The Resident Judge of Port Phillip

It’s hard to classify this book: part memoir, part history, part politics and part philosophy. In reflecting on the title of the book, Sosnowski picks up on two of the metaphors that she returns to several times throughout the text:

The past is never just past. It is like a river flowing out behind us with a main channel but also many smaller streams and tributaries. Some of these pasts shape more fully and centrally how we see and interpret our present while others are more obscured, presumed lost, under bracken and old tree growth. Nevertheless, the water from these tributaries continues to seep through, whether we know, like it, or not.

I think of these types of puzzles like a beautifully cut jewel. The kind of jewel my grandfather would have bought, cut and sold after he arrived in Melbourne in 1947 via the Japanese internment camp in Java and a migrant accommodation camp just outside Brisbane. If you hold it up in different light you will catch different stories in each of its fifty-eight facets. You will have the table, the star, the bezel, the upper girdle, the lower girdle, the pavilion and culet. You will have the dreams, the documents, the checkpoints, the bribes, the camps, the occupation and the resistance. (p. 20)

The structure of the book, presented in 58 chapters itself, is represented by a drawing of a diamond where they are linked more specifically: The table- dreams; the star – documents; the bezel- checkpoints; the upper girdle – bribes etc.

We meet all of these elements of the diamond – bribes, checkpoints, documents, violence and revolution in her telling of two different groups of people. The first is her own Jewish grandparents in Europe, who managed to make a crossing to safety at a checkpoint just as France fell to the Germans. They moved to Portugal, then to the Dutch East Indies, only be be interned by the Japanese in Java, after the Japanese invasion in 1942. Her great-uncle who had served in the Dutch Army Reserve Corps in Batavia (now Jakarta) received a permit allowing him to transfer to the British Army, escaping internment and granted a British pension. He went on to become a high-ranking general in the Israeli Defence Force, directly responsible for the repression of Palestinian people, a repression which continues to this day.

The second group comprises her friends in Syria, both under the repressive al-Assad regime and in the present, under the former opposition leader Ahmed al-Sharaa who is greeted warily, but seen as better than al-Assad. She does not name her friends, using only letters to represent their names. Some of them have escaped and are now in ‘safe’ countries; others have remained in danger because of their resistance activities; another she has lost contact with completely.

Interwoven between the stories of these two groups are her own reflections on law, violence and resistance. Some of the short chapters of the book (few chapters extend beyond four pages) reflect on the law’s reliance on violence to ensure compliance; others reflect on the nature of camps and checkpoints, triggered for her by the experience of a COVID checkpoint during the lockdown.

Sometimes she makes big claims, only to qualify them later. For example, although acknowledging that there is no scientific evidence for her connection of unconscious memories and genetic structure (p4), she still reflects on it at length, citing the Qur’anic verse that the isthmus between the known and the unknown is like the line that separates the sun and its shadow. Some 80 pages later, she acknowledges the influence of culture, belief, skills, stories and documentation as well (p. 85). Likewise, she argues that the law needs violence- something that I cannot argue against- but it takes her 100 pages to reflect on the role of the bureaucracy as an additional and less physical form of enforcement and authority of the State, as well. She writes cogently about camps – Nazi death camps, Japanese internment camps, Palestinian refugee camps, Australia’s ‘illegal entry’ camps- but then stretches the analogy too far (for me) by extending the category of ‘camp’ to an aeroplane flight.

I have mixed feelings about the book, which I could not so easily put aside were it longer. I very much enjoyed the sections on her grandparents and her Syrian friends: I was less enthusiastic about the rather fervent philosophical reflections that are threaded throughout the book, even though they have made me think. The author is a legal anthropologist, which is reflected in her footnotes and the sources that she has drawn upon. The book was shortlisted for the Stella Prize 2026.

My rating: 7/10

Read because: it was on the Stella Prize shortlist

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library

When I see the wreckage of Gaza, and now of Southern Lebanon, I wonder just how any of the destruction will ever be rebuilt. Even with good will and money (neither of which are likely to eventuate unless Trump turns them into another of his Trump Trophies), where would you even start? But then I remembered our trip to London way back in 2011, and our surprise on finding St Luke’s Bombed Out Church in Liverpool. At that stage, they hadn’t quite decided what to do with it, and I’m pleased to find that they’re now using it for cultural events. Here is how it looked in 2011:

It was a salutary reminder that, especially in London, many of the historic buildings that we had walked around, marvelling at their antiquity, had actually been bombed during May 1941- and especially on the night 10-11 May 1941, which is the particular focus of this book.

Gavin Mortimer is a freelance journalist, although he has written several war-related books. To gather the material for this book, he appealed in magazines and local papers for the reminiscences of Blitz survivors of 1941 and received over two hundred responses. He followed up by phone with several correspondents, and interviewed others who don’t feature in the book. He also drew on memoirs from several historical societies, museums and archives.

His journalist impulses are on show in how he structures this book. He starts off early on the Saturday morning on 10th May and introduces us to a wide range of characters: probably too wide. It was only half-way through the book that I found a list of the ‘Main Players’ with a helpful one-sentence summary of who they were which I wish had been at the front of the book rather than at the back. Until I found it, I kept thinking “Do I know this person? Were they earlier in the book?” As it turns out, there were many, many more characters mentioned than the featured ‘Main Players’.

As his various characters woke up, and got themselves off to their various commitments, they were unaware of what they were to face that day. After an eight-month Hitler was getting bored of the Blitz, and was turning his attention to Russia, but when the RAF attacked Bremen and Hamburg in retaliation for an eight-month ransacking of London, Liverpool, Glasgow and Sheffield, Hitler was incensed (p. 20)

It was a Saturday: the football was on at Wembley stadium. Daylight saving had started in May, and the night of 10-11 was bitterly cold even though the days were fine. Vera Lynn was performing, and the cinemas were doing a roaring trade. Little did they realize that at 10.30 that night, German planes were readying to take off. Mortimer traces through the preparations of both the RAF and the Luftwaffe pilots as they ready themselves for a raid. This seemed to take an inordinate number of pages so that it wasn’t until p. 116 of a 353 p. book that the bombing actually began. The author is obviously fond of the technical details of military hardware, because at times his descriptions of the planes and dogfights became rather tedious. I much more enjoyed the human stories.

And there are many human stories here. Some of his characters appear just once, as an example of the point that he is making. Sometimes the stories are grouped around a particular location, or a specific role (firewatcher, fireman, churchman etc.) and while some characters appear in several places, others do not. Some of the stories use his informants’ own words, in other stories he has paraphrased them. The bombing came mainly in two waves, with sporadic bombings as Sunday morning dawned. There is a good representation of both men and women, of different ages, located across London.

There is much that I hadn’t realized. It had never occurred to me that it would be bitterly cold- it was May, after all. After more than a year of bombing (imagine that, night after night), arrangements had been made for temporary reservoirs from which the firetrucks could draw their water. Some of them were constructed on the spot as needed on the streets; others were built into the basements of buildings that had been sealed and converted into reservoirs. Buildings had their own firewatchers, patrolling the building looking for outbreaks of fire, especially from incendiary bombs. And how would you even start to reinstall the services afterwards? When the bombs formed craters, the sewage culverts were repaired first because they were the deepest, then electricity cables and hydraulic power mains, followed by the gas mains which were actually lower than the hydraulics but they needed to wait until everything was secure because they were made of heavy iron. The water mains were last, fixed and sterilized. (p. 318)

He challenges some myths as well. There was looting, and the East End bitterly resented the Royal Family coming down and pretending that they were in the same boat as everyone else then travelling up to the wilds of Scotland, while Londoners were left with ruins and craters.

The book has beautiful vintage maps as the endpieces of the book, but as someone not familiar with London at all, I found them next to useless. I would have really appreciated some clearly drawn maps of various locations and landmarks, inserted in the text where he was describing the bombing.

He closes the book with an epilogue, where he follows up on the main informants and what they were doing at the time of publication (2005). Many of them were elderly then, so I suppose that there are even fewer now. This underlines the importance of capturing these ‘Voices from the London Blitz’ before they fall silent. But unfortunately there are other survivors in Ukraine, Gaza and Lebanon, who continue to endure their own blitzes as well. Their stories are yet to be written.

My rating: 7/10

Sourced from: Brotherhood Books

Read because: I loved Sarah Water’s The Night Watch and Kate Atkinson’s Life after Life.

To be honest, when I got to the end of this novella I felt a surge of relief that I don’t have to live inside this woman’s head any more. Fireweather is a follow-up to Miranda Darling’s earlier novella Thunderhead, and it deals with the same characters, some months further down the track. By now, our main protagonist Winona Dalloway has left Him (her husband). She has found a new place to live, and is now battling over custody rights with her ex-husband who is trying to use Winona’s mental health as grounds to deny access to their sons. It’s high stakes for Winona.

This time the weather is real, rather than emotional. Bushfires and a heat wave have enclosed the city in a hot, smoky envelope, reminiscent of the 2020 summer before COVID. As with Thunderhead, all the action takes place within the one day. Winona undergoes a medical test for her seizures, then waits for her children to be dropped off by Him later that afternoon. She has rented an apartment near the school, walking around the suburbs and retrieving old neglected pot plants, like a poinsettia she finds in an abandoned house. She goes to have blood tests at the pathologist, she watches a surf rescue at the beach, she has lunch at a Sushi Train and goes to watch a movie before buying the ingredients for a picnic to have with the children when they arrive.

She is alone, but her head is noisy. She has taken to devising strings of rhyming words in an internal monologue. She talks with Bruce, a neighbourhood dog. New voices have taken up in her head: The Child, The snide Archer, The bossy Nanny and the florid Poet. They bicker amongst themselves like the Greek Gods. Meanwhile, she goes off into thought trains of her own, interesting enough but didactic and distracting for both Winona and the reader.

Is this book really necessary? I wonder. I don’t know what sense you would make of it if you hadn’t read Thunderhead. I see that it has been short-listed for the Stella Prize, and I wonder if it’s an (unsuccessful) attempt at a ‘second bite of the cherry’? I think that its sequel nature would make it difficult to win, and I think that Thunderhead was the better, and more clever book. The issue of coercive control is important, but it becomes lost and almost pathologized in the noise in Winona’s head.

My rating: 6.5/10

Sourced from e-book borrowed from Yarra Plenty Regional Library

Read because: I knew it was the followup to Thunderhead and I was looking for a short book between two longer ones.