Title: The Pull of the Moon

Author: Pip Smith

Publisher: UWA Publishing, 2025; RRP: $26.99

Review by: Rhonda Cotsell

THE AUTHOR

Pip Smith won SMH Best Young Novelist of 2018. Her 2017 debut novel, Half Wild, was shortlisted for the Voss Literary Prize and longlisted for the Australian Book Industry award for Best Debut Fiction. This is her second novel.

THE BOOK

When we recall, or watch footage of the tragedy at Christmas Island, December 2010, and the horrifying images on our screens, what fades into the background are the Christmas Islander people and the island itself. All we see is a boat lurching helplessly through enormous waves, and anonymous, desperate people half concealed by spray clinging to its sides for dear life. Like toys. We don’t see the Islanders, but they were there. 

The Pull of the Moon tells the whole story, bringing the natural world and human face of Christmas Island to focus from the first pages without lessening the tragedy. It simultaneously sets a richly detailed background of the daily life of a fictional family in Tehran, representing those on that boat, before the decision to leave. The reasons for leaving are touched on briefly, but painfully, and memorably. What dominates, however, is how precious and rich that life and home were to each family member, shown through the eyes of a young son who loves his life just as it is and does not want to leave it.

The backgrounds of both Islanders and the family headed their way unfold deceptively slowly towards those terrible moments where the boat is floundering helplessly towards the rocky island edge. The story does not judge, analyse or preach but merely shows, weaving a story of people – refugee and Islander – set within a detailed picture of life on Christmas Island itself extending after the tragedy.

 The pages are filled with Christmas Island wildlife, with startling images of the resident red crabs spawning like a brilliant red river taking over the island, the elusive pipistrelle bats, the sea turtles, snakes, the giant yellow centipedes with their venomous bites, and the huge and ungainly Christmas Island frigate bird. The rich luxury of a tropical rain forest filled with orchids, ferns and vines, with its tropical monsoonal climate and deep soils, is described so vividly I could almost smell it – and feel that ever-present threat of extinction shared with wildlife globally. 

Islanders reflect on how the disaster changed their lives

@ THE GUARDIAN

The central focus, however, is the people. Those in the horrendously inadequate craft whose occupants had been tricked by a family member into believing was going to be one that could take them safely and in comfort to a life free of the dangers and restrictions they had left, and the Islanders safe in their everyday lives. The pages are filled with the small details of school and work,  references to the local phosphorous factory and the refugee camp that looms in the background with its heavy, wired fences. And within this, sensitive and believable portraits of Christmas Islander inhabitants like the environmental activist mother who sympathises with the refugees, her diving instructor husband who worries about their impact, their relationship breaking up and their daughter, Coralie, dealing with an unsettled home life. Life for all continuing as it does but, even though we know what is coming, shattered abruptly by what both Islanders and those on the boat experienced and did on that day, and what was endured in the days and weeks following.

There is also a slightly magical fantasy element to the narrative. Local gossip speaks of the ghosts that lurk in the forest that surrounds the town, something that captures and unhinges the minds of many even before the event, but especially Coralie, through whose eyes the events are described – a sensitive preteen whose parents are fighting, whose mother suddenly leaves, and who needs a happy ending for the boy in the boat whose eyes meet hers as she runs with the other Islanders frantically throwing life jackets and whatever else they think might help towards the sinking boat.

The story was unsettling to read, being aware that this happened on our watch, in our familiar home, the imperfect and difficult country we occasionally grumble about, one however we can survive and grow within despite an imperfect history and a Prime Minister who spoke of parents throwing children off boats and the too many who believed him.

I think its an important work, and I hope it is read by many.

Review copy provided by the publisher