Monthly Archives: June 2025

I hear with my little ear: Podcasts 24-31 May 2025

Posted on June 30, 2025 | Leave a comment

The Human Subject (BBC) The Woman Who Resisted Mind Control Hiding in plain sight was a renowned psychiatrist, working at the Allan Institute under the aegis of McGill University. As a 16 year old in 1958 Lana Ponting was taken to the Allan Institute where Dr Ewan Cameron subjected her, and other patients, to a regime of LSD, shock therapy at 20-40 times the usual voltage and ‘depatterning’ and ‘positive affirmation’ to wipe clean their memories. It left her unable to form coherent memories, and she even forgot that she had had a child in the hospital who was adopted out. Dr Cameron’s methods soon attracted the attention of the CIA and their mind control efforts. And it all looked so respectable and upfront.

The Rest is History Ep 522 The Last Viking: Harald Hardrada Tom Holland was driving the previous four episodes about the lead-up to 1066 (having written Millenium ), but in this episode Dominic takes the reins, having himself written The Fury of the Vikings as part of his Adventures In Time series for children. To be honest, I had never heard of Harald Hardrada and I still don’t know what the connection with 1066 is. I guess I’ll have to wait for the next episode. From the shownotes:

In the 1066 game of thrones for the crown of England, the most extraordinary of the three contenders is arguably Harald Hardrada: viking warrior, daring explorer, emperor’s bodyguard, serpent slayer, alleged lover to an empress, King of Norway, and legend of Norse mythology. How did this titan of a man come to cross the North Sea with his army, and take on Harold Godwinson, in the titanic showdown of Stamford Bridge? His story before this point is so colourful that it may be one the most exciting lives in all history. Fighting from the age of twelve, Harald was born to a petty regional king of Norway, in a Scandinavia of competing religions and kingships. As a teenager, he would then join his fearsome brother Olaf, the man who united Norway but later fell foul of King Cnut, and subsequently sailed the seas and mysterious waterways of Russia, in a mighty battle to take back Norway. Their defeat was terrible and absolute, leaving the young Harald wounded and on the run. A journey of horrors and hardship would then lead him at last to the awe inspiring city of Kyiv, where he would serve as mercenary for the Grand Prince. But still hungry for wealth and glory he then travelled on to the most remarkable city in the world: Constantinople, where his life would take an even more dramatic turn

Half Life (BBC) Episode 3 Lost From 1935 onwards, Ammendorf, south of Berlin was the main manufacturing industry town for mustard gas. It was not used during WE2, but was instead stockpiled and burned after the war, leading to environmental contamination. Our narrator Joe intended to apologize for his great-grandfather’s role in manufacturing chemicals, but it took him some time to find the opportunity to do so. In 1935 the family left for Ankara, so his grandfather no longer oversaw the factory, even though he continued to receive half-pay from the company. In Episode 4 Young Republic Joe travels to Ankara Turkey, where he believed that his grandfather had worked distributing gas masks for a company now known as MKE that still makes gas marks. . Ataturk’s modernization movement welcomed Jewish intellectuals, and Hitler was friendly towards Ataturk. Joe’s grandfather was in fact working at the chemical factory beside the gasmask factory, and he smoothed the way for the Turkish purchase of German chemicals which were used in the 1938 Dersim massacre of 13,000 Kurds (maybe 3 or 4 times more).

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‘Sneaky Little Revolutions’ by Charmian Clift

Posted on June 28, 2025 | 1 comment
2022, 448p.

[Warning: discussion of suicide]

This book, edited by Clift’s biographer and former daughter-in-law Nadia Wheatley, is marketed as ‘selected essays’. More properly, they are a selection of 80 of her 225 newspaper columns published mainly in the Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne’s Herald between 1964 and 1969, when they came to an abrupt halt with her suicide.

The newspaper columnist was (is?) a curious beast. Although there are innumerable bloggers and sub-stack writers, there seemed to be something rather special about turning over the page of a print newspaper, and seeing an article by a regular columnist, in its accustomed place on the page. I used to enjoy the columns of Sharon Gray (who I see is actually Adele Hulse), Pamela Bone and Gillian Bouras who ended up living in Greece – all women- and Martin Flanagan in the Age. I know that Anne Deveson wrote a regular column, but I only know of her through her daughter Georgia Blain. The only physical newspapers that I still receive are the Saturday Paper and The Age on Saturdays and although they have a stable of staff writers and comment columns, the only one who comes close to my perception of the ‘newspaper columnist’ in the Charmian Clift mould is Margaret Simons with her gardening columns in the Saturday Paper, and perhaps Kate Halfpenny and Tony Wright in The Age. Somehow you feel as if you know them, and that you could plonk down beside them in a coffee shop and just take up talking with them.

Of course, it’s all artifice because despite the appearance of confidentiality and intimacy, columnists project a particular view of themselves, and one that is often quite removed from reality. This is the case with Charmian Clift whose columns brim with confidence and warmth, when instead she had lived, and was still living, a life that was far removed from the suburban Australian life of many of her readers. She and her husband, writer George Johnson, circulated in an artistic and intellectual milieu on the Greek island of Hydra that could simply not be found in Australia (barring, perhaps, the communal living at places like Heide in Bulleen). There’s little sign in her columns of the infidelities and arguments that wracked her marriage. She never mentioned her family members by name, and referred only obliquely to her husband’s long hospitalization with TB. The birth of an illegitimate, and relinquished, daughter when she was 18 years old was coded as “a wrong road…that led me to disaster”.

I could find only one mention of her alcoholism:

A whole human life of struggle, bravery, defeat, triumph, hope, and despair, might be remembered, finally, for one drunken escapade.

One can only read with hindsight her essay about her husband’s forthcoming semi-autobiographical second book Clean Straw for Nothing, which she had not dared read, for fear of what he might reveal about her through the character Cressida Morley

I do believe that novelists must be free to write what they like, in any way they liked to write it (and after all who but myself had urged and nagged him into it?), but the stuff of which Clean Straw for Nothing is made, is largely experience in which I, too, have shared and … have felt differently because I am a different person …

Indeed, several commentators have linked her apprehension about the publication of this book with her suicide in July 1969 at the age of 45- a suicide that seems so paradoxical with the fiesty, intelligent personae that she had curated through her columns.

Wheatley has titled this book ‘Sneaky Little Revolutions’, echoing a rather condescending but also self-effacing comment that Clift made about her own columns to her publisher in London:

I have been making my own sneaky little revolutions …writing essays for the weekly presses to be read by people who don’t know an essay from a form guide but absolutely love it….

Some of her essays are disarmingly suburban, but there are many others that are subversive and indeed, “little revolutions” for the mid-1960s, deep in the midst of the Menzies-era. She resisted the smugness of white-Australia that expected her gratitude for returning to comfortable Australia from a ‘foreign’ country; she supported the rights of women and decried their ‘second-class’ status; she said “sorry” some forty years before the Australian government did; and she revelled in young ‘protestants’ (i.e. protesters) who challenged the complacency of the 60s. In an essay that was not published at the time, she criticized the contingency and unfairness of the National Service draft, which left some men untouched and diverted the life course of others.

As a middle-aged (who am I kidding?) woman myself, I loved her essay ‘On Being Middle Aged’.

…the middle-aged drag time around with them like a long line of fetters, all the years that they cannot escape, the mistakes that can never be undone, the stupidities that can never be uncommitted now, the sames and humiliations and treacheries and betrayals as well as the prides and accomplishments and happinesses and brief moments of wonder…. I often think that middle-aged people have two lives, the one they’ve lived, and a parallel life, as it were, that walks around with them like a cast shadow and lies down with them when they go to sleep, and this is the life they might have lived if they had made different choices in that time when time was so abundant and the choices were so many.

There is a run of essays in the volume about her trip to central and northern Australia. At a time before cheap airfares and mass international travel, her beautiful writing brought to life a view of Australia from above- something that not all Australians had seen. In ‘The Centre’:

Pitted pores. Dried out capillaries of watercourses. Culture slides of viridian clotting thick creamy yellow. Wind ridges raised like old scars, and beyond them the even, arid serrations of the Simpson Desert, dead tissue, beyond regeneration. And yet, the tenderness of the pinks, the soft glow of the reds, the dulcet beige and violet seeping in.

She has a distinctive voice, although one that is not completely unlike my own with her colons and lists and parentheses and made-up words. The genre of the newspaper column does impose a straitjacket of must-haves: an engaging introduction, a set word length, and a rounding-off last paragraph. I found myself longing for a longer essay than the requisite six pages in my e-book and something more thorny and less self-contained.

Is there any point to re-publishing seventy year old newspaper columns? Yes, I think there is in exceptional cases, and few newspaper columnists have that honour bestowed upon them. I think that it rescues some good thought, good thinking and prescience from the flow of ephemera and evokes a humility in us to remember that many others have held certain political positions and made similar observations in the past.

My rating: 8/10

Read because: Ivanhoe Reading Circle selection

Sourced from: purchased e-book

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Movie: The Correspondent

Posted on June 22, 2025 | 1 comment

This film, starring Richard Roxburgh, is drawn from Peter Greste’s memoir The First Casualty about his imprisonment for over 400 days in an Egyptian prison after his arrest while covering the unrest in Cairo after the overthrow of President Mohamad Morsi. He is bewildered by the whole process, and sure at first that a mistake has been made until the truth of the gravity of his situation seeps in. He is warned by another political prisoner that, in order to survive, he would need to learn to live with himself. He learns this for himself, as he has to face the fact that his own journalistic derring-do had led to the death of BBC journalist Kate Peyton, while they were chasing a story in Mogadishu in Somalia in 2005. I’m not really sure whether Kate’s death eight years earlier really had the centrality for Greste that is shown in this film, although he was a consultant on this film so he must have been comfortable with it. Certainly the Australian embassy doesn’t come out too well, and the film is a strong critique of what passes for ‘justice’ in Egypt and the impotence of foreign governments to help. The real life Peter Greste himself appears from the outside to be a fairly stoic sort of person, and I felt that Roxburgh didn’t really have a lot to work with here.

My rating: 3 stars out of 5

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I hear with my little ear: Podcasts 16-23 May 2025

Posted on June 15, 2025 | Leave a comment

In the Shadows of Utopia Season 2 Episode 7 A Khmer Rouge Ideology and Sihanouk’s Dark Side returns us to Cambodia after our little foray into Vietnam for three episodes. Covering the period 1963 to 1965, we start with the Cambodia communists in very different roles. Some, like Khieu Samphan who had been educated in Paris, were incorporated into Sihanouk’s government, which although including some anti-Sihanouk figures like Samphan, in reality acted as the pro-Sihanouk party. Others, like the Cambodian-born and bred Nuon Chea continued to act in the shadows, creating a spider’s web of decentralized communist links. Then there was Pol Pot, who left Cambodia for the border regions of Vietnam, where they found themselves being treated as junior partners by the Vietnamese communists.

Although Khmer Rouge ideology wanted to get rid of Buddhism, it also incorporated Buddhist grammar and principles like renunciation and detachment to give Cambodian (Kampuchean) communism a different nature to Confucian-influenced communism.

Meanwhile, Sihanouk was gradually moving away from the United States, culminating in nationalisation of the banks and import/export channels, and refusing US aid. He signed an agreement with North Vietnam to allow arms through the port at Sihanoukville, and eventually in 1965 he severed ties with the United States completely.

Half Life (BBC) Episode 1: Daughter of Radium Writer Joe Dunthorne had grown up on stories of his family’s dramatic escape from Germany in 1936 to England. He had listened to his grandmother’s stories about her father, scientist Siegfried, whose early experiments in using radium in commercial domestic products as a whitening agent led to his grandmother brushing her teeth with radioactive toothpaste. However, when Joe decided to actually sit down and read his great-grandfather’s memoirs, which at 2000 pages had daunted most of the family, he found near the end of the document a confession from his great-grandfather had he had been involved in research that led to the chemical weapons and agents used by the Nazis.

In Episode 2 The Quiet Town by the River Joe travels to Oranienburg, a city that was heavily bombed by the Allies in WW2 because it was the centre of chemical weapons, poisonous gas and uranium research. His great-grandfather worked in the Auergesellschaft factory. The bombing turned Oranienburg into a moonscape, but the soil still contains chemicals and unexploded ordnance.

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‘The Fig Eater’ by Jody Shields

Posted on June 12, 2025 | Leave a comment
2001, 352 p.

I must admit that this book was nothing like I imagined it would be. From the front cover (yes, I know don’t judge etc etc) I assumed that it would be a historical fiction but instead found that it was a detective story, and a not terribly satisfying one at that.

We meet the victim in the opening pages of the novel as a young woman’s body is being examined in the presence of the Inspector (who is never named) who, steeped in the methodology of crime investigation and influenced by the ideas of psychoanalysis swirling around early 20th century Vienna, calls in his wife, the Hungarian artist Erszébet to make a painting of the 18 year old Dora’s body in the morgue for later reference. Erszébet and her young friend, British governess Wally, embark on their own investigation, separate from and deliberately kept from the Inspector. The two investigations run in parallel, the Inspector’s being dominated by his theories of investigation and the role of the investigator, and Erszébet’s drawing on Hungarian folk tales and tropes. The ending seems to go off on a frolic of its own, straining credulity and it seemed to be an abrupt way of bringing the story to the end.

The book is set in Vienna in 1910 and the book has a detailed map at the start of the book. The text makes specific reference to particular places in Vienna, which can be seen on the map, although without an index, locating the buildings and parks was rather tedious, and I eventually realized that locations were rather incidental to the plot. Despite the care with which Shields has delineated the city, the Vienna location itself does not play an important role in the plot, unlike for example Patrick Süskind’s Perfume. There are many details in the book about figs, folklore and photography, and I began to suspect that the author was unable to let go of the research she had undertaken, and was going to put it in the book regardless of whether it actually added anything.

It was only when reading the notes that came along with the book (it was a bookgroup choice) that I realized the resonances between the victim Dora, and Sigmund Freud’s patient, Dora, on whom he based much of his theory of psychoanalysis. This clever resonance was clearly intended by the author, and yet she left it implicit in what is otherwise a very didactic book.

The relationship between the Inspector and Erszébet is a complex one, and I was pleased that she didn’t overlay the young Wally’s infatuation with Erszébet with a lot of anachronistic gender ideology. She had a light touch here, which could have been highlighted by a more overt interweaving of Freud’s theories, and their destabilizing of ‘reality’ and relationships.

The book was only 352 pages in length, but it felt much longer than that. All in all, not a particularly satisfying read.

My rating: 6/10

Sourced from: a former CAE bookgroup book. To liquidate their stock, they sent boxes of books to the disbanding bookgroups and we’re reading our way through them.

Read because: a bookgroup read.

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I hear with my little ear: Podcasts 8-15 May 2025

Posted on June 11, 2025 | Leave a comment

In the Shadows of Utopia Season 2, Episode 6 is the third part of this detour into Vietnamese history which I have found really interesting. The Path to the Second Indochina War – Part Three: Agent Orange, Kennedy… covers the years 1961 – 1963. The first tests for Agent Orange were carried out in 1961, and the program began in 1962. The nerve agent dioxin was included as part of the manufacturing process. JFK was a very close election, so now South East Asia was HIS problem. At this stage, Laos was seen as more of a problem. Kruschev announced his support for wars of national liberation, and Kennedy began escalating the war, although covertly and only as a half measure. The number of ‘military advisors’ was increased from 600 to 1600. Diem supported the defoliation program using Agent Orange, and a South Vietnamese navigator was placed in each plane as cover for the American involvement, despite US military unease about its use. After bombing with defoliants, villagers were moved to ‘strategic hamlets’, which was supposed to isolate villages from contact with the communist insurgency. Meanwhile, the Buddhist crisis that led to the self-immolation with which this little excursion into Vietnamese history began, came to a head in 1963. It had started earlier with the Buddhist Revival Movement in the 1920s. It clashed with Diem’s vision of putting Catholics into positions of power. After the protests and act of self-immolation, Diem was convinced that the Communists must be behind it, and cracked down even harder on the pagodas, leading to even further loss of support. On November 1 1963 there was a coup against Diem which the US ambassador claimed ignorance of, and although officially neutral, the US govt did not assist Diem. Diem escaped but he was later shop by the coup leaders. Meanwhile, back in Cambodia there was increased student and leftist protest. Sihanouk threatened the leaders, and fearing scrutiny of his secret identity Pol (we’ll call him ‘Pol’) returned to the jungles and the revolutionary movement.

The Rest is History Ep. 551 The Road to 1066: Countdown to Conquest (Part 4) I really have learned so much from this four part series. Rather than a great, sudden invasion, the integration of the Normans and the Britons started long before, as did the integration with Denmark. Quoting from the show notes, which explain this much better than I could:

Often symbolised as the last of the Anglo-Saxons, [The Godwinson family]’s stratospheric rise to power was engineered by Godwin, an obscure Thaine from Sussex, in a striking case of social mobility. Making himself integral to Cnut, he was made Earl of Wessex to help him run his new kingdom. But Godwin was also cunning and conniving, constantly shifting sides to ensure the maximum advantage to his family. Even Edward the Confessor, who hated the Godwinsons, had no choice but to promote Harold and Godwin’s other sons, and marry his daughter, Edith. But, with his hatred mounting and the couple childless, the fortunes of the Godwins would soon change…in September 1051, with tensions reaching boiling point, they went into exile. It would not last, and their return would see them catapulted to even greater heights of influence. Meanwhile, just as Edward’s life was dwindling, Harold’s star was rising, and across the channel William of Normandy’s prowess was also mounting.

On returning from exile, Edwin and the Godwins reconciled. Harold Godwin was shipwrecked, and taken under the protection of William of Normanby, and he swore to uphold William’s claim to the throne should Edward remain childless (which it was pretty obvious he would). Was Harold coerced into this? Certainly, if Harold or one of the Godwins became King, William certainly would invade. Meanwhile, there was ‘trouble up North’ with rebellion in Northumbria, where Harold’s brother Tosvig was in charge. In the end Tosvig went into exile, just as Edward was getting increasingly frail. And meanwhile, there was action afoot in Denmark.

Ezra Klein Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism Can I admit that I was a bit disappointed in this? It was actually recorded in 2022 before the Second Coming, and there’s lots of talk about story and narrative and it wanders all over the place.

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‘Typhoon Kingdom’ by Matthew Hooton

Posted on June 8, 2025 | 1 comment
2019, 288 p.

In my quick and rather shallow dive into Korean literature to accompany my visit there in April 2025, I feel as if I have come full circle with this book. Matthew Hooton’s Typhoon Kingdom is written in two parts, separated by 290 years. The first section is set in 1652 when Dutch accountant van Persie is shipwrecked on Jeju Island en route to a trading post in Japan. Six other sailors survived too, and were sent to the Emperor in Seoul. Van Persie is captured too and taken to a shaman, who slashes his tongue (not permanently) before he is handed over to a fisherman Hae-Jo who is charged with taking him to the Emperor Hyojong of Josean to join the other six sailors. Before embarking on the journey, his wounds are tended by one of the diving women of Jeju Island, and he carries this vision of his healer with him, as he is forced to place his fate in the hands of Hae-Jo as they traverse the kingdom on route to the emperor. The present tense narrative is told by three narrators: Van Persie, Hae-Jo and Emperor Hyojong himself.

The second part of the book is set in 1942, and it too is told by three narrators in the present tense. One is General Macarthur, impatient to take the fight to Korea after being forced to withdraw by his American commanders( I saw one of his corncob pipes in the Seoul War Memorial- I didn’t realize that it was ACTUALLY a corncob!)

The other two narrators are Yoo-jin, a young woman who uses her healing skills to treat a young villager with blue eyes, Won-je, who has joined the resistance to the Japanese occupation. Yoo-jin is captured by the Japanese (who have already been in control of Korea for the past 30 years), who use ‘insurgent’ women as ‘comfort women’ for the Japanese troops. In the chaos of the immediate post-war period, as Yoo-jin travels south to return home, Won-je continues to look for this woman healer.

Now, as it happens, two of the Korean books I read dealt with several of these themes. In Simon Winchester’s Korea: A Walk Through the Land of Miracles, he traverses South Korea following in the footsteps of Hendrick Hamel, the shipwrecked Dutch sailor, on whom the character of Van Persie is based. The Mermaid from Jeju dealt with the insurgency against the Japanese which then transformed into an insurgency against the post-war Nationalist soldiers, many of whom had fought with the Japanese previously. Yoo-jin’s family has come from Jeju Island, and it is there that she had learned her healing skills from generations of healers in her family.

Hooten’s depiction of the life of the comfort women was confronting and well-written. I was slightly surprised that a man was writing about the comfort women’s experiences, and I was impressed that he captured so well the rawness and physical pain of rough and unwanted sex. The abandonment of the ‘comfort women’ after the Japanese surrender led only to more danger as men’s allegiances shifted through self-interest and opportunity.

I found the second part of the book more – what to say? engaging, compelling, affecting- than the first and I wondered if the first part of the book was even necessary, given its distance from the events in the second part. But on second thought, there is a slight narrative link between the two section, and the events are a mirror-image of each other. In both, there is a woman who heals and in both there is a search to find the healer again; one narrative heads up towards Pyongyang, the other heads south back to Jeju Island. This is probably of more structural, rather than narrative, interest and perhaps added an extra dimension to the book. However, I felt that the second section was the stronger, and could have easily stood alone. It was certainly better written than The Mermaid from Jeju, although I found the consciously literary opening paragraph of many of the chapters a little too performative. That’s a small quibble: otherwise the narrative was well handled, the pace moved well and the landscape was rendered carefully.

It makes even more aware, though, of the complexity of the strained relationship between Korea and Japan, two countries that we tend to conflate as ‘Asia’ but which have a long and bloodied history.

My rating: 9/10

Sourced from: e-book from Yarra Plenty Regional Libary

Read because: I visited South Korea.

Other reviews: Lisa from ANZLitLovers enjoyed it (her review here) and Rohan Wilson reviewed it here.

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I hear with my little ear: Podcasts 1-7 May 2025

Posted on June 6, 2025 | Leave a comment

Background Briefing (ABC) Long Reads: The church’s disappearing women This episode, written and read by Julia Baird looks at the lack of progress in increasing the number of women in leadership in the Anglican Church, after 30 years. It’s all rather depressing, and it doesn’t really ring true with what I’ve observed, where nearly all the ministers (both Anglican and Uniting) in the churches in my suburbs are women. Nonetheless, there is a real ‘blokeification’ (my word, not hers) of churches going on where now 39% of men vs. 28% of women in Australia identify as Christian. Among Gen Z, 37% of men vs 17% of women agree with the statement that ‘Christianity is good for society’. This is the first time this has happened: in the past, more women than men identified as Christian. I don’t think that these numbers are a good thing: I wonder if it’s part of the Andrew Tate phenomenon and whether it reflects increased patriarchy in society expressed through the church.

The Agency Accused of Paying Bribes for Babies looks at the history of adoption of South Korean children by Australian families. 3500 children were adopted in Australia, most of them sourced from the Eastern Society Welfare Society Adoption Agency. Adoptions reached a peak in 1985, when 24 children would be approved in a single day. There was competition between South Korean adoption agency intake teams, and financial arrangements were instituted between agencies and hospitals. In More to the Story: Meeting your Mum as an Adult, Anna, who was adopted as a child, travels to South Korea to meet her birth mother.

Rear Vision (ABC) Donald Trump and the wrecking ball: The End of the World as We Know It. This episode asks whether the liberal international rules-based order that has underpinned international relations for the past 80 years, is about to collapse. Personally I’m a bit wary of this term ‘rules-based order’, as America, Israel and Russia have never signed up to it, so it seems that only some follow the rules. Borders and agreements existed before 1945, but the Hague Conventions at the end of the 19th and early 20th century codified them into law. After WWI, Woodrow Wilson could not get the League of Nations through Congress, and there was not enough willpower between WWI and WW2 to get anything done. Post WW2 the United Nations was formed, but the Cold War spawned a group of other ‘rules-based’ organizations like NATO, Bretton Woods, IMF- all Western based. Meanwhile the Soviet Union created its own bloc, and there was a group of non-aligned states. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, there were new attempts at universal rules, but this was all brought undone by 9/11. The expansion of globalism during the end part of last century and the first decades of 21st century weakened the global order, and many were left feeling sidelined and ignored, leading eventually to Trump.

History Extra How the English Took Manhattan. One of the history books that very much influenced me when I returned to university as a (very) mature aged student was Donna Merwick’s Death of a Notary (see my review here). Until I read that book, I had never really thought about the change of ownership of New York from Dutch to English hands, and the effect on people living through such changes. The Dutch possessed New Netherland for 40 years, until the British took over in 1664. The re-establishment of the Stuarts meant that Puritans were still seen as the enemy, so Britain began looking at New Amsterdam again. Neither the British nor the Dutch wanted to actually fight, so they settled on a deal, or a merger, whereby the British took effective control, although many Dutch people and businesses continued. A 17th century Trump would pride himself on such a deal.

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‘The Mermaid from Jeju’ by Sumi Hahn

Posted on June 4, 2025 | 1 comment
2022, 336 p.

As preparation for my trip to South Korea earlier this year, I read books with a South Korean setting, which is why I ended up reading this book. As it turns out, I read two books based on Jeju, a large island south of the South Korean mainland. It is an oval shaped island, with a large mountain Hallasan in the middle. The Jeju people are indigenous to the island, and have been there since Neolithic times. It is famous for its haenyeo, traditional women fishers who free-dive to gather molluscs and seafood in a semi-matriarchal society, where their wages formed the basis of the family income. Shamanism remained an important part of social and religious observance. Jeju was annexed by the Japanese (as was the rest of Korea) in 1910, and it became a hotbed of independence: a stance that remained when the US-sponsored South Korean government took over from the Japanese after WW2. It was this desire for independence and reunification which led to the South Korean government, led by Syngman Rhee, to see it as a potential hotbed for Communist insurgency. In 1948-9 the government led an ‘eradication campaign’ against these supposed insurgents, arising from the April 3 Incident in 1947, resulting in between 14,000 and 30,000 people (10 percent of Jeju’s population) being killed, and 40,000 fleeing to Japan.

This is the political background of the novel, which focuses on a young girl Goh Junja, who is coming into her own as a haenyeo diver. She encourages her mother to let her travel inland to swap sea produce for a pig, and on this journey she meets Yang Suwol, the son of a wealthy family on the mountain. They are instantly attracted to each other, but on her return from the mountain, she finds that her mother has died from injuries which at first she believed came from a diving accident. As the political situation intensifies, Yang Suwol becomes involved in insurgent activity, and Junja realizes that her own family is more politically involved than she realizes. The whole community is endangered by political currents at a world level that are manifested through cruelty and repression as it becomes increasingly difficult to work out whose side anyone is on.

The book is told in two parts. The first part commences with Mrs Junja Moon in Philadelphia in 2001, wife to Dr Moon, who is about to suffer an embolism. The story then backtracks to Jeju in 1944 as Junja nearly drowns while diving, then jumps ahead to 1948 and Junja’s meeting with Suwol. Part Two returns to Philadelphia, and as a reader you are wondering how Junja ended up being married to Dr Moon. Who’s he? What happened to Suwol? Dr. Moon decides to return to South Korea for the first time in many years, where he meets up with his old friend Dong Min. The book then alternates between 1944, 1948 (when Dr Moon- or more properly- Gun Joo were sent to the island as conscripts) and 2001 as the two men consult a Shaman and return to the mountain to learn the truth of what happened there some fifty years earlier.

The book starts with a timeline of political events, which is important as it frames the story. Unfortunately, it is a fairly sketchy timeline and it does not mention the word ‘nationalist’, even though it is used frequently during the book. The author does give political information, but it feels rather didactic, and I didn’t ever feel that I really understood the politics. The dual timeline, which is becoming rather hackneyed in historical fiction, made the book feel as if it were two separate books- as if she started writing one book, scrapped it, then started on another.

That said, the relationship between Junja and Suwol was well-handled and I found myself caring about what happened to them both, and pleased that it wasn’t tied up with an easy ending. However, the book seemed to be lacking something and I doubt that I would have persevered had I not had an interest in the setting.

My rating: 6/10

Sourced from: ebook borrowed from Yarra Plenty Regional Library

Read because: I was going to South Korea. I’m a little sorry that I didn’t go to Jeju now.

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