Successor to Typhoon Kingdom (2019) which I chose as when I read it in 2023, Everything Lost, Everything FouSuccessor to Typhoon Kingdom (2019) which I chose as when I read it in 2023, Everything Lost, Everything Found by Matthew Hooton is a story of imperial occupation and colonisation unlike any I have read before.
Set at the turn of the millennium and narrated in the first person, Everything Lost, Everything Found is the story of an ageing man called Jack in Muskinaw, Michigan. He is negotiating the last period of his very long life. His wife, Grace, having seen off cancer just a short time ago, is now in palliative care where her dementia comes and goes. In the home they have shared for decades, Jack is having to face up to his own encroaching frailty and the looming loss of independence and the need to sort out his fractured relationship with his daughter Jess. He's in conflict with Jess because of decisions he made when she split from Simon, her Ex.
This brief summary might suggest that Jack is an ordinary man, an American citizen now in retirement from his years as a plumber in a rustbelt city. But Jack has had an extraordinarily traumatic childhood which has shaped his entire life even though his family knows very little about it. How could they? How could they possibly imagine a childhood in Fordlandia, Henry Ford's grand colonial enterprise in the Amazon rainforest?
tells us that
... was established by American industrialist in the Amazon Rainforest in 1928 as a prefabricated industrial town intended to be inhabited by 10,000 people to secure a source of cultivated rubber for the automobile manufacturing operations of the Ford Motor Company in the United States. Ford had negotiated a deal with the Brazilian government granting him a concession of 10,000 sq km (3,900 sq mi) of land on the banks of the Rio Tapajós near the city of Santarém, Brazil, in exchange for a 9% share in the profits generated. Ford's project failed, and the city was abandoned in 1934.
In effect, Fordlandia was an American colony under occupation by a population sent there from the US.
Jack goes to this swathe of land carved from the Amazon rainforest with his parents.
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It's good to have something comparatively undemanding to read alongside muddling through a challenging novel. Not knowing enough about it, I did not It's good to have something comparatively undemanding to read alongside muddling through a challenging novel. Not knowing enough about it, I did not expect Günter Grass's The Tin Drum to be so confusing, and so it's daytime reading. I needed something to read in bed, and this historical novel about the Japanese Occupation of Hong Kong was ideal.
Especially since it coincided with my little rant at Yarra Book Club where .
In Australia, our literature and TV rarely explored how Japan had behaved in the countries they occupied throughout southeast Asia and Asia, and if we did come across any stories about it, they were through an Australian lens, not about what happened to the locals. When you think about it, it’s odd that historical war fiction from Australia is mostly all about the European war, and hardly ever about the Pacific War close to home.
When Sleeping Women Wake begins with a prologue in Shanghai in 1906. It introduces an eight-year-old orphan girl and her mistress, not much older, and their eventual departure for an arranged marriage into an elite family. The novel proper then shifts to Hong Kong in 1941, their refuge when the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) broke out.
In China, 1937 is when WW2 began, and just as Britain stood alone against Nazi Germany until 1941, China fought Japanese imperialism alone for four years, when the attack on Pearl Harbour finally prompted the US to join the war. You don't need to know any of this to enjoy the novel, but you can learn more about the 1937 Battle of Shanghai from this video:
[You'll need to visit my blog to get the URL, see below.]
The novel reveals the social conditions for women in patriarchal pre-communist China. In 1941, Mingzhu, First Wife to Wei Tang and the mother of Qiang, is often humiliated by his second wife Cai because she had produced a son. Mingzhu's sole ally is the maid Biyu who over the years has bridged the class divide to become like a sister, but there is no question that Tang rules with absolute authority in his home. (Mingzhu is expected to feel grateful that he allows her to read.) But like many, Wei Tang had misplaced confidence in the British to repel the Japanese attack on Hong Kong, and his family is torn apart in the chaos of the Occupation.
Mingzhu and Qiang are separated, and their 3rd-person limited PoV narratives alternate along with Biyu's as the story progresses.
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A Piece of Red Cloth is said to be a ground-breaking work of historical fiction for two reasons: partly because of the way it has been written and parA Piece of Red Cloth is said to be a ground-breaking work of historical fiction for two reasons: partly because of the way it has been written and partly because it is a story based on Australia's pre-colonial history.
The novel was written collaboratively by Leonie Norrington, best-known for her award-winning children's picture story books, and Yolngu cultural custodians Merrkiyawuy Ganambarr-Stubbs, Djawa Burarrwanga and Djawundil Maymuru. (Merrkiyawuy and Djawundil have collaborated with Norrington before, to co-author Welcome to My Country and Songspirals.)
But, as explained in the Author's Note, the novel was inspired by Leanie Norrington's mentor Clare Bush (deceased) — who adopted Norrington, not in the Western sense, but took charge of the Norrington family's Yolngu cultural education when they were growing up in the 1960s in a remote community in southern Arnhem Land. It was subsequently Clare Bush who worked with Norrington to help her create numerous children's books set in remote northern Australia featuring Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal kids.
Clare, keen to redress the negative and patronising depiction of traditional Aboriginal people and lifestyles in the media, also...
... wanted Australian fiction to include narratives that presented Aboriginal people as they saw themselves, from a point of view that enacted their motives, ambition and philosophy. (p.369)
Together, they worked on an outline for the book, based on pre-colonial oral history about the kidnapping of a Yolngu girl by Makassan traders, but Clare Bush* died before the novel could progress. Never very confident about making the transition to writing for adults, Norrington let the story lapse until some years later when she was asked to finish it by Clare's family, and encouragement and guidance was provided by book's co-authors and Yolngu knowledge holders, Merrkiyawuy Ganambarr-Stubbs, Djawa Burarrwanga and Djawundil Maymuru.
As you can see from , there are other examples of collaborative First Nations writing but I have not come across a fictional narrative before.
The other distinctive feature of A Piece of Red Cloth is that it's historical fiction based on oral history and a culture unfamiliar to most of us. As teachers of Indonesian or Australian history know, there is plenty of empirical evidence about Makassan trepang traders making contact with coastal Aborigines — and since at least 2007 there has been which provides information about including rock art, archaeological evidence from plants to pottery, written accounts in Indonesia, language exchange and
But —as portrayed in this novel — the relationship with the land, the patriarchal nature of Yolngu society and the kinship system with its complex rules and protocols, is as unfamiliar as is their hunter-gatherer lifestyle, their diet, their cooking methods, their tool-making, their ceremonies and rituals, and their beliefs.
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'm not making much progress with #20BooksofWinter. My current book is The Tin Drum by Gunther Grass, but I was so easily distracted by this beautiful'm not making much progress with #20BooksofWinter. My current book is The Tin Drum by Gunther Grass, but I was so easily distracted by this beautiful, beautiful book from Carol Lefevre... beautiful as an object, with exquisite artwork by Margaret Ambridge on and within the covers designed by George Saad, and beautiful in its celebration of life and a philosophy of ageing.
Interspersed among the meditations on a 70th year which included some alarming health challenges, are excerpts from Lefevre's garden journal as the book progresses through Summer, Autumn, Winter and Spring.
On the walk to the café, passing under the century-old plane trees, their withered leaves drift and fall around me like papery hands, or airborne starfish. The breeze tumbles them along the road with a scraping sound, a seasonal death rattle. Autumn is a kind of death cleaning, a process of making way for rest and regrowth.
Sadness is still a weight in my chest. I sense that people expect me to be getting over it. I see them thinking that my mother was ninety-five, a good innings, and I know I was lucky to have her in my life for so long. But what they don't seem to understand is that you're never ready to say goodbye to the very few people you truly love. (Extract from my garden journal. March 2021, p.71)
I wish I had the self-discipline to keep such a journal because I also cherish my garden, and I also associate aspects of it with events in my life. There is a beautiful camellia given to me by my dear friend and author Ros Collins, in memory of my father and I think of him every time I walk past it. It flowers in April, the month in which he died two weeks before his 92nd birthday. A careless gardener employed to do some weeding destroyed the rose that Ros gave me in memory of my mother, yet strangely I still see it there, and may perhaps not replace it. Perhaps it is a forerunner of the Imagined Garden I may one day have...
Lefevre recognises that a time will come when an imagined garden will one day take the place of the one she loves but that sometimes tires her now. Her chapter about imagined gardens references those of famous authors and garden designers, and hers will be beautiful too:
Already I plan a Garden of Lost Flowers, to give sanctuary to such beauties as a, a jellyfish tree endemic to the island of Mahé in the Seychelles, and the cry violet, or cry pansy, an extinct plant species that was once endemic to Yonne [in France]. The Garden Where Nothing Is Forgotten and All Is Forgiven must, I think, be a blue garden, though one in which the purple-blues will be admissible. (p.183)
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A novella crafted into only 136 intriguing pages, Little World is Josephine Rowe's fourth book. She has previously published the 2016 novel A Loving A novella crafted into only 136 intriguing pages, Little World is Josephine Rowe's fourth book. She has previously published the 2016 novel A Loving Faithful Animal and two short story collections. , it was the her first collection Tarcutta Wake (2012) that alerted me to the promise of this writer:
Beautifully crafted, powerful stories that made me stop and reflect, and remember. Many of them are the kind of stories that trigger memories of similar situations. This collection is one that will have the reader spend as much time thinking as actually reading.
Little World has that strange compelling quality too. This is the kind of book that makes a reader stop to think: why is there this episode that seems to be out of place or irrelevant? Josephine Rowe is too good a writer to be placing random episodes without purpose, so we readers have to do the work of interpreting opaque or ambiguous sequences. For me, the work of multiple re-readings is worth it...
Written in three parts, the book begins with the arresting image of a retired engineer taking delivery of a (maybe) saint. Orrin Bird is somewhere in the remote bush, and the nameless saint arrives by horse float, and just as well, because a more appropriate conveyance, such as a hearse, would have attracted attention, prying in the guise of condolences. Condolences would not have been unwarranted because it is his old friend Kaspar Isaksen who has sent him this bizarre bequest. Kaspar had cared for her in a box of tamanu wood that Orrin had crafted without knowing its purpose, but Kaspar, haunted by horror, has drunk himself to death. It is Orrin to whom he entrusts the responsibility while, so the solicitor tells him, the process for potential beatification continues.
Orrin—not devout, or not in a Catholic sense—is conflicted about the nature of this legacy. He has no notion of how to care for a saint. Even a small one. Does not even believe. Not in any one God, attended by angels and casting his divine judgement down from On High. If he has gods, they are many, and they themselves tend—are the kind who get their hands dirty and wet, who are the Dirt and the Wet. And yes, the Dry. Terrible Dry, who doubtless has no comprehension nor will towards terror. Just is. As are the gods Salt and Reef and Ant Mound. The birds who tell him whether he is or isn't home.
Still. Catholic or not. You don't turn away a saint. (p.5)
This strange but convincing scenario is the vehicle for historical allusions about events that have been largely obliterated by time and indifference:
In the years that followed, Kaspar Isaksen took up the task of methodically drinking himself to death. His letters came clogged with remorse for fates he'd not learnt of until after the war. For instance how, during the occupation, his former charges had been rounded up on their cultivated strip of coast and loaded onto small boats, and the boats towed out to sea, shelled and sunk. Thus leprosy was removed from the island. (p.27, see
[These events take place on the island of Nauru, known to Australians for the phosphate mining that destroyed its landscape into a moonscape, and for its reincarnation as a detention centre for refugees. This novella does not allow it to be out-of-sight and out-of-mind.]
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Bliss Mountain was the perfect 'handbag' book for the waiting rooms that occupied my time this week! (My regular (always punctual) doctor has been gadBliss Mountain was the perfect 'handbag' book for the waiting rooms that occupied my time this week! (My regular (always punctual) doctor has been gadding about on holiday, and the replacement always goes over time). But Bliss Mountain was absorbing reading, and also conducive to pleasurable re-reading...
I liked it for much the same reason that I liked Subhash Jaireth's Spinoza's Overcoat, Travels with Writers and Poets (2020, ) because I enjoyed the musings of a traveller across space and time, and the literary allusions e.g. to the Australian poet Les Murray. Kaul's narrator, however, is also preoccupied by the landscape of his surroundings, and in New York, his observations of its architecture are unexpected where new sights crowd out the old.
In a different age, the city's vertical lines thickening out of the morning mist must have quickened the pulse of passengers entering the harbour. With inflamed minds—the tiredness eclipsed for now by the promise of future rewards, felt like a pinprick between breaths—they must have hurriedly climbed ashore, over rocks of mica schist and gneiss a billion years old. Formed in the tectonic drama that had shaped much of the eastern seaboard and that had left new York with one of the longest natural harbours in the world, the strategic significance had not been lost on the first Dutch settlers, the foundations of these modern erections, whose gothic traceries and glittering spires touched the skies with a brash exuberance and doused the crepuscular streets below with untold passions, were in fact layered in deep time.
So a dizzying geological pastness had anchored all this freedom and ambition. (p.3)
The narrator comes to New York at an awkward time in his relationship with his wife Rita, who has stayed in London after being made partner in a law firm, while he has abandoned that career. He respected her ambition, her confidence, her practical attitude and her knowledge of the ways of the world but her cool demeanour became at times too vexing to ignore.
She had both kindness and virtue but was unwilling to extend her imagination to abstract ideals. (p.6)
As he walks the streets and parks of New York, he is absorbed by memories of walking in London, among smooth Georgian façades with arched doorways and stuccoed lower floors and in the cemetery, the graves of Karl Marx and Mary Ann Evans, author of Middlemarch. But in New York, where the jazz age represented casting off European legacies, it is Art Deco that dominates his meditations.
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Born in Tasmania but now resident in Melbourne after an academic career in the UK, author Francesca de Tores a.k.a. Francesca Haig is an academic, wriBorn in Tasmania but now resident in Melbourne after an academic career in the UK, author Francesca de Tores a.k.a. Francesca Haig is an academic, writer and poet. Her novel Saltblood, based on the real life of the pirate Mary Read (d. 1721), is a tale of adventure on the 18th century high seas. I think it must have been the buccaneering history of Britain that was the catalyst for this novel: our seafaring history such as it is, tends to focus more on convict and settler sailing ships and the perils of an uncharted coastline, and our rogues are more likely to be escaped convicts and highwaymen.
Whatever about that, Mary begins her life by having the identity of her brother foisted on her, but finds that the options open to her as a man are more to her liking. She takes a job in service not in the drudgery of the kitchens but as a male member of staff, and she leaves that position to enlist in the navy during one of England’s numerous wars with France and Spain. When the battles become land-based, she joins the army, fighting all the time as an undetected female in men’s clothing. She falls in love, and marries, but takes to the sea again when she is widowed.
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When speaking of one of our foremost writers of literary fiction, it seems reductive to suggest that Gail Jones' new novel The Name of the Sister is When speaking of one of our foremost writers of literary fiction, it seems reductive to suggest that Gail Jones' new novel The Name of the Sister is a literary thriller, but it's true to say that I devoured it in less than a day, mulling the early pages slowly as one does with any novel by Jones, but then racing through to the heart-stopping finale to see who might survive... The Name of the Sister evokes all those alarming tropes about outback predators. People, that is, not animals. Dreadful, horrifying disappearances of hapless travellers on remote outback roads, far from any kind of help. Sometimes, , but those are not the deaths that prey on our fears. No, we think of or the victims of serial killer , and the lost-and-never-found who we hear about during Missing Persons Week. If you've ever been the prey of aggressive motorists on an outback road (and I have, in outback Queensland), these fears are magnified, even if no harm was done.
The Unknown Woman given ', is found in the Outback, not lost. Hers is an appearance, not a disappearance. But she is a mystery because she cannot speak. She can't be identified, and authorities don't know what trauma lies behind her emergence onto the road, where Terry Williams (known as Tezza to his mates), almost ran her down. Angie, the freelance journalist, is interested in approaching the story from a different angle. She wants to explore the stories of people who ring Crime Stoppers, people who are convinced that 'Jane' is a long-lost loved one. Dismayed and yet absorbed by the media frenzy, Angie seeks a more high-minded purpose. Though she can't yet articulate to herself or her unsatisfactory husband how she might proceed, she rejects the populist approach:
Angie felt uncomfortable entering the genre of 'true crime': styrofoam cups rolling in the wind; wannabe solvers of dodgy whodunnits, seekers of gory details; raincoated perves. Not really her thing. There was enough of it anyway, enough willed malfeasance out there to satisfy the grossest demand. And fiction: grimly Norwegian, darkly Finnish, wittily Scots. At some level she was appalled by the public appetite for stories of hurt, and by the addictive excellence of crime dramas on television. (p15).
As she watches the news reports...
Now by some dark magic, Angie more fully imagined her. She was wavering in the headlights, a figure in a ragged dress, her feet bloody, perhaps, and her frame slowly staggering. This driver charging at the darkness saw a shape ahead and thought first of an animal. Knowing how to drive in the country, he slowed rather than swerved. And then the woman drifted towards him, a set of human angles and skinny as a new lamb, and he stamped his brake in panic, coming to a skidding halt—too close, too close (how his heart hammered). (p.4)
This scene has a significance easy to miss on a first reading. Jones does not give us a narration of what happened. She shows that Angie, a journalist experienced in fact-finding, has assembled it from media reports and let her imagination recreate a scene at which she was never present.
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As I said last month when I attended for women of my generation, As I said last month when I attended for women of my generation, (1939-2019) was an important person in our lives. Even for those who never met her, she was a public intellectual and activist with a commanding presence in the media, advocating for reform on issues that mattered to women. She first came to attention when she founded WEL (the Women's Electoral Lobby) so that when the time came to vote in 1972, for the first time women could choose representatives who would act in their interests because the WEL survey provided them with relevant information about the candidates.
Fearless Beatrice Faust is more than a biography. Even if you've never heard of Beatrice Faust, this is a must-read social history of the women's movement in an exciting time in Australia's history.
It's so easy to miss the significance of events when you're living through them!
Though Brett's admiration of her subject is obvious, Fearless Beatrice Faust is definitely not a hagiography. Bea comes across as a highly intelligent woman who didn't fulfil her potential at university but made a decades-long career as a freelance journalist and public intellectual. A lively and determined progressive, she refused to be defined by her chronic ill-health and childhood trauma as a motherless child, but in later life she succumbed to addiction to tranquilisers. She was a forthright and engaging columnist and published four books, but these have not weathered well. In particular, she took far too long to write the second one and by the time it was published, the zeitgeist had moved on, indicative of how many of her ideas are either taken for granted or out-of-step with feminism today.
Most notably, Brett interrogates Bea's contentious views on pornography and paedophilia, acknowledging that they were framed by views about civil libertarianism — but she remains clear-sighted about Faust's failure to recognise the harm.
After decades of somnolent conservative governments, progressives in the 1970s needed to be pugnacious and opinionated when necessary, and Bea was. As the success with WEL shows, she was strategic in her use of grassroots women's networks and very good at political mobilisation, but interpersonal relationships were not her strength. With access to Bea's personal papers, Brett reveals that wrote furious letters to friends she felt had let her down, but subsequently healed the breach. She was not always prudent in her columns, attracting legal action from aggrieved subjects, and when she reinvented herself as a reviewer of photography exhibitions, she could write a mean review that required an apology from the curator to the artist. (She was hostile to postmodernism.)
It was interesting to read that Bea met her match with Margaret Tighe.
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After the bitter nihilism of it was a pleasure to read Parting Words by Cass Moriarty. It is a novel about values, and hoAfter the bitter nihilism of it was a pleasure to read Parting Words by Cass Moriarty. It is a novel about values, and how our values influence the people we become and the ways we behave.
I have never approved of people using their bequests to try to control matters from beyond the grave, but that is exactly what Daniel does. He sends the three off on quests to find people that he has wronged, or who he has failed to acknowledge, or owes recompense to, or who deserve an explanation for his behaviour. Moriarty's imaginative plot delivers a variety of people as recipients of these letters and their experiences cover a range of events in a life that spans schooldays, military service in WW2 and a successful career in real estate.
It's a fantasy, of course, to believe that Daniel can 'put things right' decades later by using his children as couriers, and since some of those to whom the letters are addressed have been dead for years, Richard asks, not unreasonably, why didn't he do it himself when he and they were still alive? And what was Daniel hoping for, by passing his responsibility off onto his children? That is the question for book groups to mull over. And after all, don't we all put off doing things that make us feel uncomfortable, eh?
The characterisation of Richard is interesting. He's cranky, and he has reason to be since he's keeping the news of his retrenchment secret from his wife and he's hoping that his father's money will assuage his woes. But he's also opinionated, racist, sulky and mean-spirited.
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Near the suburb where I spent most of my Australian childhood, there were numerous street names alluding to the (1853-1856), commemoratingNear the suburb where I spent most of my Australian childhood, there were numerous street names alluding to the (1853-1856), commemorating battles, military leaders, a couple of ships, and also one very famous nurse. This was because the suburb was developed in the 19th century when Melburnians were avid consumers of news from Britain and memories of that faraway war were fresh. So Balaclava — the suburb and the railway station, and Balaclava Road itself — commemorates the Battle of Balaclava, 1854; with other battles commemorated by Alma Rd, Inkerman St, Malakoff St and Crimea St itself. Sebastopol Street commemorates the Siege of Sevastopol. Various notables include [Sir John] Pakington St, [Earl of] Cardigan St, [Commander Lord] Raglan St, while Westbury Grove and Westbury St commemorate soldier-turned-author who emigrated to Australia in 1866. The troopship Mooltan and HMS Blenheim gave their names to an avenue and a street.
And Nightingale Street, which runs between the railway line and Chapel Street, commemorates the achievements of Florence Nightingale, a.k.a. 'the lady with the lamp' who revolutionised nursing and saved the lives of countless soldiers.
The Crimean War was one of those big imperial wars when competing empires used men as cannon fodder in pursuit of ambitions that seem meaningless now, and as you can see they were so casual about the death toll that even now the number of casualties varies wildly depending on whose calculations are used. But one thing is undisputed: Casualties include death by disease. In all cases, death by disease exceeded the sum of 'killed in action' or 'died of wounds'.
As I wrote before , I learned about heroic women of the past from the children’s annuals that I used to receive at Christmastime. One of those was Florence Nightingale (1820-1910), and the story of her life is the frame for Laura Elvery's debut novel, Nightingale. Part historical fiction, part ghost story, the novel shines a light on the way Nightingale's pioneering nursing regime reduced death rates in the Crimean War, and made her an icon long before celebrity culture degraded the term. The story proper begins in 1910 with her narration in her very old age, when she is mostly alone in her bedroom with her memories, tended by her housekeeper and nurse Mabel.
But this beginning is preceded by a prologue — a vivid scene set on the Acropolis in 1850, when Florence is pondering how to avoid banalities in a letter home, and comes across some boys at play. The game looks complicated, and she watches intently to get the details right for her letter to Aunt Mai.
Then from the middle of the boys' circle the white ball began to rise, and her mind narrowed as she tried to keep up with what she was seeing. The ball was rising too slowly to be something that had been kicked up from the earth. And the word that came to her began with the shape of her mouth, which was making an O.
Owl.
The thing they were playing with was an owl.
Just a baby. (p.2)
Florence intervenes, but not without an analytical pause. She reasons that she will use her charm and sense of justice, her reasoning, which her father had praised in the past. This Florence is no Victorian female stereotype: she is calm, methodical, and she will get her way. This Florence is an observer who solves problems, and she will have agency even in an age that denies it to most women.
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I think I was expecting too much from With My Little Eye. Alas, it is a case of a potentially interesting story weighed down by leaden prose and weakI think I was expecting too much from With My Little Eye. Alas, it is a case of a potentially interesting story weighed down by leaden prose and weak editing that has not dealt with the repetitions and padding. And it isn't funny at all.
What bothers me more, though, is the uncritical acceptance of (a) ASIO's surveillance activities and reproducing the characterisation of the parents' attitude as doing their 'patriotic duty' by spying on local trade unionists, anti-war activists and grassroots community groups; and (b) the uncritical presentation of the father Dudley Doherty's bullying of his children, and the mother's acceptance of that. And when Joan Dudley herself joined The Firm, snug within suburbia but watching every move in her community, I couldn't help but think of innocent people who were the subjects of her reports to ASIO, who may merely have been good citizens paying attention to current events and keeping an eye on government overreach in an era of communist paranoia. According to With My Little Eye, ASIO approved Joan Doherty's inclusion in ASIO's official history the couple were acknowledged by ASIO and their names are included in the index. I'd have to read that book to know whether she really was instrumental in ferreting out spies, or was rather a compliant agent useful for offloading or if she was just a vigilant ideologue who caused trouble for her neighbours. found that the only Australians knowingly involved in espionage for the Soviets were communists.
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