Tag: Queensland

Alex Miller, Allen & Unwin, Australia, Author, Book review, Fiction, historical fiction, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting

‘Coal Creek’ by Alex Miller

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Coal-Creek

Fiction – paperback; Allen & Unwin; 304 pages; 2014. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Coal Creek, published in the UK earlier this year, is typical of what I have come to expect from Alex Miller’s writing: quietly understated prose, slowly paced narratives, characters who are deep thinkers and themes which are universal.

Outback life

This story, set in the Queensland outback in the 1950s, unfolds gently but culminates in violence.

The narrator, Bobby Blue (short for Robert Blewitt), is a simple man with a strong moral compass, who finds it difficult to express himself so usually says nothing — occasionally to his disadvantage. He left school as a 10-year-old (“my mother never did get the chance to teach me nothing”) and became a stockman with his father and two others. Later, after the death of his father, he decides to work for the police, putting his horsemanship and knowledge of the bush to good use, tracking thieves and stolen stock and helping to settle the odd property dispute.

His boss, Constable Collins, is an ex-soldier who survived World War Two’s New Guinea campaign. He grew up on the coast but has accepted a bush posting, dragging his wife and daughters with him. He’s a bit out of his depth and is struggling to adjust to the scrub — he’s no natural bushman, which means he is increasingly reliant on Bobby’s skill and knowledge, although he is too arrogant to admit it.

There’s not much crime to investigate apart from the odd family feud and a bit of cattle rustling. Indeed, the previous constable used to turn a blind eye to much of this because he preferred to let people sort things out for themselves, but Collins is different: he only ever sees things in black and white, and believes his job is to police the community in the strictest possible sense. So, when an old aboriginal woman claims that Ben Tobin, an old school friend of Bobby’s, has hit Deeds, his aboriginal girlfriend, Collins is ready to throw the book at him — despite a lack of evidence.

And so Miller sets up his key theme — that of the stranger in a strange land (Collins) doing a job for which he’s ill-equipped — and pits him against the seemingly naïve and silent local (Bobby), who knows the landscape intimately and feels, if not at one with it, certainly a part of it.

First person narrative

The narrative, told entirely from Bobby’s point of view, is written in the voice of a simple, uneducated man — complete with grammatical errors —  who desperately misses his late mother and is starved of female company until Collins’ wife, Esme, encourages him to share meals with her family. Through this, Bobby develops a close friendship with the Collins’ 12-year-old daughter, Irie, who teaches him to read. But while these were simpler times and Bobby seems strangely asexual, this relationship between a man and a prepubescent girl threatens to destroy everything that Bobby holds dear.

And while I would describe Coal Creek as a proper slow burner — it took me a long time to get into — the story has a funny way of sneaking up on you and then holding on. This is largely due to the strong voice (and the wonderful storytelling), which puts you in the head of a narrator who is relating the story as it happened to him in the past (remember, things happen slowly in the bush). And because he often indicates that he wished he’d done or said something differently, a sense of doom, melancholia and regret begins to build. There’s lot of foreshadowing so that you know the narrative is going to culminate in an unhappy ending or dramatic event.

But what I liked most about this novel is the ways in which the landscape dominates the entire story; it’s beauty and strangeness, the way in which it makes man very small and insignificant, is a metaphor for the conflict between Bobby and Collins — that to survive in this land you need to understand it, or at least respect it.

We are only men. When you live as we had lived our lives in the scrubs you know you are not the boss of nothing and there is the sky and the eagles and the scrubs going on forever into them great stone escarpments. No man knows himself to be the boss of that.

Essentially Coal Creek is a love story — not only Bobby’s love for Irie, but of his mother and of the landscape and way of life. It’s also a very good examination of loyalty, trust, male friendship and the ties which bind mothers and sons. And it’s an eye-opening look at black and white relations, and the way in which remote rural areas are policed.

It is very much typical Alex Miller fare: richly evocative, intelligent and unsentimental, tethered to a strong sense of place and peopled by well-drawn characters. Don’t let the slow pace turn you off: this is one of the most absorbing stories I’ve read all year.

Australia, Author, Book review, Fiction, literary fiction, Penguin Modern Classics, Publisher, Setting, Thea Astley

‘The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow’ by Thea Astley

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Multiple-effects-of-rainshadow

Fiction – paperback; Penguin Modern Classics; 296 pages; 1996.

Long before Chloe Hooper wrote her extraordinary non-fiction book The Tall Man: Life and Death on Palm Island (2010), Australian novelist Thea Astley penned The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow (1996), also set on Palm Island and based on a similar violent incident.

A fictionalised account of a true story

Palm Island, off the coast of Far North Queensland, was set up by the State Government in 1916 as a place to house aboriginals as a kind of punitive mission. In 1930, the white superintendent, grieving over the death of his wife in childbirth, went on a drink-and-drug-fuelled rampage and set fire to many of the buildings. He used dynamite to blow up his own home, killing his two children inside, and after fleeing the island temporarily, was gunned down upon his return. (You can read more about him and the incident in his entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography.)

For the purposes of this novelisation, Astley changes the name of the island to Doebin and invents a cast of characters who were present at the time. The book uses multiple voices in self-contained chapters to tell the story of events leading up to the fateful rampage and its aftermath. Most of the voices are third person, but the opening — and very engaging — first chapter is told in the first person.

All of the characters are white, except for Manny Cooktown, an aboriginal man, whose story is told in brief excerpts — written in dialect — between each chapter.

Everything is not as it seems

The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow is a wonderful metaphor for race relations in Australia, specifically between 1918 and 1957, although it could also be argued that it remains relevant today.

In its depiction of violence in the tropics, it also reveals that appearances can be deceptive. The island may look like paradise, the superintendent may seem fair-minded, the priest well-meaning, the doctor caring, aboriginals subservient, but there’s more going on beneath the surface than meets the eye. Here’s how Mrs Curthoys, a fine upstanding woman who arrives on the island to run the boarding house, describes Doebin:

If you happened upon this island, sails bellied and straining to a landfall, as you balanced on deck with your eyes gummed to this mountain humped above riffled reef waters, you would be enchanted by that necklace of white beaches, foliage growing almost to the sea in a density of plaited vine, aerial roots, leathery green leaves and palms waving casual welcome feathers. Now and again, as the boat rocked, an enchanting white-wall glimpse, the glare of a roof, the spurious domesticity of a cooking fire. God love us, you might say as Father Donellan said that morning of our one and only Mass, what a paradise of a place!

But then she later goes on to describe it as “a rubbish tip for government guilt” filled with aboriginal men white society doesn’t know how to deal with, pregnant women, unmarried mothers, runaways, alcoholics and the old.

Lessons of the past

Astley throws light on a subject many would rather forget and the book’s power comes from the realisation that history has a habit of repeating.

And as much as I was gripped by the characters, most of whom are deeply flawed and full of their own self-importance, and the exploration of Australian society, both before and after the Second World War, the structure of the novel didn’t work for me. It felt too disjointed and, as ever when there are multiple voices, I tended to favour particular characters over others.

But there’s no doubt that Astley can write. Her sentences are often breathtaking — and that’s not just because they are occasionally very long — while her insights into the human heart are hugely perceptive.

The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow won The Age Book of the Year in 1996 and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 1997. Sadly, it appears to be out of print in the UK, although you can order second-hand copies via online book sellers. My thanks to Lisa Hill of ANZLitLovers for providing the generous gift voucher last Christmas which allowed me to buy this handsome Penguin Modern Classics edition direct from Australia.

Australia, Author, Book review, Chloe Hooper, Non-fiction, Publisher, Setting, true crime, Vintage

‘The Tall Man: Life and Death on Palm Island’ by Chloe Hooper

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TheTallMan

Non-fiction – paperback; Vintage; 272 pages; 2010.

In late April this year I read Chloe Hooper’s extraordinary non-fiction book, The Tall Man: Life and Death on Palm Island, and found it deeply disturbing in a way I could not quite put my finger on. Over the weeks to follow I tried to review it but kept hitting a wall; I could just not formulate my thoughts in any coherent way.

Since then, I’ve thought about it on and off, wondering why I was having so much trouble writing about the book. It was only when Simon, from Savidge Reads, asked me whether I’d read it yet (he’d seen the thumbnail picture in my “Reviews coming soon” menu bar) that I had to confess I couldn’t bring myself to review it because it made me feel horribly ashamed to be Australian. And that, my friends, is the stumbling block I hadn’t realised when I first struggled to review this book some three months ago.

In telling the real life story of the death of an Aboriginal man in police custody, Hooper reveals the dark underbelly — where black man is pitted against white man, and vice versa — of my homeland. It is not a pleasant read, nor even a satisfying one (particularly as the conclusion of the subsequent court case left much to be desired), but it’s certainly a thought-provoking book that sheds light on some painful paradoxes in modern day Australia.

If nothing else, The Tall Man reveals how Australia is not one nation united but a series of regions diametrically opposed to one another. I’m not necessarily referring to white versus black, but to the cultural gap between those that live in the North (the tropics and sub-tropics) and those that live in the South (mainly NSW and Victoria). (I have lived on both sides of the North/South divide, and can testify that the two opposing “cultures” do very much exist. Early in this book, Hooper meets a Northern cabbie who says he can detect a Southerner easily, because “they’re fuckwits”. Charming.)

Of course there are other divisions too, between the cities and the outback, between the West coast and the eastern seaboard, between Tasmania and the mainland. But the division which Hooper’s book really hones in on is the one between the haves and the have nots, and never is this more apparent than in Aboriginal communities which often become “impoverished ghettos of alcoholism, petrol sniffing, brutality, arrests and early deaths”.

Palm Island — don’t let the idyllic-sounding name fool you — is one of those places. Situated off the Far North Queensland coast, it was set up by the State Government in 1916 as a place to house Aboriginals. This was all thanks to the 1897 Aboriginal Protection Act, which made all Aboriginals in Queensland, whether full blood or “half-castes”, as wards of the state. The Palm Island Mission became the dumping ground for these people, somewhere they could be looked after and controlled. But, as Hooper points out, it’s isolation meant that it became “increasingly authoritarian — a kind of tropical gulag”.

When Aboriginals were granted equal rights in 1967, it remained a segregated community, and today it is not much different. Home to 2,500 people, Palm Island is one of the largest Aboriginal communities in Australia. The only white faces in the street belong to the teachers, nurses and police who work there. (When Hooper arrives for the first time she feels “incandescently white”.) But it’s a long way from anywhere: two hours by ferry from Townsville, on the mainland, or a 15-minute flight on a small, chartered plane.

For those who don’t know the case on which the book is based, let me provide a short thumbnail portrait. On Friday November 19, 2004, Cameron Doomadgee, a 36-year-old aboriginal man living on Palm Island is arrested for swearing at a white police officer. He is thrown into the back of a divisional van and transported to the police station. There’s a scuffle and a punch thrown when he is escorted from the van to his cell. Later, just 45-minutes after his arrest, Doomadgee is found dead, a black eye the only tell-tale sign of violence.

The police claim Doomadgee tripped on a step and that he must have died of an unseen head injury arising from that accident. But the autopsy revealed that he had four broken ribs, a ruptured portal vein and a liver almost cleaved in two, injuries consistent with a serious car accident. As Hooper states, “his internal injuries were so severe that even with instant medical attention he would not have survived”.

A second pathology report discovered further bruising on Doomadgee’s right eye and eyelid, his forehead, the back of his head, the upper part of his back, along the right side of his jaw and on his right and left hands, suggesting he had been kicked while lying down.

Of course, police deny any wrongdoing, and so an inquest is held. The man responsible for policing the island is the “tall man” of the title: Senior Sergeant Chris Hurley, who has won much respect for being a firm and fair cop. But did Hurley snap that day and lose his temper?

Hooper sketches an interesting portrait of a man, just 36 years old and in charge of six white policeman and an Aboriginal liaison officer, who had risen fast up the ranks because he’d been happy to be stationed in remote areas, or as Hooper puts it:

He had become a creature of the Deep North, a specialist in places on the edges of so-called civilisation, Aboriginal communities and frontier towns in Cape York and the Gulf of Carpentaria, places were the streets, the days shimmered as if you were in a kind of fever — all of it, with its edge of menace, like some brilliant hallucination.

It seems completely at odds with Hurley’s character as a fine, upstanding and highly respected policeman for him to be blamed for Doomadgee’s death. The island had more than its fair share of problems (according to this wikipedia entry there is “an extreme level of theft, domestic violence, sexual assaults against children and abject drunkenness” brought about by “boredom, aimlessness, lack of education, absence of role models and a complete loss of self-worth”), but by all accounts Hurley had won the respect of the locals.

But following Doomadgee’s “unexplained” death, the police were obviously worried about the outfall in the local community — fifteen extra cops were brought in. When news broke about the first autopsy a riot ensued; the police station was burned to the ground. Hooper describes it in such a way you feel for the officers, trapped behind a barricade, fearing for their lives. One cop called Command, begging the Army to be flown in to rescue them.

The early chapters explain the circumstances of Doomadgee’s death and give us an insight into Hurley’s reputation; Hooper then turns to tracing the convoluted justice system — the investigation, the inquest, the submissions, the findings, the trial, the verdict — which Doomadgee’s family find themselves caught up in. The court room scenes are particularly tense and emotional. The games played by lawyers, by police, by those seeking to protect Hurley’s reputation at all costs do not go unnoticed by Hooper’s perceptive eye. This is court-room drama writ large. It’s deeply affecting without being sentimental.

If there is anything positive to come out of this terrible story it is Hooper’s own tale about her developing friendship with Doomadgee’s family. Effectively she is “adopted” by his sisters, accepted as one of their own. When you realise that Hooper, “like most middle-class suburbanites, grew up without ever seeing an Aborigine, except on the news”, this seems the perfect example of how it is possible for two races to get along with each other in the most extreme and distressing of circumstances.

The Tall Man is not your average “true crime” book. It’s a sociological, psychological, legal and political drama. In telling the story of the first police officer to be tried for an Aboriginal death in custody, Hooper also tells a peculiar Australian story of a nation divided. We may never know what really happened in that police station, but we know that the destructive forces of white settlement will continue to impact on its native inhabitants and that Palm Island will remain a paradox in the sun. My feelings about the book are summed up nicely by Hooper’s last line:

I had wanted to know more about my country and now I did – now I knew more than I wanted to.

Australia, Author, Book review, Fiction, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting, Susan Johnson, William Heinemann

‘Life in Seven Mistakes’ by Susan Johnson

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Lifein7mistakes

Fiction – paperback; William Heinemann Australia; 346 pages; 2008. Review copy courtesy of the author.

It seems somehow appropriate to review Susan Johnson’s new novel, Life in Seven Mistakes, on Christmas Eve given that the book is set at Christmas — although this is not how I planned it. I read this book in October and kept meaning to post my thoughts about it. As ever, life got in the way, and it’s only now, with the fairy lights twinkling in my living room and my traditional chocolate festive cake baking in the oven that I feel inclined to put my thoughts down on paper.

Christmas in the sun

The book opens on “a blistering December afternoon” on Australia’s Gold Coast. The Barton family, which is spread across the continent, gathers at the parental home — a penthouse in Surfers Paradise — for the Christmas holidays. But this is no carefree, happy family get-together. There are underlying tensions and complicated family relationships with which to contend. It takes the reader a little time to come to terms with the wide cast of characters, but it is forty-something Elizabeth, the eldest daughter of Bob and Nancy Barton, whose eyes we largely experience the “celebrations” through.

Married three times, and with three children from three different fathers, Elizabeth has not lead a conventional life. She’s a ceramicist on the brink of international success — she has a show in New York coming up and one at the Australian Embassy in Washington — and yet her parents don’t take her career seriously, particularly her 70-something father who equates success with being rich.

‘You know what depresses me most?’ Elizabeth says. ‘How infantilised I become around them. Out there in the world I am an adult, with a career and a husband and a house. People buy my work and articles are written about it in art magazines. I’m about to have my first show at the best ceramics gallery in the world. I am a mother myself, for God’s sake, with three children who depend on me. Yet Dad only has to start bagging artists and I’m like a kid trying to get his approval by showing him my best finger painting. Or Mum says something in a certain tone of voice and I turn into a ten year old.’

If that’s not enough Elizabeth has to contend with a younger brother, Robbo, who is “loud and uncomplicated” and the apple of her mother’s eye.

He was Nancy’s joy, a boy who made her laugh and for years and years Elizabeth was jealous of him.

And then there’s the never-mentioned youngest sibling Nick, a long-term drug user — “the ghoul at the table, who always rises, covered in ash” — who is in a low-security “correctional centre”.

Throw in difficult spouses and an assortment of children, and it’s no wonder Elizabeth finds the strain of Christmas almost too much to bear. Heightening this tension is Bob and Nancy’s impending golden wedding anniversary, just four days after Christmas, upon which no one can agree how to celebrate appropriately.

Second narrative

Intertwined with this rather complicated, and at times funny, family drama is a second narrative that explores Bob and Nancy’s life together, from lovestruck teenagers in the 1950s to hard-bitten parents trying to maintain control over three teenage children.

It is this beautifully written element of the story that makes Bob and Nancy come alive in the eyes of the reader. You learn the source of Nancy’s current primness, her forthright opinions on rearing children and her staunch support for Bob in the face of what others view as his ongoing rudeness, and you gain an admiration for Bob — patronising, loud and overbearing as a retiree — who worked his way up the career ladder from labourer to managing director of a major company through sheer bloody hard work, all the while supporting his family.

Life in Seven Mistakes has been described as a black comedy, but I’m not sure that’s an apt description. While there are funny moments throughout the book, for the most part this is a richly layered family drama imbued with emotion. There’s plenty of thought-provoking material here to mull over too: How do you ever reconcile your childhood with your adult life? How do parents cope with children who don’t live up to expectation? At what point do you learn to accept responsibility for your own life and your own mistakes?

My only quibble with the book — and it’s a minor one — is Johnson’s tendency in places to be a little long-winded with the narrative and to over-explain things, but for the most part the prose style is effortless and authentically Australian. (Maybe it’s me, but whenever Bob spoke I heard his voice in a distinctly ocker accent, aka Australian acting legend Bill Hunter.)

But it’s the somewhat unexpected ending, which ties everything together nicely, that rounds out this lovely tragic-comedy of a novel and makes it one of my favourites reads of the year.