Mirror, Shoulder, Signal

What a delight this quirky little Danish novel is! I came across Dorthe Nors in the first story I read from Found in Translation last week. I had decided to read the 20 short stories written by women in this collection for Women in Translation Month #WITMonth. And I was very quickly off to an auspicious start with Dorthe Nors' She Frequented Cemeteries (from the short story collection Karate Chop).

I enjoyed the writing and translation of She Frequented Cemeteries so much that I searched for anything  by Dorthe Nors on Audible. And there I found Mirror, Shoulder, Signal. A few days later I was downloading it. And what an utter delight it is!

Sonja is 40 something. She lives alone in Copenhagen, and works as a translator of Stieg Larsson style Swedish crime fiction novels, violent tomes with many murdered women strewn about the Swedish countryside. Sonja grew up on a Danish farm among the rye fields in remote Jutland. She has vivid childhood memories of playing in the rye fields, and the calls of the Whooper Swans are evocative. She reminded me somewhat of Eleanor Oliphant with less vodka and less childhood trauma. Sonja is afflicted with BPPV as is her mother. It was fascinating to see this condition used in a story. 

There are a small cast of supporting characters, Sonja's two driving instructors at her driving school where a lot of the action of the book happens, Ellen, Sonja's New Age masseuse, and her friend Molly who is a psychologist and overshares about her patients. 

and Molly proceeds to talk about her clients. Sonja's certain that that's forbidden but noone's very concerned about oaths of confidentiality anymore. The private has become so trivial and pawed over anyway, and who cares? So she sits there and watches Molly expand on someone else's catastrophe.

Sonja has become estranged from her family, and she mulls over them and her rural origins. She writes cards and letters to them that she will never post.

The place you come from is a place you can never return to.

There is much humour to be had in Mirror, Shoulder, Signal, something that is not always easy to achieve in translated fiction. Or in any fiction to be fair. A large part of this must come down to the considerable skill and wonderful translation by Misha Hoekstra (@mishap). The last chapter and especially  the very last few pages/minutes of the book confused me somewhat. I went back and listened to the last chapter to see if I had missed something, but I don't think I did. This was a mere quibble really and not enough to staunch my joy at finding this wonderful book, and an intriguing new author. One that I hope will become a firm favourite. I ordered all her books today! I can only imagine that I'll love them all. 

Denmark is rather high on my travel wish list. Not that I know all that much about it really. Princess Mary. Hygge. Hans Chrisitian Andersen. No-one is travelling internationally in 2020, and I can't imagine I'll be travelling anywhere like Europe before 2022 and yet I was able to spend a delightful few days driving around Copenhagen with Sonja.

I really enjoyed Kate Rawson's delightful narration. Although it feels a bit odd when she slips into rural British accents for the rural Danish characters. Her pronunciation of many Danish place names and words seems very good to my uneducated ear. I always enjoy it when the narrators can seamlessly pronounce the meaningful words of the text. 

Mirror, Shoulder, Signal has many echoes of She Frequented Cemeteries, both female characters like to spend time in the lonely, quiet parts of cemeteries as they hide away from friends, family and the modern world.

Dorthe Nors writes fiction in Danish, and essays in English!
Dorthe has given us her Top 5 reasons to go to Denmark

An Isolated Incident

I've been meaning to read An Isolated Incident for at least three years. I saw Emily Maguire speak at Newcastle Writers Festival back in 2017. Remember when Writers Festivals were a thing? It makes me all nostalgic. I had a copy somewhere I bought back in 2017, but fear it has disappeared somewhere. Recently I found the audiobook on my  BorrowBox. A few days ago, I started listening, and then, four days later I was done. 

An Isolated Incident kicks off grabbing our attention from the very start. A young policeman is knocking on a door to tell a woman that the body of her sister has been found. 

It was the new cop who came to the door, the young fella who'd only been on the job a couple of months. I thought that was a bit rough, sending a boy like him to do a job like that. Later I found out that he was sent because he'd gone to pieces at the scene. That's what we all call it now: the scene. 

Chris is a local barmaid, working at one of the four pubs in Strathdee, a small town in South West New South Wales. She is perhaps a bit rough around the edges, but she loved her younger sister very much. They had a difficult mother, and a difficult childhood for various reasons, and they've been very close as adults. Bella's murder hits Chris and the small town hard. Much of the book is told in first person narration by Chris.

The other narrative voice is May, a journalist who has come to town to cover "the story". To me An Isolated Incident was then somehow like a female version of Chris Hammer's Scrublands- which was also an audiobook for me, and another NWF connection! (see my review) Female author, female journalist. Female victim. An Isolated Incident is of course the earlier of the two books, but a similar story with a damaged journalist coming to a small town. Of course this perspective from the outside fills out the story a lot, and gives a broader perspective on the town and it's inhabitants. The articles that May writes for her online newspaper are included too. 

I always enjoy a multiple point of view but the dual narrative was sometimes confusing, as changes in narrator are unannounced on the audiobook, which is an ongoing audio problem. Just a short pause between sections is all we ask. Too much? Seems to be. The print book has obvious spaces, give us pauses on the audio. 

An Isolated Incident asks us not to see Bella's murder as an Isolated Incident, but to see how it sits within the history and context of violence against women. 

This had nothing to do with what happened to Bella and what happened to Bella had nothing to do with Tegan Miller and none of it had to do with the rich Sydney housewife left out to rot in the street which had nothing to do with the Nigerian girls stolen as sex slaves or the Indian woman eviscerated on a bus or the man grabbing women off the streets in Brunswick. 

It also explores family, female friendship, marriage, infinidelity, our culture of alcohol. It is sexy and provocative in a way that is rather unusual for a murder mystery. 

I've been listening to quite a bit of crime fiction over the past year since I listened to Scrublands really. I'm just about  half way through Nicci French's Frieda Klein series, and loving it. 

The narration by Katherine Littrell (what a surname!) is masterful. She is astonishing actually. She is a trained actor- which really shines through, and does work in multiple accents  and dialects- Australian, New Zealand, American and British! Wow. Sadly most of the titles she narrates are not my cup of tea, but I'll be searching out more of her work. 

An Isolated Incident was Shortlisted for the 2017 Stella Prize

https://australianwomenwriters.com

Ghost Wall

I listened to Ghost Wall in January (January 2019! Seems I forgot to post this). I was spellbound. When I finished I couldn't settle on another audiobook to start after it, so I just listened to it again straight away. That was partly the story, but also the wonderful audiobook narration by Christine Hewitt. I loved her Northern English voice so much. It was one of the audiobooks where you sit in car parks after you've arrived somewhere just to keep listening.

The opening words are arresting. 

They bring her out. Not blindfolded, but eyes widened to the last sky, the last light. The last cold bites her fingers and her face, the stones - not the last stones- bruise her bare feet. She stumbles. They hold her up. No need to be rough, everyone knows what is coming. From deep inside her body, from the cord in her spine and the wide blood-ways under the ribs, from the emptiness of her womb and the rising of her chest, she shakes. A body in fear. 

"No need to be rough, everyone knows what is coming." I don't! I don't know what is coming, but I sure want to now... The first page or so sets an incredible scene, and then there is an abrupt change of pace, and I was initially confused by this change, thinking that I'd missed something. And so I started the audio again, but I hadn't missed anything. 

Fifteen year old Silvie and her parents have joined a university excursion in Northumberland in the recent past. The Berlin Wall has recently fallen. Silvie's father is obsessed with Iron Age Britain, and the excursion is an exercise in 'experiential archeology', a reality tv type experience of living as people would have done some 2,000 years ago. Silvie's father is not an academic though, he's a working man, a bus driver, and the Iron Age is his hobby, and he's dragging his family along with him on his annual leave. Because of his passion for it his wife and daughter have become experts in the Iron Age too. 

The group must are wearing scratchy gather their own food, and it falls to Silvie's mother to prepare food for everyone- the Professor, the three university students, and her own family.

I didn't see quite a few of the themes as strongly as many English readers, people I follow on booktube. But certainly Sarah Moss was talking about Brexit and migration and very modern issues in her ancient story. 

Ghost Wall is such a tight compact little book. It is rather tense at times. There is a lot to think about. I have some minor quibbles with the very end of Ghost Wall, but that wasn't enough to diminish my joy in this fascinating tale. 

Sarah Moss on her blog, On Prehistorical Fictions

CBC Interview with Sarah Moss

The Household Guide to Dying

It wasn't my intention to start this book a few months ago. I didn't think it would be a good idea given that my week was going to include the funeral of an old friend. But then I hopped in my car for a road trip to discover that I had forgotten to download the other audiobook that I was actually planning to listen to. What to do? What to do? I had to listen to something... so I started this one, albeit somewhat cautiously. Planning to bail and just listen to music if I had to. 

Only to have the first chapter be all about dying in spring. Oh dear. This was flying rather close to reality. 

It didn't get more cruel than this: the season of expectation, of hope, of growth; the season of the future, when there was none at all. 

But there were enough difference to let me continue. Our first person narrator of The Household Guide to Dying is Delia Bennet. A woman in her late thirties, with a husband and two young children, Delia is dying of metastatic breast cancer. Depressing enough when you're feeling a bit fragile. 

Delia is a copyeditor, proofreader and writer and  has had an "accidental" career as an author to various Household Guides. The Household Guide to Home Maintenance. The Household Guide to the Kitchen. The Household Guide to the Laundry. A veritable modern day Mrs Beeton (who is reference multiple times in the book). Now Delia wants to write The Household Guide to Dying.

Always a devoted reader, I found myself surprisingly ahead when I commenced the arts degree. I finished under time to discover I was brilliantly unqualified for anything. 

The Household Guide to Dying is filled with literary references, whether discussing dying mothers

How cruel, how unfair, how totally unsporting, how unlike the stout mothers of public life, the mothers of fiction. You could never imagine Mrs Gandhi or Mrs Micawber or Mrs Thatcher or Mrs Weasley dying before their time and leaving their children unmothered. The prime minister's wife - any prime ministers wife - Nicole Kidman's mother, Mrs Jellyby, Angelina Jolie, the Queen, Lady Jane Franklin, Mrs George Bush Senior and Junior .... they would never have died young and left motherless children. They might have been doubtful, dominating or dysfunctional - all Dickens's mothers were- but they stayed around. Even Lady Dedlock hung in there. Jane Austen's Mrs Bennet would never have left five young daughters weeping over a coffin. 

or dying readers. There is a whole chapter on what to read when you're actually, actively dying. 

Even before I realised I'd be leaving this world prematurely, I had fantasised over what I would be reading at the point of death. 

How practicalities interfered.

Middlemarch was far too heavy. Witty, yes. Ardent, doubtless. But just too damn heavy.... Lolita was too clever. Pride and Prejudice was suddenly all so brittle... Madame Bovary far too sly... Then I realised, when I started rejecting books that I knew were perfect works of literature, that it was not them, and not the authors. It was me, the reader. The reader in me was unwinding, spooling backwards. The reader who was me was now no longer. 

But it's more than a book about illness and dying, it's also mediation on the lives of modern women and mothers.

Thirty years later, it was different. We women of the early twenty-first century knew we were poised somewhere between domestic freedom and servitude. The home was ripe for reinvention. Event he theorists were claiming it. Angels were out, they'd been expelled years back. Now you could be a goddess, a beautiful producer of lavish meals in magnificent kitchen temples. Or a domestic whore, audaciously serving store-bought risottos and oversized oysters and leaving the cleaning to others. Goddess or whore, both were acceptable. 

The burden of choice, one of the late twentieth century's most insidious was lifted. 

One of the literary references really spoke to me. The Metaphysical Poets was not a book I knew. Despite the fact that this was published in 1965 and I could well have been tortured with it in high school.  I've never recovered from my lifelong loathing of poetry caused by misadventures in high school English.  Of course a few days later on a spontaneous visit to the Newcastle Lifeline Book Fair the universe threw up a copy of this classic into my path. I couldn't help but buy it... among a few other things. 

It was if one person in the world had decided that school-kids should eternally read Hamlet, To Kill a Mockingbird, Herodotus's Histories, The Catcher in the Rye, and something called The Metaphysical Poets.

Of those I only had to suffer through Histories. 

There was a lot of beautiful writing about the mundane, the every day.  About back yards, lawns and chook sheds. 

I entered the shed. Despite the dust, the earthy pungency of the chicken manure, the remains of bones and shell and everything else they unearthed in their endless, resales scratching for vermicular treats, the shed and the run was a pleasant place. It offered tender moments that couldn't be found anywhere else. The angled poles of light capturing swirls of golden dust. The feathers rising and settling on the ground. The clucking that sounded equally contented and distressed. The air of expectancy that emanated from every hen, no matter how silly. The pure optimism that kept her laying an egg day after day, when day after day that egg was taken away. 

My day job often interferes with my enjoyment of medical scenes or procedures. There is a rather preposterous medical situation later in the book, and it was so egregious that for me it was like the rest of the book was suddenly a bit out of focus ( even though I was listening to it). Although when Delia goes to observe an autopsy it was clear that Debra Adelaide had been in Glebe Coroner's Court, and I had more than a tingle of recognition. 

Overall my sad week in September was actually a good week to listen to The Household Guide to Dying. Some of it resonated very strongly, and much of it has stayed with me months later. I have more Debra Adelaide on my TBR, I'm looking forward to getting to it. 

I loved Heather Bolton's narration of the audiobook. She had me in from the start. 


Read in 2019, blogged in 2020.

http://australianwomenwriters.com

http://australianwomenwriters.com

The Yellow House

I haven't had a big reading year it must be said. And I haven't been blogging about those few books that I have read. Although most of what I've actually read has been audiobooks I do believe. I will have to tally up the proportion when I do my end of the year post. 

The Yellow House was another audiobook for me. Despite it winning The Vogel Award last year I first heard of The Yellow House when I saw Emily O'Grady speak at a panel at Newcastle Writers Festival earlier this year. I was intrigued by this book so came home with an autographed copy, which I then didn't actually read. Opening up my copy now I see that my lovely friend ANZLitlovers is blurbed! How fabulous. 

Newcastle Writers Festival was way back in April, so when I approached The Yellow House in December I had pretty much forgotten what it was about. The Yellow House has a child narrator, not something that every one likes. I usually do, but I was a bit frustrated by our 10 year old narrator here at times. 

Ten year old Cub (Coralie) is a twin. She lives with her twin brother Wally, who sounds as obnoxious as a ten year old boy can be, her older brother Cassie (Cassius) and her parents on a property some way out of town.

Our house sat at the edge of the paddock, down a dirt road off the side of the highway. There were no other houses close by, except for the yellow house over the fence. A weatherboard, almost identical to ours except for the colour: the same rickety verandah that looked out over the hilly paddock and the inky mountains on the other side of the highway, the dirt crawl space that rustled like tinsel if you gave the nesting cockies a fright.

Cub's family are on the outskirts of town in more ways than one. Her maternal grandfather Les committed a series of terrible crimes before she was born, and her family is still paying the price for his actions more than a decade after he died. They are shunned socially, her father and brother find it hard to get work. The twins have never really been able to make any friends at school. 

Then Cub's aunt Helena and cousin Tilly come to live in the yellow house next door, her brother Cassie makes a new friend Ian, and things begin to change. Cub's parents have taken great pains to keep her and Wally in the dark about their grandfather's crimes. That bit took quite a bit of suspension of belief for me. I really don't think that you could survive five or six years at school and have not one kid (or teacher) say something about the nationally famous crimes of your grandfather. Or that some kid would find that really the twins were just kids despite the warnings of their parents and befriend them, at least in the school yard. 

Cub was not the overly precocious child narrator, indeed she was quite in the dark about most things, she was a pestery questioning kid though. But she couldn't know some things I really wanted to know. Why did her aunt Helena move to the yellow house? It's suggested along the way, actually I think Helena's perspective would have been really interesting. 

Most of the action of the story takes place on the family property or at the local public school were the twins attend school. Cub's world is quite small so the story is quite small really. The twins spend most of their time at home, especially over the long summer holiday when a lot of the book is set. Like all country kids they roam about the paddock and the dam, but they have always steered clear of the knackery that was involved in their grandfathers crimes. 

While reading I didn't get a good feeling for when the book was set. Perhaps I missed obvious statements, but sometimes it felt like it could have been set anytime from the 1950s onwards. No-one had laptops or internet, but there were cars, microwaves and it became more obviously recent past. 

I didn't particularly like the very end of the book. I wanted something else, more perhaps. 

I know I'll be gravely disappointed (pun almost intended) but whenever I come across a ghost drop (Cub's favourite lolly) I'm going to have to have one. I'd never heard of them before. Perhaps they're a Queensland thing?

Read in 2019, blogged in 2020. Yes I'm trying to catch up a bit, clear the backlog.

http://australianwomenwriters.com

http://australianwomenwriters.com

The White Girl

,

Tony Birch is a writer I've been meaning to read for ages. I remember his debut novel Blood coming out in 2011 and wanting to read that then. I've bought a couple of his books in the years since, for which I'm sure he is grateful, but I hadn't got to reading any. Back in July I used ANZLitlovers Indigenous Literature Week to spur me on to listen to Tony Birch's newest novel The White Girl. And of course I'm very glad that I did.

The White Girl is a quiet, small story about Odette Brown and her granddaughter Sissy living a rather marginal existence on the outskirts of Deane, a small town in Menzies-era rural Australia. 

Odette Brown rose with the sun, as she did each morning. She eased out of the single bed she shared with her twelve-year-old granddaughter, Cecily Anne, who went by the name of Sissy. Wrapping herself in a heavy dressing gown to guard against the cold, Odette closed the bedroom door behind her and went into the kitchen. 

The location is never really specified, which I often find annoying, but I do see that it's used to make a more universal story. The mention of mountains and beaches made me think most of New South Wales, but Tony Birch is a Victorian. In the Author's Note at the end of the book, Tony Birch says The White Girl is a "fictional work set in a fictional town somewhere in Australia".

Odette has raised Sissy, the white girl of the title, ever since Sissy's mother left town about 10 years earlier. The arrival of a new police officer, Sergeant Lowe, changes things for Odette and Sissy. 

In his new role he was simultaneously appointed as a Guardian to the Aboriginal population of the district. He found the title both enticing and apt. 

I really like Tony Birch's storytelling, it is often deceptively simple, yet political, truthful and yet humorous.

Odette had been raised to excuse the ignorance of white people, but it was a difficult task. 

Odette is a calm, wise, and generous woman. Particularly generous. 

'Because they're the ones we deal with every day of our lives. Police. Not the Welfare or the ones who write the rules for the government. Think if you were police, Jack, knowing that one day you'd be told to go into a house and take kiddies away from their family. If you were to treat people with any decency, you couldn't do that job. This fella is giving us a hard time, he needs to be angry at us. Maybe even hate us. The only way they get by.'

I'd like to meet her. I'd like to be her friend. 

The 1950s and 60s was of course still the time of the Stolen Generations. The White Girl humanises these events, 

'Because any older Aboriginal woman I set my eyes on, I really believe she could be my mother. Never is, of course.'

The White Girl is a rather domestic novel, that I thought surprising for a male author, it packs political heft as it explores major life issues for Aboriginal people of the time. The casual and institutional racism. Lives lived in poverty and governed by paternalistic governments, laws and local police. I wasn't aware that under the Aborigines Protection Act Aboriginal people used to need travel permits to leave the district where they lived, and that these travel permits would be granted, or not, by the local police. Aboriginal people needed police permission to travel to visit family, or just go to another town for shopping or an appointment. That a small number applied for Exemption Certificates from the Act by which they could travel freely, and enjoy some of the freedoms of white people. It's extraordinary. It's extraordinary that I didn't know this. The ongoing ignorance of white people I guess ... 

The local police had total control over the lives of Aboriginal people, and very few of them walked through the station door of their own accord. 

The White Girl possibly has the best cover image ever. It's striking to look at, and absolutely perfect for the story.

I listened to the audiobook of The White Girl narrated by Shareena Clanton. She is an Australian actor, and did a great job of the audio narration. I particularly liked her voicing of  Odette. It's lovely, and warm, and brings her to life perfectly. 

ABC RN Conversations Tony Birch (2013)

The Gap

I came across The Gap recently while browsing the new releases on one of my library e-audibook apps. I hadn't heard of it, or the author (or so I thought) but borrowed it immediately and was soon listening to it in the car and out on walks with the dog. 

The Gap of the title refers to a beautiful clifftop on the South Head of Sydney Harbour. It offers a wonderful view, and a lovely sea breeze. But it has long been a busy spot for those wishing to end their lives. And so it was in the Sydney Summer of 2007-8 when Benjamin Gilmour was an ambulance paramedic stationed at Bondi, Sydney's most famous beach, a short drive south from The Gap. 

At the highest point of the The Gap where the clifftop rises like a tower it is 90 metres to the sea. Tourists and day-trippers come in groups to stand at the wood and wire fence inhaling the sunrise. They chatter about nothing of consequence but are quickly made speechless by nature's might. I've seen them stand like people at a crossroads, suddenly conscious of their smallness. The Gap is a place of great change, new journeys, different paths but for others who come their hope is long lost. To them The Gap is a backdrop for the final act of life. It's the edge of the world from which they leave. Fifity or more go over each year from the top or further around where the fence is easier to scale. They do it at dawn, in the heaviest rain and on the quietest of nights. For us local paramedics the beauty up here is hard to admire.

The Gap was written at the time, but Benjamin Gilmour thought it was too sensitive to publish at the time, and it is only with the passage of time that he feels these stories can be told. I did wonder at the rather strong trigger warnings in the Introduction, about mental health, black humour and the need for it for emergency services workers at all levels. Having read the book I can fully understand it. 

What will never change is the trauma and death that paramedics are exposed to and the impact this can have on us and the way we manage our mental health. 

The manuscript was even assessed by psychologists, and changes made to soften imagery and remove explicit detail. At the beginning I was dismissive about this, but then I listened to the book. It's by no means soft or warm and fuzzy. There is a lot of death, a lot of it by suicide, but also trauma, heart attacks and other medical conditions. Benjamin Gilmour and his partner have a bad run of calls, and come to refer to their ambulance as the Suicide Truck, and feel that he is a Suicide Magnet. All while Gilmour and his (ambulance) partner John are going through the breakdown of their own personal relationships.

Gilmour is an author and filmmaker and he doesn't just write about a series of jobs he has attended as an ambo in Sydney, he takes a longer lens to look at his patients and their lives. 

As we leave the building I contemplate the lives that have ended here. The building is a repository of worn-out men and women with deeply tragic stories. Lives spoiled by drugs and alcohol, marriage breakups and mental illness.

It is not a cheery, postcard touristy version of Sydney that emerges from these pages. The Gap takes a long hard look at the very detrimental effects of shift work and sleep deprivation on ambos, who have a challenging job to begin with. Traumatic shared experiences at work creates close bonds among paramedics and other emergency services personnel. These experiences also take a great toll on the health and well being of those who respond to these calls. But they have great resilience, showing up for shifts when they can be hurting more than the people who have called them for help.

The cases are banal, but as soon as I'm chatting to my patients I'm in their lives and not in mine, and that's what I'm here for. 

At the time of writing most of the book Gilmour had not had a patient suffering an out of hospital cardiac arrest survive to hospital discharge. Not uncommon. In the introduction he says that has changed in the decade since, with better bystander CPR, and public access to defibrillators, that he has had some saves. Still survival of out of hospital cardiac arrest is around 10% in Australia.

"We tried our best, but he didn't pull through". It's a worn phrase that makes it sound like it's the old man's fault, as if he refused to come back. "We tried our best" sounds inadequate too. It may be true that we tried our best, but I wonder if trying is good enough. In our line of work where the opposite of success is death there's no prize for trying. 

Hmm, yes, but these people are already dead. There were several sections where Gilmour talked about the words we use at times like this. I have to speak to people frequently at these times in my own job, and I enjoyed his thoughts and perspective on the words we use. These are difficult times, for everyone. The ambos, the families and loved ones. Gilmour's partner John used to tell suicidal people that you don't have to kill yourself to get people to listen. I like that phrase.

I listened to the last third of the book in one afternoon. I hadn't intended to. I planned to listen for an hour or so while I was doing some weeding, but was unable to stop. I had tears streaming down my face for much of that last section. I finished off the remains of a bottle of red that night, and then had an extra glass for good measure. I had been planning to start watching Unbelievable that evening, but I chose a couple of episodes of Black Books instead as some much needed relief. 

Matty Morris did a sterling job of the audio narration, coping well with all the medical terms that necessarily lace a paramedic memoir. But I wish someone had given this poor Melbourne lad some help with the pronunciation of Sydney place names - Clovelly, Cahill Expressway, Vaucluse and more. In a book where the Eastern Suburbs Sydney location was such a major part of the story it would have been nice.

Benjamin Gilmour RN Lifematters interview 

Scrublands

Aussie Noir is another trend having a moment just now. Scrublands came out last year to much fan fare, and it caught my attention. I'd fondled it in bookshops and read the prologue. It seemed a bit much, a bit far fetched, so I put it back down.

Recently I saw Chris Hammer speak at Newcastle Writers Festival 2019 and my interest was piqued again. Chris read that prologue and this time I was intrigued. Soon after I found the Scrublands audiobook downloaded on my phone.

That prologue recounts the Sunday morning when  a small town priest takes aim at his congregation and kills five men. From the start we know what has happen, but we can't imagine why.

The day is still. The heat, having eased during the night, is building again; the sky is cloudless and unforgiving, the sun punishing. Across the road, down by what's left of the river, the cicadas are generating a wall of noise, but there's silence surrounding the church. Parishioners begin to arrive for the eleven o'clock service, parking across the road in the shade of the trees. Once three or four cars have arrived, their occupants emerge into the brightness of the morning and cross the road, gathering outside St James to make small talk: stock prices, the scarcity of farm water, the punitive weather. The young priest, Byron Swift, is there, still dressed casually, chatting amiably with his elderly congregation. Nothing seems more amiss; everything appears normal. 

So many Australian books mention cicadas at the start! They must be great scene setters. Scrublands then is a powerful whydunnit, not a whodunnit. A year after the massacre a journalist from the Sydney Morning Herald travels to Riversend, a small fictional Riverina town made famous by their murderous priest. Martin Scarsden is there to write about the town one year on.

Martin is 40, single, damaged from his time as a foreign correspondent, and is at a low point of his career. He comes to this very small town, remarkably a town with no wifi and no phone reception, and a lot of secrets. Scrublands is a big, chunky book, 481 pages, and there's a lot of plot. Perhaps too much really. But the writing was so compelling that even when it all got a bit much, when it became even more implausible, I was still compulsively listening. I just couldn't stop. I would sneak in another chapter whenever I found a few spare minutes. Chris Hammer would use conversations and Martin mulling over the events to recap, and refresh the story for the reader/listener. This was a great technique and worked really well, especially for such a plot dense story. I greatly appreciated these breaks in the story moving forward, to give me enough time to process what had been going on and keep up as it all got even more intricate.

Chris Hammer was a journalist for over 30 years. Naturally, he wrote about his transition from journalist to author, a difference I'd not really thought about before. But there are clear and important differences between the two. His experience as a journalist really showed in Scrublands, the dynamics between the different types of media, each striving to make the story their own. And I just loved that he used actual names of real Australian newspapers and TV stations. Yes, it's a work of fiction, but it made it feel much more real, that he was writing for the Sydney Morning Herald, whilst his rival wrote for The Age. Instead of disguising things with fake media names. 

I've listened to Jane Harper's first two crime novels this year, and enjoyed the blokey, masculine voice of Steve Shanahan telling me those tales. Here, Dorje Swallow is even more laconic, his voice as parched as Riversend. He did a great job reading  although I think it pretty much never works when blokey men do women's voices. I always find that grating. 

I listened to a lot of Scrublands on a road trip to the coast in May and the mood and story has really stayed with me. I'll certainly be lining up early for Chris Hammer's next novel. Oooh, it's a sequel called Silver and is coming in October. 

Once

I've just started using Borrow Box from my library, and I'm in love. Borrow Box is an app that you use via your library to borrow eaudiobooks and ebooks. The app is super easy to use. Once was the first audiobook I listened to with Borrow Box. It was such a fab reading experience. I listened to most of it on a train trip, some whilst out walking the dogs, some driving the car to work. All so easy.

At this stage I'm only planning to use it for audiobooks (because I'm using it on my phone and I don't really like ebooks so much, especially reading phone size ebooks). I can borrow four audiobooks at a time (and four ebooks if I choose to), which is enough to keep me out of trouble I guess, although there are so many there that I want to inhale.

I'd been meaning to read Once for some time. It's a very well known book, and I've had a copy sitting about the house in the TBR for quite a while. Although I didn't know all that much about it. I knew that it was about a boy called Felix and set during the Second World War, but not really much more than that.

Felix is a nine year old boy living in a remote Polish orphanage in 1942. Although he isn't an orphan, or he wasn't when his parents left him there three years and eight months ago. As you might expect things are rather grim in a Polish orphanage during the war- watery soup, shared baths and bullying amongst the kids. But things change enormously for Felix when he leaves the orphanage one day to return home to find his parents.

Of course Felix's Jewish bookseller parents are no longer keeping their small town shop. They have been displaced by a Polish family, and Felix starts a larger quest to find them. We visit the Warsaw Ghetto, and witness so much brutality (and some kindness) at the hands of Nazi soldiers. I may have cried at times. It's hard not to.

As an adult reader it is impossible not to be aware of what Poland 1942 means as a setting. I guess as a child you would have less of an awareness, and less of an understanding of the historical and political context. When groups of people are being marched down a road or pushed onto a train you know where they are going. Felix doesn't.

Morris Gleitzman is such a prolific Australian author, who is just taking on his role as our fifth Australian Children's Laureate. I've seen him speak quite a few times. I've read a few of his books. Loyal Creatures, which I loved (see my review), and Two Weeks With the Queen, which I don't remember loving so much.

Once was tremendously successful and popular and has now grown into a series of six books. Once. Then. Now. Soon. After. Maybe. I'm planning on listening to all of them. Indeed I have Then all downloaded and ready to go next.

Speaking Up

I really have been straying out of my comfort zone lately. So much nonfiction! I saw Gillian Triggs speak at Newcastle Writers Festival recently, she was very impressive, and so when her audiobook Speaking Up popped on my BorrowBox I was there.

Because of my general head in the sand approach to life I only heard of Gillian and her work last year. She gave a keynote at a conference I attended, unfortunately I missed that session, but everyone there raved about it. Then I saw her in Newcastle April. Speaking Up was the overall best seller at the festival bookshop. Which is intriguing, as it's not a super easy read.

Gillian has had an extraordinary life and career. Born in the UK, her family migrated to Melbourne in 1958. Gillian remembers seeing refugees on the streets of London after the war, and feels her sense of social justice was forged by the war and her parents visions of freedom, non-discrimination and racial equality, "the values for which their war had been fought". She studied law at Melbourne Uni in the 60s and went on to have an international career specialising in International Maritime Law. She worked and lived in Texas, Singapore, Paris, London and Sydney. She has had two marriages, the first to the Dean of her law school, and with the second she became a diplomatic wife to the Australian Ambassador in Singapore then Paris. Yes I got a little bit jealous around that part. She had three children, the third of whom was profoundly disabled by Edwards Syndrome.

In 2012 Gillian Triggs became President of the Australian Human Rights Commission and "discovered her public voice and that she had something useful to say." She certainly has a lot of useful things to say. 

Human rights apply to everyone, all the time. Those whose human rights need protecting are not always socially worthy citizens. Human rights defenders do not pick and chose whom to protect and this is the point. Vulnerable people, usually minorities, and sometimes unpopular people all have the right to enjoy fundamental freedoms and respect as human beings. 

I really enjoyed these early, more biographical chapters, but the majority of the book is much more academic and scholarly. Law for the nonlawyer is quite often dry and boring. And how long can anyone really think about Senate Estimates? Gillian Triggs does her best to make this accessible for the average reader, but still my eyes and consciousness glazed over at times. Quite literally one day on a long distance drive.

Yet the subjects that Gillian Triggs addresses are interesting, and clearly important. Family violence, economic empowerment of women, constitutional recognition of indigenous Australians, Aboriginal deaths in custody, refugees, mandatory detention, racism, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, youth suicide, metadata, marriage equality. Gillian wants nothing more than for us to join her in speaking up for human rights. 

Australia is the only democratic nation in the world and the only common law country that does not have a bill or charter of rights to ensure the freedom of its citizens and residents. Australia is also the only Commonwealth country not to have a treaty with its indigenous people...

Gillian Triggs dates the decline of human rights in Australia from 2001. A lot of things changed around the world that year of course, but she sites particularly Tampa, Children Overboard and September 11 as causing Australia to change course. 

How is it that the sovereign nation of Australia, one of the architects of international human rights agreements following World War II and a globally recognised good international citizen has regressed so far in failing to respect human rights in the 21st century?

It is shocking that Gillian finds human rights to have regressed further over her five years at the Commission. 

It's fair to say that most Australians (myself included) know next to nothing about our Constitution, and indeed we would hardly ever consider it, unless wishing to quote The Castle. 

The Australian Constitution does not prohibit torture, slavery or racial or sexual discrimination. The rights of children, the disabled or aged are not mentioned.

I guess none of this is too surprising given that it was set out in the dying years of the 19th century. Our Constitution does not even grant us the right to vote! Which is interesting given we have compulsory voting. Oh dear, perhaps I'm going to have to read that book too... (From Secret Ballot to Democracy Sausage)

I was especially interested in the sections on Aboriginal deaths in custody, on the Northern Territory Intervention, and other factors affecting Australia's Aboriginal people. Gillian recommends Ali Cobby Eckerman's poem Intervention Payback.

Juxtaposing human rights with child protection is a false binary. Australia can both protect its vulnerable children and respect the fundamental rights of our First Nations peoples to dignity and to consent to laws that affect their lives. 

Sadly, Australia can't always protect our vulnerable children though. I am glad to have learnt about the Uluru Statement from the Heart. What apart from politics can stand in the way of a First Nations Voice to be enshrined in the Constitution?

Indigenous deaths in custody are reported to have increased 150% since 1991 numbering 340 in 2017.

While this number is still shocking, this sentence is badly worded. I initially thought it suggested that 340 Aboriginal people died in custody in the year 2017 which stopped me in my tracks. What she means is that 340 Aboriginal people died in the 25 years since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody in 1991. An appalling number. 

Similarly, the section on refugees were enlightening, and damning. 

Road signs warned that the (Christmas) islands giant robber crabs had protected status, asylum seekers are not similarly cared for here. 

Currently there are 65 million displaced people in the world, 1/3 of whom are refugees.

Australia's responses to this global tragedy have been exceptionally harsh, illegal and inhumane attracting international condemnation. 

I was reminded that Mandatory Detention was started in 1992 by the Keating government. It is interesting that in 2016 the Supreme Court of Papua New Guinea found that detention of adult male refugees and asylum seekers on Manus Island is in violation of its (relatively new) constitution. 

Naturally, Speaking Up gives us an idea of the work of the Human Rights Commission. I was most surprised that "Overwhelming people come to the Commission alleging employment discrimination." I had thought the day to day workings would be on more general social concerns, not specific complaints by individuals. But they do a lot of conciliation work. 

The protection of minorities is fundamental to our democracy. 

In the end Speaking Up is quite a lengthy argument for an Australian Charter of Rights. Gillian Triggs makes no secret of her opinion, she argues for it many times due the text and her final chapter is entitled The Time is Now, A Charter of Rights for Australia. Apparently it will help counter our "dysfunctional parliament and disempowered courts".

The real value of human rights acts lies in their symbolic, educative and informative roles restraining parliaments from passing laws that infringe fundamental rights and ensuring administrators do not impose policies that do so. When protections for human rights get legislative expression they form the scaffolding for a social structure that respects rights for communities and individuals. 

As a random fact I was fascinated to hear Gillian say that the UK had television soon after the war. I took that to mean that television started broadcasting there after the war, but the BBC actually started broadcasting regularly in 1936, and then British TV was shut down in 1939 at the start of WWII. Broadcasting then resumed in 1946. Television came to Australia in 1956 for the Melbourne Olympic Games. Not that I was there for that, but I didn't realise Australia at that time was a full 20 years behind.

Still young Gillian watched BBC documentaries on the liberation of concentration camps and recounts that her sense of social justice had its origins in her parents commitment to the values of freedom, non-discrimination and racial equality. "A choice is not binary in favour of one right or the other, rather as shown by amendments to the marriage act it is possible both to achieve marriage equality and to provide protection to those religious views that would condemn it."

There is no hierarchy of rights. One freedom does not trump another.

I had to rush towards the end to read this book. Borrowing e-audiobooks is a rigid process. You can't hang onto it for a day or so if you haven't finished with it. An e-audibook just vanishes from your phone (or device) at the allocated time. So I had to find 6 hours in a few days. I wasn't sure that I'd make it- especially when I have many other draws on my time (as we all do). I'm also halfway through the Aussie Noir thriller Scrublands, and trying to watch Season 2 of The Handmaid's Tale before June 6 when Series 3 starts. Plus living a life from time to time. I tried speeding it up to 1.25 but Speaking Up is dense, and you need to concentrate properly so that didn't work for me at all. I made my deadline with a few hours to spare. 

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