Review

Irma Gold, Shift (#BookReview)

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If Australian writer Irma Gold suffered from Second Book Syndrome while writing her second novel, it certainly doesn’t show. Her debut novel, The breaking (my review), is well-written and a great read. However, in Shift, I sense a writer who has reached another level of confidence in fusing her writing, story-telling, and the ideals and beliefs the drive her. She is passionate about her subject matter, as she was in The breaking, but in Shift she ups the ante to encompass wider themes about art. The result is a strong read that offers much for its readers to think about.

Shift is not the first novel I’ve reviewed about post-apartheid South Africa, but it is my first by an Australian author. Published, says MidnightSun (linked below), in the 70th anniversary year of the Freedom Charter, which outlined the principles of democracy and freedom in South Africa, Shift is set in Kliptown, where this charter was signed. Protagonist, Arlie, is a thirty-something art photographer who has just sold his first work to a significant gallery. It’s potentially career-changing and he should be happy, but he can’t “get his shit together”. He can’t keep girlfriends and while he gets on well with his happily established brother, his relationship with his parents is fraught. He feels his successful architect father has expectations he can’t (or doesn’t want to) meet, and his mother refuses to talk about her South African upbringing. But, Arlie wants to know.

So, after yet another relationship break-up, Arlie decides to go to South Africa, and ends up in Kliptown, in Soweto. He becomes immersed in its life, mixing with visionary choirmaster Rufaro, singer Glory and her younger brother Samson, and other locals such as his favourite photographic subject, the 80-something, “sassy as hell” Queenie. Can he create an exhibition out of his experience? Rufaro would like that …

“sold a dream”

The bulk of the novel comprises Arlie’s experiences in Kliptown, where he is the only white person. Through his eyes, we see the dire situation the people find themselves in. Early in the novel, he goes on a date with Glory to a spoken word evening at Soweto Theatre, where he hears some truths:

The people here had been sold a dream and yet more than two decades on they found themselves still in the same relentless poverty. Mandela was the broker of broken freedom.

Which is not, necessarily, to say that Mandela achieved nothing, but that life is far more complex than a “god”, as Mandela was to Arlie’s mother, can ever be. What Arlie sees, then, is poverty, drug addiction, violence and hopelessness. He sees young people, like Samson, not believing there’s any point to school. He sees a settlement without proper sewerage, electricity, or running water to their homes, not to mention with “asbestos sheeting everywhere”. However, on the flip side, he also sees community, hard work and hope.

So, back to my opening claim about Gold and her second novel. Taking the writing and the storytelling first, the writing is tight. It has the confidence of an editor, which Gold is, but mostly of one who is passionate about her material. The descriptions are fresh and vivid. We can visualise the place, with, for example, its “ramshackle tapestry of shacks constructed from discarded materials, each one rippling into the next”. The characters – who are drawn from Gold’s travels to the region (see here) – feel authentic. They are not stereotypes, but breathe life into the story with their thoughts, worries, fears and hopes. Arlie questions his actions, are they that of “a white saviour”? The colourful Glory, with her orange hair and fake orange nails, doesn’t “try to please”. She has her own views, and “plays her own game … take it or leave it”. The visionary Rufaro is passionate about the power of singing. It shows everyone, he says, who they are, that “we will be more … we are more”. Samson is a boy on the cusp of manhood, exuding bravado one moment, begging to play soccer the next.

The novel, too, is well structured. It opens with a shocking event to which we return at the end, and then follows a chronological arc from Arlie’s personal crisis and his decision to go to South Africa, through his time there, to his ultimate return home. There is drama along the way. Arlie’s father Harris visits, and Gold perfectly captures the discomfort between them alongside their unspoken love for each other. There is no simple resolution, just, perhaps, another step along the way to understanding. There is also love, violence and tragedy, but I won’t spoil those.

“make the invisible visible”

Shift is a story about a forgotten, if not betrayed, community, but one that survives all the same. It’s about a man who cannot keep a girlfriend, who is at odds with his father and distanced from his troubled mother, but who wants better relationships. It is a multi-layered love story – to a community and its people, and between Arlie and the people he cares for. But, most of all, it is a story about the power of art – or, if not that, at least about hope for art’s power. From first meeting Arlie, Rufaro has a dream that he will create “an exhibition that will show the world the truth about Kliptown”. He tells his choristers that Arlie

is going to expose what the government is doing here. That they have forgotten us. The pressure must come from outside, because our government does not listen to us.

Arlie, Gold writes later in the novel, “had always believed that art could change minds, that if enough minds were changed then the world changed” but, when it comes to it, he wonders “what could his photos possible achieve?” Can he “make the invisible visible”?

This brings me back to my opening paragraph and Gold’s wider themes. Shift is a strong, moving novel about a struggling community that has been left behind, for all the promises of freedom. However, it is also a novel that believes art can expose truths and, through that, shift our thinking and thus nudge the world towards being a better place. Gold has written her heart out in this novel to “make the invisible visible” – and to make room for hope. The next move is ours.

Irma Gold
Shift
Rundle Mall, SA: MidnightSun, 2025
269pp.
ISBN: 9781922858566

(Review copy courtesy MidnightSun Publishing)

Paddy O’Reilly, Other houses (#BookReview)

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It’s not totally coincidental that this week’s Monday Musings post was about a publisher of realist or social novels, that is, of novels which aim to explore social problems of their time. My reading group’s March book, Paddy O’Reilly’s Other houses, belongs to this tradition. I have been wanting to read it since it was published in 2022.

Searches of the Internet, including of Wikipedia, retrieve various definitions of the social novel (also called social problem or social protest or social justice novel), but they essentially agree that these are works of fiction which tackle some sort of inequality, prejudice, or injustice, through the experiences of their characters, and that their intention is to encourage social change. In Other houses, O’Reilly interrogates the idea of social mobility. Her protagonists, Lily and Janks, are “battlers“, working class people who struggle payday to payday, but they want more for their now 15-year-old daughter, Jewelee, who had started to run wild, heading down the path of delinquency.

“Good people live here” (Lily)

So, they move from their working class suburb to one they “could barely afford”, and enrol Jewelee in “a good school”. Jewelee might now behave as though she’s “too good” for her “bogan” parents, but they believe it was worth it. The problem is, Janks, now working in a food-factory, has mysteriously disappeared. The novel opens with Lily driving through her old neighbourhood at night, hoping to find Janks there. “Good people live here”, she says. “They try”.

From here the novel is told in the alternating first person voices of Lily and Janks, with Lily’s story occupying the greater part of the narrative. Having worked as a supermarket cashier in her old home, she is now a cleaner, which is where the title comes in. The novel is beautifully constructed around the cleaning jobs Lily does with her cleaning partner, the older, and wearing out, Shannon. While they clean houses, Lily reflects on her current and past lives, on the “entitled” Jewelee, on the lives and aspirations of the people they clean for, all the while worrying about Janks, and trying to find him. She prints “have you seen” leaflets and scours all the places he might possibly be. She does not believe he has deserted her willingly.

And, we know that he hasn’t. Having borrowed money from a bikie gang, he’d been “snatched” off the street, and coerced into paying off the loan by doing a job for them. The novel’s plot comes from this: will Janks get the job done, without being caught, and be allowed to return safely to the life they are building? Many of us in the group called this book a page-turner, but some disagreed. The plot is too straightforward, they said. It doesn’t have the breath-catching twists and turns of a thriller. Others of us, however, define page-turners differently. Ours don’t require an edge-of-the-seat plot. Rather, they are books that compel us on, because of the characters, or the writing, or the ideas, or the plot, or any combination of these. What do you think?

“Things, world, wrong” (Shannon)

Anyhow, there is a plot – whether you see it as a page-turning one or not – and there is also lightness, despite the seriousness of the protagonists’ plight. Much of the lightness comes from the house-cleaning scenes. Lily and Shannon name the houses they clean, such as the House of Hands (with its profusion of chrome dirtied by sticky hands), the House of Doom (whose owners see the world as “blighted”), Horror House (inhabited by a hoarder), and Lily’s favourite, the House of Light (which lets the sun shine in). They share their thoughts about the inhabitants and the lives they know (or think) they lead. If anyone knows how we live, it’s likely to be cleaners, eh? Lily’s and Shannon’s perspectives – their observations, opinions and reflections on how others live – are what gives this book its real heart.

Lily speaks with the dignity of a worker, when she says:

We know things no one else knows about our clients. I sometimes pick up objects in the places we clean – a vase, a notebook, a scarf … I give them attention, these things that I believe hold meaning for someone … It’s my moment of saying what I can’t say to their faces. I respect what you hold dear, even when you’re rude to me or barely acknowledge I exist. (p. 30)

Meanwhile, the older Shannon has her own mantra for how things are going, says Lily:

Something has gone wrong in the world … Shannon uses it about the eating habits for the population, the number of appliances in the kitchens we clean, leaf blowers, hair straighteners, so-called superfoods, weird weather events, toilets that wash your bottom, plastic wrapping on fruit that already has its own natural wrapping, quiz shows where she disagrees with the answers, tap water sold in plastic bottles and so much more. (p. 29)

Most definitions of the social novel say “through the experiences of their characters”, and this is true here. Telling her story through the experiences of Lily, Shannon and Janks enables O’Reilly to show what she wants to explore, without being didactic. Through these authentic characters we come to see just what the much-touted upward social mobility really is, means, and feels like. We see Lily and Janks recognising that the poverty faced daily in their old working class suburb results in lives that are lived on the edge with little opportunity to improve one’s chances, but we also see that it’s not easy to simply transplant yourselves into a different life and, essentially, culture:

Tonight my water-stained ceiling and the creeping draught taunt me that although we’ve adjusted to living here, it might be because we brought things with us when we crossed: rental damp and rot, clothes that fall apart, bank accounts that bounce between payday and zero. (p. 74)

For Lily, Broadie feels like “home” and it’s where she returns to find a solution to the problem of the missing Janks.

Other houses is a slim and accessible book, but it offers no simple answers. Rather than support the comfortable view that upward social mobility is the answer to the problems posed by socioeconomic inequity, it asks us to consider instead, how do we overcome the problems caused by inequity – indeed, how do we remove inequity – without expecting people to give up everything they hold dear about where they come from? It’s a quietly provocative novel that speaks to one of the most urgent issues of our time.

Paddy O’Reilly
Other houses
South Melbourne: Affirm Press, 2022
245pp.
ISBN: 9781922626950

Sun Jung, My name is Gucci (#BookReview)

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Some reading synchronicities – those coincidental connections that happen between books we read in a short period of time – are zeitgeist-related. For example, grief is not my go-to, but it is a common theme in contemporary writing so it’s not entirely remarkable that I have written three reviews since January about books focused on grief. What is remarkable is that, in the same period, I have read two books, written nearly 80 years apart, which are told from the perspective of dogs. This surely takes synchronicity to a whole new level – wouldn’t you agree?

A canine perspective is, however, where the synchronicity ends, because Dusty (my review) is told third person through two main voices, Dusty’s and his owner’s, and Dusty is very much a dog. He has no knowledge beyond what he knows as a dog. Gucci, in Sun Jung’s My name is Gucci, is something very different. Not only is he the novel’s sole first person narrator, but he has been reincarnated many times, so has a wealth of knowledge and experience way beyond that of a typical dog. Indeed, as he tells us, he is a “sage”, and an erudite one at that. Now, before you click away, thinking non-human narrators and ideas of reincarnation are not for you, do read on, because Jung makes this work, creating a story that is not only charming and often delightfully humorous, but also thoughtful about life and the connections we make.

Gucci is a Dalmation-like bitzer. At the book’s opening, he is five-years-old and living in a Singaporean animal shelter. He’d given up ever being rescued, when, seemingly out of the blue, “she” appears, and whisks him off to Sydney. Is this destiny? This never-named she, it turns out, has been connected to Gucci, in earlier lives, through their inyeon. Inyeon, the book’s glossary explains, is “Karmic relation or destiny”, but in fact our two are connected through the rarer form of “perpetual-inyeon”. This is “a persistently recurring Karmic relation between two beings through their numerous past lives”, one built on the understanding that “interactions must be mutually beneficial”. Gucci tells us:

I have been reborn three times during her present life; interestingly, and quite unusually, all three rebirth were dogs and all had one absolute karmic duty – to help her to collect and rekindle the shattered smithereens of inyeon that she had long lost.

Notwithstanding this idea of inyeon, the obvious question is, of course, why choose a dog as narrator. Telling a story through a non-human character is not only not easy, it’s a risk, so why? I don’t know Jung’s reasons, but the driver must surely be that unusual narrators have something useful to offer – tone, maybe, or experience or a different way of thinking. Gucci meets all of these. He has some painful things to share about her life, but does so in a lighter tone, which feels more acceptable from a non-human character. Further, as a dog who has experienced the world differently from humans, he can offer different insights into her experiences, not to mention those of humans in general. And, finally, he can illuminate important things about human-animal relationships.

“nothing is absurd”

My name is Gucci is not a hard read, but it does require concentration because we move back and forth in time, in her life, as it intersects with Gucci’s lives – as Nari, the Jindo dog, who dies in an accident when she is 9; as General, the Sapsal-cross dog, who was forced to work as a fighting dog, and is euthanased when she is 13; and of course as Gucci in her present life, now helping her confront and perhaps reconcile the traumas of her past. She had a difficult childhood in Korea, which is where Nari and General know her. The product of an adulterous union between a married man and a melancholic young woman (jageun umma), she is removed from this birth mother when she is 4 years old to live with her father’s wife (keun umma). Keun umma accepts her, with kindness and love, but not so keun umma’s mother, the “old hyena”, who is cruel to this “filthy child” brought into her home.

The time shifting, then, occurs between her past life in Korea, with Nari and General, and her current life in Sydney’s Kings Cross and Darlinghurst, where she is married to an Irishman, but haunted by her past. It’s no surprise to Gucci that she is a “horror novelist … [of] … spinechilling and gory urban mythologies”. In telling his and her story, Gucci is often insouciant if not downright playful, but he is also wise and philosophical, as he guides her and us through the challenges of coping with past experiences which threaten to undermine the present.

Closely associated with this idea of past and present is that of “destiny”. It is a constant thread in the book, and it discomforted me a little, perhaps because as a Westerner, the idea of destiny doesn’t sit easily with my world view. However, if we reframe it to encompass the way past experiences impact present and future actions, then it works – for me, and for the book, where the idea of fate/destiny/luck is variously respected, or upended or foiled, or treated sceptically by her Irish husband. There’s no one answer – just perspective and tolerance for difference.

Much of this story is serious. Bad things happened to her in her childhood, and Gucci reflects on the hows and whys. Early on, she is ostracised at school because of her “impure heritage”. Thinking back to their Seoul home in the suburb of Itaewon, which means “village of strangers”, Gucci wonders “what is being strange or different? Different to what?” Why do humans demonise, or make fun of, those who are different? My name is Gucci is full of good questions and wise ideas, but they are not laboured. Instead, Gucci keeps the story moving forward, with warmth and compassion, leavened by humour that is, at times, lightly satirical. There is a delightful scene when she takes her young Irish boyfriend to Korea, and, after a boozy night they go out for a “hangover cure” breakfast:

Bleary-eyed and with a severe hangover, he could not believe his misfortune as he stared at the abalone congee bowl.

Finally, there are the stories about human-animal relationships. Some of the funniest scenes in the book come from these, such as the Kings Cross apartment dog-wars, between dog-lovers and dog-haters. But there are tough stories too, like the sport of dog-fighting which destroys General’s life. This book pays tribute to the importance of our relationships with our animals.

Early on, Gucci forestalls our potential scepticism about his story by claiming that “if you look at everything in the world as connected by the complex web of inyeon, nothing is absurd”. Well, I have a high tolerance for the absurd, anyhow, but even if I didn’t, Gucci is such a delightful guide that I was in for the duration. If you want to read something that’s meaningful but doesn’t weigh you down, try this one.

Sun Jung
My name is Gucci: A dog’s story
Melbourne: Transit Lounge, 2024
254pp.
ISBN: 9781923023178

(Review copy courtesy Transit Lounge, via Scott Eathorne, Quikmark Media)

Andra Putnis, Stories my grandmothers didn’t tell me (#BookReview)

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Cover

Local writer Andra Putnis’ book, Stories my grandmothers didn’t tell me: Two women’s journeys from war-torn Europe to a new life in Australia, was my reading group’s February read. Not only was it highly recommended by two members who had read it, but we were told the author would be happy to attend our meeting if we chose it. That was an offer too good to pass up, so we scheduled it.

We’ve had a few authors attend our meetings over the years, and it has always been worthwhile. Yes, it risks constraining discussion if people have any reservations about the book, but that has never really been a problem, either because there haven’t been serious reservations or because the value of having the author present has far outweighed any perceived impact on free discussion. In Putnis’ case, the story is so powerful and so well-told that it was unlikely there’d be any reservations that wouldn’t turn into questions about why or how she wrote her story.

“hidden pasts, still very much present”

Stories my grandmothers didn’t tell me is a family biography centring on the author’s two Latvian-born grandmothers, her maternal Grandma Milda (1913-1997) and paternal Nanna Aline (1924-2021). Teenage Aline was separated from her parents around 1942 to go serve in Germany’s war-time labour force. Meanwhile, in late 1944, with the war ending and the Soviet army looking set to return, 7-months pregnant Milda left Latvia with her parents and 18-month old son, enduring a tough, desperate journey. Both women ended up in UNRRA-managed Displaced Persons camps in Germany, where they experienced years of hardship before arriving in Australia in late 1949/1950. Milda, and later Aline, settled in Newcastle in the early 1950s, and met there through its tight-knit Latvian migrant community.

That’s the rough outline, but of course their stories – what they endured – are far more complicated, and Putnis wanted to understand. She told us that as a young child she had a sense of Latvia as almost an unreal fairytale place with beautiful forests, music and dancing, but she had also sensed, through family murmurs, a darker side, one that encompassed sadness and pain not only about Latvia but also about the family’s own story. She likened it to being on a boat, where you can see the surface but have no idea of what lies in the deeps below. She feared, as a granddaughter, that it wasn’t her place to go there, and worried about upsetting people. However, she did go there because she wanted to know and because Nanna Aline was willing. But, she said, she was always cognisant of just how far a granddaughter – even an older one – could, or should, go.

“moving between darkness and light”

I have read several hybrid war-related biography/memoirs written by family members, and this one is as good as any of them. This is not only because of the power of the story, and the honesty with which it is told – but also because of the structure Putnis uses. It is told chronologically, which is logical, but through the voices of Milda and Aline interspersed with those of others including, of course, Putnis’s own. I wanted to know about this and Putnis was happy to explain.

The structure was driven by Aline who told her story chronologically. She had thought deeply about and “understood the arc of her life”, said Putnis. So, with this in hand, Putnis started to piece Milda’s story – which was gathered less systematically – along the same lines. The challenge came in making the “weave” work, in getting the balance right, between them and their stories, and the wider historical, community and family framework.

Putnis worked on her book for nearly 20 years – with the occasional gap when life took over. Aline lived a long life so Putnis was able to spend a lot of time with her. Aline had also had the toughest life, particularly in terms of her personal choices and circumstances. Our hearts went out to her. Milda, on the other hand, died when Putnis was 19 years old, before she started working on her book. However, Milda had lived for nearly a decade with Putnis’s family, so Putnis had spent a lot of time talking with her, getting to know her. Putnis enhances both stories with information gleaned from conversations with other close family members, from secondary reading, and from primary research through letters, in archives, and so on.

The result is a coherent story of these two women told from more than one perspective, which has the effect of varying the intensity as we read – of mixing the light and the dark – and of enhancing authenticity, because the perspectives reinforce each other. It’s sophisticated and highly readable.

“the world is in tears” (Aline’s father)

It is a powerful and often heart-rending story, and it is to Putnis’s credit that she is able to convey both the individual personalities of her very different grandmothers and the universality of their experiences. Their experience of living under multiple invasions is both personal but, as we know too devastatingly well, political and general. Same for their experience of living in camps for years – of having your life on hold while you just survive. And for their experience of being migrants – “reffos” – in 1950s Australia. The negatives abound, with any positives achieved being hard fought. It’s a lesson in how ordinary lives are changed irrevocably by political actions way out of their control.

So, the book raises many questions – about the past and about what is happening now. Putnis also specifically raises the issue of protecting children, and I wanted to know about this too, because, given our knowledge of intergenerational trauma, how do you protect children from horror without laying them more open to ongoing trauma within? There is no easy answer, we concluded, but awareness and consideration about where to draw the line can only help.

Finally, Stories my grandmothers didn’t tell me, is fundamentally a book about the importance – and limits – of stories. Early on Putnis talks to Aline about her project, and Aline is clear about her intentions:

Alright then, I don’t remember everything. But I have my own point of view. Some old Latvian women go on about how wonderful things were before the war … You heard these stories? Well, it was not always like that. Not all the boys were good and I was not as kind to my māte [mother] as I should have been. If you want that story, you are talking to the wrong grandma.

Aline was brave, and this is a brave book about survival that doesn’t shy away from the tough and sad stories. But, more importantly, it conveys something about stories, which is that individual stories are very important, but they are not the whole story. In other words, the more stories we have the better picture we have – of history, and of the complexity of humanity that makes us who and what we are.

Putnis concludes with Aline’s funeral, and shares the words she spoke, which also encapsulate this book:

Nanna taught me nothing less than what it means to be human, to earn the grace and wisdom that come from surviving darkness and celebrating light.

I’d like to tell more stories about the book, including about Milda and the strong woman she was, but this post is long enough, so I’ll just encourage you to read the book for yourselves.

Andra Putnis
Stories my grandmothers didn’t tell me: Two women’s journeys from war-torn Europe to a new life in Australia
Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2024
292pp.
ISBN: 9781761471322

Lisa Kenway, All you took from me (#GuestThoughts)

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With my Review TBR pile teetering on the brink, I decided to call in a favour from Mr Gums, and handed him Lisa Kenway’s debut novel, All you took from me, thinking it might be up his alley.

Now, a word about Mr Gums. He is an engineer by training, and not the world’s biggest reader. When he does read – in the past at least – his go-to has been Jane Austen (whose books he has read multiple times, including more than once in German) and other classics. However, with more time at his disposal since retirement, he has started reading a little more broadly. He likes to be “entertained”, not overly challenged in his reading. (Apparently, reading Mansfield Park in German is not challenging!) Life is challenging enough, he says. So, crime fiction seemed to be a good fit, and he’s been trying out several authors with varying success. Chris Hammer is a big hit. Garry Disher goes down pretty well too. Peter Temple not so much. He has also read non-Australian crime writers – English, and others, including, recently, a Japanese author (thanks to JacquiWine). As you can tell from his Austen love, he is more than happy to read women writers, and has crime by Dervla McTiernan and Shelley Burr, and recently, Dinuka McKenzie’s first novel. So, why not Lisa Kenway?

So, Lisa Kenway. According to the media release that came with my review copy, she is an Australian writer and anaesthetist. This debut novel, All you took from me, was “inspired by her longstanding fascination with memory and consciousness”. An earlier manuscript version was longlisted for Hachette’s Richell Prize for Emerging Writers in 2020 (out of over 800 submissions). That must have given her confidence to keep working on it, because here it is, published by Transit Lounge in 2024.

Anyhow, the novel is set in two places – the Blue Mountains (which I love) and Sydney. The protagonist, Clare Carpenter, is an anaesthetist – write what you know! – whose husband has died in a single-vehicle car accident which also caused her to lose her memory. Soon after, she senses she is being followed by a stranger. Why? Finding the answer becomes her mission, but it is hampered by her loss of memory. Can she reverse that? Of course nothing is simple, and the risks and threats mount. This novel is not Mr Gums’ (nor my) preferred type of crime, which is the police procedural. It is, instead, as the blurbs say, a psychological thriller.

Mr Gums was intrigued by this debut, but he had reservations. He particularly liked the set up – the protagonist as anaesthetist. It was different, and an interesting idea. He enjoyed reading the technical details about anaesthesia, and liked the attention paid to details in those parts of the story. (Like me, he enjoys it when novels teach him about a world he doesn’t know much about.) However, this is also where his main reservation came, because, scientifically trained himself, he found Clare’s behaviour hard to believe. The risks she took, her foray into unscientific ideas, lost him. Mr Gums, though, has not been in the position Clare found herself in. Perhaps, in the same desperate circumstances, he might try anything too?

All you took from me is told first person, and the voice rings true. Clare is articulate and intelligent, and honest, as she starts to uncover less pleasant things about herself. The novel opens in the hospital a month after the accident, with Clare starting to return to her – new – consciousness. From here, the plot picks up, becoming increasing dramatic and sensational, as you’d expect for its genre, with Clare’s shaky memory, and her attempts to recover it, underpinning much of the intrigue. There are the usual red herrings and misleading threads, which kept Mr Gums challenged as he tried to work out what was true and what wasn’t.

Overall, Kenway’s novel is not Mr Gums’ preferred crime genre. He prefers more dogged analysis in his crime to the stress and tension of a thriller. However, he did conclude that All you took from me was “strangely entertaining”, which suggests to me that Kenway’s debut should not be the last novel she writes. I’d love to know if anyone else has read it?

Lisa Kenway
All you took from me
Melbourne: Transit Lounge, 2024
328pp.
ISBN: 9781923023123

[Review copy courtesy Transit Lounge (via Scott Eathorne of Quikmark Media)]

Melanie Cheng, The burrow (#BookReview)

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You may have heard the announcement by Sean Manning, of Simon & Schuster’s flagship imprint in the US, that he will “no longer require authors to obtain blurbs for their books”. Australian media academic Julian Novitz discussed the decision in The Conversation in a piece titled “Brilliant, moving, thought-provoking! Simon & Schuster is dispensing with book blurbs – will it make any difference?” I considered writing a post on this, asking for your thoughts on these blurbs. Do they influence you in any way? But I didn’t. Instead, I am using it to introduce Australian author, Melanie Cheng’s latest novel, The burrow.

As you can see from the cover of my edition, it is beautifully spare, but it does have two blurbs. At the top is Christos Tsiolkas’ “stupendously good” and at the bottom, Helen Garner’s “how rare this delicacy – this calm, sweet, desolated wisdom”. Tsiolkas and Garner are respected, robust writers who don’t flinch from uncomfortable truths, so their commendation carries some weight with me. However, there are readers who don’t like these authors. Will that turn them away from the novel? I’d be interested to know. Meanwhile, I’ll get onto the book, which, at 184 well-spaced pages, is surely a novella.

The back cover tells me that it’s about a family confronting “long-buried secrets”, and that it “tells an unforgettable story about grief and hope”. Oh, and that the family buys a pet rabbit. There’s not a lot to go on here besides the usual cliches about secrets, grief and hope, but I was interested because I have had Melanie Cheng in my sights for some time, and it has just been shortlisted for this year’s Victorian Premier’s Literary Award.

It does seem, however, that grief is following me around this year, as the heart of this novel concerns the drowning death of a six-month-old baby girl some four years before the novel starts. The family – parents Amy and Jin Lee, and their remaining daughter, 10-year-old Lucie – is surviving intact, but only just. The novel is set in Melbourne during the pandemic, just as lockdown restrictions are being relaxed, so the family is needing to confront the outside world a little more. Reminding me somewhat of Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard devotional (my review), our threesome is disturbed by two new additions, the pet rabbit bought for Lucie, and Amy’s mother Pauline who has broken her wrist and cannot live alone for a while. These two, along with the relaxing of lockdown, offer potential catalysts for change. Will it be for the good or will the family implode?

Cheng tells her story through the alternating third-person perspectives of the characters. The writing is beautifully spare, but also engaging and moving. Having experienced a devastating death in my own family – my sister, not my child – I am interested in how people traverse such grief, particularly when there is potential for blame and guilt. Every situation is different, but there are, I think, some universals – love, generosity, and communication (or lack thereof). The Lee family has some of each of these, but not enough, and hence the just-surviving-but-not-really-living state they find themselves in. It’s realistic, believable.

I am always impressed by writers who can unfold a story slowly, but in few words, and Cheng is one of these writers. What exactly happened is divulged gradually in such a way as to make us think about how it affected – and is still affecting – the person whose perspective we are reading. It lets us feel the different ways grief can stall us. It also gives us time to get to know the characters, and to understand and relate to them. For these reasons, the story is tricky to talk about because if I explain what happened, I undermine all Cheng’s good work, so I’ll leave the story here and get back to the two additions.

As actors in the story, the rabbit and Pauline are opposite ends of the spectrum. The rabbit is a quiet, largely passive presence which interacts minimally with the family but provides a focal point for their thoughts. He brings a “sparkle” back to Lucie’s eyes that had been missing for some time. However, as a prey animal he also reminds them of the fragility of life. A rabbit is an interesting choice, one that kept me thinking about in terms of his significance. The novel is titled “The burrow”, but it’s not a simple literal reference to the rabbit. A burrow is also referenced in the epigraph from Franz Kafka’s short story “The burrow”:

The most beautiful thing about my burrow is the stillness. Of course, that is deceptive. At any moment it may be shattered and then all will be over.

How are we to read this? The family has already been shattered, and at the opening of the novel it does feel as though all is over, that they are mainly going through the motions of living. But of course it’s not all over. Sure, they are not doing very well. They are isolated from others (and not just because of the lockdown which had given them “a reprieve”, excuses to not engage). But they are still together, and they haven’t completely given up. They buy the rabbit for Lucie when she shows interest in something; they invite Pauline back into their lives when it appears she needs them.

And this brings me to Pauline. She sweeps in, injecting much needed energy, whether they want it or not. She can’t help herself, and for death-focused Lucie it’s energising, “a good thing”. However, it’s also clear that Pauline is involved in Ruby’s death in some way, that it’s not only the pandemic that has separated her from the family for four years. Now, though, she might make the difference.

But, there’s no guarantee. The family suffers several setbacks, literal and metaphorical, on their journey – sickness, an intruder, conflict, and more. Their journey reflects that in Richard Adams’ classic, Watershed Down, which Pauline reads to Lucie and which she characterises as “the epic story of an odd group of rabbits and their quest to establish a thriving warren”.

There is so much to like about this book, and it starts with the characters. With almost as few brushstrokes as artist Phil Day used for the cover rabbit, Cheng has created characters who represent some big ideas and thoughts, who embody the humanity of unspeakable grief, but who are yet so very individual. It’s a great read, with an ending that captures hope and fragility at the same time.

Melanie Cheng
The burrow
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2024
185pp.
ISBN: 9781922790941

Review copy courtesy Text Publishing

Frank Dalby Davison, Dusty (#BookReview)

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It’s a strange coincidence that my second review for Bill’s Gen 1-3 Aussie male writers week is for a novel titled Dusty, when my first was for a short story titled “Dust”. One of those funny little readerly synchronicities. The title, however, is about the only synchronicity because, although both stories allude to the dusty Australian landscape, Casey’s short story is about miners’ lung dust disease while Davison’s novel is about a part-kelpie part-dingo named Dusty.

A bit about Frank Dalby Davison

Davison (1893-1970) was best known as a novelist and short story writer, and was a significant figure in Australian literary circles of his time. There are useful articles for him in Wikipedia, and the Australian dictionary of biography, and I plan to devote a Monday Musings to him soon. Meanwhile, as background to this post, it’s relevant to say that he was born and schooled in Melbourne, but left school in his early teens to work on his father’s farm near Kinglake. The family moved to the United States in 1909, when he was 16. After working there in the printing trade, he travelled more, eventually enlisting for World War 1 in England. After the war, he took up a Soldier Settlement selection near Injune, in central western Queensland. 

Davison wrote several novels, but his best known is probably Man-shy (1931), which won the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal. Featuring a red heifer, it was my introduction to Davison in my first year of high school in the 1960s. Dusty (1946) is also about an animal – this time a dog – and has been in my sights for some time. Both novels drew on his experiences in Injune. AustLit reports that the manuscript of Dusty, ‘entered under the title “Stranger”, and the pen-name “Tarboy”, won the Melbourne Argus and Australasian Post 500 pound Novel Competition in 1946′. 

Dusty

At the end of my edition of Dusty is a promotion for Man-shy which quotes from H.M. Green, the literary historian who inspired Bill’s “generations”. Green writes:

Although other novelists have made animals their principal characters and drawn them realistically, Davison is the first to make a serious attempt to get inside their minds. The red heifer and the mob of wild cattle to which she belongs stand for the spirit of freedom and dogged, untameable resistance; their struggle is made extraordinarily real to us … Davison has a genuine and individual talent.

This could equally apply to Dusty, which tells the story of a dog, sired by a kelpie to a dingo mother. Violently wrenched from his lair when he was a few weeks old, he is sold to a decent man, a bushman named Tom. Tom is no fool. He recognises the mixed blood, but also sees potential in the pup, and trains him to become a champion sheep dog. Their bond is strong but is tested when Dusty’s “dingo blood” starts asserting itself, and he turns sheep-killer by night. This will not do, and Tom knows it. The novel, however, does not play out quite the way you’d expect, and we are left guessing until the end about what will, indeed, happen to Dusty.

That’s the plot, but like many plots it doesn’t tell you much about what the book is really about, or what makes it a good read. Told in three parts, Dusty is a realist novel, detailing life on Australian sheep stations and cattle properties, and told mostly through the perspectives of Tom and Dusty. Yes, you heard right, Dusty, the dog. I was completely engaged because not only is there none of the sentimentality common in stories about a man and a dog, but there’s also nothing anthropomorphic in the dog’s point-of-view. He feels pure dog, which I thought quite a feat. Early on, for example, Tom, having previously given Dusty his dinner without ceremony, puts the food down and starts some training:

Then followed a series of mystifying events. A hand appeared just above the dish and twitched, giving forth a series of soft snapping sounds; then there was a little soft whispering, and then a voice that, like the hand, kept repeating a small noise over and over again. He could make nothing of it …

This dog’s-eye view of the world, based on his experiences to date, continues through the novel.

Soon, though, bigger issues are at play involving the two parts of Dusty’s being, “the ancient battle between conflicting heredities, and between early influence and present environment; the mother against the father, nature against art”. Then Davison adds something interesting. The dingo is the product of nature, while the kelpie, the working dog, is “a product of art”. But, Davison adds, “nature, if man fails in toil or vigilance, hastens to reclaim her own”.

In other words, beneath this deeply interesting story about a man, his dog and outback farming, is a wider story about “nature”, or the essence of our beings. Contained within Dusty is the struggle between the two forces – that of freedom, of following his instinct, and that of living by his training, by rules and responsibilities. After Dusty’s dingo side becomes apparent to all, Tom knows what must be done but chooses to change his life rather than kill his dog. He becomes a self-employed possum scalper in cattle country, and finds, “without meaning any ingratitude for past kindnesses”, that he relishes his new situation in which he is invited to share a meal as “a guest and not just the hired man”. In other words, as a possum scalper, Tom is freer to be his own man.

But, while I think Tom’s life is part of this wider theme, the main focus is animals, and the idea that, in them, “is a whole scheme of values outside those familiar” to us.

There is no easy ending for Tom and Dusty, and we are left, three paragraphs from the end, with a dingo howl, “a cry of mournfulness and dark mirth, of drollery and love and hate and longing, of the joy and sorrow of life, of the will to live, of mockery and despair”.

Dusty is not a didactic book. There is no moralising, no subjective pronouncements about choices. Instead, with its objective tone, and plain but expressive prose, it feels more elemental, something that examines the essence of who we are and what we do to live. And that makes it feel timeless.

Frank Dalby Davison
Dusty
Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1983 (Arkon ed., orig. 1946)
244pp.
ISBN: 0207133891


Andrew O’Hagan, Caledonian Road (#BookReview)

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When my reading group started back in 1988, most of us were time-poor mothers so we had a rule-of-thumb that our books could not be longer than 350 pages. Those days, however, are long gone, and some time ago we agreed that our January (aka summer) read could be a BIG book. Last year, for example, it was Demon Copperhead (my review). This year, some were keen to read Andrew O’Hagan’s Caledonian Road, so that’s what we scheduled.

My problem is that while it’s summer, January is also tennis season. I don’t watch much sport, but I do love the tennis. Reading a big book while trying to keep up with the tennis is always a challenge. As is the fact that, as most of you know, I love short books. Give me a novella and I’m (usually) happy. However, I also love my reading group, and so I gave myself extra time and got stuck in. I was immediately engaged. The protagonist, fifty-two year old Campbell Flynn, art historian, writer and academic, captured me. There was a certain Jane Austen tone to the opening:

Tall and sharp at fifty-two, Campbell Flynn was a tinderbox in a Savile Row suit, a man who believed his childhood was so far behind him that all its threats had vanished.

Ha! He certainly was a tinderbox, as he was about to slowly implode. Further, as we soon discover, his childhood was not at all behind him, and is implicated in his unravelling. The first paragraph ends with some foreshadowing telling us that the first of his “huge mistakes” was not to “take people half as seriously as they took themselves”, with the second being “the proof copy” he had in his briefcase.

It is Thursday 20 May 2021, so the first wave of the pandemic is over but its long shadow provides a quiet background to the novel which is told over five parts, from Spring 2021 to Winter 2022, concluding around the time of the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Now, back to my reading journey. I was interested, but as I read on, following the ups and increasing downs of Campbell’s life, along with those of an ever-growing cast of characters, there was a point where I started to baulk. It felt like a long wallowing in the ills of the modern western world. Did I need 640 pages of it? And then it clicked. I realised I was reading a modern take on the 19th century “condition-of-England” novel. These novels, as the The Victorian Web explains, “sought to engage directly with the contemporary social and political issues with a focus on the representation of class, gender, and labour relations, as well as on social unrest and the growing antagonism between the rich and the poor in England”. We’re talking Dickens’ “big” novels, Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and south and Mary Barton, and so on. I loved them.

“a deep dive into the era’s shallows” (Campbell)

These novels have to be big, because a nation’s “condition” does not comprise one issue but a network of them, and this is what O’Hagan pulls apart in Caledonian Road. Through a cast of around 60 characters, O’Hagan explores a grab bag of the various ills we read about every day, with a British spin. All the big issues are here, including toxic masculinity; intergenerational wars; racism; modern technology with its related concerns like security, privacy, hacking, and digital identity; disruption as activist action; financial corruption and malfeasance; foreign interference; and human trafficking. Grab bag these might sound, but they are overlaid and connected by the traditional biggies – class, entitlement and privilege, economic inequality, and now, globalisation.

There’s a lot going on, but O’Hagan’s characters are vividly drawn, the plot is compelling if complicated, it is satirical in tone, and the language is so captivating that I enjoyed reading it after all. It is, necessarily, a disjointed read with the narrative constantly switching between the different storylines that make the whole, but I found I didn’t need the cast of characters helpfully provided at the beginning because the context always made clear who they were.

Before I return to the subject matter, I must share a couple of perfect character descriptions. First is Milo, a person whom Campbell doesn’t take seriously enough, and second is Candy, Campbell’s sister-in-law, the fey do-gooder wife of the egregious Duke of Kendal:

The young man had edges and they often glinted on the blade of his charm. (p. 76)
and
Candy stood like an emaciated meerkat looking out for an opportunity to enthuse. (p. 262)

So now, back to the “condition-of-England” idea. The characters range across the breadth of British society, from twenty-somethings to eighty-somethings, and include MPs, aristocrats, academics, journalists, business people, actors, criminals, activists, do-gooders, hackers, landowners, renters, gang members, migrants, factory workers, and lorry drivers. But, what most of them have in common is an idea of what England is. The most poignant comes from the migrants, like Polish Mrs Krupa and her son’s undocumented employee, also Polish, Jakub. As Jakub’s life, under the control of human-traffickers-cum-drug-lords, starts looking different to what he expected, he begins “to wonder if England was anything like the myth he … had bought into”.

O’Hagan, then, explores with clarity and a healthy sense of irony, today’s England (or Britain). The flawed but self-questioning Campbell – increasingly conflicted by his middle-class success and working-class origins – is our guide through a story in which hope, promise and sincerity are set against hypocrisy, greed and hatred. Desperate to remain relevant to the times, and to be a decent person, Campbell lets his guard down, allowing the driven, idealistic Milo into his life. Both are complex characters, who test our moral compass. Others not so much, like the aristocratic Duke of Kendal and Lord Scullion, the Russian oligarch Aleksandr Bykov, the corrupt billionaire William Byre, and the criminal Bozydar, all of whom, indirectly or directly, slash and burn those around them. In between are the decent, including women like Campbell’s wife Elizabeth and sister Moira, and the powerless, like rapper Travis and undocumented migrant worker Jakub.

Towards the end of the novel, the unravelling Campbell, who has become “lost in the sprawling web of it all”, inverts my favourite EM Forster quote when he reflects to himself, “only disconnect”. It’s a paradox. Campbell’s survival will depend on disconnecting from all that is wrong in his world (technologically and personally), while hanging tight – keeping connected, in other words – to all that is good. Ultimately, while O’Hagan paints a grim picture of what is wrong – the superficial, the hypocritical, the greedy and the cruel – in England, he also leaves us with a glimmer of hope. There are good people and they can prevail – but, will they, is the question we are left with.

PS Caledonian Road, being a big book, invites multiple responses. You can read those by Brona and Jonathan, who approached it from different angles and perspectives.

Andrew O’Hagan
Caledonian Road
London: Faber & Faber, 2024
642pp.
ISBN: 9780571381388 (Kindle edition.)

Alice Ruth Moore, A carnival jangle (#Review)

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Over the last two years I worked my way through the anthology Great short stories by contemporary Native American writers that was sent to me by my American friend Carolyn. It introduced me to many writers I hadn’t read before, and, valuably, to the issues and concerns facing some of America’s first peoples. Many of these issues – such as identity, and the long-lasting, all-encompassing fallout from dispossession – overlap with the issues First Nations Australians are confronting. It was an excellent reading project, so I was thrilled when, a year ago, Carolyn sent me another Dover anthology, Great short stories by African-American writers. I’ve read a few more of these authors than I had of the Native American collection, but not many, so I’m looking forward to another worthwhile reading project. Thanks again, Carolyn!

Alice Ruth Moore

The first thing to say about Alice Ruth Moore is that she is better known as Alice Dunbar Nelson, which is the name Wikipedia uses. Born Alice Ruth Moore in New Orleans in 1895, she married three times – Paul Laurence Dunbar (1898–1906), Henry Arthur Callis (1910–1916), and Robert J. Nelson (1916–1935). Poet Dunbar died in 1906, but it had been an abusive relationship and she’d left him before his death. Her marriage to physician and professor, Callis, ended in divorce, and she did not it seems take – or keep – his name. Her final marriage was to poet and civil rights activist, Nelson, and this marriage lasted for the rest of their lives. His name she used, but she also retained Dunbar. Fascinating.

A poet, journalist and political activist, Dunbar Nelson, who had a black mother and white father, was among the first generation born free in the South after the Civil War. She was also one of the prominent African Americans involved in the Harlem Renaissance (about which I wrote in my post on Nella Larsen’s Passing.) She lived in New Orleans for 21 years, and briefly taught primary school there, before moving to Boston and then New York, where she co-founded and taught at White Rose Mission, a school for coloured working girls (in the non-euphemistic meaning of the term!) She also lived in Washington D.C., Delaware and Pennsylvania.

Racism was an important issue for her, but she also took a wider view of human rights. She was an activist, for example, for African American’s rights and women’s rights. By the 1920s, she was concerned about social justice and the struggles of minorities in general. Wikipedia’s article concludes with this:

Much of Dunbar-Nelson’s writing was rejected because she wrote about the color line, oppression, and themes of racism. Few mainstream publications would publish her writing because they did not believe it was marketable. She was able to publish her writing, however, when the themes of racism and oppression were more subtle.

“A carnival jangle”

“A carnival jangle” appeared in her first collection of stories and poems, Violets and other tales, which was published by The Monthly Review in 1895, while she was still in New Orleans. She wrote a brief, self-deprecating introduction to the collection, commenting on the number of books being foisted on the market, and then offering her “maiden effort, — a little thing with absolutely nothing to commend it, that seeks to do nothing more than amuse”. Many of “the sketches and verses” had appeared in before, but many others were new.

There is also a preface by Sylvanie F. Williams (d. 1921) whom Wikipedia describes as New Orleans-based “educator and clubwoman“. (Click on the link to find out more about the women’s club movement in the USA.) She says the author ‘belongs to that type of “brave new woman who scorns to sigh”, but feels that she has something to say, and says it to the best of her ability”. However, she is also young, “just on the threshold of life, and with the daring audacity of youth makes assertions and gives decisions which she may reverse as time mellows her opinions, and the realities of life force aside the theories of youth”. Love this.

Williams also writes that “there is much in this book that is good; much that is crude; some that is poor”. I haven’t read any Moore/Dunbar Nelson, so I have no way of knowing where “A carnival jangle” sits in terms of her oeuvre, but it certainly feels like a standout in this collection.

Set during New Orleans’ Mardi Gras festival, “A carnival jangle” is fundamentally a mistaken identity story. It is just 4 pages, but delving into it – as the podcasters at CodeX Cantina did – reveals an impressively complex story offering multiple readings. I don’t usually go looking for analyses before I write my posts, but I came across CodeX Cantina when I was researching who Moore/Dunbar Nelson was. I’m glad I did because they teased out some culturally specific aspects that I didn’t know. For example, I completely misread the use of “Indians” in the story. These are the New Orleans or Mardi Gras Indians – an African-American carnival subculture, not Native Americans.

The story opens:

There is a merry jangle of bells in the air, an all-pervading sense of jester’s noise, and the flaunting vividness of royal colors; the streets swarm with humanity, — humanity in all shapes, manners, forms, — laughing, pushing, jostling, crowding, a mass of men and women and children, as varied and as assorted in their several individual peculiarities as ever a crowd that gathered in one locality since the days of Babel.

It’s tight and short, and tells of a young girl named Flo, who, hovering “between childhood and maturity”, is drawn away from her “unmasked crowd” by a “tall Prince of Darkness”, “a shapely Mephisto”, who promises to “show [her] what life is”. She is swept away to a costume shop and disguised as a “boy troubadour”, before joining the masked dancers – but things don’t turn out the way she is promised.

The two podcasters discussed “the tower of Babel”, which is alluded to in the opening paragraph and which suggests the idea of people coming together, until all falls apart, and the Faustian bargain, which is implied through the narrative and which presages a promise not fulfilled. The masked society can be understood as one in which all are equal, regardless of race or gender. However, masked people can also be invisible, unknown, and this tension between freedom and danger underpins this story.

The language is vibrant and lush capturing the excitement of the carnival, but is also constantly subverted by references and allusions to darker things. Carnivals, after all, tend to encompass opposing ideas – fun versus pandemonium, humour versus derision. The revellers here include “jesters and maskers, Jim Crows and clowns, ballet girls and Mephistos, Indians and monkeys…”, an odd and unsettling assortment which reflects not only traditional carnival characters but the diversity of New Orleans, and the racial tensions developing as Jim Crow laws were being enacted. Moore’s New Orleans is a place in flux, and the carnival motif is a perfect vehicle for conveying that.

The CodeX Cantina podcasters don’t talk much about Flo, and the fact that we don’t know what she wants or thinks. Described as “the quietest and most bashful of the lot” when she is drawn away, she seems to have no choice or agency in what happens to her. Is this because she’s simply a tool in the wider story, or is there a comment on gender, or both? What does it mean that she’s white?

“A carnival jangle” is a sophisticated story about a complex place and time, written by someone who was just starting her writing journey. It warrants more teasing out than I’ve done here, because it has so many angles to think about. Do read it, and, if you have time, listen to the CodeX guys. They don’t have all the answers but they do some good thinking.

Alice Ruth Moore
“A carnival jangle” (1893)
in Christine Rudisel and Bob Blaisdell (ed.), Great short stories by African-American writers
Garden City: Dover Publications, 2015
pp. 1-4
ISBN: 9780486471396
Available online at louisiana-anthology.org

Gavin Casey, Dust (#Review)

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I have had to put aside the novel I was reading for Bill’s Gen 1-3 Aussie male writers week, as my reading group book called. I will get back to it, and post on it later, but in the meantime, I wanted to post something in the actual week.

So, I turned, as I have for other Reading Weeks, to The Penguin century of Australian stories, an excellent anthology edited by Carmel Bird. Given Bill’s week encompasses writers working from 1788 to the 1950s, Bird’s anthology offered almost too many choices. Besides the obvious Henry Lawson, there were Steele Rudd, Tom Collins, Vance Palmer, and more, ending with Judah Waten’s 1950 story, “The mother”. I considered several, but Gavin Casey captured my attention because in her Introduction to the anthology, Kerryn Goldsworthy, looking at the 1930s and 40s, commented that Gavin Casey’s “Dust” and John Morrison’s “Nightshift” exemplified the more overtly political stories of this era. She added that:

they are stories in simple, unadorned language … that focus on workers and workplace disasters, on the physical dangers lying in wait for working men and women.

I have been interested in this period – and its socialist-influenced political thinking – for some time, so it had to be Casey or Morrison. Casey it was because I have listed him in a couple of Monday Musings posts but knew nothing about him.

Who was Gavin Casey?

Casey (1907-1964) was an author and journalist, born in Kalgoorlie, Western Australia, to an Australian-born father and Scottish mother. 

He doesn’t have a Wikipedia article but there is a useful biographical entry for him in the Australian dictionary of biography (ADB). Written by Anthony Ferguson, it says he had a sketchy education before obtaining a cadetship with the Kalgoorlie Electric Light Station. However, he left there to work in Perth as a motorcycle salesman, only to be “forced” back to Kalgoorlie in 1931 by the Depression. He then worked “as a surface-labourer and underground electrician at the mines, raced motorcycles and became a representative for the Perth Mirror“. He married in 1933, but “poverty plagued them, long after their return to Perth next year”.

By 1936, he was publishing short stories in the Australian Journal and the Bulletin, and in 1938 he was foundation secretary of the West Australian branch of the Fellowship of Australian Writers. His two short story collections – It’s harder for girls (1942), which won the 1942 S. H. Prior memorial prize and in which “Dust” appeared, and Birds of a feather (1943) – established his reputation. Ferguson writes:

Realistic in their treatment of place and incident, his stories showed—beneath the jollity and assurance of his characters—inner tensions, loneliness, unfulfilled hopes, and the lack of communication between men and women.

You may not be surprised to hear that his first marriage failed!

Overall, he wrote seven novels plus short stories and nonfiction works. His novels include Snowball (1958), which “examined the interaction between Aborigines and Whites in a country town”, and Amid the plenty (1962), which “traced a family’s struggle against adversity”. There is more about him in the ADB (linked above).

Ferguson doesn’t specifically address the political interests Goldsworthy references. Instead, he concludes that critics liken Casey’s earlier works to Lawson, seeing “a consistent emphasis on hardship that is tempered, for the male at least, by the conviviality of mates”. Ferguson also praises both for “their perceptiveness” and “their execution”.

The reality of Casey is a bit more nuanced, I understand. For a start, his men are not bush-men but suburban workingmen. Consequently, I plan to write more on him in a Monday Musings Forgotten Writers post, soon. Meanwhile, on with “Dust”.

“Dust”

“Dust” features male characters only, and there are some mates but, while they are important, they are not central. “Dust” also must draw on Casey’s experience of working in Kalgoorlie’s mining industry. It’s a short, short story, and is simply, but clearly constructed. It starts with a physical description of dust swooping through the township, over housetops and hospital buildings, and “leaving a red trail wherever in went”. It sounds – almost – neutral, but there are hints of something else. Why, of all the buildings in town, are “hospital buildings” singled out with the “housetops”, and does the “red trail” left behind signifiy anything?

Well, yes it does, as we learn in the next paragraph. Although this dust comes from “honest dirt” and can do damage like lifting roofs off, it is “avoidable” and is nothing like the “stale, still, malicious menace that polluted the atmosphere of far underground”. Ah, we think, so the “dust” we are talking about is something far more sinister than that flying around the open air.

And here is where the hospital buildings come in. Protagonist Parker and his miner friends are waiting for their six-monthly chest x-rays checking for the miners’ dust lung disease which killed his father. Things have changed since his father’s times, Parker knows. Not only are there the periodic medical examinations, but there are mechanisms to keep the dust down, and a system of “tickets” and pensions for affected miners. But, the risk is still there, and Parker’s anxiety increases as he watches his mates go in one by one, while he waits his turn.

This is a story about worker health and safety – but told from a personal not political perspective. It’s left to the reader to draw the political conclusions. However, it is also a highly relatable story about humans, health, and risky choices and behaviour, because it seems that Parker does have a choice. I won’t spoil it for you, but simply say that the ending made me smile – ruefully.

Gavin Casey
“Dust” (orig. 1936)
in Carmel Bird (ed.), The Penguin century of Australian stories
Camberwell: Penguin Books, 2006 (first ed. 2000)
pp. 86-90