Book review – The Dawn of Language, by Sverker Johansson

Title: The Dawn of Language: How we came to talk

Author: Sverker Johansson; Translation by Frank Perry

Publisher: Mac Lehose Press Quercus/Hachette Australia, 2021; RRP: $24.99 (pbk)

Sverker Johansson, Doctor of Philosophy in Physics and Master of Philosophy in Linguistics, was born 1961 in Lund, southern Sweden. He is a senior advisor at Dalarna University, has conducted research at CERN in Switzerland and participated in EVOLANG, the leading international conference for research on the origins and evolution of language, since 2006.

Frank Perry’s translations have won the Swedish Academy Prize for the introduction of Swedish literature abroad and the prize of the Writers Guild of Sweden for drama translation.

Johansson is clearly an accomplished user of language: The Dawn of Language is a readable, fascinating, and informative book. Frank Perry has produced a very credible English edition, although I have no idea what the Swedish version is like as I have no Swedish language. And, according to Johansson, languages are best learnt in childhood.  

A key structural approach in the book is the presentation of a hypothesis and then a close examination of relevant material, looking at both sides of the theory, to support or debunk the claim. In the closing pages of the book, Johansson admits that this book is a less academic version of an earlier work, one with more detail and attention to explaining the references. At 400-plus pages, leaving out some esoteric detail of this subject probably has made the book more broadly appealing.

The Dawn of Language is not a rainy Sunday afternoon escape from bleakness and boredom. It is a dense book, full of information, and slippery arguments regarding the origin of language; I say slippery as there does not seem to be a lot of solid data. Johansson has, however, made the analysis of what there is into an engaging story. Apparently, humans love a story, love a good gossip, going over the whys and wherefores of living. Johansson even postulates that this aspect of humanness  contributed to the evolution and development of language.

Passing the ‘chimp test’: delving into the birth of language with Sverker Johansson

steven poole @ the guardian, 2021

Ironically, the lack of definitive evidence surrounding the question of how we come to talk, with language, makes this book possible. One might consider the lack of evidence as thoughtless by the first users of language not to have recorded the incident and for subsequent generations not to have preserved these facts. Linguistic researchers, such as Johansson, are left with speculation and second-level evidence to piece together the past. 

Significant parts of the book are devoted to the story of human evolution and to the research of language in other primates. These are like subplots and do much to make the book more fascinating.

Johansson’s writing is refreshingly honest, and he shares with the reader his own curiosity and intellectual journey in trying to find an answer to the question of the origin of language.

There is a lot of material in this book, and I would suggest it deserves more than one reading, and I look forward to re-reading this book in the fullness of time.

Reviewed by: Frank Thompson

Ballarat Writers Inc Book Review Group

Review copy supplied by the publisher

Book review: Yeah, Nah!, by William McInnes

Title: Yeah, Nah!: A celebration of life and the words that make us who we are

Author: William McInnes

Publisher: Hachette Australia, 2023

William McInnes is one of Australia’s most popular and well-known writers and actors.  He began his writing career with his memoir A Man’s Got to Have a Hobby.  In 2012 his book, co-written with his wife, Sarah Watt, Worse Things Happen at Sea, was named the best non-fiction title in the ABIA and Indie Book Awards.  He now has a dozen books to his name.

His acting credits include leading roles in Blue Healers, Sea Change, Total Control and The Newsreader.  He has won two Logies and two AFI/AACTA Awards for Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor.  William now lives in Melbourne after spending his formative years in Queensland.

Language is an important identifier of culture and community and William McInnes looks into the changes in the language of Australia.  This entertaining read is part memoir – a nostalgic look at expressions used in his childhood, his parents’ time and through to the present day.  The book consists of 11 chapters each examining a particular ‘time’, the language used and developed and McInnes’s thoughts and memories.  He begins with Simpler Times and Unprecedented Times (memory inducing for all of us).  He looks at Sporting Times and ends with Calling Time.  Occasionally, I thought he had lost his way but he always neatly brought it back at the conclusion of the chapter.

It becomes part manifesto in chapters like Men of Their Time where he and a best mate devise a list to guide young men in their early to mid-twenties, including their sons, on how to be a ‘good bloke’ and, I must say, if the young men of my acquaintance followed the list they would be on the right track.

William McInnes on his favourite Australianisms

@ ABC australia

McInnes is a wonderful storyteller with an insight into the human condition.  The book has some laugh-out-loud moments and a lot of quiet chuckles and smiles while still getting his point across.  As an example, a former girlfriend dumped him because he surfed like Herman Munster from a TV series in the 1960s.  Being of a similar age, I could really identify with a lot of his reminiscences.  When there was some lingo I hadn’t come across (he did grow up in a different state to me) he explains these terms neatly and succinctly. 

I would recommend this book for middle to older generations for the remembrance of a time past and the reminder that the world has moved on and so has our language.  However, it is still relevant for younger readers for some inside information into a previous time and proof that Australia is still a living language after giving the world “selfie”.  Yeah, Nah! is a particularly Australian term and I think is worth an unequivocal Yeah.  Read it in one sitting or dip into it a chapter at a time.  Make the time even if you’re flat out like a lizard drinking.  You won’t be sorry.

Reviewed by: Marian Chivers, January, 2024

Ballarat Writers Inc Book Review Group

Review copy provided by the publisher.

  • Marian Chivers is a retired librarian with a lifelong interest in reading, writing and language with her work and study involving books from children’s literature to postgraduate studies.

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The results of the Southern Cross Short Story Competition 2023

The winning entries of the 2023 Southern Cross Short Story Competition were announced at the Ballarat Writers members’ night on 29 November.

The successful entries were selected by judge Graeme Simsion from a long-list as selected by the reading committee from a pool of 95 entries. Graeme’s comments about the winners and entries are available to read here, and the winning entry here.

Congratulations to the winners, and all those who made the shortlist!

Winner ($1000): Maxwell Han: A Boy in a Raincoat and a Boy in a Bus Stop

First runner-up ($400): Janeen Samuel: Branch Lines

Second runner-up ($100): Nakita Kitson: Digging

Highly commendeds: “Over Your Souls” by Rebecca Higgie and “Summer’s Desire” by Shelley Dark.

Southern Cross Short Story Competition 2023 – Judge’s Report

Graeme Simsion

Thank you for the opportunity to read the twenty-one shortlisted entries in the above competition and for entrusting me with the responsibility of judging them.

First, by the standards of competitions I’ve been involved in before, this was a strong collection. While the intents and styles differed, the writing was consistently assured, and, I sensed, had benefited from careful revision and editing. Any criticisms should be taken in that context.

Selecting the winner, place-getters and highly-commended entries was difficult, and necessarily subjective. I suspect that if there had been multiple judges, we would have found it easy to agree on the ten best stories, but would have had plenty of debate as to the order in which to place them.

On first read, I rated the stories on each of four criteria: quality of prose, story, originality and engagement – incorporating other factors such as character and sense of place under those headings.

I did not consider fidelity to the theme tracks of desire. I assumed the pre-readers would have confirmed that hurdle had been cleared, but generally it seemed to have been addressed – sometimes fundamentally, sometimes cleverly, sometimes as a box-check!

I returned to the stories some time later and flagged those which had stayed with me –  another criterion to consider. I ended up with a short-short list of seven stories, which I re-read and reflected on before making final choices.

As noted earlier, the prose was consistently of a high standard.

Most stories had a strong sense of place and period, from seventeenth century London to Italy to the street where I live. The descriptions of physical environment featured some of the best writing, and were overall stronger than those of character. Emotions were vivid on the page; motivation sometimes less clear.

The best stories had a good balance of ‘show’ and ‘tell’, some of the less successful ones could have used more dialogue and action. No surprise there for writing teachers!

It was in the domain of story that writers took advantage of the convention that short stories need not follow the beginning-middle-end structures of popular fiction. But I felt that overall, the storytelling, in the broadest sense of how events and revelations unfolded, was not as developed as the prose: the authors hadn’t always realised the full potential of some promising ideas.

Several of the stories alternated between two situations (one past, one present), an entirely workable structure, but there was often room for clearer causal or thematic links between the two threads.

The old-fashioned twist is still alive though not necessarily well. To work effectively, it needs to change the reader’s understanding of and response to what has gone before in a fundamental way. In several cases, the ‘reveal’ was of something less central with correspondingly less impact. Indeed, few of the stories hit me with an emotional punch; their power was steady rather than sudden.

Originality lay largely in the choice of subjects. Prose and structure were consistently familiar rather than experimental or confronting, and there was little that was attention-seeking or distracting.

A couple of stories ventured into non-literal territory, but there were guideposts for readers. The overwhelming majority of the writing would have sat comfortably in a mainstream novel.

Which is also to say that most authors did not take advantage of the short-story format to experiment with styles that the reader might find tiring in a longer work. About half the stories were written in present tense and about half in first-person, and a couple chose omniscient points of view. But not much to scare the horses.

‘Desire’ was predominantly sexual and the sexuality conventionally straight or gay male (which was well represented). Within that, there were a couple of quite distinct voices and unusual settings. Unfortunately, the most original ideas didn’t correspond with the strongest execution.

I included ‘engagement’ as a catch-all for how interested I was, how much I wanted to keep reading and what impact the story might have on me – and, by extension, other readers. Most of these stories were easy and, yes, engaging, to read, and, as noted earlier, the styles would happily lend themselves to full-length novels.

My involvement in the stories was mostly emotional rather than intellectual; I tended to finish with a feeling rather than something to think about. And emotionally, there was definitely more ‘down’ than ‘up’ – not a lot of happy endings! Writers sometimes forget the emotional power of an instance of human kindness or decency in an otherwise grim scenario. And humour, even in the form of a wry observation, was thin on the ground.

When I returned to the stories, there were five that had stayed with me more than the others. It’s perhaps interesting that they were already all in my short-short list.

So:

The Winner: A Boy in a Raincoat and a Boy in a Bus Stop.

The most demanding of the stories, and the most rewarding to read a second time. A finely controlled piece which explores connection and disconnection and alternates deftly between the allegorical and the literal, and between authorial and character points of view. As much about what it evokes as what it says.

Second:  Branch Lines

Assured writing that would be at home in a contemporary novel of family life. The narrator’s desire to know her history is ever-present but elegantly understated. The sharp but not showy observation of place and character lift it above the ordinary.

Third: Digging

The strongest conventional storytelling: two stories linked by the central character. One gives us a powerful description of place and physical jeopardy; the other, memorable characters and emotional conflict.

Highly Commended

Over Your Souls
Summer’s Desire

A boy in a raincoat and a boy in a bus-stop

by Maxwell Han.

Winner of the BWI Southern Cross Short Story Competition 2023


There is a boy in a bus-stop. Let’s call him the-boy-in-the-bus-stop. He waits for a bus that never comes. The waiting is the best part.

There is a boy in a raincoat. Let’s call him the-boy-in-the-raincoat. He stands beside the bus-stop, pretending not to watch the boy inside. The watching is the best part.

Because there is so nothing to see in this summertime stasis. Sunburnt tiles. Skateboards struggling to roll through the thick, humid air. The wildlife of modern suburbia – dogs, cats, girls, all endangered species – dying of thirst in every cul-de-sac, every driveway, every hollowed-out house. Boys with banged up knees flirting with death, with each other. There is nothing to see, but the-boy-in-the-bus-stop.

The bus-stop boy doesn’t like being watched. He prefers to be pretentious alone. “Did you want something?” he asks as the eleventh minute ticks by.

“Many things,” the raincoat boy says. He yawns out to give off a veneer of nonchalance but, really, he’s enthralled. Finally!

“Like what?”

“Summer, maybe.”

“It is summer.” The heat is a living thing. A tumour, malignant. An invasive species, eating away at the cool until there’s only this residential desert left behind. The daylight darts after him like an apex predator and his only escape from the sun’s scowl is the shade of the bus-stop.

“No, it’s not.”

“It is. Look.” The raincoat-boy flaps his arm, the bright yellow sleeves swishing so hard it provides the first cool wind the bus-stop boy’s felt in ages.

No, it isn’t. The bus-stop boy doesn’t even bother to look.

*

The next day, the bus-stop boy returns. Let’s call him Sai. He’s waiting again for that bus that never comes. Sometimes, he imagines it – as yellow and hot as everything else in this town – coming to a stop right in front of him. The bus driver tells him that it’s going far away, and it’s not coming back.

The boy in the raincoat returns. Let’s call him Oliver. He’s watching again, keen for another conversation. It isn’t every day that you find something that’s actually living in this place.

“You again,” Sai says, without looking Oliver’s way. The bus shelter was his hiding place, his respite. Here, the heat hounds after you. It’s every boy for himself.

“It’s raining again.”

“It’s not.” If only!

“It is.”

“Prove it.”

Sai shifts on the silver seat a little to make room for Oliver, who stomps his way over. Sai wants to tell him to shush; the heat will hear them.

Now there are two boys in the bus-stop.

“Well,” Oliver says.

Sai turns to him.

“Take my hand.”

“…No.”

“C’mon. Take my hand.”

He tugs at Sai, who stumbles after him, and they step onto the road.

At first, it’s just a droplet. Sai gasps at the unwelcome sensation, a slight prickle on the back of his neck. He instinctively touches it, ghosting the injured area with his free hand. He brings it up to his face, expecting to be stained with the red of blood.

He casts his eyes skyward. The sun sets like a lover not wanting to leave — but when she finally disappears a thousand clouds take her place. Thunderclaps like applause echo in the distance. Lightning illuminates the blackening world. Then, it really begins. Rain like he’s never seen before begins to wash over him in rounds, as if heaven is shooting harmless gunfire. Maybe this is how the Flood began. The deluge showers over him in cascades until the downpour is no longer distinguishable from the deep. He’s drowning in it, but now he can finally breathe.

“It’s extraordinary!” says Sai over the roar of the rainstorm, feeling its lashes against his flesh.

“Don’t you have a raincoat at home?”

“…No, I don’t.”

“OK. Wear mine.” Oliver’s already shrugging it off.

Sai’s scowl deepens. “I’m not wearing your stupid raincoat!”

“OK then.”

Oliver discards his raincoat anyway, tossing the ugly thing on the drenched concrete and watching it get washed away in the torrent. Oliver gives Sai a small smile, like a gift.

Now they aren’t boys in bus-stops or in raincoats. They are just boys.

*

Let’s say these just-boys become just-best-friends. Let’s say it comes as easily as the pavement catches the rain, or as the stars give the night kisses, or as a raincoat gets lost in an ocean. It comes to them like the raindrops do every time Sai’s hand touches Oliver’s. A daily deluge. A stormy sanctuary. It comes to them like they come to explore different places in their town, leaving muddy footprints in their wakes. Sai has never seen the town like this – roofs leaking like every house is crying of laughter, pruned bushes in perfect front yards carried away by the sea, silent streets suddenly full of the drumbeat of rainfall.

They fall into patterns, and Sai wants to fall faster. They meet every day at the bus-stop, but not inside it. They walk hand-in-hand through puddle after puddle, talking about everything and nothing. Sometimes, where the water is particularly deep, they have to swim together and it’s terribly awkward and they keep knocking into one another but they’re laughing the entire time. Sai comes to dread when the sun comes up and he has to let go.

*

Sometimes, they are boys in trouble. One day, Sai’s not there.

Oliver’s surprised. Neither Sai nor Oliver have ever been late before. If anything, they come early, like how in winter the moon arrives prematurely because she’s too excited for night-time. Oliver waits for a little while, squatting in the storm, and counts for ten lightning strikes. On the eleventh, he leaps up and goes looking for his best friend.

Oliver knows where to go, of course. As best friends, they know each other better than anyone else does. Oliver knows Sai pretends he doesn’t want a raincoat, but really it would help with the weather sometimes; Oliver also knows Sai likes to think he’s a fan of waiting, but really he’s an impatient bastard; and Oliver knows Sai’s house address, but also know he’s not allowed to visit. Every step squelches. Every raindrop rings out. It feels strange to walk these streets with no one by your side, chatting in your ear.

On the way, Oliver notices something bright sticking out of a gutter, so stark because of the dreary weather. He bounds towards it – it’s his raincoat! He wonders whether he should pick it up or not. Oliver’s fine with the rain; he doesn’t need a raincoat anymore but perhaps Sai can have it, and then he won’t forget to meet at the bus-stop anymore.

When Oliver gets to Sai’s house, smaller and shoddier than the rest, he doesn’t hesitate to knock. A man opens up the door, but only a little so Oliver can barely see inside. Like everyone else’s in this town, the man’s face is hard to make out.

“Who are you?” His voice is monotone.

Oliver blinks. “You must be Sai’s dad. I’m Oliver.”

“Who?”

Oliver bristles. “Sai’s best friend.”

The man makes a low sound. “Sai,” he calls. “Someone’s here for you.”

After a few moments, Oliver hears footsteps. The man opens the door a little wider, so that Oliver can see Sai, who looks so small next to his father.

“Sai!”

“…Oliver. Now’s not a good time.”

“You didn’t come today.”

“It’s too hot outside.” The man frowns down at Oliver. “Sai will get sunburnt.”

“The sun’s not even out. It’s raining,” Oliver says, laughing even if the man’s frown deepens. Oliver waves the raincoat in the air, getting water everywhere. “Tell him, Sai. Tell him it’s raining.”

Sai can’t meet his watery eyes.

“I think you should go,” says the man. This time, Oliver agrees.

*

Now, they are boys in a spat.

When Sai finally musters the courage to leave his house and look for Oliver, he regrets it immediately. Every step on the red-hot concrete burns the soles of his feet. The sun beats down at him like a divine punishment, like the flaming eye of God glaring at him and Sai can’t glare back. The heat has caught up to him, a living beast that has now evolved to hound at him every chance it gets.

Sai is about to burst into flames.

Look, what was Oliver thinking, showing up to his house like that? Oliver knows what Sai’s family is like; they’ve spent entire rainstorms talking about it. Oliver is lucky, Sai thinks, luckier than he’ll ever be. Oliver gets raincoats; Oliver gets the rain. What does Sai get?

Third-degree-burns, if he doesn’t get back inside.

In any case, why’s he bothering to look for Oliver? It’s too bright out anyways – even a celestial being like Oliver can’t be made out in this blindingly-white town. Even if Oliver were to put that awful raincoat on, summertime has metastasised and spread to Sai’s eyes, a myopia blocking out all else. The heat is relentless; the rain is nowhere to be found.

But can it be?

It’s always raining, isn’t it? Not just for Oliver, or for Sai. Some things just are, like the need to breathe, or the ticking of time. Sai breathes. Time passes. It rains.

And just like the first time he felt it, he gasps when the first drop touches him. His gasps turn into laughter as the sun dies and the sky blackens and the world floods. Rain cleanses his eyes and his feet, and his arms still have those burns, but they’ll fade. He turns his face upward and drinks in the torrent, so much so that he chokes and begins to drown in it – but instead of sinking, he ascends.

And when he submerges, there’s Oliver, his second sun, outshining anything else in the town. More surprisingly, there’s a bus at the bus-stop, the one he’s been waiting for all this time. Its wheels have tracked desire all over the muddy road; its engine thrums with the magic of something more.

“You know,” says Oliver, “I think it’s been waiting for you.”

Sai believes it.

“Well?” Oliver grins. “Are you getting on?”

Sai smiles back.

Now they are boys in a bus, but soon enough they will be somewhere else. Who knows where they’ll be, where that bus will take them? But perhaps it doesn’t matter where they are – just who they are.

Book review: Mother Earth, by Libby Hathorn

Title: Mother Earth: Poems to celebrate the wonder of nature

Author: Libby Hathorn, illustrated by Christina Booth

Publisher: Hachette, 2023; RRP $24.99

Libby Hathorn is a prolific writer for children, young adult and adult readers. Her work has won honours in Australia, the UK, Britain and Holland, and she has won multiple awards and prizes. Her work has also been translated into a number of languages, and adapted for stage and screen.

Illustrator Christina Booth is also an award-winning author of seven books and has illustrated over twenty, receiving a CBCA Honour Book award for her book Kip.

Mother Earth is a beautifully illustrated collection of poems aimed primarily at children between the ages of four and eight, but there are also poems older children might enjoy. The poems’ main theme is the beauty and vulnerability of the world we inhabit, and repeated throughout is the responsibility of all of us to protect and maintain it.

My first thought was how both message and reading and/or listening pleasure would be delivered,  as this requires delicate balance given the age of its audience. If the educational component is heavy handed, the poetic element can get lost in the facts. What made this danger particularly poignant is that its message is a more important subject for its audience than the adults who will share it with them.

Children, because of their age, respond to the natural world differently to the way adults do. Consequently alongside the need for environmental damage needing to be discussed with children it is equally important that it be relayed with rhythm and beautiful words they can connect with and enjoy.

Libby Hathorn has balanced these two concerns skilfully. Sharing what is meant by the natural environment and its need to be protected is explored throughout, including gentle hints about how this can be achieved. These ideas are presented in entertaining and informative poems alerting children to the need not to take its safety for granted, and what sorts of things that can be done, e.g., the bouncy ‘Say Rubbish to Rubbish’.

The natural world is defined in its full complexity, starting with a poem that talks about how we are all connected with the natural world.

You connected. Me. Us. They.

to things unseen and all you see.

The messages about current happenings doing damage are inserted amongst those concentrating simply on how blessed we are with the world we have. A poem filled with how good it feels to swim in the ocean, for example, is followed by another that recalls a beach walk and how too many of the shells have been removed.

This technique is used throughout, introducing invasive species, the effects of climate change, wildlife loss, etc. These are outnumbered by poems sharing the beauty and magic of the natural world however, so the overall tone is one of celebration.

A poem I particularly enjoyed was ‘Valley under the rock’ which gives voice to the mysterious and unknown about the natural world, recalling to me the otherworldly feel in underground caves, and the peace evoked by the deep silence when I walk deep into bushland to where the sounds of human habitation disappear. This allows reader and listener to experiencing it not just as a collection of one-dimensional facts.

Found a rock cathedral

in mansions of green

ancient secret cavern

glistening, serene.

This book could be used both for reading out loud and for sitting reading alone with a child. The illustrations add colour, shape and movement to the words, and the vivid colours and inclusion of details both large and small in the illustrations support this as well as the size and construction of the book itself. The firm front and back covers means it is easy to hold open, facing outwards.

I practised reading some of the poems aloud and found they lend themselves well to performance, invaluable for the adult reader who is able to add that element to the reading or who just likes to put on a bit of a show, whether teacher, librarian, or adult at home. Repetition is used throughout, and rhythm, for example in the poem on how we are all connected

to butterfly, to hairy ape

to itchy nits, to slipping snake

and another about a storm:

water sobbing

in the doorways

cats hobnobbing

Though all the poems are expressed in simple, vivid language aimed at younger children, a few also include less common words to challenge, inspire and entertain, e.g., coruscant, thrum, gnarled, monotreme. Useful environmentally aware words and phrases are also scattered throughout, e.g., ecosystem, recycling, connectedness to add to children’s vocabulary.

Mother Earth invites questions thus adding to its educational value, but also – speaking as a parent here – opportunity to reassure. Practical solutions are offered, and I can see also how some questions, especially those that need to give hope, might lead naturally to talking about Greenpeace and Landcare, or positive stories like the ongoing emergence of new species.

A small warming. The poem ‘Bushfire baby’ contains a drawing of a wounded koala being given water by an emergency worker to illustrate what happens to animals caught up in a bushfire, which even as an adult I found painful to look at. There are children who might find this image distressful so it’s good just to check that page and be aware of this in relation to your audience, whether just one or a group.

In conclusion, my overall impression is that Mother Earth is anexcellent starting point for introducing children to our natural world and the issues it is facing in the world as it is today. As parent and grandparent, I think it is an attractive, entertaining and useful tool to help introduce our children to the world they will inherit.

Reviewed by: Rhonda Cotsell

Ballarat Writers Inc. Book Review Group

Review copy provided by the publisher

— Rhonda is a retired librarian, ex child bookworm and previous avid reader and performer of children’s books to her own children and later grandson, clocking up over 20 years’ reading a minimum two books every night.

Book review – Other Houses, by Paddy O’Reilly

Title: Other Houses

Author: Paddy O’Reilly

Publisher: Affirm Press, 2022; RRP: $32.99

Paddy O’Reilly is a well-known Australian writer. She has written four novels including 2022’s Other Houses: The Wonders (2014), The Fine Colour of Rust (2012) and The Factory (2005). She has also written two collections of short stories and a novella, all published over the last couple of decades. Paddy has been short-listed and successful for numerous awards, both in Australia and overseas. Paddy O’Reilly lives in Melbourne, Australia.

Set in Melbourne’s western suburbs, Other Houses tells a vivid story of disadvantage and struggle. Lily is the mum of Jewelee, a rebelling teenager, when Janks, a reformed drug addict joins their family. They decide to leave the rough side of town and move across the tracks. Their motive is to give their daughter a chance to attend a better school and provide her with the opportunities in life they never had.

Lily collaborates with a friend, Shannon, cleaning other people’s houses. Their boss is a shifty character with his  own interests at heart. The daily grind of the work is back breaking for the two women, but they pride themselves on their ability to achieve exacting standards. They are good friends supporting each other and making the most of earning a wage together. The clients they work for are a precious lot but cleaning their houses on a regular basis provides the women with amusement, concern and intriguing insights into the secrets and oddities of other people’s lives.

Janks works in a factory. He and Lily are dependent on both their wages to make ends meet but no matter how hard it becomes, Lily and Janks are determined to turn Jewelee’s life around, and they are comforted when she finally shows signs of responding. They teeter on the edge of financial fragility each week but believe in what they are doing, for Jewelee and themselves. Then something happens that shatters their plan for a better existence.

George Haddad on Other Houses: ‘trauma without the porn’

@ the sydney review of books

This book has Paddy O’Reilly’s signature written all over it: clever and humorous storytelling that bursts alive on the pages. It also contains an honesty that is cringe worthy but so accurate that the reader becomes acutely engaged with the characters. Lily, Janks and Jewelee don’t mince words. They are living and evolving products of a world where privilege is absent and surviving without it is harsh.

Written with a tension that has the reader turning pages, Other Houses provides a window into hardship and poverty and the extreme difficulty of finding a way out. I was left with a reminder of how the circumstance of class inequality and disadvantage is difficult to exit. In fact, for some people and families, escape is near impossible.  

I loved this book and the characters danced in my head for days after I finished reading it. It’s a close-up read. Clever, funny, serious and real.  

Reviewed by: Heather Whitford Roche, October 2023

Ballarat Writers Inc. Book Review Group

Book review – The Broken Places, by Russell Franklin

Title: The Broken Places

Author: Russell Franklin

Publisher: Phoenix Books/Hachette, 2023; RRP $32.99

The Broken Places fits into the genre of biological fiction, defined as a work based on the life of a real person but developed further within a fictional framework.

Nobel Laureate Ernest Hemingway had three sons: John, Patrick, and Gregory, his youngest and favourite. The Broken Places is  positioned within the history of Hemingway himself and the Hemingway family, but the main character is Greg, or Gigi as his family often called him.

Like his father, Greg was highly competitive and adventurous, a boy who won an international shooting competition in Cuba against far more experienced adults. He was fearless, muscular, and very fit. Being a little on the short side, he was also often referred to affectionately by his father as his ‘pocket rocket’. He also excelled academically and, when he left school, undertook medical training, working as a physician in NYC before moving to work in a small country town community hospital.

He and his older brother Patrick had a seemingly idyllic childhood including long stays with their larger than life, loving but overly indulgent father in his estate Finca Vigia in Cuba, including allowing them at a very young age to drink alcohol and smoke. Though he loved his sons he also demanded much of them. Being able to brag about his sons’ achievements gave him much pleasure, and the opposite  was true if they failed, something of which they were both painfully aware. Despite this, they loved their father and in their own ways tried to adjust to the demands he made of them.

Greg, however, had a secret other life. Quite early on in childhood, he developed a fascination for wearing women’s clothing. This  fascination grew steadily stronger as he got older, filling him with  shame and self-loathing.

As he grew into adulthood, he suffered periodic attacks of manic depression. These manic attacks wreaked havoc with his relationships, causing him to escape his marriage and home life and take to the night streets trying desperately to deal with the mayhem in his mind, and usually ending up in bars or parties out of his mind on alcohol and drugs.

Treatment included electric shock therapy but this changed from being a medical intervention to another addiction. Over time he begun submitting to the treatment willingly, even seeking it out for the period of peace and calm that followed. He refers to the sessions as his  ‘shocks’, in the same way an addict might refer to needing more heroin or an alcoholic needing another bottle of whisky.  The relief they provided, however, became shorter and shorter and the mania and the black depression which preceded them would always return.

More about Greg and the Hemingway family

@ the Chicago Tribune

The sections in the book dealing with his growing understanding of his desire to dress in women’s clothing are tragic and convincing. This side of himself was unwelcome but over time he found the only way to stop it from destroying his sanity, and his professional life as doctor, was to allow it a place in his life, in a safe and structured way. Like his ‘shocks’, however, each time he did, the reprieve was temporary. By the end of The Broken Place, however, he comes to a place where he is able to accept himself as all of who he is: Greg, Gigi, and finally, Gloria .This book is how he gets there, as well as how his family tries to support him.

The author, Briton Russell Franklin, states clearly at the start that this, his debut novel, is a fictional work inspired by Gregory’s life. There is no mention of  Hemingway family members in his Acknowledgements but at the end of the work he does provide a useful list of biographical and autobiographical works written by a number of them.

Franklin himself was able to write the book after being selected for the prestigious London Library Emerging Writers Programme 2000-2001 and he thanks those in his cohort there ‘for helping me take myself seriously as a writer’.

 In his Author’s Note at the beginning, and aware perhaps of his responsibility to his subject and possible responses from their fans, he writes:

I make no claims that my approach is definitive, but I hope the reader will appreciate that it arises from a place of love and respect.

I did have some qualms about this work. The book is filled with actual Hemingway family members and references real events and places like Hemingway’s Cuban home so it’s difficult  to extricate what is fiction from the factual.

Franklin’s writing is also very engaging and convincing. His characters leap from the pages and it is easy to see it may be taken as more factual than it actually is.

I enjoyed the book despite these doubts. The list of references is reassuring, and Franklin’s  reference to academic Paul Hendrickson’s Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961 as ‘the original well spring and authority on the real Greg’s life’ offers much. In there may be found a clearer sense of what is true and what is fiction. 

These concerns aside, I found the resolution at the end to be satisfying and the descriptions of his occasional ventures out into the world, unmasked, dressed as a woman – including the terrible  moment his father walked in on him, still only a young boy, dressed in his stepmother’s clothing – painfully convincing, giving insight into how very difficult life is in a world which restricts gender identity to either male or female. The author taking us deep into the loneliness and the shame and  conveying it skilfully and movingly, and, as he promises in his Author’s Note, respectfully.

In conclusion, the title, taken from Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, provides in retrospect an excellent introduction to what lies at the heart of his favourite son’s story.

The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.

Reviewed by: Rhonda Cotsell

Ballarat Writers Inc. book review group

Review copy provided by the publisher

Book review – Borderland, by Graham Akhurst

Title: Borderland

Author: Graham Akhurst

Publisher: UWA Publishing, October 2023; RRP: $22.99

The hidden Chosen One trope is as old at least as Arthur, especially in the Young Adult realm, but Graham Akhurst gives it fresh poignancy in his debut novel by using the frame of the Stolen Generations and colonial displacement. In fact, the non-fantastical elements of Borderland are where the tale strikes deepest, the horror elements familiar and the narrative trajectory treading a well-worn path of discovery, mentorship and challenge.

Our hero is Jono, a First Nations lad raised in Brisbane with no knowledge of his mob or Country, his family’s past either not known or obscured by his loving single mum who is, one suspects, battling her own demons. In an echo of the acclaimed TV series Cleverman, Jono is embroiled in a journey of discovery that reveals far more than he could ever have expected about the world and his place in it.

The story opens with Jono feeling like the odd one out, he and his long-time friend, Jenny, graduating as the two Indigenous kids on a scholarship at a prestigious high school. That the discrimination comes not only from classmates either ignorant or jealous but also other blackfellas, who brand him a ‘coconut’, is telling. Hell, even magpies give him a rough time, even out of nesting season.

Aside from his mother, Jenny – attractive, talented and secure in her cultural identity – is Jono’s rock. It is at her instigation that Jono joins an arts academy, where the story picks up the pace. It is here that the pair find themselves on a flight to western Queensland to shoot a ‘documentary’ extolling the virtues of the mining industry to the traditional custodians whose land sits above rich seams of gas ripe for the fracking.

Akhurst looks back at life in Nudgee and forward to his next writing project

@ behind the stripes, 2021

For the boy from Brisbane, the tension of mining interests, economic drivers and preservation of Country is an intriguing backdrop to the simple fact that he is making serious money for the first time in his life – money that can help his mother. This mirrors the argument of trying to better the lot of traditional owners by allowing exploitation of Country, a contemporary conflict that gives the story added social weight. Further illustrating the clash, Akhurst appears to draw upon a decade-old, contentious accusation of methane released by coal seam gas operations setting the Condamine River alight in one of the book’s more evocative scenes.

It is out west that Akhurst finds his most vivid descriptions of landscape in a tale simply told, as befits its young first-person narrator who wields slang, not metaphors. And it is out west where truths are uncovered that will irrevocably change the lives of Jenny and Jono. There is the matter, for example, of Jono’s growing attraction to his confident, mature friend. And there’s the question about that dog-headed monster that’s been haunting him of late, the visions growing in potency despite the medication he has been prescribed. And what about that enigmatic ringer so at ease in the dust and haze of the west, and tales of Dreamtime spirits that may not be as quiescent as believed?

These spirits and other totemic and symbolic meanings are the creation of Akhurst, a Kokomini writer and academic who grew up in Meanjin (Brisbane). In a note, Akhurst, who includes a Fulbright scholarship among his accomplishments, reveals extensive consultation with First Nations people in relation to this story, but he makes the point that he carefully invented settings and cultural elements to avoid appropriation.

This incorporation of beliefs, however fictionalised, and Jono’s growing understanding of their meaning and their relationship to him, are key elements of this coming-of-age yarn that sets the scene for further volumes.

At story’s end, Jenny and Jono both have quests awaiting them that provide further opportunity for social exploration as well as good old-fashioned adventure. As such, Borderland is a solid start, both for our heroes’ journey and Akhurst’s fiction career.

Reviewed by: Jason Nahrung

Ballarat Writers Inc. Book Review Group

Advanced reading copy provided by the publisher

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