Category Archives: Page 7x/47/7

Laurie Duggan’s Kite Hangs above the Border

Posted on 22 Jul 2026 | Leave a comment

Laurie Duggan, A Kite Hangs above the Border, translated into Chinese by Chris Song and Matthew Cheng (Flying Island Books 2022)

Flying Island Books are published jointly by ASM and Cerberus Books. The first of those publishers is based in Macao, the second in Markwell, a rural community in New South Wales whose population in 2021 was 144. The series consists mostly of English-language poetry, but there are a number of bilingual books, mostly bringing Chinese-language poets to Australian readers. This is the second book I’ve read that reverses the flow. The first was Geoff Page’s Codicil (link is to my blog post), which was translated, like A Kite Hangs above the Border, by Hong Kong poets Chris Song and Matthew Cheng. This book, like that one, may act as a taster to potential Chinese readers. For readers who can’t decipher Chinese characters, it offers the intriguing experience of seeing what the poems look like in translation. And given that many non-Chinese readers won’t have read much of Laurie Duggan’s poetry, it’s a taster for us as well.

I’ve written longish posts about Duggan’s work here and here, which I’ve just reread and can recommend if you want a bit of background.

This book includes a number of poems from his two long-running series, Blue Hills and Allotments. Both series reflect the influence of classic Chinese poetry: they are often sharp, minimalist evocations of a moment in time in a particular place, generally Australia in Blue Hills and England in Allotments. For instance, the opening lines of ‘Blue Hills 86’:

_______________________a rectangle of sky
lights the kitchen bench

shadows of screeching corellas
cross this space

(Intriguingly, it takes 16 characters to translate the seven words of that second couplet there, six for ‘cross this space’ alone.)

There are satirical comments on current events, poems about poetry, travel poems, all quietly self-effacing and sometimes sharply witty.

Pages 78–79* feature one of the travel poems, ‘Catacombs’:

It’s interesting to notice that the word ‘catacombs’ needs four characters in Chinese, and that the last three couplets resemble each other visually in a way the English don’t (and seeing from a quick run through Google translate that this visual effect seems to be deliberate).

I thought I knew about catacombs before reading this poem. I’ve visited the Capela dos Ossos in Evora, Portugal (and ventured a little verse translation of my own, at this link), and the Hypogeum in Malta. Neither those, nor photos from the Paris catacombs, fit these lines. But a quick search turned up the Cappuchin Catacombs in Palermo, which the TripSavvy website says are ‘not recommended for the squeamish or for children’. It’s as if this poem condensed out of the air of that place.

If you’re not the squeamish type, you might like to watch this short video about the Palermo catacombs. But do read the poem first. It’s short lines – using fewer words than the video – create a visual sense of the place and allow its emotional resonances to hang lightly about the words.

The poem is in three parts. First, a general description:

They grin or howl, 
heads twisted from bodies

each hangs forward 
unsupported by neck muscle

There’s initial shock of the grinning or howling skulls. Is it that some grin and others howl, or is the poem undecided whether to describe them as grinning or howling? It doesn’t matter which way you read it, that ‘or’ holds you back from a pure horror movie response. The second couplet has a cool, practical feel. There’s a simple anatomical cause for the potentially horrible twisting in the first couplet: there is no neck muscle.

The second part notices the range of corpses. I’ve just spent some time reading about these catacombs, and I am in awe of Duggan’s restraint in not mentioning the child corpses, especially the beautifully preserved two-year-old Rosalia Lombardo. That would be a different poem. This one focuses on what amounts to class:

some in bow ties 
some in moth-eaten trousers

those in the professions 
have their own aisles

those of the cloth 
the darkest spaces

Incidentally, I ran the translation through Google translate, and the bot’s version of Chris Song and Matthew Cheng’s translation of ‘those of the cloth’ is ‘the commoner’, that is, the couplet refers to common people rather than the clergy, so whether by the machine or by the weird interplay of languages, class looms larger in the translation, or at least in the retranslation of the translation.

And then the observation:

all are covered 
by thick dust

The poem has no need to spell out the metaphorical resonance here (‘ashes to ashes, dust to dust’, and so on). As the US poet said, ‘No ideas but in things.’ The absence of punctuation at the end leaves it up to the reader – we can take it as implying a rumination on death as the great leveller, or simply let it stand as a tourist’s note.

So that’s a taste of a taste. Having written this far, I’ve picked up my copy of Homer Street (2020) and am browsing happily as I press ‘Publish’.

I am an Australian man of settler heritage. I’ve written this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Darug Nation. I acknowledge Elders past and present of those clans, and welcome any First Nations readers and commenters.

* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 79.

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Amitav Ghosh’s Ghost-Eye and the book clubs

Posted on 20 Jul 2026 | 6 comments

Amitav Ghosh, Ghost-Eye (John Murray Publishers 2026)

Before the meetings: I loved Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy – Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke and Flood of Fire (links are to my blog posts) for their exuberant language, their array of brilliant characters and their remorseless portrayal of British colonialism.

Ghost-Eye is a very different animal. It’s set in the recent past and present. Its characters live mainly in urban India and Brooklyn, with excursions to a remote village in the Sundarbans in the Ganges Delta. The main action involves westernised characters coming to terms with a case of reincarnation that is gradually revealed to be something even more challenging to Western ways of thought. The academics who take the incursions from the ‘other reality’ seriously are described as being ‘woowoo’, but the book – in my reading at least – asks us to take them seriously as an alternative to the western culture’s extractive, reductive, and now catastrophic dealings with the natural world.

I found the book didactic, plodding, and often incoherent. I was unconvinced by the characters. Where in previous books Ghosh’s play with language has thrilled me, the one distinctive use of language in this book is an irritating attempt at a hip young person’s dialogue.

It turns out that page 79* is a good place from which to launch a description of the book as a whole:

Four of the book’s main characters appear here.

Varsha, the subject of conversation, is the book’s central phenomenon. The book begins in 1969, when she is a three-year-old living in an extravagantly wealthy, strictly vegetarian family in Calcutta. One day, to her parents’ consternation, she asks for fish and refuses to eat anything else. Fish has never been in their house, and none of the servants would ever dare to break the rigid prohibition. A doctor is called in, and after spending time with Varsha, decides that this is a job for his wife, a psychologist who has dealt with ‘several cases of this type’ – that is, he explains, children who remember past lives. End chapter one.

Back to page 79: Monty is that doctor. In spite of being the one who first broached the subject of past lives, he is the book’s main voice of ineffectual scepticism. Shoma is his wife. She has done a lot of research into ‘cases of the reincarnation type’ in collaboration with a professor from the University of Virginia, and she has conducted tests with Varsha that convince her she really does remember a past life.

The other character named on this page is Dev, a refugee from Burma who is a servant in the household.

After a long session with Varsha, Shoma has had a vivid dream in which the little girl came to her bedroom and stared at her through the mosquito net. When she wakes up there are three knots in the string binding the net to the bedpost:

‘Shoma!’ said Monty sharply. ‘Of course there are knots in the string. That’s what it’s there for – to hold up the net. It has to be tied, doesn’t it?’
Shoma began to chew her lip. ‘It’s just that when I went into Varsha’s room yesterday, she was playing with a piece of string, tying knots. Her ayah said that she’s been doing that a lot lately.’
‘What does that have to do with our mosquito net?’ said Monty in astonishment. ‘Shoma, get a grip on yourself –’

You can hear the Twilight Zone music playing. Not only can this little girl remember a past life as a fish-eater, but is she also capable of out-of-the-body travel? And wait, there’s more:

Monty was interrupted by a loud thumping on the stairwell door.
He went to see who it was and came back looking puzzled. ‘It was Dev,’ he said. ‘He wanted to know if you were all right.’
Shoma stared at him. ‘You mean he knew I had a nightmare? How is that possible?’
‘Who knows?’ Monty shrugged. ‘Let’s go and sit on the veranda; it’s nice and cool out there.’

Ooooh, here’s something psychic about Dev too!

Out on the veranda, Shoma and Monty labour the point:

‘I just can’t stop thinking about that dream,’ Shoma said, sinking into her easy chair. ‘To be honest, it didn’t even feel like a dream; it was as if Varsha was really there, watching me through the mosquito net.’
‘Now, now, Shoma,’ said Monty. ‘You’re just imagining all this.’

Your mileage may vary, but that reads us pure clunk to me. It comes as no surprise that Varsha does indeed turn out to have amazing supernatural powers, and so does Dev. Towards the end of the book there is a twist in which even more people recover memories of past lives and discover that reality is much richer, more mysterious and full of possibility than their limited western mindset has allowed them to understand. And in this discovery lies the possibility of averting the climate crisis. To which I say, Bollocks!

There’s a lot of power in the proposition that Indigenous knowledge and ways of understanding the world will be crucial in dealing with climate change. But to conflate Indigenous knowledge with acceptance of the literal reality of reincarnation, mind-reading, astral travel and a string of other paranormal phenomena, as this book does, is a travesty. It may be that the book and I just got off on the wrong foot and I couldn’t recover. Maybe it’s meant to be just a bit of fun and I’ve misread its tone completely. It’s being read by both my groups – the BookGroup and the Book Club – so I hope to hear from people it worked for.

Back to page 79:

Outside, as happened every day at dawn, municipal workers were washing the street with hosepipes, and in the distance, across the lake, vultures were slowly taking wing, rising into the sky, one by one, on an upwelling early-morning thermal.
Monty, meanwhile, was leaning over the veranda’s balustrade, waiting for the newspaper boy to throw up the two dailies, English and Bangla, that were delivered to them every day, both rolled into stiff batons and secured with strings made of coconut husk. Monty liked to think that if he succeeded in catching even one of the papers in mid-air, the day would be off to a good start. As for the occasions when he caught both, he would radiate good cheer all day.

This paragraph reminds me that the book has its pleasures, including a vivid evocation of places, but especially the Indian ones. This is middle-class Calcutta in the 1960s, where vultures catch thermals and newspapers are delivered daily. You have to love the detail of that coconut-husk string. And neither Monty nor I feel any need to reconcile his moment of idiosyncratic superstition with a hard, logical view of the world.

The Book Club meeting: I was the only one who had trouble with the book’s preternatural elements. Everyone else enjoyed the yarn, some as pure fantasy, at least one as playfully challenging reductive materialism. I’m left with the odd sense that I’ve misread the book, but can’t undo that reading.

Ghost-Eye was one of three books discussed at the Book Club. It will also be discussed at the Book Group‘s next meeting, which I will not be able to attend. If I glean any further insights from reports of that meeting, I’ll add a note here.

The Book Club’s five members are all of settler heritage. We met on Gadigal land, and I have written this blog post on Gadigal and Wangal land. I gratefully acknowledge the Elders past and present who have cared for this beautiful country for millennia, and welcome any First Nations readers of this blog.

* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 79.

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Say Nothing, Patrick Radden Keefe and the Book Club

Posted on 19 Jul 2026 | 2 comments

Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland (William Collins 2018)

Before the meeting:

This book starts dramatically. A woman in Belfast, widowed mother of ten, has just got out of a hot bath at 7 o’clock at night when there is a knock on the door. Minutes later, she has been taken off into the night, and her children never see her again. Her name was Jean McConville, and her abduction – its context, the motive of the abductors, her eventual fate, the identity of her murderer(s), the stories told about it – forms a central narrative thread of this gripping, immensely readable account of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, focusing on the IRA and Irish nationalism. It’s a gripping true crime story that unfolds into a broader historical narrative – though in his note on sources, the author says the book is ‘not a history book but a work of narrative non-fiction’.

The book reads like a thriller, though about a fifth of the book’s 512 pages are dedicated to notes, mostly naming sources but also occasionally acknowledging different interpretations of events. As well as conducting his own extensive interviews, Radden Keefe drew on an archive of interviews with IRA members who had agreed to be taped on condition that the tapes would remain locked away in Boston College in the USA until after their death. The final chapters tell the devastating story of how that condition was broken, and raise important questions about the control of political narrative.

A television series based on the book that aired on Disney+ last year has provoked trenchant criticism that sometimes spills over into criticism of the book. Timothy O’Grady in The Irish Echo (at this link) decries the way the series turns one particularly horrific act into public entertainment, and then picks apart Patrick Radden Keefe’s evidence for his solution to the murder of Jean McConville. The person Radden Keefe accuses took no action when the book was published in 2018, but is apparently suing over the TV show.

I suppose it’s not surprising, given my Irish Catholic background (as a young child I imagined my North Queensland home was a kind of mystical version of Ireland) that I was deeply engaged with this story. It joins what I now see as a lot of reading and television watching I’ve done recently. The characters of Derry Girls, which debuted the year Say Nothing was published, are in the crowd at Bill Clinton’s 1995 visit to Derry when, as page 252 has it, ‘people were everywhere, clotting the narrow streets of Derry, teeming beneath the arches of the ancient city walls’. The excellent police procedural Blue Lights (2023–) creates a version of what happened when the political violence came to an end but the enmities and violent mindsets remained. Seamus Heaney, whose letters I read recently (blog posts beginning here), is quoted a number of times – the book’s title echoes that of his poem ‘Whatever You Say, Say Nothing’, and a number of the book’s characters appear in Heaney’s letters. For example, Dolours Price, IRA terrorist and hunger striker, whose masked photo is on the cover of my edition of the book, married actor Stephen Rea and turns up in a letter written from London in 1986: ‘Will see S. Rea. And Dolours (I suppose).’ Given Heaney’s usual warmth, it’s easy to surmise that Dolours wasn’t one of his favourite people.

The book gives rounded portraits of many Irish nationalists, including Gerry Adams, who insists against all the evidence that he was never a member of the IRA; Brendan Hughes, a major figure in the IRA, who felt betrayed by the Good Friday agreement in which the IRA agreed to disarm; Dolours Price, a glamorous and notorious IRA member. As it happens, page 79* is part of one of the few stories from the other side. Frank Kitson, nicknamed the Little Brigadier, had served in the British Army in Kenya during the Mau Mau uprising, and was an expert in counter-insurgency. He was sent to Northern Ireland in 1970 to join the young and inexperienced military there:

You can get a sense from this page of how the prose moves along. But if you want to check, there are eight notes at the back of the book relating to these four paragraphs. For instance, the narrative isn’t cluttered with the name of the ‘subordinate’ who described Kitson as the sun, but the notes and bibliography tell us it was Mike Jackson, in his book Soldier: An Autobiography (2007).

When Frank Kitson arrived, in 1970, he was not the overall commander of British forces. But he was in charge of the army’s 39 Airportable Brigade, which had responsibility for Belfast, and his influence far exceeded his station. As one of Kitson’s subordinates later put it, ‘Within his area of responsibility he was the sun around which the planets revolved, and he very much set the tone.’

A good story needs a villain, and while Maggie Thatcher comes to play a villainous role in the hunger strikes, Frank Kitson is the main villain on the ground in this story. But he’s just a man doing his job, and he’s pretty good at it:

The biggest challenge facing the army when Kitson arrived was a shortage of solid intelligence. The men and women who became paramilitaries, whether republican or loyalist, looked like everyone else in the civilian population. So how to identify them? In previous decades, the membership of the IRA had been relatively static – the same names came up year after year. But the old police files were in desperate need of an update, now that there were new recruits flocking to the cause every week. This difficulty was only exacerbated by the blunderbuss approach favoured by the army. ‘When I was first there, the tactics were rather to stand in a line, pump the place full of gas, and let people chuck bricks at you until they got tired of it,’ Kitson later recalled. ‘Not a very good idea because the gas did so much damage to the local people. It made them hostile.’

As the story unfolds, Kitson establishes an undercover group called ‘the Feds’, who also ‘looked like everyone else in the civilian population’. Largely under Kitson’s influence, the IRA came to be riddled with informers. One of the book’s main narrative strands deals with an informer at the highest level, and one of its unresolved questions is what is to be made of atrocities committed by British operatives in order to maintain their cover.

Then at the bottom of the page, the picture of Kitson takes us back to the main story, and we for a moment see one of the main characters, Brendan Hughes, from an antagonistic perspective. There’s also a tiny glimpse of the general language and lore of the army, that reminds us incidentally that US movies, in particular Westerns, were standard entertainment fare in Britain in the 1970s:

In particular, Kitson was interested in D Company of the Belfast Brigade, the IRA unit operated by Brendan Hughes and the one that was doing the most damage. British soldiers referred to Hughes’s operational area in West Belfast as ‘the reservation’ – Indian country, where soldiers should tread carefully, if at all.

The meeting: After a delicious meal and entertaining general catch-up, we discussed this book along with two others. – Ghost-Eye by Amitav Ghosh and When the Doves Disappeared by Sofu Oksanen. It was generally agreed that three books was too many, and I may have been the only person who actually finished all three.

Interestingly, some people found this book hard going. One person felt she now knows much more than she wanted to know about the IRA, though at the same time she wished she had read it before a number of encounters with a friend who was dealing with the difficulties of a childhood in the dangerous and secretive environment it so vividly evokes. For another the book only came alive in the last third, when the focus shifts from the violence to the way the narrative was shaped – and especially the extraordinary betrayal of trust involved in the tapes recorded and stored at Boston College in complete secrecy, until they weren’t secret any more. One, who has read a lot of Irish history, talked about the history of violence on that island that preceded the English invasion by centuries.

We reminded each other of moments towards the end of the book that are deeply moving – especially the discovery of Jean McConville’s body decades after her disappearance. We agreed that Gerry Adams, terrorist turned politician, emerged in a bad light. Though three of the five of us had Irish Catholic childhoods, the Catholic–Protestant sectarianism of pre-1960s Australia didn’t come up.

The Book Club’s five members are all of settler heritage. We met on Gadigal land, and I wrote the blog post on Wangal and Gadigal land. I gratefully acknowledge the Elders past and present who have cared for this beautiful country for millennia, and welcome any First Nations readers of this blog.

* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 79.

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S. Shakthidharan Gathers Up His World in One Long Breath

Posted on 30 Jun 2026 | 1 comment

S. Shakthidharan, Gather Up Your World in One Long Breath (Powerhouse 2025)

Sydney’s new Powerhouse Museum at Parramatta, due to open later this year, may be an impending disaster as a museum – see John Macdonald at this link – but as a publishing house it’s off to an excellent start with this book, which it commissioned from S. Shakthidharan, co-creator with Eamon Flack of a number of superb and acclaimed theatrical events. (His second play, The Jungle and the Sea, is about to have a return season at the Belvoir Street Theatre in Sydney. I recommend it.)

The book has already received a number of awards. Receiving the Multicultural NSW Award earlier this year, Shakthidharan named its most interesting quality when he described it as ‘an act of vulnerability’.

It’s a memoir. Its prologue begins, ‘At first light, you wake,’ and each of the six chapters that follow is similarly addressed to someone, a different person or personified being each time. Because part of the pleasure is figuring out who is being spoken to in each new chapter, I won’t give you a complete list – enough to say that the addressees include his parents, his wife and his young son. The effect is a profound shift from the individualism that might have seemed an inevitable quality of memoirs. The book becomes a self-portrait, but of a self that is always in relationship. David Winnicott’s famous quote, ‘There is no such thing as a baby, there is a baby and someone,’ comes to mind.

It’s a story of family migration from Sri Lanka to Australia, with all the disruption, cultural challenge and unexpected opportunities that brings. There’s a wonderful account of the creation of Shakthidharan’s first play, Counting and Cracking, which is intimately connected to his family’s own story. I was delighted to read about the response of his family and the Sri Lankan community to it and its success in Australia and elsewhere. There’s a delicious episode where he can’t appear at a writers’ festival because of an emergency with his infant son, and his mother – who has been reserved in her comments about his work – agrees to stand in for him. When he later sees the video of her appearance he is deeply moved by what she has to say, things she had never said to him in person.

Place is important. There’s the first, major migration of the Tamil family from Sri Lanka to Sydney, but place is important in other small and big ways. Rather than telling the story of how he first met his wife, he tells the story of his first visit to her family in her childhood home in rural New South Wales, a visit that marked the beginning of their romantic relationship. The picture is rounded out when she visits Sri Lanka with him – only then do they feel they really know each other. Partly this is cultural but, as he tells it, the smells, sights and feels of a place are crucial.

Page 79* falls in ‘A New Performance’, the chapter addressed to his mother.

The page gives you a good idea of the quality of his writing. It’s straightforward with a strong current of emotion that carries it forward, and a generosity towards the person it addresses.

Living in Sydney gives Shakthidharan’s mother ‘the freedom and the courage’ to divorce his father, and as a matter of survival she starts a small dance school, making ‘something out of nothing’. This new beginning reaches back to the deep cultural knowledge she received from her mother, and leads a splendid future (and present):

You create a dance company that earns enough for you to keep our house and gives hundreds of women like you an opportunity to hold on to their culture and share it through the flow of their bodies across a space. It feeds you, your art form: no, it feeds our entire community, this magical thing. It connects them to their language, to their stories, to their old home – all of which might otherwise be lost in this new one.

And once you begin, you cannot stop. Your mother is in you after all. What began as classes in my uncle’s basement for a handful of girls grows into a company of brown women dancers that tours Australia and the world.

You do this in the nineties and the early years of the new millennium, when diversity is not yet a buzzword. You name the company Lingalayam, in honour of your mother.

Though he doesn’t give us his mother’s name – the chapter is addressed to her, so it wouldn’t make sense – there’s enough information for the interested reader to find it. The Lingalayam Dance Company has a webpage (here), and names its founder as Anandavali. Anandavali has performed at the Belvoir Street Theatre a number of times, in her son’s work and others, without making any kind of point about their relationship. I for one have come away from her performances feeling that my world has been transformed. Here the son honours of his mother’s art, and her life. Maybe he’s making a point about multiculturalism, but it’s beautifully folded into the address to his mother.

The shows you choreograph are faithful to the classical form and also speak to what it means to be a woman, here, today. You do what hardly anyone else can do: you hold on to the integrity of who you are and your culture, but you figure out a way to share it that invites everyone else in.

What a way to become Australian! To belong! Not by limiting yourself, but by expanding the collective sense of what we might all become, what our country might one day be. God, I am proud of you for doing that. You are not just a dancer, a teacher, a choreographer: you are now a guru, sustaining our heritage in the dance hall your mother built for you.

To bring cultures together, holding on to the integrity of them all, but figuring out ways to share them that invite everyone in: that’s a lot more attractive than the defensive calls for something called monoculture that are getting airplay just now.

It’s a beautiful, rich book – about family, art, migration, creativity, love, parenthood, masculinity, Western Sydney, domestic negotiations, intimacy. About life in place and in relationship.

I am a man of settler heritage. I wrote this blog post as the days are beginning to lengthen and get colder on the land of Gadigal and Wangal. I acknowledge their Elders past and present and welcome any First Nations readers of the blog.

* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 79.

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Reading with the Grandies 36: Tui T. Sutherland’s darkstalker, the graphic novel

Posted on 9 Jun 2026 | Leave a comment

Tui T. Sutherland, Darkstalker: The Graphic Novel (adapted by Barry Deutsch & Rachel Swirsky, art by Jake Parker, colorist Maarta Laiho, Graphix Press 2025)

Tui T. Sutherland’s Wings of Fire series continues to dominate my granddaughter’s reading. When I asked her about a character in The Lost Continent, the second book in the series I’ve read, she handed me the comics version of Darkstalker, a stand-alone novel, saying that it would explain the background. She was right.

The action of Darkstalker takes place two thousand years before the main series. It answers my questions about the nature of Clearsight, the dragon venerated almost as a god in The Lost Continent. I’m guessing from its final image that the character Darkstalker emerges as a major villain in the series. This is his origin story: a tale of love and ambition, of good intentions leading to terrible deeds, of epic battles and bloody assassinations. It includes a scene that resembles the Blood Wedding from Game of Thrones. There’s a magical device that could be a satirical take on Donald Trump’s golden dome. At the heart of the narrative are challenging ethical issues.

For what it’s worth, I would recommend the prose novels rather than the comics. I found the art in this book generally unattractive compared to that in The Lost Prophecy (different artist, same colorist). To my eye, the many characters aren’t different enough from each other – I suppose there’s only so much you can do with dragon faces and bodies. But the story is gripping, and ends in a satisfying cliffhanger.

Page 79* illustrates both my dissatisfaction with the art and my enjoyment of the complexity:

These two characters are Darkstalker (on the left, with crooked horns) and Clearsight. They are both animuses (or is it animi? a question raised by the characters, not me), that is to say, they both have magical powers. [Ny granddaughter has read this and informs me that Clearsight is actually NOT an animus.] Clearsight is a seer, who can see many versions of the future with remarkable clarity, and is acutely aware that a decision made in the present determines which of many futures will come to pass. Darkstalker has the most powerful magic of any living dragon. They have just met for the first time, though because of their remarkable powers it’s as if they know each other intimately from their intense future relationship. On page 77 Darkstalker takes one of Clearsight’s claws/hands in his, and page 78 shows us the kaleidoscopic visions this produces in her mind – a smattering of blood, images of grief, tenderness, pride, a scroll and a bracelet whose meaning will be made clear later …

On this page, we realise that Darkstalker has not seen the visions, and he promises in gentlemanly manner that he will never read Clearsight’s mind. Only then do they introduce themselves. Clearsight can say her name is Tailbite because she knows that he knows that she knows he was expecting her. It’s love at first sight, but that sight has been preceded by detailed visions of each other. Clearsight’s thought bubbles in the final frame might be read as expressing pure romantic love, but there’s terror there as well: ‘I want to fly away and I want to keep having this conversation for eternity’. This moment of first meeting is filled with joy. But Clearsight knows how many ways and how terribly things could go dark. Well, reader, they do go very dark, and she was right to want to hold onto this moment. People coming to this after reading books in the series published before it will know that already, so the moment is charged with tragic irony.

From the little joke about the plural of animus to the complex play with what the ability to read minds and see the future can do to relationships, this is a book that treats its young readers with respect. The popularity of the series is comforting evidence that young people’s attention spans may not be as monstrously shortened as we some people fear.

Also, I enjoyed this story a lot.

I am a man of settler heritage who has been alive for almost a third of the time elapsed since Arthur Phillip claimed this continent for the British crown. I wrote this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation. I acknowledge their Elders past and present and welcome any First Nations readers of the blog.

* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 79.

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Maria Reva’s Endling and the book club

Posted on 7 Jun 2026 | Leave a comment

Maria Reva, Endling (Virago 2025)

An endling is the last surviving individual of a species. Famous ones were Benjamin the Tasmanian tiger, and Martha the passenger pigeon. The species facing extinction in Maria Reva’s novel are less impressive than thylacines or pigeons: they are snails. The central character, Yeva, is a Ukrainian woman who has made it her life mission to find individuals from endangered snail species, keep them alive in her laboratory–van, find mates for them, and with any luck release the results of their pairings back into the wild. As other sources of funding have dried up – because who cares about snails going extinct? – she funds her project by joining a ‘romance tour’. Men, mainly from the USA, come to Ukraine in search of wives and a bridal agency rounds up women who are desperate or foolish enough to let themselves be put on offer. Our heroine has no intention of marrying one of the men, but their compulsory gifts have become her source of funding.

The first chapter of Endling is all about the snails – how richly varied in their behaviours, mating habits and generally lifestyles. One snail in particular, whom she names Lefty, has a shell that spirals to the left, severely limiting its chances of finding a mate. Yeva’s snail obsession comes to make complete sense to us. We understand how death after death, extinction after extinction, takes its toll. Yeva sinks into a deep depression and decides to end her life. It’s a grim, compelling stand-alone short story.

But another of the ‘brides’ has also joined the agency with complex ulterior motives. She has a plan to kidnap a hundred of the ‘bachelors’ and expose the horrors of the bride trade, and she wants Yeva’s help. And chapter two sets a whole new direction.

Things proceed pretty much as you would expect: there are obstacles, unexpected changes of plan, oddly comic missteps, and the van full of kidnapped bachelors sets off on some half-arsed plan to expose the marriage trade. Then there’s an explosion. Russia invades Ukraine and the novel comes to a sudden halt. There’s an interim as the author scrambles to get back on her feet. I loved the scrambling, but don’t want to say too much more because the surprise of how the disruption plays out is a big part of the sometimes grim pleasure of the book. I was enjoying the more or less conventional story-telling in the first part of the book, so was relieved that the story does continue, transformed. Lefty survives to play a key role in a climactic scene involving terrible violence, unlikely romance, and what seems to be the author giving instructions to a character over the phone.

Page 79* is all about Pasha, the only one of the ‘bachelors’ to be treated sympathetically. Like Maria Reva, he is Ukrainian-Canadian. His parents were immigrants who did everything they could to assimilate, and part of his motive for coming to Ukraine has been to reclaim his Ukrainian identity. Here he is imagining the woman he wants to meet on the romance tour:

She’d be sitting on the sidelines, in what she thought was her best dress – something comely but plain, like a church smock – hardly distinguishable from the interpreters, and she’d be wondering why she’d come to this glitzy social. She’d feel like she didn’t compare to the svelte femmes fatales, though she was decidedly more beautiful in an unplaceable ethereal way. She’d regret not having put on more makeup, having stayed up the night before finishing a university assignment (some rigorous program) so that the delicate skin under her eyes bore the slightest hint of blue. No, the woman of Pasha’s dreams did not belong on this romance tour any more than Pasha himself did, but they’d both been spurred by the hope of love. They simply did not know what else to do.

We’re being played with there. The woman in Pasha’s hopelessly romantic fantasy is described in a way that could apply to Yeva, and more unlikely matches have occurred in fiction. But everything in my readerly soul rebelled at the thought of Pasha and Yeva pairing up to live happily ever after. At the same time, I so wanted him to find happiness: he’s naive, but his heart is in the right place, and his yearning to be part of Ukraine is genuine. I won’t tell you what happens, but I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that in this book that focuses on a handful of fabulously unconventional female characters, the last couple of pages belong to him.

The meeting: We had three books on our agenda. Along with Endling there was Maria Reva’s Endling and On Not Climbing Mountains by Claire Thomas (see here).

I probably shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was, that one person hated this book and one didn’t finish it. They found the disruption of the form self-indulgent and tedious. When I mentioned the passage that Maria Reva had read out at the Sydney Writers’ Festival, which I found hilarious, they screwed up their noses and said that was exactly the kind of thing they hated. One of them liked the snails, but found the romance tours story repetitive and then improbable. Oh well, as my high-school Latin teacher used to say, de gustibus non est disputandum.

The three of us who did enjoy the book, really enjoyed it. One said it was bonkers, a good thing.

One of the unrelated joys of the evening was a reading-aloud of Evelyn Araluen’s poem ‘Acknowledgement of Cuntery’. I will make my acknowledgement anyhow. The Book Club’s five members are all of settler heritage. We met on the beautiful, unceded land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation, which is also where I have written this blog post. I gratefully acknowledge the Elders past and present who have cared for this beautiful country for millennia, and welcome any First Nations readers of this blog.

* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 79.

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Hannah Kent’s Always Home, Always Homesick at the book club

Posted on 5 Jun 2026 | 1 comment

Hannah Kent, Always Home, Always Homesick (Picador Australia 2025)

Before the meeting: You don’t have to have read Hannah Kent’s first novel, Burial Rites (my blog post here), to enjoy Always Home, Always Homesick, but having read it had me loving this book. It’s a memoir about Kent’s love affair with Iceland, beginning with a period she spent there in her teens as an exchange student. It’s also about the making of that first novel – the landscape and history that inspired it, the persistence and serendipity of research, the critical reception, and especially the way it was received in Iceland.

Soon after I finished reading my library copy, I visited the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art to see the Olafur Eliasson exhibition, Presence. Although the most striking works there are installations that play with light in miraculous ways, there are also many photos of Icelandic landscapes – treeless, austere, other-worldly. These works formed a magnificent accompaniment to Hannah Kent’s loving descriptions.

Of course, it’s not all about the book and the landscape. Relationships are important. An Icelandic family weren’t originally meant to be her hosts but stepped in when they saw she was less than happy. They became like a second family for her, and over the years since that original visit they have stayed in her life. The language casts a spell on her; the weirdness of day–night cycles so close to the pole fascinates, and of course there’s food, which brings me to page 79*.

At this stage of the book, teenage Hannah is still finding her way in Iceland, staying with a taciturn family who make her feel strangely isolated. If I had picked the book up in a shop and read this page, I’m pretty sure I would have bought it:

The traditional midwinter feast:

There are hrútsprungar, lambs’ testicles, pressed into a loaf bound with something clear and gelatinous. There is also sviasulta, which is the boiled meat of a sheep head that has been pressed into a mould. It, too, is jellied, and as I cut a slice 1 am told that the eyes and tongue are included in the mix. I glance at my plate, half expecting to find the steady, clouded gaze of a boiled eye. Alongside these dishes are blood pudding, blóğmör, dark red and granular, and liver sausage, lifrarpylsa.

Yum!

After the meeting: We had three books on our agenda. Along with Always Home, Always Homesick there was Maria Reva’s Endling and On Not Climbing Mountains by Claire Thomas.

I found the first five pages of the Claire Thomas book deeply unpromising and gave up on it. Only two of the five of us had read it: they loved it and made us non-finishers regret our life choices.

But we all enjoyed Always Home, Always Homesick. We admired young Hannah Kent’s courage in going to the ends of the earth as a teenager. We commented on the evocation of place and though none of us were inspired to visit Iceland, we were reminded of other examples of its austere beauty.

Someone pointed out that there was very little if anything about Hannah Kent’s relationships with people of her own age group in Iceland. The difficulty involved in attending school where only Icelandic was spoken is mentioned, but the social difficulties are passed over in virtual silence.

People who hadn’t read Burial Rites apparently enjoyed the book as much as those who had.

The Book Club’s five members are all of settler heritage. We met on the beautiful, unceded land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation, which is also where I have written this blog post. I gratefully acknowledge the Elders past and present who have cared for this country for millennia, and welcome any First Nations readers of this blog.

* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 79.

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Edwina Shaw’s Dear Madman

Posted on 4 Jun 2026 | 2 comments

Edwina Shaw, Dear Madman (AndAlso Press 2026)

Revisionist exploration of family lore is a rich vein of story telling. As one of many examples, Tasma Walton’s novel I Am Nannertgarrook grew from that kind of impulse, and it’s part of the truth-telling project that stems from the Uluru Statement from the Heart. Dear Madman doesn’t deal with First Nations issues, but it is a gripping addition to the genre, and it also deals in truth-telling.

Edwina Shaw’s great-aunt, her maternal grandmother’s sister, was murdered as a small child. The murder was part of family lore, a historic family tragedy, a scary tale told to children by a loving grandmother. The book is part memoir – how the story featured in the lives of Edwina and her family, and how she scoured newspaper accounts, prison records, the murderer’s mental health files and more, to find a fuller story. And it’s part novel: alternating chapters take us into the life of the early 20th century family and, most grippingly, into the murderer’s mind.

Edwina is my niece, and I have been privileged to see the book in a number of drafts, so I should leave it to others to discuss it in detail. I’ll just say that it’s a white-knuckle tale of suspense and a marvellous achievement of empathy. It’s a family history, a True Crime essay, a horror story, a dark and violent version of A B Facey’s A Fortunate Life, a hard but rewarding read.

Page 79* is in one of the sections where the author speaks about her task:

I didn’t know whether it was the murderer, the girl who was killed, or me who wanted the story told more. I only knew I couldn’t put it off any longer. It had to be told. Not only that, it had to be me who told this story, showing all sides, looking back with compassion for all of them, even the murderer.
… I began researching in earnest, trying to understand the murderer, his past, his crimes, the times. To even attempt forgiveness, I had to know why he’d killed. I understood why my ancestors had not been able to forgive him, or Life or God. For a child to be taken so violently, for no reason. How is that forgivable?
Why should they forgive?
I had the story Nana Franny told – the murder, the murderer’s notes of confession, the ending – and I had Great Aunty’s version too, not the same story, no ending, but a name. Joe Frisby. And the name he’d worked for them under, Charles Davies. I knew that to begin, I had to bring this Shadowman out of the darkness and see him as human like the rest of us, not imbued with some mystical evil. He was just a man.

It’s rare that a book includes such a neat statement of its goals. Maybe it’s an underlying goal of all good story telling – to have compassion for all one’s characters. And maybe the extent to which that’s achieved is a test of all serious story telling. I think this book does it in spades.

Without being too spoilerish: the cover image is the photo of the murderer taken on his admission to Goodna Mental Asylum ten years after the murder, which Edwina found very late in the research process, after reading about him, having conversations with him on car journeys, meeting some of his descendants, and imagining her way into his mind. In some ways, the appearance of this photo is the moment in the book when he becomes ‘just a man’. Here’s Edwina’s description of it:

Joe’s forehead is deeply creased, and his moustache, huge and grey, is hiding his lips. Above the collar of his rough cotton uniform, you can make out the scar across his neck from where he slit his own throat, but there’s also a softness about the image that makes him look like an old Labrador. His eyes, dark and bright and mad, are looking up with hope as if he’s glimpsing God. He seems happy to me, though others don’t see it.
I propped up his photo as I wrote on, but when it came to the murder scene, I had to turn the picture face down.

I’m one proud uncle (on the murderless paternal side).

I am an Australian man of settler heritage. I’ve written this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation. I acknowledge Elders past and present of those clans, and welcome any First Nations readers and commenters.

* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 79.

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Toby Davidson’s Grand Reopening

Posted on 17 May 2026 | Leave a comment

Toby Davidson, The Grand Reopening (Puncher & Wattmann 2025)

I know Toby Davidson mainly as a Francis Webb enthusiast. He did a beautiful job of editing the Collected Poems (UWA Publishing 2011) and has organised an annual Francis Webb reading for more than a decade.

Toby is also a poet in his own right. The Grand Reopening is his third collection. My blog post about his first, Beast Language, is at this link.

The Grand Reopening is a post-Covid-lockdown book. There are poems featuring haircuts, live-streamed funerals, the Great Resignation, ambivalence about going to the pub and the theatre. There are poems about crank conspiracies and an ‘Aussie Nazi’.

These poems are engaging, and they reward repeat reading, but the one that stands out has nothing to do with Covid. ‘His Blood Whisper Scolds the Deathless Intelligence’, a poem in sixteen parts, accounts for nearly half the book. It features Klippel-Trenaunay Syndrome (KPS), a rare congenital condition which, according to a helpful note:

affects limbs, especially legs, and is characterised by cutaneous capillary malformation (‘port wine stain’), higher temperature, variable or overgrown veins, tissue, bone and the internal sensation of pronounced or incompetent circulation.

The poem picks up on the word ‘pronounced’. Its speaker is a ‘slewed susurrus / spokeswhisperer / for the Syndrome’. The ‘Deathless Intelligence’ that it scolds is something like divine inspiration – creativity that comes and goes.

At the book’s launch last year, Toby Davidson said that he lives with KPS. So the poem’s narrative elements, mainly dealing with medical interventions and the experiences of ‘Child-He’, are autobiographical or at least autobiography-adjacent. It’s a portrait of the artist as a young man living with KPS, with the device of Syndrome-as-narrator allowing for distance and so reflection on meaning. In a back cover blurb, Kevin Hart says that this poem ‘enters the mind and heart and simply will not leave’. I agree.

Page 79*, happily, falls in the middle of this wonderful long poem. It’s the first of Section XII’s two pages:

The first thing you’ll notice is the patterning of words on the page. The whole poem is structure this way: in stanzas made up of three short lines, with alternate stanzas indented. The effect is of a slow heartbeat, a hypnotic to-and-fro, an expectation of call-and-response that is never consistently met but never totally disappointed. It reminds me of the way religious communities recite the Psalms antiphonally: the sides of the chapel recite/chant alternate lines. On this page you can see the call and response pattern in pairings like: ‘he’d learn’ / ‘I taught’; ‘spot’ / ‘piece’; ‘not a soul’ / ‘not even’; ‘floated’ / ‘leapt’; then ‘leapt’ /’raised his foot’.

The overall narrative moves along in this poem. Where previous sections have dealt with diagnostic and other medical interventions, here the whisperer takes the credit for the un-intrusive, non-surgical intervention of compression. Venosan compression stockings (they exist, I looked them up) bring relief. Paradoxically, and antiphonally, the sea brings relief in its vastness – but the main narrative of this section is about the discovery that that relief is temporary. In an earlier section, Child-He realises he can be alone, unaccompanied by the Blood Whisper, only in his dreams. Here he goes swimming alone, telling no one. On the next page he looks at the foot raised at the end of this one:

and it was shrunken,
bloodless, obscene,
wrong in his mind
_____________unrecognisable.

The emotional impact of the incident is summed up in the lines:

so much
_____________for being normal

The narrative conveys with a gut-punch something of the emotional reality of growing up with a congenital condition. The poem has other interests as well. What to make of this?

_____________not even the 
_____________Deathless
_____________Grand Pooh-bah
who co-wrote,
like I did, his best 
sacramental poems...

(The Deathless Intelligence collects a number of nicknames. The Gilbertian ‘Deathless Poo-bah’ is as disrespectful as they get.)

The Blood Whisper’s assertion that it is co-author of ‘his poems’ is part of what makes the long poem so engrossing. It’s not a simple body–mind opposition. The poet has two co-authors. One is the Deathless Intelligence, something like the traditional concept of a Muse, or the Christian tradition’s divine inspiration. The poem reaches for an understanding of how the physical reality – in this case a syndrome affecting the circulation – can also contribute to the creative process.

I’m a long way from grasping this poem. I’ll keep coming back to it. I’d love to hear in the comments from anyone who has engaged with it.

But that’s all I’ve got time for now.

I am an Australian man of settler heritage. I’ve written this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora nation. I acknowledge Elders past and present of those clans, and welcome any First Nations readers.

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Reading with the Grandies 35: Tui T. Sutherland’s Lost Continent

Posted on 12 May 2026 | 4 comments

Tui T. Sutherland, The Lost Continent (Book Eleven of the Wings of Fire series, Scholastic Press 2019)

My granddaughter is an obsessive reader, possibly even more so that I was at her age. She reads a lot of comics, often called ‘graphic novels’ to claim a vague respectability, but mostly of a kind that I find hard to take or even fake an interest in: baby sitters, schoolgirl politics, etc. But one series that takes a lot of her time, reading and rereading, and then rereading in apparently random order, is Tui T. Sutherland’s Wings of Fire series. First the comic versions and then the original proper-novel versions of the ones that haven’t been made into comics yet.

I did read the first of the Wings of Fire graphic novels, The Dragonet Prophecy, eighteen months ago. Recently when my granddaughter spontaneously offered to lend me The Lost Continent, how could I say no? It’s the eleventh novel in the series but, she said, it is the first in a whole new story arc (not her exact words – she is after all only eight). When I’d finished it she told me that her reason for letting me read it was that she wanted someone to talk to about the world of the novels. My motive for accepting was to be a decent grandfather and provide her with some company in her reading life.

Virtuous motivation aside, I have to report that I loved this book and am tempted to sign up for the rest of the series. In a prologue, a dragon called Clearsight arrives on a continent that’s far from her home. Chapter One takes up the story two thousand years later when Clearsight is revered as a prophet who is responsible for all that is good in the society. There are three main tribes of dragons on this continent: SilkWings, HiveWings and LeafWings. There has been a huge war. According to the official account, the vicious LeafWings were wiped out by heroic HiveWings (with a red flag to readers of all ages: trees were also wiped out). The SilkWings, forever indebted to their saviours, are pretty much a slave species. Ruling the whole society is Queen Wasp.

Blue, the main character, is a young SilkWing whose wings haven’t come in yet. He believes that all is well. He accepts as simple facts of life that he and his kind have to pass through checkpoints constantly and must never meet the eyes of a HiveWing. But when his older sister Luna’s butterfly-like metamorphosis is brutally interrupted by HiveWing soldiers he has a rude awakening, the seeds of a revolutionary spirit are sown, and adventures ensue.

(Yes, there are words like metamorphosis. Also inexorable. This series doesn’t insult its readers’ intelligence.)

On page 79* Blue has hidden from a host of HiveWings and has met someone we know from the first moment will be the love of his life, a HiveWing named Cricket. Where all the others of her kind can be mind-controlled by Queen Wasp (who Blue now realises is not a benevolent ruler), Cricket somehow remains untouched, and she has helped him to hide in the hive’s library. At the start of this page she wakes him from an exhausted sleep.

What can I say about this? The story rattles along. We never forget that the characters are dragons (‘the sound of tramping talons’, ‘his tail seemed to be entirely in the way’, she ‘put one claw to her mouth in warning’). The queen’s mind-control is vividly, and creepily, conveyed in the image of eyes as ‘blank white pearls’.

As far as I can tell from a quick web search, the books have been extremely popular and, in spite of fostering discussion of subjects including vegetarianism, pacifism, slavery, authoritarian modes of government, internalised oppression, they don’t seem to have fallen foul of book-banners. Maybe it’s because it’s only dragons.

I don’t plan to go back to the previous 10 books, but my granddaughter has lent me the comic version of Darkstalker, a stand-alone that gives some of the back story. Both duty and desire urge me to read it.

I am a man of settler heritage who has been alive for almost a third of the time elapsed since Arthur Phillip claimed this continent for the British crown. I wrote this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation. I acknowledge their Elders past and present and welcome any First Nations readers of the blog.

* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 79.

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