, returns with the first in a brand new trilogy where parallel worlds clash over the struggle between good and evil.
  Mists, shimmering silver fingers, rose over the pale green water of the lake. They twined and twisted toward a sky quietly gray, while in the east, over the hills, a pink blush waited, like a held breath, to waken.
  Breen Kelly had always been a rule follower. So, when her father left when she was twelve years old, promising to return, she waited. Now, more than a decade later, she’s working at a job she hates and is tired of the life that playing by the rules has dealt her. It’s time to make a change.
  Breen makes a leap into the unknown with a summer trip to Ireland – her father’s homeland. Little does she know how much of a leap until a walk in the woods leads her through a portal into another world – Talamh – where Breen will find magic, family and a destiny she could never have dreamed of…
  From Sunday Times bestseller Nora Roberts – a tale of adventure, magic and finding your home.

From Goodreads comment

Author Nora Roberts begins a new trilogy of adventure, romance, and magick in The Awakening.
In the realm of Talamh, a teenage warrior named Keegan emerges from a lake holding a sword—representing both power and the terrifying responsibility to protect the Fey. In another realm known as Philadelphia, a young woman has just discovered she possesses a treasure of her own…
When Breen Kelly was a girl, her father would tell her stories of magical places. Now she’s an anxious twentysomething mired in student debt and working a job she hates. But one day she stumbles upon a shocking discovery: her mother has been hiding an investment account in her name. It has been funded by her long-lost father—and it’s worth nearly four million dollars.
This newfound fortune would be life-changing for anyone. But little does Breen know that when she uses some of the money to journey to Ireland, it will unlock mysteries she couldn’t have imagined. Here, she will begin to understand why she kept seeing that silver-haired, elusive man, why she imagined his voice in her head saying Come home, Breen Siobhan. It’s time you came home. Why she dreamed of dragons. And where her true destiny lies—through a portal in Galway that takes her to a land of faeries and mermaids, to a man named Keegan, and to the courage in her own heart that will guide her through a powerful, dangerous destiny…

16^th February, 2021

‘How I Clawed My Way To The Middle’ by John Wood., published in 2020, 308 pages  –  An interesting read  [autobiography, rather reluctantly written, I gather] – this was the third of the three books that Heather gave me for Christmas last year, all now read. Easier to read than most biographies – perhaps because  he was an actor, not really a writer, and referenced often to the fact that he couldn’t remember specific details and/or names!!

From Goodreads

• The long awaited autobiography of one of Australia’s best loved actors.
  ‘Your job is to go out there, grab the audience by the balls, and drag them up on stage with you!’ I was flabbergasted. This I understood. A language that I spoke – had spoken most of my life. It was the best acting note I ever got.
• John Wood grew up in working-class Melbourne; when he failed out of high school, an employment officer told him, ‘You have the mind of an artist and the body of a labourer.’ And so John continued to pursue his acting dreams in amateur theatre, sustaining himself by working jobs as a bricklayer, a railway clerk and even in the same abattoir as his father.
  When he won a scholarship to NIDA, in Sydney, it moved John into a new and at times baffling world, full of extraordinary characters. It was the start of a decades-long acting career, most famously on shows such as Rafferty’s Rules and Blue Heelers, where his charm made him beloved in households across the country. His popularity was such that he was nominated for a Gold Logie nine times in a row, finally culminating in a win in 2006.
  How I Clawed My Way to the Middle is a beguiling memoir from one of Australia’s most cherished actors on both stage and screen. Full of humility, warmth and humour, it tells of the ephemeral nature of theatre, the luminous personalities John encountered along the way, and the perilous reality of life as a professional actor in Australia

21^st February,  2021

 ‘A Passionate life’ by Ita Buttrose, published in 1998, 468 pages.  A very interesting and informative book – much of it about her life up until the 1990’s, and considerable chapters devoted to her opinions, and those of others on such topics as Mateship vs Friendship; Aids; Have men lost their way?; Will the ‘Family’ survive?;   Women in the 90’s; Australia: where to now?,  and so on.  Obviously, much of the book was devoted to the changing roles of women in society and the work place , but that was to be expected, nevertheless a very balanced look at many aspects, including those topics mentioned.

From Booktopia:

Known and loved by Australians as the editor of The Australian Women’s Weekly throughout the second half of the seventies, Ita Buttrose has also made lasting contributions to many other aspects of our lives and culture.
In A Passionate Life, she traces her working career – from fifteen-year-old cadet journalist, through editorships of Cleo, the Weekly and ITA magazines, to heading up the National Advisory Council on AIDS (NACAIDS), working with World Vision, Alzheimer’s Australia, the Macular Degeneration Foundation and Arthritis Australia, and accepting broad-ranging speaking engagements. Along the way, Ita gives us glimpses of the inner workings of the Australian media, politics, the arts – and the lives and personalities of many of the well-known people she has met and worked with, including Australian media giants Kerry Packer and Rupert Murdoch. With great courage and honesty, she also allows us into the more personal aspects of her life as a working mother during these years.
Ita shares the insights and philosophical views she has developed through her rich and diverse experience of life in Australia during the second half of the twentieth century. From her position as respected stateswoman, Ita Buttrose explores such varied subjects as the value of friendship, the changing nature of families, the ageing of our population, and Australia’s future directions in these early years of the twenty-first century. Laced with optimism, humour and wisdom, Ita’s perspective is uniquely Australian – and always passionate.

And from an early ‘Penguin’ edition.

Kerry Packer described her as a ‘dedicated and brilliant journalist who has achieved greatness in her industry very early and so quickly’ and ‘a jewel beyond price’. Cold Chisel wrote a song about her. Rupert Murdoch was so impressed by her talents, he asked her to be the editor-in-chief of both the Daily and Sunday Telegraphs – and in doing so, become the first woman ever to edit a major Australian metropolitan newspaper.

In her extraordinary career, spanning over fifty years, Ita Buttrose has been involved in every aspect of the media, from newspapers and magazines to television and radio and now, electronic publishing. From her creation of a new type of women’s magazine in Cleo and then ITA, to her appointment as the youngest-ever editor of The Australian Women’s Weekly (a distinction she still holds today), a passionate love of journalism has driven her every step of the way.

Refreshingly candid about the challenges she has faced as a professional woman, not only in her career but also in her love life and as a mother, A Passionate Life describes those ground-breaking years with Ita’s trademark clarity, precision and wit.

In this substantially revised and expanded edition, Ita also shares her views on current affairs and the state of the media today, including an insider’s perspective on the Murdoch empire. We hear about her significant recent contribution to various health awareness campaigns, particularly Alzheimer’s Australia; her coverage of the 2011 royal wedding; her new incarnation as a rap star; the making of Paper Giants and her recent venture into the new territory of electronic publishing.

An appealing and lively autobiography by one of Australia’s most distinguished journalists, A Passionate Life will strike a chord with working women everywhere.

14^th March 2021

 ‘Sea of Dangers: Captain Cook and His Rivals’ by Geoffrey Blainey, published in 2008, 420pages

As usual with Blainey’s historical writings, very interesting and fascinating depiction of the subject matter.

Hill of Content Bookshop,

• Two ships set out in search of a missing continent- the St Jean-Baptiste,a French merchant ship commanded by Jean de Surville, and the Endeavour, a small British naval vessel captained by James Cook. Distinguished historian Geoffrey Blainey tells the story of these rival ships and the men who sailed them. Just before  Christmas 1769, the two captains were almost close enough to  see one another – and yet they did not know of each other’s existence. Both crews battled extreme hardships but also experienced the euphoria of ‘discovering’ new lands. Sea of Dangers is the most revealing narrative so far written of Cook’s astonishing voyage. It also casts new light on the little-known journey by de Surville; Blainey argues that he was in the vicinity of Sydney Harbour months before Cook arrived. ‘A master storyteller’s account of the way fantasy and rumour have driven science and exploration’ – Weekend Australian ‘Blainey’s characteristic curiosity raises new questions about Cook and his reputation’ – The Age

From Goodreads.

• In 1769 two ships set out independently in search of a missing continent: a French merchant ship, the St. Jean-Baptiste, commanded by Jean de Surville, and a small British naval vessel, the Endeavour, commanded by Captain James Cook. That Christmas, in New Zealand waters, the two captains were almost within sight of each other, though neither knew of the other’s existence. This is the stirring tale of these rival ships and the men who sailed in them. Cook’s first long voyage was one of the most remarkable in recorded history. He not only sailed around the world, following the most difficult route any navigator had ever attempted; he also changed the maps of the world. In heavy seas he made a more thorough search for the missing continent-believed to lie somewhere between New Zealand and South America-than had ever been made. He was the first to explore most of the New Zealand coast and a vast stretch of the east coast of Australia, and the first to explore the longest reef in the world, the Great Barrier Reef. In Jakarta and Cape Town, and in the seas between them, Cook lost a third of his crew to tropical illnesses, after earlier saving them from scurvy. The ship in which he circled the world was not much larger in area than a tennis court. Along with the de Surville vessel, the sea was an arena of international rivalry, for during his voyage Cook encountered Dutch, Spanish, French, and Portuguese competitors and suspicions. Geoffrey Blainey brings his marvelous storytelling powers to bear on this fascinating and important adventure, drawing us brilliantly into the lives of the major figures.
  
  

19^th March 2021

 ‘Persuasion’  by Jane Austin, published in 1817, this ‘Folio Society’ edition of 235 pages. I quite enjoyed reading this, despite a slow start, and taking time to get into the story  –  this was part of a collection of the Jane Austin novels, I purchased as a package some years ago. Have still not read them all –  just decided to turn to her among my other readings and pleased I did.  Certainly a different style of writing, reflecting a different style of society to what we experience today!!

Some comments from three sources.

Wikipedia

Persuasion is the last novel fully completed by Jane Austen. It was published at the end of 1817, six months after her death.

The story concerns Anne Elliot, a young Englishwoman of twenty-seven years, whose family moves to lower their expenses and reduce their debt by renting their home to an Admiral and his wife. The wife’s brother, Navy Captain Frederick Wentworth, was engaged to Anne in 1806, but the engagement was broken when Anne was “persuaded” by her friends and family to end their relationship. Anne and Captain Wentworth, both single and unattached, meet again after a seven-year separation, setting the scene for many humorous encounters as well as a second, well-considered chance at love and marriage for Anne in her second “bloom”.

The novel was well-received in the early 19th century, but its greater fame came later in the century and continued into the 20th and 21st centuries. Much scholarly debate on Austen’s work has since been published. Anne Elliot is noteworthy among Austen’s heroines for her relative maturity. As Persuasion was Austen’s last completed work, it is accepted as her most maturely written novel, showing a refinement of literary conception indicative of a woman approaching forty years of age. Her use of free indirect discourse in narrative was in full evidence by 1816.

Persuasion has been the subject of several adaptations, including four made-for-television adaptations, theatre productions, radio broadcasts, and other literary works.

From Booktopia

Persuasion narrates the emotional journey of its protagonist Anne Elliot, who chances upon Captain Wentworth, a suitor she was persuaded to reject seven years earlier, and whose reappearance causes her to reflect on her past decisions and contemplate her marital future.
Vividly depicting the society holiday towns of Lyme Regis and Bath and infused with its author’s trademark wit, Austen’s last completed novel, set against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars, is an entertaining and enduring account of the dilemmas facing young women in the early nineteenth century

From Goodreads

Twenty-seven-year old Anne Elliot is Austen’s most adult heroine. Eight years before the story proper begins, she is happily betrothed to a naval officer, Frederick Wentworth, but she precipitously breaks off the engagement when persuaded by her friend Lady Russell that such a match is unworthy. The breakup produces in Anne a deep and long-lasting regret. When later Wentworth returns from sea a rich and successful captain, he finds Anne’s family on the brink of financial ruin and his own sister a tenant in Kellynch Hall, the Elliot estate. All the tension of the novel revolves around one question: Will Anne and Wentworth be reunited in their love?
Jane Austen once compared her writing to painting on a little bit of ivory, 2 inches square. Readers of Persuasion will discover that neither her skill for delicate, ironic observations on social custom, love, and marriage nor her ability to apply a sharp focus lens to English manners and morals has deserted her in her final finished work.

Wikipedia

The story begins seven years after the broken engagement of Anne Elliot to Frederick Wentworth. Having just turned nineteen years old, Anne fell in love and accepted a proposal of marriage from Wentworth, then a young and undistinguished naval officer. Wentworth was considered clever, confident and ambitious, but his low social status made Anne’s friends and family view the Commander as an unfavorable partner. Anne’s father, Sir Walter Elliot, and her older sister, Elizabeth, maintained that Wentworth was no match for a woman of Kellynch Hall, the family estate. Lady Russell, a distant relative who Anne considers to be a second mother after her own passed away, saw the relationship as imprudent for one so young and persuaded Anne to break off the engagement. Sir Walter, Elizabeth, and Lady Russell are the only family members who knew about the short engagement, as Anne’s younger sister Mary was away at school.

Several years later, the Elliot family is in financial trouble on account of their lavish spending, so they rent out Kellynch Hall and decide to settle in a cheaper home in Bath until their finances improve. Sir Walter, Elizabeth, and Elizabeth’s new companion, Mrs Clay, look forward to the move. Anne is less sure she will enjoy Bath, but cannot go against her family. Mary is now married to Charles Musgrove of Uppercross Hall, the heir to a respected local squire. Anne visits Mary and her family, where she is well-loved. As the war against France is over, the tenants of Kellynch Hall, Admiral Croft and his wife Sophia, (Frederick’s sister), have returned home. Captain Wentworth, now wealthy and famous for his service in the war, visits his sister and meets the Uppercross family, where he crosses paths with Anne.

The Musgroves, including Mary, Charles, and Charles’ sisters Henrietta and Louisa, welcome the Crofts and Captain Wentworth, who makes it known that he is ready to marry. Henrietta is engaged to her cousin, clergyman Charles Hayter, who is absent when Wentworth is introduced to their social circle. Both the Crofts and Musgroves enjoy speculating about which sister Captain Wentworth might marry. Once Hayter returns, Henrietta turns her affections to him again. Anne still loves Wentworth, so each meeting with him requires preparation for her own strong emotions. She overhears a conversation in which Louisa tells Wentworth that Charles Musgrove first proposed to Anne, who turned him down. This news startles Wentworth, and Anne realises that he has not yet forgiven her for letting herself be persuaded to end their engagement years ago.

Anne and the young adults of the Uppercross family accompany Captain Wentworth on a visit to see two of his fellow officers, Captains Harville and Benwick, in the coastal town of Lyme Regis. Captain Benwick is in mourning over the death of his fiancée, Captain Harville’s sister, and he appreciates Anne’s sympathy and understanding. They bond over their mutual admiration for the Romantic poets. Anne attracts the attention of Mr William Elliot, her cousin and a wealthy widower who is heir to Kellynch Hall despite having broken ties with her father years earlier. On the last morning of the visit, Louisa sustains a serious concussion. Anne coolly organizes the others to summon assistance. Wentworth is impressed with Anne’s quick thinking and cool-headedness, but feels guilty about his actions with Louisa, causing him to re-examine his feelings for Anne.

Following Louisa’s accident, Anne joins her father and sister in Bath with Lady Russell while Louisa and her parents stay at the Harvilles’ in Lyme Regis for her recovery. Captain Wentworth visits his older brother Edward in Shropshire. Anne finds that her father and sister are flattered by the attentions of William, believing that if he marries Elizabeth, the family fortunes will be restored. Although Anne likes William and enjoys his manners, she finds his character opaque and difficult to judge.

Admiral Croft and his wife arrive in Bath with the news that Louisa is engaged to Captain Benwick. Wentworth travels to Bath, where his jealousy is piqued by seeing William trying to court Anne. Captain Wentworth and Anne renew their acquaintance. Anne visits Mrs Smith, an old school friend, who is now a widow living in Bath under strained circumstances. From her, Anne discovers that beneath William’s charming veneer, he is a cold, calculating opportunist who led Mrs Smith’s late husband into debt. As executor to her husband’s will, William has done nothing to improve Mrs Smith’s situation. Although Mrs Smith believes that William is genuinely attracted to Anne, she feels that his primary aim is to prevent Mrs Clay from marrying his uncle, as a new marriage might mean a new son, displacing him as heir to Kellynch Hall.

The Musgroves visit Bath to purchase wedding clothes for Louisa and Henrietta, both soon to marry. Captains Wentworth and Harville encounter them and Anne at the Musgroves’ hotel in Bath, where Wentworth overhears Anne and Harville discussing the relative faithfulness of men and women in love. Deeply moved by what Anne says about women not giving up their feelings of love even when all hope is lost, Wentworth writes her a note declaring his feelings for her. Outside the hotel, Anne and Wentworth reconcile, affirm their love for each other, and renew their engagement. William leaves Bath; Mrs Clay soon follows him and becomes his mistress, ensuring that he will inherit Kellynch Hall. Lady Russell admits she was wrong about Wentworth and befriends the new couple. Once Anne and Wentworth have married, Wentworth helps Mrs Smith recover the remaining assets that William had kept from her. Anne settles into her new life as the wife of a Navy captain.

11^th April, 2021

 ‘Story of Ireland: In search of a New National Memory’ by Neil Hegarty’, published in 2011, 374 pages

A very detailed book as I guess most histories should be.  If you talk to an Irishman, most of Ireland’s troubles over the centuries were caused by the English – yes, that obviously had a large bearing on the lives of the population. But what I found thoroughly confusing in some ways, and in my view, another major cause of that country’s troubles – the Irish themselves, their lack of tolerance for difference, be it religion or other things, the constant massacres and ‘civil war’ type conflicts within their own peoples, and sadly, the terrible hatred generated between Catholic and Protestant [although of course, similar periods occurred in England in that respect as well, eg, in the Reformation period, and at other times in Britain’s history].  It was also noteworthy to read of the many raids by the Irish on the coastal fringes of south west England in the early centuries, where English prisoners were taken back to Ireland where they virtually became slaves to Irish property owners etc. History shows it was not all a one-way persecution.

In some ways, a difficult book to retain the volume of detail and names, etc referred to in Hegarty’s volume, and for myself, it was not always easy to determine just who was fighting who, not really sure if during some of those early centuries, the Irish always knew just who were their enemies or their friends!!

A couple of comments from more expert reviewers.

From ‘Goodreads’

• In this groundbreaking history of Ireland, Neil Hegarty presents a fresh perspective on Ireland’s past. Comprehensive and engaging, The Story of Ireland is an eye-opening account of a nation that has long been shaped by forces beyond its coasts.
  The Story of Ireland re-examines Irish history, challenging the accepted stories and long-held myths associated with Ireland. Transporting readers to the Ireland of the past, beginning with the first settlement in A.D. 433, this is a sweeping and compelling history of one of the world’s most dynamic nations. Hegarty examines how world events, including Europe’s 16th century religious wars, the French and American revolutions, and Ireland’s policy of neutrality during World War II, have shaped the country over the course of its long and fascinating history. With an up-to-date afterword that details the present state of affairs in Ireland, this is an essential text for readers who are fascinated by current events, politics, and history.
  Spanning Irish history from its earliest inhabitants to the country’s current financial crisis, The Story of Ireland is an epic and brilliant re-telling of Ireland’s history from a new point of view. 

And from Jonathan Yardly in the ‘Washington Post’ [March 2012.

• The collapse of the Celtic Tiger four years ago, in a spectacular collision of private and public corruption amid a wildly inflated real estate bubble, was a dreadful blow to the people of Ireland, who with some justification thought that after centuries of poverty and disappointment, their country had at last come into its own. As Neil Hegarty writes in “The Story of Ireland,” however, the implosion was easily explained by Irish history:

“There are specific cultural reasons why such a situation evolved. The history of Ireland had propagated a sense of failure and of inferiority, encapsulated in the forced emigration of generation after generation of young people in search of opportunities that their homeland simply could not provide. The economic boom seemed to put this traumatic history firmly in the past: it belonged in another era — virtually in another country. The ongoing moves towards resolving what had seemed an intractable conflict in Northern Ireland, moreover, served to copper-fasten this sensation that Ireland had indeed left its scarred past behind. The result was exuberance and confidence on a widespread scale.”

Unfortunately, though, “the political and administrative structures of the country remained rooted firmly in this ostensibly banished past.” The “power of patronage and of local connections ruled supreme; and a small political and economic elite, with guaranteed access to bank officials and ministers, ran the country in its own interests.”

The collapse of the Celtic Tiger four years ago, in a spectacular collision of private and public corruption amid a wildly inflated real estate bubble, was a dreadful blow to the people of Ireland, who with some justification thought that after centuries of poverty and disappointment, their country had at last come into its own. As Neil Hegarty writes in “The Story of Ireland,” however, the implosion was easily explained by Irish history:

“There are specific cultural reasons why such a situation evolved. The history of Ireland had propagated a sense of failure and of inferiority, encapsulated in the forced emigration of generation after generation of young people in search of opportunities that their homeland simply could not provide. The economic boom seemed to put this traumatic history firmly in the past: it belonged in another era — virtually in another country. The ongoing moves towards resolving what had seemed an intractable conflict in Northern Ireland, moreover, served to copper-fasten this sensation that Ireland had indeed left its scarred past behind. The result was exuberance and confidence on a widespread scale.”

Unfortunately, though, “the political and administrative structures of the country remained rooted firmly in this ostensibly banished past.” The “power of patronage and of local connections ruled supreme; and a small political and economic elite, with guaranteed access to bank officials and ministers, ran the country in its own interests.”

Hegarty’s analysis of this calamity, though astute, occupies only a few paragraphs at the end of this book; readers who want a more detailed (and far more pungent) analysis should turn to Fintan O’Toole’s “Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger” (2010). But Hegarty does place the present state of affairs in historical context, which in Ireland’s case is a history of religious hatred and discrimination, endemic violence, suppression and exploitation at the hands of England, all this taking place in a small island nation of incomparable natural beauty and with a cultural heritage far richer than that of almost any larger nation.

“The Story of Ireland” is the companion book to a television series of the same name that was broadcast by the BBC’s Northern Ireland arm a year ago; no plans have been announced for airing in the United States, but let us hope that will change. For all the tragedy and fierce contention with which it is charged, the history of Ireland is dramatic and, as a human story, utterly engaging. The themes that Hegarty detects in it include “persistence and consistency”; the “disenfranchised or otherwise put-upon exile seeking foreign aid — with potentially momentous consequences”; a relationship between Ireland and England that is “close and mutually significant”; a “fusion between religious and civil authorities”; and a “connection between faith and nation indivisible in the minds of its people.”

All of this is familiar to anyone with a passing knowledge of the Irish past, but Hegarty takes a significant step beyond the conventional wisdom when he argues that Ireland is not a cramped, inward, provincial place isolated from the rest of the world by the sea and by its hermetic character, but rather a place with a powerful “international dimension.” There is, he argues, “a long-established tradition in Irish culture: one of porousness, of openness to overseas influence — a tradition that sprang from long years of inward migration, travel, and human and economic relationships.”

The Norse invaders in the 10th and 11th centuries were violent and cruel, but they left their positive marks as well: “In Dublin, as in the other Norse seaports, cultural mingling became increasingly the order of the day: in the decorative work that survives from the period, for example, Norse symmetry and interlacing begins to replace the Anglo-Saxon detail that had previously influenced Irish design.” Though the lower social orders remained rooted in the places of their birth, “a great many merchants, soldiers and politicians were well acquainted with the wider world.” As Hegarty says in conclusion:

“Ireland has always been open to the world, its population from the very beginning bolstered, its towns shaped and its gene pool widened by newcomers. . . . Ireland has donned the garb of many cultures over the years: its Gaelic kingdoms cheek by jowl with Norse city states and later with an English colony slowly taking root in the land; its post-Cromwellian Ascendancy estates living with a growing Catholic middle class. And for almost a century, two states in Ireland have been divided by a border that was once heavily policed but has now essentially vanished. Ireland has always been ‘incorrigibly plural’ — and, as part of a wider European culture, it remains so today.”

The great and not-so-great names of Irish political, military and religious history march through these pages: Saint Patrick, “a complex and compelling character” whose interesting peculiarities have been lost in a fog of myth; Brian Boru, bold soldier of the 11th century and “Emperor of the Irish”; Robert Emmet, executed in his mid-20s, famous through the centuries for “idealism, enthusiasm, oratory and youthful energy,” albeit fame based in “slender achievements”; Daniel O’Connell, whose Catholic Association was “one of the first popular democratic organizations in the modern world”; Charles Stewart Parnell, a heroic figure ultimately disgraced; Michael Collins, Eamon de Valera and others of more recent vintage who in their differing ways shaped the Irish republic and brought the Troubles to an end late in the 20th century.

Along the way there are secret societies too numerous to mention, battles of a mostly ferocious character and almost unceasing acts of violence, many of them perpetrated against the innocent. That Ireland has been bitterly divided between Catholics and Protestants for as long as those denominations have existed requires no elaboration here; no theme in Irish history is stronger than this one, and none has had more painful consequences. The terrible potato famine of the 1840s of course gets its due, but I find it odd that there is no mention, in the text or even the “further reading list,” of Cecil Woodham-Smith’s “The Great Hunger” (1962), in the view of many the definitive book on that terrible subject and a vastly more compelling account of that great human tragedy than Hegarty’s brief overview.

This is doubly odd because Hegarty, a writer of both fiction and nonfiction, clearly knows his Irish history well and has done admirable research. As a one-volume guide to political, military and economic matters, “The Story of Ireland” can be read to useful effect. It is considerably less useful, though, on Irish social and cultural life. We are told, for example, that in the early 19th century, “social distress, vagrancy and destitution became part and parcel of the lives of the poor; agrarian crime, want and hunger grew following a disastrous collapse in agricultural prices,” but we really don’t get much sense of what quotidian life was like for those at the bottom of the ladder, i.e., for most of the Irish.

By the same token we are told that beginning with medieval monastic writings, “a literary tradition evolved in Ireland centuries before it appeared elsewhere in Europe,” but the subsequent development of that tradition is only scantily attended to. You would hardly know from Hegarty’s narrative that Ireland — the land of Jonathan Swift, William Butler Yeats, John Millington Synge, Maud Gonne, James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, Sean O’Faolain, Edna O’Brien and too many others to mention here — has in fact a literary tradition so deep and rich as to be the envy of the rest of the world. He quotes Yeats — “We are no petty people. We are one of the great stocks of Europe. We are the people of Burke, we are the people of Swift, the people of Emmet, the people of Parnell” — but is content to leave it pretty much at that.

Nor are we told anything about Irish music, which from medieval balladeers to U2 has expressed the temper of the land and has become widely known, and loved, throughout the world. Ditto for other aspects of Irish culture and life, from food to architecture. How can the book be called “A History of the Irish People” with all that left out?

Which is to say that so far as it goes, “The Story of Ireland” is fine, but it doesn’t go nearly far enough.

Mid April, 2021

‘Lydiard Street: The Goldfield Grandeur of Ballarat [Doug Bradley],  a ‘Ten Delightful Tales’ publication in 2021; 32 pages  –  another delightful little read with photos and pictures, and old newspaper inserts – as with the others I have read in this Series [many more to come], as I’m reading, I wish I was in Ballarat to see many of the remaining buildings that are spoken of in the booklet.

This is Bradley’s third book in the series – the other two summarised below

• AUTHOR and historian Doug Bradby has released two small books as part of a new ongoing miniseries Ten Delightful Tales.
• Bridge Street: The Historic Heart of Ballarat, and Merry Christmas from Historic Ballarat are 32-page publications “full of joy, hope and humour,” looking at life in the city between approximately 1860 and 1920.

“It was a gorgeous period of time. Hard work had paid off, people had a few dollars in their pocket, they had some leisure time, and they didn’t know World War One or The Depression were coming,” Bradby said.

“We race through the Bridge Mall, but in 1850, it was the most exciting place in the world, and it changed the world. Tens of thousands of people got an opportunity in life they otherwise wouldn’t have had.

“Bridge Street as The Historic Heart of Ballarat was fabulous. It never was architecturally wonderful, but it was where Ballarat East and Ballarat West all integrated.”

• Merry Christmas makes the connection between Ballarat residents now and those living in the same neighbourhoods 160 years ago.

“It’s the awareness that they were as human, as good, as bad, as funny and as silly as us. I recognise myself in their humanity, and that’s what history does,” Bradby said.

“You’re living in 2020, reading about them eating Christmas pudding, having funny hats on their heads and playing with crackers in 1860.

“All the things in the book are so recognisable to what we’ll be doing around the 25th and 26th with child-centred days of feasting.”

Now Ballarat is almost through one of its most challenging years, Bradby said “it’s time to take a gulp of happiness and experience joy of living” again through literature.

He hopes people will slow down this summer to savour the written word like wine.

“We need things that are a bit lighter, to celebrate how good it is to be able to communicate with other human beings.

“Anybody who can link back to enjoying the simple things in life; picnics, shopping, promenading and travelling, will enjoy this series,” Bradby said.

“They’re lighter, frothier books than I’ve done before, and I’ve really enjoyed writing them.”

• Bradby is planning to produce more Ten Delightful Tales each month. They are available at Collins on Lydiard and in the Bridge Mall, at Campion Education Sebastopol and Crawford’s Pharmacy.

Mid April, 2021

 ‘Eucalyptus’ by Murray Bail, published in 1998, 255 pages – not sure why I bought this little novel,  3 years ago, guess I was attracted by the awards and prizes it had won. Described on the front cover as ‘The Love Story of the Year’ –  I don’t think so, in my opinion  – certainly an unusual piece of writing, and storyline, yet it was awarded the ‘Winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award and the Commonwealth Writers Prize;.  I have to wonder about the thinking of some of these book award judges??? Anyway, not a story I will probably remember in years to come, nor would I be sad about that fact.

Certainly, there were lots of short stories related during the book –  most seemingly unrelated and disjointed insertions into the story, together with the regular but spasmodic botanical references to the variety of Eucalyptus trees which dominated the property in question.   Having said all that, if you read the three pages of favourable reviews at the beginning of the book  – well my disquiets are certainly at odds with all of those readers!!

From Booktopia

On a property in western New South Wales a man named Holland lives with his daughter Ellen. Over the years, as she grows into a beautiful young woman, he plants hundreds of different gum trees on his land. When Ellen is nineteen her father announces his decision: she will marry the man who can name all his species of eucalyptus, down to the last tree…
Eucalyptus is a modern fairy tale and an unpredictable love story. Haunting and mesmeric, it illuminates the nature of story-telling itself.

And from Goodreads summary

The gruff widower Holland has two possessions he cherishes above all others: his sprawling property of eucalyptus trees and his ravishingly beautiful daughter, Ellen.
When Ellen turns nineteen Holland makes an announcement: she may marry only the man who can correctly name the species of each of the hundreds of gum trees on his property.
Ellen is uninterested in the many suitors who arrive from around the world, until one afternoon she chances on a strange, handsome young man resting under a Coolibah tree. In the days that follow, he spins dozens of tales set in cities, deserts, and faraway countries. As the contest draws to a close, Ellen and the stranger’s meetings become more erotic, the stories more urgent. Murray Bail’s rich narrative is filled with unexpected wisdom about art, feminine beauty, landscape, and language. Eucalyptus is a shimmering love story that affirms the beguiling power of storytelling itself.

In the June 1998 edition of the ABR, Peter Craven reviews this novel –  I won’t copy all he wrote, except the following –

‘There is a stoical sadness and solemnity to his fictions (which resemble even the more magical forms of realistic novel writing the way a slab hut resembles a townhouse) that comes it seems from the author’s incomprehension and incapacity in the face of anything like novelese. The husband of Helen Garner seems as incapable of telling an involving transparent story where the characters come off the page as he is of flying at the moon. On the contrary, he is a kind of homespun modernist, the sophistication of whose handling of his material is in inverse relation to his own narrative suavity.  Murray Bail has always written with a bit of a clunk. His sentences sing no tune, and he is always in danger of defying the very comprehension of the reader because his material seems so undramatic………’ [had to pay to read on.

Interesting comments from the Sydney Morning Herald [Fe 5^th, 2005]

Its originality won it the Miles Franklin and Commonwealth writers’ prizes. It so beguiled Russell Crowe and Nicole Kidman that they are starring in the film adaptation, in production near Bellingen this week. London’s Evening Standard opined: “You won’t have read anything like it.”

But a Singleton man, John Bennetts, felt he had read something like Murray Bail’s Eucalyptus. He found that several passages from Bail’s novel were word-for-word matches with an out-of-print textbook, Eucalypts Vols One and Two by Stan Kelly, George Chippendale and Robert Johnston, published in 1969 and 1978.

Mr Bennetts said he discovered eight “direct lifts” from the textbook. On page 91 of Eucalyptus, Bail writes of a Eucalyptus maidenii: “The trunk has a short stocking of greyish bark at the base, the upper bark smooth, spotted. Its juvenile foliage is conspicuous and attractive in the undergrowth.”

Of the same tree, the Kelly book says it has “a short stocking of persistent, greyish bark at the base of the trunk, the upper bark being smooth, blotched . . . Its juvenile foliage . . . is conspicuous and attractive in the undergrowth.”

On page 69 of the novel, Bail writes that the Eucalyptus maculata’s beauty “lies in the smooth, clean-looking bark. This is shed in irregular patches, leaving small dimples – hence spotted gum – and as the bark surface ages it changes colour from cream to blue-grey, pink or red, giving a mottled appearance … The flowers are borne in rather large, compound inflorescences, whilst the fruits are ovoid, with short necks and deeply enclosed valves.” Of the same tree, the Kelly text speaks of “the smooth, clean-looking bark. This is shed in irregular patches, leaving small depressions like dimples, and as the bark surface ages it changes colour, from cream to blue-grey, pink or red, giving an interesting, mottled appearance … The flowers are borne in rather large, compound inflorescences, whilst the fruits are ovoid, with a short neck and deeply enclosed valves.”

There are other instances, but, says Bail’s publisher, Michael Heyward, they are “an instance of the novelist as bowerbird rather than any kind of brazen break-and-enter into someone else’s work”. The passages amount to about 180 words in a 90,000-word novel. To label Bail a plagiarist would be disproportionate (if not without precedent: lesser-known writers are routinely flogged for much less) but the absence of acknowledgement raises questions about the nature of literary production.

Bail says a “mix-up” occurred due to “the ridiculous number of bits of paper I had floating around” researching the novel, jottings from books “by people who knew a million more things about eucalypts than I did”. He says: “In an early draft I had these passages in quote marks, but I became concerned that the book was becoming too botanical, too technical. At some stage between drafts I must have ripped out the quotes … I loved the Kelly book … I wanted to put something in the book as a homage to Kelly, and got a fair way towards that, but it was going too far in turning it into a factual book about the trees, so I took it out.

“When you’ve got a novel with a firm thread of fact running through it,” Bail says, “it’s difficult not to let the book get clotted up with it.”

Stan Kelly died recently, but the author of the text in Eucalypts, George Chippendale, now 83 and living in Canberra, said he had read Bail’s novel and enjoyed it. Asked if he recognised his own words, he said: “Not at all!”

Authors as notable as Robert Hughes, Tom Keneally and Colleen McCullough, and as notorious as Helen Darville, have been accused of plagiarism for as little as a few words. This week, Jessica Adams was accused in The Australian of copying a plot from Agatha Christie for a short story she donated to The Big Issue. Adams denied the claim. Being nationally “exposed” as a formula writer cribbing from another formula writer, for no money and a tiny audience, shows how virulently the stain of plagiarism can spread. The writer Peter Rose, a Miles Franklin judge in 1998, the year Eucalyptus won, says “plagiarism has an amazing stigma and taboo”.

Bail places the correspondences between his writing and Chippendale’s into the broader texture of his writing, and much other literature and art, where one creator aims a “nod or a wink” at another. Within Eucalyptus, there is a pattern of unacknowledged references to Patrick White and Nikolai Gogol, among others. Bail’s earlier story, The Drover’s Wife, was a direct reply to Henry Lawson’s story of the same name. In his Miles Franklin acceptance speech, he said: “It becomes more and more difficult to create something individual and distinctive, yet … worthwhile. Even then the novelist is standing on the shoulders of others before him, or her.”

Heyward, part-owner of Text Publishing, says: “Bail’s story, vision, characters, language are absolutely his own, and it’s fascinating how the tone of the words from Kelly’s book changes in their new context: they become laconic, po-faced, as they are absorbed into the fabric of the story.”

This kind of conversation between different works is part of the orthodox repertoire in art. To include readers in the joke, modernist writers offer signposts, as Bail did with The Drover’s Wife, or use famous phrases, as Bail did in Eucalyptus in playing with Patrick White’s “dun-coloured realism”. Yet the practice is riskier when the source text is both unknown and unacknowledged. A reader may praise an author’s original ability to mimic a type of language without knowing he has in fact copied it.

The judges of the Miles Franklin, for instance, responded to Chippendale’s writing thinking it was Bail’s. “We assumed he had read a lot of natural history textbooks,” Rose says of his discussions with other Franklin judges, “but we read [Eucalyptus] as a work of the imagination.” He stressed that Bail had committed only “a minor fault”, which could have been solved with an acknowledgement. “It’s always prudent to acknowledge, to avert confusion or awkwardness afterwards.”

Bail has himself been on the other side of this debate, when he found “exact details and sentences and phrases from a monograph I’d written on [the artist] Ian Fairweather pop up in quite a well-known novel. I got indignant for a while, but then I thought the author had used my work for general information and there wasn’t anything too wrong with it.”

Nonetheless, he says he is “normally very courteous” about acknowledging sources, and will talk to his publisher about putting in an acknowledgement in future editions of Eucalyptus.

26^th,  April, 2021

 ‘The Saddler Boys’ by Fiona Palmer, published in 2015, 362 pages  –  indeed, a good old fashioned love story, with demonstrated passion for the land, the people, and a rural life. A thoroughly enjoyable read for which  I put aside ‘The Reformation’ for a few days, as I felt like a bit of light reading. This was the second book I purchased from the QBD bookshop in Melton, on the way back from lunch with Heather, on the 9^th April.

A bit of a tear-jerker in many aspects [though it is easy to create that sensation in this reader these days].  Fiona Palmer is one of a number of female Australian authors who write novels about rural life in particular. I guess the storyline written to ensure that ‘true love’ won out in the end, but I was not unhappy about that.  I planned to email the author a brief appreciation of her story.

From Goodreads

Schoolteacher Natalie has always been a city girl. She has a handsome boyfriend and a family who give her only the best. But she craves her own space, and her own classroom, before settling down into the life she is expected to lead.  When Nat takes up a posting at a tiny school in remote Western Australia, it proves quite the culture shock, but she is soon welcomed by the swarm of inquisitive locals, particularly young student Billy and his intriguing single father, Drew. 

As Nat’s school comes under threat of closure, and Billy’s estranged mother turns up out of the blue, Nat finds herself fighting for the township and battling with her heart. Torn between her life in Perth and the new community that needs her, Nat must risk losing it all to find out what she’s really made of – and where she truly belongs. 

The Weekly Times

This is a book about rural Australia, love gained and lost, and fighting for what you believe in. But, unlike many books in the same genre,The Saddler Boys is subtly about so much more.’Weekly Times

Email written to the author:

Hello Fiona,    I just felt I’d like to drop you a line after having read ‘The Saddler Boys’.

While I know you wrote this some years ago, I picked it up in in a store the other day, having recalled reading two earlier novels of yours – ‘The Road Home’ and ‘The Outback Heart’.

I must admit, I’m usually reading much heavier material, re politics, biographies and histories, etc, but now and then search for something a little lighter and quick reading.

Hence ‘The Saddler Boys’ which I thoroughly enjoyed from beginning to end  – your passion for the rural life and the people in it, I find really refreshing and a pleasant read.

So thank you again –  I think there are many others of your stories I need to search out!!

With kindest regards and wishes for ongoing success in future writings.

Bill Kirk [Sunbury, Victoria];  billjkirk5358@gmail.com

And the author’s reply

Hi Bill,

Lovely to hear from you. Thank you for reading The Saddler Boys. I wrote 8 rurals as a way to write about the life I love so much. I have sinced moved more broader fiction but I hope to write more rurals one day. I live the life everyday (we are flat our seeding at the moment, long days…12 to 15hours and then I’m trying to get edits done on my next book!)

I aim to make my books a quick enjoyable read. Being so busy I like books easy to get into, finish them quick and leave me happy.

Thanks again for your email, it made my day.

All the best,

Fiona

Late May, 2021

Writers on Writers: Thomas Keneally by Stan Grant, published in 2021, 90 pages.  I general impression – Stan Grant did not like Keneally’s interpretation of Jimmy Blacksmith [or real name, Jimmy Governor]  –  he felt it was a white man’s depiction of Governor, and Aborigines in general, not the real Indigenous ‘Governor’. A lot of comment about Bruce Pascoe’s book ‘Black Emu’ which Grant seem to be much more favourable towards. At times I felt Grant’s writing was too pro-Aboriginal/anti White, although he tries to argue that is not the case, despite his own Indigenous background.  Overall, I felt Keneally got much less attention in this short ‘essay’ than perhaps should have been the intention of the Series!!!  Just my view  –  some other comments, as follows.

State Library of Victoria [the publisher]

• On Thomas Keneally is the latest instalment of the Writers on Writers series, in which leading writers reflect on another Australian writer who has inspired and influenced them. Provocative and crisp, these books start a fresh conversation between past and present, shed new light on the craft of writing, and introduce some intriguing and talented authors and their work.  In his book, Stan weaves literary criticism, philosophy and memoir to shed light on The chant of Jimmie Blacksmith. Drawing parallels with Indigenous writers Tara June Winch and Bruce Pascoe, Grant re-examines Keneally’s novel, raising questions about identity, modernity and storytelling.
• Google:  Keneally’s caricature of a self-loathing Jimmie Blacksmith is a lost opportunity to explore the complex ways that Aboriginal people . . . were pushing against a white world that would not accept them for who they were; that would not see them as equal; that, in truth, would not see them as human. …
• Hobart Book shop

A thoughtful’ nuanced look at Thomas Keneally’s The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith by award-winning journalist Stan Grant’ which considers race’ representation and Australian history. Stan Grant is drawn to Thomas Keneally ‘for many reasons- we share an Irish heritage and a complicated relationship with religion. I am especially interested in The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith’ which was a formative novel for me. My family shares a connection with the real Jimmy Governor as well. The book raises questions about non-Indigenous writers tackling Indigenous issues and characters.’ In this eloquent’ clear-eyed essay’ acclaimed journalist Stan Grant sheds light on one of Australia’s most controversial yet enduringly relevant novels. In the Writers on Writers series’ leading authors reflect on an Australian writer who has inspired and fascinated them. Provocative and crisp’ these books start a fresh conversation between past and present’ shed new light on the craft of writing’ and introduce some intriguing and talented authors and their work. Published by Black Inc. in association with the University of Melbourne and State Library Victoria.

• Sydney Writers Festival

Thomas Keneally reflects on his esteemed career in conversation with his long-time friend Stan Grant. Thomas’ 1972 Booker Prize–nominated story of a black man’s revenge against an unjust society, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, was a formative novel for Stan, helping the young reporter recognise the contradictions at the heart of our national identity. Stan has written the latest instalment of the Writers on Writers series on Thomas. The two take to the stage to continue a long-running conversation about their body of work and friendship.

22^nd May, 2021

Ten Delightful Tales: Lake Wendouree: ‘Pleasing to the Eye, Satisfying to the Soul’, introduced by Doug Bradby’, published 2021, 32 pages   – another pleasing read from this series, bringing back memories of Ballarat,.

 “You’re living in 2020  “All the things in the books are so recognisable to what we’ll be doing around the 25th and 26th with child-centred days of feasting.”  Now Ballarat is almost through one of its most challenging years, Bradby said “it’s time to take a gulp of happiness and experience joy of living” again through literature. He hopes people will slow down this summer to savour the written word like wine. “We need things that are a bit lighter, to celebrate how good it is to be able to communicate with other human beings. “Anybody who can link back to enjoying the simple things in life; picnics, shopping, promenading and travelling, will enjoy this series,” Bradby said. “They’re lighter, frothier books than I’ve done before, and I’ve really enjoyed writing them.”  Bradby is planning to produce more Ten Delightful Tales each month. They are available at Collins on Lydiard and in the Bridge Mall, at Campion Education Sebastopol and Crawford’s Pharmacy.

24^th May, 2021

–  ‘The Reformation in England’ Vol 2  by J.H.Merle d’Aubigne, first published in 1866-78, this edition printed in 1977, 507 pages. – a rather heavy and at times [most of the time] disturbing piece of reading   But also, an amazing educational read –  at times difficult to distinguish just which side of Christianity was been favoured, not just by the King [Henry VIII] but by the various sectors of the England  of the 1500’s –  it would have been a very dangerous era to live in if you had any kind of attachment to Christianity – beginning with a breaking away from the Pope and the Roman Catholic doctrines –  forms of reform, be they a moderate version of Catholic, an Evangelical style, complete reform away from Catholic, the Church [Anglican] of England  –  generally if you lived or died, depended on the religious views of Henry VIII at any time  –  views which changed through the years of ‘reform’ meaning loyal supporters, friends, even wives, could suddenly become the enemy, with execution in most cases the outcome, whoever you were.

King Henry VIII, born 28/6/1491; died 28/1/1547, his six wives were:

• Katherine, married 1509; marriage annulled on 23/5/1533;
• Anne of Boleyn, married25/1/1533; executed 19/5/1536;
• Jane Seymour, married 30/5/1536; died natural causes 24/10/1537;
• Anne of Cleves, married 6/1/1540; marriage annulled 9/7/1540;
• Katherine Howard:  married 18/7/1540, executed 13/2/1542; and
• Katherine Parr, married 12/7/1543, died 7/9/1548 [after the King’s death on 28/1/1547].

From Amazon –

• ‘Here is no dry as dust story. the work is of immense learning…but is popular in the best sense. Short chapters and rapid scene changes give the story movement, and human interest is always to the fore.’
• Quoted price of hardcover version: $2,400.00; Paperback: $59.00

Heritage Books [and] BannerofTruth Books, the publisher in this case]

• When the present publisher first issued The Reformation in England in 1962, it was hoped, in the words of its editor, S. M. Houghton, that it would ‘be a major contribution to the religious needs of the present age, and that it [would] lead to the strengthening of the foundations of a wonderful God-given heritage of truth’.

In many ways there has been such a strengthening. Renewed interest in the Reformation and the study of the Reformers’ teaching has brought forth much good literature, and has provided strength to existing churches, and a fresh impetus for the planting of biblical churches.

Concurrent with this development in the life of the churches, however, has been a dramatic shift in Western society at large. In the decades since the 1960s, the de-Christianization of society at a cultural and legislative level has been rapid. Biblical illiteracy is the norm. Secularism now dominates the Continent that witnessed the reforming work of Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin, Tyndale, Cranmer, and Knox.

In this hostile intellectual climate, d’Aubigné’s work again provides a means for Christians to place themselves in history. The Reformation in England brings to mind the important part that Reformers and Martyrs played in the development of our now fragile modern freedoms.  Above all, however, this work bears testimony to the power of the Spirit of God in the lives of individuals, churches, and nations. D’Aubigné wrote as a serious historian, but also, and crucially, as a pastor who had a deep understanding of the way in which God sovereignly acts in providence to bring about his purposes.

Gripping in its prose, yet far from sensationalist, this colourful record of the period is one which will be appreciated by spiritually-minded Christians everywhere.

From Goodreads: 

• Dr Merle d’Aubigne(1794-1872) devoted a lifetime to the study of the Reformation. His Spiritual insight remains unsurpassed.

5^th June 2021

‘The Tavern on Maple Street’ by Sharon Owens, published in 2005,  321 pages.  I bit of light reading, amongst some of the more serious books I’m reading at present,  a pleasant change, bit of a love story[s] in some ways, situated in Belfast, Ireland, where the book was first published, this edition published by Penguin.

From Goodreads: 

• Beautiful Lily Beaumont and her husband Jack are owners of a genuine Victorian tavern, situated on one of Belfast’s few remaining narrow cobbled streets. It’s a favourite among the locals who love the quiet atmosphere, good beer, and simple food. Then one day, Dublin-based developer Vincent Halloran arrives with big plans for Maple Street. The other traders are keen to sell up and retire, but Jack and Lily aren’t ready to call `time, please’ on their beloved tavern. Instead Lily hires four pretty barmaids to bring in the customers. Enter pint-sized, man-eater Bridget, lazy art-student Daisy, neurotic Trudy, and painfully shy Marie. And if the stakes for Lily and Jack weren’t already high enough, there’s a secret about the Maple Street tavern that has yet to be discovered. A secret that will redefine the meaning of love, friendship, and family in the most surprising ways .

From www.fantasticfiction:  .

• An irresistible novel brimming with wit, warmth, and Irish humor, about the married owners of a friendly tavern in Belfast and the intimate lives of the customers and employees who band together to save it from demolition.
  Jack Beaumont and his beautiful wife, Lily, are the owners of the tavern on Maple Street, a tiny Victorian pub they inherited from Jack’s great-uncle Ernest. It’s a quiet place, untouched by the modern world, and that’s why the customers like it so much.
  But a property developer wants to demolish the tavern and build a shopping mall on Maple Street. Jack and Lily and their little home-away-from-home are suddenly plunged into the limelight, caught in a desperate struggle to save their business from the bulldozers-or, with the help of some new employees, to at least make as much money as possible during their last few months as landlord and landlady.
  In The Tavern on Maple Street, Sharon Owens delivers another delicious sparkler full of love, friendship, relationships, and the day-to-day lives of ordinary people, one that is sure to satisfy readers’ insatiable appetite for her romantic and quirky Belfast tales.

23^rd June 2021

Meanwhile, this afternoon, I finished reading ‘Breaker Morant’ by Peter FitzSimons, published in 2020, 647 pages:  as I would write on the inside cover pages –  another masterpiece by FitzSimons – presenting as true a depiction of the Breaker Morant story, then perhaps has been told elsewhere by others. I was shocked at the treatment of the Boers [not just the military side] by the English [British] forces – especially the use of the concentration camps, little better in my view than those of Nazi Germany – except in this case, those confined were not killed or murdered outright generally, but were ‘allowed’ to die through lack of any kind of humanity – and 40 years later, the rest of the world [including the English] condemns [and rightly so] the Nazi camps used to try and obliterate the Jewish populace of Europe.

By the end of the conflict in 1902, according to FitzSimon’s figures, 30,000 Boer homesteads had been destroyed [not as causalities of battles but as part of a deliberate policy by the English], likewise, tens of thousands of the ‘homes’ of the Boers African labourers, 40 Boer towns razed, and 28,000 white civilians alone, lost their lives. As the author also notes, many of the whites’ African slaves also died but ‘for the latter, no-one was particularly counting’

[an aside, sadly man & nations don’t learn from these occurrences, as even in 2021, human tragedies of like nature, continue to occur in various parts of the world].

A couple of reviews and comments of a more professional nature. My bleak references to the ‘conflict’, are detailed and explained in much fuller fashion,  in the Canberra Times review which I’ve copied in full below.

From Booktopia

• The epic story of the Boer War and Harry ‘Breaker’ Morant: drover, horseman, bush poet – murderer or hero?
  Most Australians have heard of the Boer War of 1899 to 1902 and of Harry ‘Breaker’ Morant, a figure who rivals Ned Kelly as an archetypal Australian folk hero. Born in England and emigrating to Queensland in 1883 in his early twenties, Morant was a charming but reckless man who established a reputation as a rider, polo player and writer. He submitted ballads to The Bulletin that were published under the name ‘The Breaker’ and counted Banjo Paterson as a friend. When appeals were made for horsemen to serve in the war in South Africa, Morant joined up, first with the South Australian Mounted Rifles and then with a South African irregular unit, the Bushveldt Carbineers.
  In September 1901 Morant and two other Australians, Lieutenants Peter Handcock and George Witton, were arrested for the murder of Boer prisoners. Morant and Handcock were court-martialled and executed in February 1902 as the Boer War was in its closing stages, but the debate over their convictions continues to this day.
  Does Breaker Morant deserve his iconic status? Who was Harry Morant? What events and passions led him to a conflict that was essentially an Imperial war, played out on a distant continent under a foreign flag? Was he a scapegoat for British war crimes or a criminal himself?
  With his trademark brilliant command of story, Peter FitzSimons unravels the many myths and fictions that surround the life of Harry Morant. The truths FitzSimons uncovers about ‘The Breaker’ and the part he played in the Boer War are astonishing – and, in the hands of this master storyteller, make compelling reading.

From the Canberra Times [Michael McKernan, Dec 2020]

• Peter FitzSimons is an Australian phenomenon. He is our greatest storyteller. Writing, it seems, a couple of books a year, every year, for a long time, he sells extremely well. It is team work, he openly admits, employing a team of researchers as dedicated as he is to the stories he tells.
• Usually Fitzsimmons celebrates and applauds – great men, remarkable, uplifting events – James Cook, Ned Kelly, Charles Kingsford-Smith and great and successful Australian battles, Gallipoli, Kokoda, Villers-Bretonneux. His many readers feel better – about our country, about our story – after reading a FitzSimons yarn.

But not Breaker Morant. This is a dark, black book about grievous moral failure, about a wrongly conceived and dreadful, appalling war, and about the destruction of a society and its people. Before it was over, there were 115 000 Boers, mostly women and children, in concentration camps, terribly housed, barely fed, diseased and dying in awful numbers.

FitzSimons can find little good in Harry Harbord Morant, the “Breaker”. Morant lies as easily as he tells the time, consistently and always. He has several versions of his family background and education, all of them untrue. He takes people’s money, their wives and anything they hold precious.

He marauds and drinks his way through Queensland, New South Wales and South Australia. He is a wonderful horseman, an entertainer and a popular versifier but there is more to him than that. He is also a murderer.

Convicted of the murder of 12 people and shot by firing squad, it is certain that Morant’s tally of death was greater. One was a much-loved missionary, most were unarmed Boer prisoners.

He treated the prisoners well, he claimed, until the Boers tortured, murdered and mutilated the body of his good friend, Captain Percy Hunt. The Boers did no such thing. Hunt was killed attacking a heavily defended house. His body was untouched apart from the bullet wound to his heart.

There is much more to this book than an account of this one evil man. FitzSimons finds the entire war a terrible catastrophe. Lord Kitchener, the man in overall command, invented the idea of the concentration camps and the destruction of farm houses and farms. He creates a desert where once farming thrived.

A cold, charmless man, Kitchener was also adept at picking precisely the wrong person for the job and backing him to the hilt. FitzSimons argues Kitchener was prepared to win the war by the total annihilation of the Boer population and society. Eventually those in power in London could not allow this to happen.

There are others too, perhaps none more despicable, calculating and murderous than Captain Alfred Taylor, manipulating lesser soldiers like Captain Hunt and Morant.

Though placed before a court martial alongside Morant, Handcock and Whitten, Taylor’s cool, incisive mind saw him convincing the court martial of his innocence of all charges.

Taylor saw out his life on his farm in Rhodesia, unpunished and dying, in his bed, at the age of 79. In FitzSimons’ view he was “the most guilty, the one most responsible for the many atrocities that occurred”.

It will dawn on the reader slowly that this is a book for our times. If some Australians fighting in Afghanistan have been validly accused of war crimes, the Australian government will need to respond to this. Peter FitzSimons has written a book about war crimes in a different country and in a different war.

Make no mistake though, this is a book about a variety of revolting war crimes and crimes against humanity.

There is some light, however, in this bleak, black account of the war. FitzSimons writes in his characteristic way – a style not to everyone’s taste – but, for the most part, graphic, engaging and highly readable.

He also finds an action to celebrate with determined, hard-working, successful and brave Australian soldiers to applaud to the full. This is his account of the Battle of Elands River, where a small number of Australians held off an overwhelming Boer force for several days, holding a vital post.

He tells of the bravery and determination of Queenslander Lieutenant James Annat, “a very popular if quietly spoken officer in his mid-thirties” – “as game a man as ever lived”, one of his soldiers wrote admiringly to his family. There is not very much else in this book to celebrate.

Breaker Morant marks an evolution in Peter Fitzsimons’ work as a writer. It is an important book, powerful in its grim telling, requiring the reader to think carefully and weigh up the moral conundrums FitzSimons exposes.

Breaker Morant may well be Peter FitzSimons best book so far. It deserves a wide and thoughtful readership.

26^th June 2021

‘New Guinea: Nature and Culture of Earth’s Grandest Island by Bruce M. Beehier, photography by Tim Laman, published in 2020, 376 pages  –  a great read, a little difficult at times with all of the descriptive types of animals, birds, sea life , vegetation, geographic features, and so on –  I had anticipated the book would be more about the people of New Guinea, but it provided a much wider scope than that. Overall, very interesting, and a valuable addition to my library, to be a proud owner of.

Media Review:

• “A great introduction to the natural history of New Guinea, this book is remarkably thorough in its breadth and depth. Beehler is a noted authority on many of the subjects covered, from the island’s birds to its ecology. He provides an excellent description of a ‘traditional’ New Guinea village of today, and gives a feeling for what the island’s untouched forest is really like. And Tim Laman’s photographs are great.”
  – John P. Dumbacher, California Academy of Sciences  “With its excellent photos, this is a highly readable and appealing account of the natural and cultural history of New Guinea. There really isn’t any book comparable to this.”– Allen Allison, Bishop Museum, Honolulu

And from Amazon

• An enthralling exploration of the biologically richest island on Earth, featuring more than 200 spectacular colour images by award-winning National Geographic photographer Tim Laman

In this beautiful book, Bruce Beehler, a renowned author and expert on New Guinea, and award-winning National Geographic photographer Tim Laman take the reader on an unforgettable journey through the natural and cultural wonders of the world’s grandest island. Skillfully combining a wealth of information, a descriptive and story-filled narrative, and more than 200 stunning colour photographs, the book unlocks New Guinea’s remarkable secrets like never before.

Lying between the Equator and Australia’s north coast, and surrounded by the richest coral reefs on Earth, New Guinea is the world’s largest, highest, and most environmentally complex tropical island ― home to rainforests with showy rhododendrons, strange and colourful orchids, tree-kangaroos, spiny anteaters, ingenious bowerbirds, and spectacular birds of paradise. New Guinea is also home to more than a thousand traditional human societies, each with its own language and lifestyle, and many of these tribes still live in isolated villages and serve as stewards of the rainforests they inhabit.

Accessible and authoritative, New Guinea provides a comprehensive introduction to the island’s environment, animals, plants, and traditional rainforest cultures. Individual chapters cover the island’s history of exploration; geology; climate and weather; biogeography; plantlife; insects, spiders, and other invertebrates; freshwater fishes; snakes, lizards, and frogs; birdlife; mammals; paleontology; paleoanthropology; cultural and linguistic diversity; surrounding islands and reefs; the pristine forest of the Foja Mountains; village life; and future sustainability.

Complete with informative illustrations and a large, detailed map, New Guinea offers an enchanting account of the island’s unequalled natural and cultural treasures.

5^th July, 2021

‘The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet’ by Colleen McCullough, published in 2008, 467 pages  –  a great read,  a wonderful and interesting imaginary follow-up to Jane Austen’s novel ‘Pride and Prejudice’, I really enjoyed this story and the depiction of the time and era in which it was written.  Some of the old novels from that era do leave you wondering what might happen ‘down the track’ [or laneway!!].  I purchased this book at the Woodend bookshop [on 21 May, 2021] on the way back from most recent meet up with Heather, at Daylesford.

From ‘Goodreads’   – 

• ‘Everyone knows the story of Elizabeth and Jane Bennet in “Pride and Prejudice.” But what about their sister Mary? At the conclusion of Jane Austen’s classic novel, Mary, bookish, awkward, and by all accounts, unmarriageable, is sentenced to a dull, provincial existence in the backwaters of Britain. Now, master storyteller Colleen McCullough rescues Mary from her dreary fate with “The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet,” a page-turning sequel set twenty years after Austen’s novel closes.

The story begins as the neglected Bennet sister is released from the stultifying duty of caring for her insufferable mother. Though many would call a woman of Mary’s age a spinster, she has blossomed into a beauty to rival that of her famed sisters. Her violet eyes and perfect figure bewitch the eligible men in the neighborhood, but though her family urges her to marry, romance and frippery hold no attraction. Instead, she is determined to set off on an adventure of her own. Fired with zeal by the newspaper letters of the mysterious Argus, she resolves to publish a book about the plight of England’s poor. Plunging from one predicament into another, Mary finds herself stumbling closer to long-buried secrets, unanticipated dangers, and unlooked-for romance.

Meanwhile, the other dearly loved characters of “Pride and Prejudice” fret about the missing Mary while they contend with difficulties of their own. Darcy’s political ambitions consume his ardor, and he bothers with Elizabeth only when the impropriety of her family seems to threaten his career. Lydia, wild and charming as ever, drinks and philanders her way into dire straits; Kitty, a young widow of means, occupies herself with gossip and shopping; and Jane, naive and trusting as ever, spends her days ministering to her crop of boys and her adoring, if not entirely faithful, husband.

Yet, with the shadowy and mysterious figure of Darcy’s right-hand man, Ned Skinner, lurking at every corner, it is clear that all is not what it seems at idyllic Pemberley. As the many threads of McCullough’s masterful plot come together, shocking truths are revealed, love, both old and new, is tested, and all learn the value of true independence in a novel for every woman who has wanted to leave her mark on the world.’ 

And a personal review by the ABC’s Melanie Telford

• I read this book because it was a sequel to Pride and Prejudice.

It is the first Colleen McCullough I have read and I thoroughly enjoyed the main plot as well as returning to the Bennet sisters 20 years after the marriage of Elizabeth to Mr Darcy.

After the death of Mrs Bennet, Mary, who has been caretaking her mother in a large residence, is now free to do as she pleases. Mary has been isolated from any real life, but has had free access to books usually kept from 18th century women.

As a consequence, she is a well read but naive and eccentric. Motivated by her infatuation with a social activist newspaper columnist, Mary decides she will write a book, touring the country and reporting on the ills of England – much to the horror of Mr Darcy and the Bennet sisters.

Early along her journey, Mary is abducted by a crazed cult leader. The narrative of mystery and intrigue that follows, will entertain a wider audience, while Jane Austen fans enjoy revisiting their favourite characters as they come together in their search for Mary.

D’arcy fans will be initially disappointed by the faltering relationship between Elizabeth and Darcy, and by Darcy’s cold, self fulfilling character. However this setting allows McCullough to revisit the successful Pride and Prejudice formula between Lizzy and Darcy as well as Mary Bennet and her suitor.

Jane Austen fans will need to get past some tacky language and conversation topics used by McCullough to demonstrate Mary’s eccentricities, Lydia’s appalling social condition, and the modernization of the Bennet sisters.  While the dialogue may seem unlikely to some readers, it may not be as historically inaccurate as it seems. I have read other sequels to Pride and Prejudice where unconvincing and bizarre social interaction has later been shown to be historically plausible. I would enjoy reading an appraisal by a reputable social historian in this matter.  I was initially disappointed by the state of affairs between Darcy and Elizabeth, but was drawn in by a good page turning plot which I enjoyed all the way to a satisfying conclusion where love prevails and Mr Darcy returns to his pedestal.

[In retrospect, perhaps I enjoyed this story because of it’s familiarity – I’d previously purchased, and completed reading a copy back on the 18 February 2016, having purchased the book 4 days earlier at Melton!!!  My recollections are dwindling!!.  My comment at the time – ‘A delightful story – I have not read enough of this author’. Since then, have read the majority of Colleen McCullough’s general novels, although have found it hard to get involved into her ‘Roman’ series of stories, though most of them are on my shelf – a future project!!]

Finished reading on the 7^th September  –   ‘Let The Land Speak’ by Jackie French, published in 2013, 440 pages:  a history of Australia: How the land created our nation. 

A very interesting read, and in the main, presented to a large degree from the Indigenous perspective. Though not to the same degree of ‘almost unbelievable far-fetched’ ideas of Bruce Pascoe, in ‘Dark Emu’ or Bill Gammage’s ‘The Biggest Estate on Earth’, there were certainly strong parallel’s between all three writers in respect to the impact that the originals Australians had on the land,  and a strong negative comparison, with the disastrous affect the European civilisation and early decade farming methods had on the land they ‘inherited’ from the Indigenous peoples.

The book was written from a strongly personal viewpoint by a writer who has lived on the land and observed the changes which have occurred  over the decades.  If she’s not sure of the answer, she provides her theory while acknowledging quite often, that she doesn’t claim her view to be the final word.  I think the biggest suggestion I obtained from the book –  our early settlers from the UK and similar countries, tried to adopt  the English way of farming onto an environment which was totally alien to those methods, and in doing so over the decades, basically destroyed the landscape and environment that the original Australians had managed so well, despite whatever historical claims and assumptions have been applied over the years.

Another reviewer commented that ‘Her work is often concerned with the truth of Australian Aboriginal heritage and contemporary circumstances, with history that’s been forgotten, wilfully misunderstood or deliberately shunned, and a deep and abiding love and respect for the land.’[Shannon].

As stated on the back cover: “To understand Australia’s history, you need to look at how the land has shaped not just our past, but will continue to shape our future’.

To explain the book in more detail, the following are a few more professional reviewers and opinions on the book, to encourage readers.

From BookTopia

To understand the present, you need to understand the past. to understand Australia’s history, you need to look at how the land has shaped not just our past, but will continue to shape our future.

From highly respected, award-winning author Jackie French comes a new and fascinating interpretation of Australian history, focusing on how the land itself, rather than social forces, shaped the major events that led to modern Australia.

Our history is mostly written by those who live, work and research in cities, but it’s the land itself which has shaped our history far more powerfully and significantly than we realise. Reinterpreting the history we think we all know – from the indigenous women who shaped the land, from terra Incognita to Eureka, from Federation to Gallipoli and beyond, Jackie French shows us that to understand our history, we need to understand our land. taking us behind history and the accepted version of events, she also shows us that there’s so much we don’t understand about our history because we simply don’t understand the way life was lived at the time.

Eye-opening, refreshing, completely fascinating and unforgettable, Let the Land Speak will transform the way we understand the role and influence of the land and how it has shaped our nation.

A review from 29 March,  2014 on  hercanberra.com.au

I knew when I first heard about Jackie French’s upcoming work on the land that the result would be much more than a book about the geographical elements that comprise our great country. I knew it would be very much about this, but I also knew it would be about spirit. About heart. About an almost ethereal human connection to the land that so many of us fail to feel, even after a lifetime.

And I was right. This is our land through the eyes of one who is deeply in love with every intimate part of its geographical structure, its history, its people—its soul.

Let the Land Speak is, in part, biographical. It is about one woman’s journey, from her oyster-shucking days in Darling Harbour as a child, fossicking along the rocks to find the abundant food available, just as it was when the First Fleet arrived, to the many hours she has spent with Aboriginal women in her later adulthood—women who have passed on innate knowledge and land-connection from millennia past.

It is also an historical account. Opening with the arrival of Captain Cook’s Endeavour, we are taken back in time to first see the ‘real’ Australia encountered by white man. We are introduced to five hundred years of misunderstandings as to how white man first approached this land and how it was subsequently settled.

And my goodness, it is eye-opening.

We are told of the Real First Fleet—the people who came by boat around 60,000 years ago. We are given a vivid picture of the land as it was then, and we are gradually transported to the land we have now. The drought-hardened, flood-ravaged, raw, wild, beautiful land new settlers tried with all their might to turn into the sweet green fields of England, dotted with fluffy white sheep and crops that would never stand a chance.

This is an extraordinary, comprehensive, information-crammed tome that is at once mindboggling in fascinating content, and extremely emotional to read. It made me realise that, like many Australians, I have lived a life more or less detached from the land. Growing up as a teen on the Central Coast of New South Wales, I felt more of an affinity with the ocean than I did the land, and then moving from city to major city thereafter, I again felt more connection to the manmade than I ever did to nature.

As a result, I felt profoundly moved to read of Jackie’s closeness to the land—her ability to predict weather patterns, rains and drought, simply by smell, the mating calls of animals, and the condition and flourishing of plants and trees each and every season in her beloved Araluen Valley in southern tablelands of New South Wales.

French’s book is a holistic view of the place we all inhabit—a land that is tough, has always been tough, and will continue to be tough to live on. It is tough to farm, tough to survive, tough to control—and Let the Land Speak asks us to look at the possibility of releasing this need to control. Of living in harmony with our environment, and allowing it to return to a balance and a beauty that has been—and continues to be—rapidly lost.

It is a cry for help. It is a call to action. And it will not fail to move you.

As we age and become more attuned to our history, and more aware of the possibility held in our future, returning to the land and developing a relationship with earth is an emotional journey. From the plight of the Great Barrier Reef to the life of our farming folk, from the earth-scourging mining industry to the perilous insistence we have to build homes where fire comes and where corroding coastlines will soon wash all into the sea, the overriding messaging in Let the Land Speak is in listening. Stopping. Watching. Becoming one with our land.

This is an important book, and a must-read for all Australians, for it contains messaging we simply can’t ignore. In the words of Jackie herself: “We need to listen to our land. If we fail, we will stumble into a future we can neither predict nor understand.”

A comment from a reader [Paul Daltron]  – 

I enjoyed this book. I liked reading Jackie French’s reflections based on her observation, over the past 40 years, of changes in the ecosystem of the Araluen valley, south-east of Canberra. The first 3/4 of the book, illustrating ways in which the climate and landscape have influenced human and social development in Australia over the past 60,000 years, were the most interesting.

While from Rachel  – 

I really enjoyed this book. While it is as much storytelling as it is history, Jackie’s perspective as a woman and a farmer provided me with new perspectives on well known events. I felt the thesis was stretched a little thin in the middle of the book, but the start and finish kept me well engaged. I am in awe of Jackie’s knowledge of her local area and what she’s learnt through observing it. This book hopefully will help me observe and understand more too. 

While Shannon, mentioned earlier. Further noted that

 have always believed that Australians – both Indigenous (which would seem obvious) and ‘white’ Australians – are and have been shaped by the land. That all the stereotypes associated with Australians – from the positive (laconic and irreverent sense of humour; self-deprecating abhorrence of ‘tall poppies’; community spirit and neighbourliness; bravery and courage; hard-working; laid-back and easy-going; innovative; friendly and welcoming) to the negative (racist etc.) – have their roots in our relationship with the land and what it takes to survive here, whether you adapt to it as the Aboriginals did, or whether you try to mould it into a semblance of an English pastoral landscape as the British did. This understanding started to form when I was studying for my undergrad many years ago; Let the Land Speak confirms and explains it.

Other

The following article, written by former ABC radio presenter and commentator, Jon Faine [whose aggressive posturing with interviewees I often found distasteful] is rather relevant at this time to the ‘crisis’ [as some would describe it] facing the British Royal Family. I think enough has been presented world-wide  in recent days about that issue, so I won’t dwell on it except to say, I felt Jon’s article on this occasion was worth sharing.

With respect especially to the Victoria situation and the processes that Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews is proposing,  I think the context and history of what that issue is referring to be should be made aware to all of us  – for too long, we have hidden behind the old format text-book presentations of our State [and Nation’s history] of what our education system, and governments wanted us to believe. Those views have gradually started to change and evolve over recent years, as they should have.

Jon Faine’s comments complement another article in the same edition of the Sunday Age, too lengthy to comment on here, but a useful piece of relevant reading for all who are genuinely interested in how our history really happened, rather than just simply what we were told at school!! Titled ‘Ground Rules’, the writer speaks to First Nations [Indigenous] Victorians and asks the question as to whether telling the truth of this state’s ‘real’ history of it’s response to Aboriginal communities in early settlement days, and even up to modern times in some cases, would lead to a treaty of some sort.  For example, one representative states “There is a brutal history down here in the south-west [of Victoria], and that needs to be told…it was domestic terrorism, the way our mob were treated….But there’s this gap in history. This gap is knowledge”. However, as Jon Faine suggests below [on both aspects of his article] for too long, we have put our fingers in our ears and said ‘I would rather not know’!!

In any case, here is Jon’s article for the benefit of those interested in reading further..

Family – and racist past – both Victoria [the State] and the Windsors have racist pasts to face up to. Only one is doing it.

Two appeals were made this week to deal with uncomfortable truths. Meghan, ex-Duchess of Something-or-Other, asked us to believe that at least one person – someone important – in our Australian Royal Household is a racist.

Meanwhile Dan Andrews has unveiled a unique process to consider that colonial Victoria has a racist past – that early settlers held secrets to be divulged if only we go the right way about asking the right questions.

Both are compelling challenges. Both require an unflinching gaze. Both tell us something about ourselves, although many people will put their fingers in their ears and say “I would rather not know”. Here is why they should listen – here is why we MUST listen.

‘Our’ Royals are literally the most entitled people on the planet – it is not possible to be more entitled than having a title. Their insistence on the antiquated protocols and pointless archaic etiquette to match is all evidence of unfathomable privilege.  Apparently, they have special blood and by reason of ancient birthright are not like their ‘subjects’.

Whether you like it or not, these feudal concepts linger in our contemporary democracy, and are the foundation fantasy of our Constitution. Despite them being the opposite of that most Australian ethos of a ‘fair go’ for all. Enough is enough. Our continuing dependence on this nonsense is embarrassing.

Meanwhile, the same day, in a case of serendipitous timing, the state government’s ‘Yoo-rrook Justice Commission’   is announced. It is astonishing in its substance and style.

A path to gradually – no doubt very gradually – move  to truth telling, reconciliation with Indigenous Victorians and to heal is on offer. Underpinning the idea is the use of what is called restorative justice – like the specialist and successful Koori Court, modelled itself on Maori Courts in NZ.

No government in Australia has dared to allow these questions to be asked – until now we have been too afraid to open those wounds.

But it is not just a commitment to a ‘Royal’ Commission [there it is again … could it not be a Commission of Inquiry? Why do we need the Queen’s imprimatur, but I digress] It is also the unique methodology that Andrews has committed to for the selection and appointment of the commissioners who will do this sensitive job.

Under our Constitution, only the Premier can recommend to the Governor who will be a royal commissioner. Dan Andrews has delegated the selection of the five Yoo-rrook Royal Commissioners to an independent assessment panel. This vetting group will run a public process, seek nominations and check the credentials of those who put their names forward. A short list will be published and the public can comment – favourably or otherwise – about those short listed.

The vetting group of four – two are First Nations leaders, a third a highly qualified Indigenous lawyer who runs the Premier’s Aboriginal affairs policy unit, the fourth a Spanish international lawyer who has worked on truth and healing all over the world – will interview the short-listed candidates and then recommend to the Premier who to appoint as the Royal Commissioners. The chair of the commission and a majority of the five must be Indigenous.

This breaks the fundamental political rule to only start inquiries that find what you ask them to find and recommend what you seek to have recommended. The Premier’s strategy, backed by focus groups and polling, is to press on with reform, to follow the voluntary assisted dying laws, supervised injecting centres, medicinal cannabis, abortion law changes, banning gay conversion ‘therapy’ and a raft of similarly progressive policies. Reconciliation will take time, but that time starts now.

Dan Andrews’ short-term absence resulting from his fractured vertebra has accentuated the dominant role he plays in this administration. As always in politics, senior colleagues keep an eye out for any opportunity for advancement should the Premier retire, move to the private sector or pursue a career change to professional golf. But possible successors are not too animated just now.

His enforced rest will afford him and his family a chance to sample life without the daily stress and hurly-burly of political life and whether he emerges re-invigorated or tempted to leave is anyone’s guess. What is abundantly clear though is that his stamp on this state will continue with the work of Yoo-rrook Commission and other landmark reforms enduring.

.In contrast, the House of Windsor,  self-obsessed and more concerned about their showbiz credentials than the well-being of their ‘subjects’, are on borrowed time. Anyone interested in some truth telling in London? If we are going to tell the truth about what happened a few hundred years ago, we must also tell the truth about our no longer fit-for-purpose constitutional monarchy’

[Jonathan Eric Faine AM (born 21 September 1956) is an Australian former radio presenter who hosted the morning program on ABC Radio Melbourne in Melbourne. Faine is recognised as a prominent and influential member of the Australian Jewish community]…