Category Archives: Book Reviews 2026

‘The Elegance of the Hedgehog’ by Muriel Barbery

Posted on April 28, 2026 | Leave a comment
2006/2008 320 p.

Translated from the French by Alison Anderson

I know that this book was on the best seller list for ages several years ago, but somehow or other I missed out on reading it. I think that I had it mixed up with Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes -both European animals, I guess- and I was surprised to find that it wasn’t a WW2 Jewish family story at all. Instead it is set at some undetermined time -1990s?- in a luxurious Parisian apartment block. Reneé Michel is the concierge there, a job that she she took over from her late husband Lucien after his death.

SPOILERS AHEAD

Outwardly Reneé appears to be a working class menial worker, largely invisible to the residents of the apartment block who see her as little more than one of the amenities of the building, like the elevator. But she is much more than this. A precocious child from a poor family, who was forced to leave school early and marry young, she has a thirst for knowledge of the most esoteric and philosophical kind but she hides her abilities from everyone. Her best and only friend is Manuela, who works as a cleaner in the building. Manuela does not share Reneé’s interests at all, but she is quick, observant, generous with her limited resources and a loyal friend. She also provides cover for Reneé, giving the appearance of two equally humble and uneducated women friends- which of course we know Reneé is not. An equally precocious child lives several floors up, twelve year old Paloma Josse who is a mixture of intellectual superciliousness, ennui and determination to subvert the bourgeois future that awaits her by planning to commit suicide on her thirteenth birthday.

The book is told alternately from the first person perspective of Reneé and Paloma. The author distinguishes the two voices through different fonts, but the narrative voice is strong enough in both of them that there is no need for the visual cues. Both of them are exploring big philosophical questions- Reneé at a more abstract level; Paloma by observing the behaviour of people around her and gradually distancing herself from her avowed intention to set fire to the apartment buildings and kill herself at the same time.

I’ll confess that I found some of the philosophical chapters rather tedious- a long chapter about phenomenology, for example- and until halfway through the book I was wondering whether it was going to go anywhere. But then one of the residents of the apartment block died, and his apartment was purchased and renovated by the wealthy Japanese Kakuro Ozu. A man of refined and simple tastes, and an observer of beauty, he recognizes through small clues that both Reneé and Paloma are intelligent, philosophical women, both hiding their intelligence behind a surface of gruffness and ignorance, in Reneés case or adolescent moodiness and self-centredness in the case of Paloma. Manuela, Reneé, Paloma and Kakuro form a bond to which the apartment residents are completely oblivious.

Kakuro asks Reneé on a date, and with endearing awkwardness she procures a dress through Manuela’s help and goes to the hairdresser for the first time in many years. But she is increasingly uncomfortable at his attention, telling herself that such a cultured and wealthy man could not be interested in a lowly concierge. This, however, is all a defence mechanism, and we learn from her family story that her sister Lisette had died after giving birth to the child of the wealthy employer she had left home for. Shaken by her sister’s death, “Don’t fraternize with rich people if you don’t want to die” had become her watchword, but it was countered by Kakuro’s response “You are not your sister, we can be friends”. Indeed, possibly even more than friends.

I won’t divulge the ending, but it came quickly and out of left field. All of my reservations about the lack of movement and philosophical pretension in the first half of the book were dispelled. It left me in tears, wishing that I could stop the ending and just hold on to the characters for a bit longer.

I am rather mystified by the title though. Paloma watches Reneé and observes:

Madame Michel has the elegance of the hedgehog: on the outside, she’s covered with quills, a real fortress, but my gut feeling is that on the inside, she has the same simple refinement as the hedgehog: a deceptively indolent little creature, fiercely solitary- and terribly elegant. (p.139)

I’m no expert on hedgehogs: indeed, I don’t know if I’ve ever seen one. I must say, though, that ‘elegant’ is not a word I would readily associate with them. Certainly Madame Michele is prickly, solitary, combative and self-contained but elegant?

My rating: 8/10

Read because: Rosanna Readers bookgroup (i.e. ex-CAE) selection through YPRL.

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‘Flashlight’ by Susan Choi

Posted on April 21, 2026 | Leave a comment
2025, 445 p.

It’s ironic that often the books that impress me the most are the ones that I delay writing about. I want the story to percolate for a while, and to really craft my response to it – and then by the time I get round to writing a blog post, it has all faded and I can’t remember enough details. However, in this case, the details (and even the plot) don’t really matter because I wouldn’t tell you about them anyway. For me, one of the real joys of this book was that I really didn’t know where it was going to take me next and by the time I got to the end, I felt as if I had been on a very long journey that crossed time and national boundaries. It’s a mystery, domestic fiction, historical fiction all rolled into one. I really enjoyed it but it really is impossible to talk about it in detail without spoiling it for you.

Suffice to say that it spans the years 1945 to 2008 across Korea, Japan and the United States, with a cast of inscrutable characters. It is based around a family: American born Louisa; her Korean-born father Serk who had been raised in Japan before emigrating to America; her mother Anne, estranged from her family and Anne’s illegitimate son Tobias who re-enters his mother’s life as an adult. There’s defiance and stubbornness, coldness and detachment, as well as a suffocating over-solicitousness and emotional games between the adults of the family. But if you’re someone who feels that you have to like a character, you’re going to be challenged because none of them are particularly likeable.

There are so many themes that come through here: secrecy and shame; language and communication; nationality; belonging; family; identity. They are never once mentioned as themes, but they emerge through the narrative and plot.

The title ‘Flashlight’ is well chosen, not just for the ‘ray of light’ motif that appears throughout the narrative, but also for the writing style. The omniscient third-person narrator moves from one character to another, but unlike many recent books that I have read that barely alight on one character before bouncing off onto the next one, this book stayed with each character for long enough that you felt you knew them, and at least can understand their perspective, even if you don’t share it. In fact, as readers, we know the characters better than the characters know each other, or than the characters even know themselves. Although there are connections between each character and the others, the emphasis is on one character at a time, in the same way that a flashlight can only illuminate one thing in isolation.

It is a long book- 445 pages- but I didn’t feel that it dragged. But perhaps that’s because I’m interested in Korean history: I know that other people in the Reading Circle did feel that it was far too long. It’s ambitious; it has a big story; the writer is control throughout and she takes responsibility for her story, instead of expecting the reader to put the bits together.

If there’s any disappointment here, it’s with myself. I know that I haven’t done justice to this book, because the surprises in the plot are the real strength of the narrative. All I can say is, read it for yourself.

My rating: 9/10

Read because: March selection for the Ivanhoe Reading Circle.

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‘I You We Them’ by Dan Gretton

Posted on April 18, 2026 | Leave a comment
2021, 1120 p.

Has anyone ever complained so much about reading a book? At 1.6kg, I found it too heavy to hold up while reading it in bed and having recently sprained my knee, I was not keen on ‘tenting’ my knees to lean the book against. At over 1000 pages long, it took two renewals at the library to complete, and even now as I write this review, it is overdue.

So why did I so willingly heft it off the floor each night, to keep reading? Quite simply, because I enjoyed the company of the author and once I gave up any idea of following an argument, I just floated along on his observations – a little bit like reading Proust, really.

The lengthy subtitle of the book is “Journeys Beyond Evil: The Desk Killers in History and Today” and this is the overall theme of the book, but it is intermingled with reminiscence, nostalgia, regret and curiosity as he travels around Europe researching his topic. It could just as easily be a travel book. Attracted to maps from childhood, he maps out the sites of concentration camps of Europe and their accompanying industrial infrastructure, he follows forced marches and places himself in massacre sites, forming his own mental and physical maps. And it could just as easily be an ecological/environmental diary of landscape. For him, the environment in which he holes up to immerse himself in his writing – the Suffolk Coast for Book One in winter; Pembrokeshire in spring in Book Two- becomes part of the narrative as well, particularly when he writes about a hurricane that buffets the cottage in which he is sheltering when the power goes out in the house he has rented.

Gretton himself is an activist as well as author and teacher. In 1983 he co-founded the political arts organization Platform, which describes itself on its website as bringing together workers and communities “to create new, liberatory systems that tackle injustice and climate breakdown”. In particular, it confronts the power of transnational corporations. You can see this emphasis coming through in this book in its focus on corporations; especially that of the German manufacturing, banking and insurance companies that still exist powerfully today, which had flourished in Nazi Germany through its contacts and contracts with the government. He also targets Shell and its influence in Nigeria that looked the other way during the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa, the activist who died trying to save his land and people from the destruction of Shell’s oil conglomerate. The “desk killers’ that he focuses on here are the managing directors of wealthy, multinational corporations, many of whom he interviewed after they have retired, and the often invisible bureaucrats and office workers who followed the procedures and timetables and the accountants in charge of the financial accounts that made genocide an anonymized, abstraction. There are no innocents here.

Although his focus is on corporations, he also hones in on individuals – most particularly Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect, whose own biography and the work of Gitta Sereny has thrown up so many questions about culpability and redemption. He also spends quite a bit of time on the Wannsee Conference of 20th January 1942, which pulled together as many agencies as possible to discuss the implementation of ‘the Final Solution of the Jewish question’. Of the 15 attendees (there were actually 16, counting the unnamed stenographer), seven held PhDs in law. We only know this because just one copy survived of the thirty copies made at the time. He parallels this with a discussion of the two Washington lawyers, who prepared memos for the Bush administration discussing the legalities and grey areas of torture and ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’.

Then there are the individuals who survived: Primo Levi, Jan Karski, Elie Wiesel. Some of the testimony in these books kept me awake at night, after turning off the light.

He concentrates predominantly on Nazi Germany, and on Nigeria to a lesser degree. But he also turns back to history to take up Gunther Grass’ question about how young people grow up in Britain and know so little about the long history of crimes during the colonial period. He looks at the East India Company and the Opium Wars, the slave trade, the Irish Famine, and what he claims as “the genocide” and the “extermination” of the Tasmanian Aboriginals (a contested question here in Australia, where there is a continuing Tasmanian First Peoples community today)[As an aside, if you’re looking a desk killers, I would have focused more on later bureaucrats and Protectors in the late 19th-early 20th century Australia whose arbitrary and desk-bound decisions did just as much as outright massacres to distort indigenous families and expunge language and culture]. He spends quite a bit of time on Namibia (former German South West Africa) where the systematic killing, detention and forced labour of the Nama and Herero people was a forerunner to actions undertaken by the Nazi government. He looks at the French massacre of between 120 and 200 Algerian demonstrators by the French government on 17 October 1961.

All of which would be pretty grim, continuing for over 1000 pages, if this were all that this book contains. But it’s not. There’s beautiful writing about his father and a wistful recounting of his own torrid, passionate affair with a younger man. There’s information dumps at time, as if you’re reading someone’s research notes. Interwoven are his own childhood memories, his political stances, travel-journey type entries.

It’s big; it’s untidy; it’s completely indulgent but it’s also thought-provoking and very easy to read. My complaints about weight and heft not withstanding, I missed hearing Dan Gretton’s voice when I finished. But perhaps there’s more: apparently this 1000+ pager is just Volume 1 of a two-volume publication. Hopefully the next volume will have an index, which I really missed in a book of this size. Will I read Volume II when it comes out: most probably, if I still have the strength to hold a 1.6 kg book!

My rating: Hard to say. 9?

Read because: I read or heard someone raving about it- can’t remember who.

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‘Find Me at the Jaffa Gate’ by Micaela Sahhar

Posted on April 15, 2026 | Leave a comment

2025, 265 p. & notes etc.

I feel a bit naive. As part of the standard Christmas schlock, there’s usually a TV report from Bethlehem where brief mention is made of the Christian congregations that celebrate Christmas, often supplemented by Christian pilgrims from other countries, most particularly the United States. It has never occurred to me to think about the status of Christian Palestinians who continue to live there beyond Christmas, and how the Israeli/Palestinian conflict affects them. I have become so accustomed to linking Palestinian with Muslim, that I’ve forgotten that Palestinians can be of any religion.

And so ‘Find Me at the Jaffa Gate’ is a brisk corrective to this ignorance. The author, Micaela Sahhar, comes from a Christian family: at first an Orthodox family, then later some family members were born again into a more evangelical brand of Christianity. Following the Nakba her extended family has splinters: some come to Australia and settle in Newport and Williamstown, many others emigrate to America, and some stay. Michaela herself was born in Australia, and does not subscribe to any particular faith. Her father is Palestinian but was born in Jordan, because he was born within days of his family fleeing Jerusalem in the wake of the bombing of the Semiaris Hotel by Jewish terrorists, the Haganah, as part of the ‘de-Arabization’ of West Jerusalem. Just as important in this book are her grandparents, particular Pa and Ellen, who emigrated to Australia as part of the family shift. She has grown up with the stories of her grandparents, aunts and uncles, and great-grandparents, and the photos that testify that – yes- the family lived in Jerusalem, no matter how much their presence and identity as Christian Palestinians has been denied.

This book is a piecing together of the stories of the different generations of her family, with stories and photographs interwoven. She travels to America to meet branches of the family, and returns to Jerusalem and Jaffa to locate the places where they lived, and to find that her family is still remembered by the people who stayed. Palestinians- Christian and Muslim- face the same appropriation (theft) of land and livelihood, and they are subjected to the same surveillance and humiliation by the Israeli military forces. This is a personal, family pilgrimage, but it also part of her academic identity, explored through a Ph D, and so bolstered by subtly placed quotations of historians and activists. I particularly enjoyed the chapter on ‘Mr Settler Colonialism’ where she writes about her friendship with the late Patrick Wolfe, who I also knew, and who died far too young but whose influence is still powerful- if anything, with the destruction of Gaza it is even more plangent.

There’s a beautiful piece of writing at the close of the book where she dreams of returning to Jerusalem, standing in her Pa’s garden and speak to her grandparents:

I would like to say to my Pa and to Ellen that nothing is truly gone if you know how to look, to say, look here, I have built our beautiful home out of words, a house Pa built twice in his life already, first in Jerusalem and then with the shape of his key in the eye of his mind. One day I will…[shout] I am I. And I am here. And when I do, I know that Ellen and Pa will be with me too.

I will shout this at the intersection of Mamillah, and on the balcony of the house my Pa built, and I will give what voice I have to the most joyous euphonia of the Palestinians returning to our once and future home, with the dead on our shoulders and the living in our arms. We will burst through the gates of the Old City and roam the New Jerusalem from the Greek Colony to Talbiyeh, from Qatamon to Baq’a, sweeping south to Gaza and north to the Galilee, and to all the places we are indivisibly from and that are ours. And as I cross the threshold of my grandfather’s house, I will lay my burden down.

And if it should not be me, then it will be another, when I will be an ancestor and those that I have loved will all be stars. (p. 263)

But this really strong, affecting and ultimately defiant and hopeful ending is not enough to overcome my other qualms with the book. The subtitle of the book is ‘An Encyclopedia of a Palestinian Family’, and it does reflect the fragmentary, all-embracing nature of an encyclopedia. But few of us would read an encyclopedia by choice, and this does not have the genre-structure of an encyclopedia: it is not alphabetical, there is no index. There are 48 chapters, between 5-10 pages in length. The chronology and setting skip about, and right up to the end of the book I found myself having to refer to the family tree at the back of the book to work out who this person was because there were just so many, and only a few were fleshed out to be instantly recognizable.

I know that I’ve been complaining about these short, almost kaleidescopic mosaic books that seem to be so popular at the moment, and here I am doing so again. Any one of these chapters, except the last one, could have been placed anywhere, and with each one it felt like a carefully polished piece of discrete writing, almost more like a journal article or the product of a writing workshop rather than of an overarching structure. Perhaps I’m showing my age, but it all feels so filmic and the product and fodder of a short attention span. Perhaps I’m too old for all this and need something more 19th or 20th century in structure, staying well away from anything that has ‘fragmentary’ ‘gaps’ or ‘blank spaces’ in its description.

My rating:7.5/10

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library

Read because: I saw that it won the non-fiction category of the Victorian Premiers Literary Awards.

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‘Silence is my Habitat’ by Jessica White

Posted on April 8, 2026 | 1 comment
2025, 150p.

The subtitle of this book is ‘ecobiographical essays’. What a many-stranded thing biography is becoming! Jessica White, the author of these essays and other academic work in the field, defines ‘ecobiography’ on her website in this way:

While a biography chronicles a person’s life, an ecobiography details how a person’s sense of self is shaped by their environment. My forthcoming essay collection, Silence is my Habitat: Ecobiographical Essays, details how deafness shapes my relationship with different environments, such as the bush, bodies of water, archives, and institutions.

This double focus – i.e. deafness or Deafness (she notes the distinctions of that capital letter) as both identity and medical condition, and the physical environment- permeates these essays, which range across both her personal and academic experiences. I admit that I’m not absolutely convinced that her approach needs the specific genre-descriptor of ‘ecobiography’ : is really a separate strand of biography or just a particular consciousness of environment on the part of the subject or on the part of the narrator?. In locating them as essays, she picks up on the etymology of the word ‘essay’ as her attempt to ‘trial’ and ‘try’ her responses to a subject, and to explore her own identity as woman and writer, after the death of her mother.

There are a number of themes that emerge through this collection of eleven essays. The first, as suggested by the title, is that of deafness. “Silence is my habitat” was a comment that the poet Judith Wright made to Heather Rusden in a 1990 interview, one of the few times that Wright discussed her increasing deafness. Reflecting, perhaps, the emphasis on identity in the intervening thirty years, White seems almost frustrated that there are no specific references to deafness in Wright’s poetry, although she and other scholars have detected it in the ‘negative poetics’ of her work- singing the praises of the natural world while acknowledging the inadequacy of words to describe it. When asked why she had not chosen to write about her deafness, Wright replied “Oh, I wouldn’t say it was a choice. I haven’t felt that it was an important part of my life in that way” (p.74). That could not be said of Jessica White. She writes of how meningitis as a three-year old robbed her of all hearing in her left ear, half the hearing in her right ear, and possibly some scarring on her brain (p. 17). She consciously seeks out writers who are conscious of sound and deafness including Fiona Murphy, poet Ilya Kamisky and the online Deaf History Collection of the writing, images and artefacts of deaf people. She explains the difficulties of architecture and the design of academic teaching at university, and how it has exacerbated the workload of a deaf tutor. She titles her essay about the shutdown of borders with COVID as “We Were All Deaf During the Pandemic”.

White shares with Judith Wright a deep environmental consciousness, which she expresses in her essay on Golden Orb spiders in her essay “Quintessence” and bird song- which she can hear- in the essay “On the Wing”. This alertness to the natural world runs through White’s academic work on Georgiana Molloy, the West Australian botanist who arrived in 1830. Molloy appears in the chapters “Intertwining” and ” Unseamed”, while White’s own grappling with her research and writing about Georgiana Molloy filters across different essays. In “Intertwining” where she describes Molloy’s experience in childbirth and loss of infant children, she explores – very honestly- her own yearning for a child, set against her partner’s refusal to have children, and her own awareness that the time for having a child was passing.

“The Breath Goes Now” focusses on her mother’s death: always a confronting event, the tenor of which is often shaped by the relationship between mother and child. In White’s case, it was her mother who was encouraging her to finish her book on Georgiana Molloy before she died- a comment made only half in just as her mother’s chronic lung weakness was curtailing her activities and life. Indeed, these essays emerged as a response to her mother’s death, when she found the architecture of her book and all those words collapsing. Ah Jessica- the death of the remaining parent is another event to be confronted yet, with all the questions it raises about your own identity as child when you no longer have parents.

These essays are beautifully written, as they approach her overarching themes tentatively, circling around them, advancing towards them, then retreating or splintering off to other safer ground before moving forward (literally essay-ing) again. Most of them are between 10-20 pages in length containing many short shards, like a flow of thoughts, asterisked to separate each one from the other, which is a writing style and fashion I am becoming less enthusiastic about, I must admit. They are very honest, especially those describing her relationship with her partner Bruce: perhaps too honest, when she re-reads them twenty years hence? But this honesty is also what gives the reader a feeling of intimacy with the author: a Garner-esque feeling that you have been having a good chat with an intelligent, sensitive friend.

My rating: 8.5/10

Read because: I encountered Jessica in the Australian Womens Writers Challenge a few years back, was aware of her work on Georgiana Molloy, and was interested to see what she’s doing now. Or does that just mean ‘nosiness’?

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‘The Last Painting of Sara de Vos’ by Dominic Smith

Posted on April 5, 2026 | Leave a comment
2016, 372 p.

I guess that you could say that if a historical fiction book sends you off to internet-land to find out which bits are true, then it has worked. I should have taken more notice of the author’s note which explains that Sara de Vos is a fictional, composite character. But I didn’t and so, yes, there I was half-way through the book, searching high and low for the paintings that are described in the text, trying to find out more about Sara de Vos, only to find myself directed back to publicity for Dominic Smith’s book. So, to save you the search, Sara de Vos is a 17th century fictional character and the paintings described don’t exist, although there are similarities with the few details known about Sara van Baalbergen. Like the Sara de Vos of this book, she was admitted to the the Haarlem Guild of St. Luke and married a fellow painter. None of her works have survived.

SPOILER ALERT

But in Dominic Smith’s book, three of Sara de Vos’ paintings still exist- but which ones? The book opens in New York in November 1957, as a painting by Sara de Vos is stolen from the luxurious apartment of wealthy Marty de Groot, plucked from the wall above the marital bed. It ends up in the lands of Australian art historian, Ellie who is studying de Vos, freelancing in art restoration as a sideline activity. Her rather dodgy associate, Gabriel, asks her to make a copy of it. She asks no questions about where it comes from or to whom it belongs: she doesn’t want to know. It’s an opportunity to really study a de Vos painting close-up but it’s a decision that she regrets for the rest of her life, especially as her career blossoms and she becomes a noted academic and curator of Dutch Golden Age paintings. After assuming that the copy (i.e. forgery) has been resolved through her own contact- and more- with de Groot, it seems that her indiscretion of some forty years earlier is about to bring her undone as what she fears is two copies of the same painting are heading towards Australia, for an exhibition that she is curating at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

So what was this painting, source of both desire, possession and trepidation? It was At the Edge of the Wood, thought to be painted by Sara de Vos in 1636, depicting a young girl standing against a silver birch, watching skaters on a frozen river as the sun sets. Through the flashbacks to the 1630s that are interwoven through the book, we learn that it was painted surreptitiously by Sara de Vos, who although admitted to the Guild of St Luke- something almost unheard of for a woman- was expected to paint still life pictures within a domestic setting. She and her husband Barent had been expelled from the Guild for painting unsigned landscapes outside of the Guild strictures and her life is falling apart. She is still grieving the loss of her seven year old daughter, and deeply in debt, Barent has deserted her, leaving her to make her own way.

The book, then, has three intersecting strands: Sara’s story in 17th century Netherlands; Ellie’s life in 1950s Europe and ill-advised venture into forgery and later interaction with the rightful owner Marty de Groot, and 2000 in Sydney when three de Vos paintings are heading to upend Ellie’s career. In places it reads like a mystery, and historical fiction, in other places a critique of the art scene and collecting practices, and an exploration of grief and regret. He writes exceptionally well of Ellie as an awkward, young and inexperienced girl far from home, embarrassed by her virginity and alternately attracted to and repelled by an older man who is interested in her for his own purposes. He does conversation well, and his descriptions of paintings are so crisp that you think that you might have seen them once- even though, of course, you couldn’t have. At times his description of painting and forgery techniques drag a little, but they do pay testament to the research that he has undertaken as part of writing this book.

And what was Sara de Vos’ last painting? Ah well, you’ll have to read the book…

My rating:8/10

Read because: Book Group selection, sourced from Yarra Plenty Library Book Groups collection.

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‘Ankami’ by Debra Dank

Posted on April 2, 2026 | 2 comments
2025, 152 p.

Both visually and in its subject matter, this third book by Debra Dank and her first We Come With This Place (see my review here) are linked. However, the tone of this book is different: instead of being a celebration of family, country and continuity as her first book was, this book is infused with an anger which is moulded into regret. The beautiful writing is still there, but there’s an injury here as well. I wonder if the timing of this book has something to do with this? It was published in 2025, post-Voice Referendum. I see the defeat of the Referendum as a mean-spirited rejection on the part of white Australia of the responsibility to listen – something that Governments seem happy to do with lobby groups, particular religious groupings and big business, but not our First Peoples whose ‘brand’ we blithely adopt at international events like Olympic Games and tourism advertisements.

She herself acknowledges her anger, which she capitalizes with an Upper Case A. As soon as she awakes, her uninvited bedfellow Anger whispers to her and causes her body to tighten. As she tries to locate where Anger comes from, she moves to “the outskirts of my reminiscence”, where she finds

sombre sub-memories that suggest the what might have beens, the sentient breathing of those who did not have the opportunity to make themselves more substantial by their living, but I find them there all the same, prowling like misshapen birds waiting to tell a calamitous story. I know too much about those birds, their earthly form an unsettling combination of shiny black feathers and yellowish beaks, staring eyes… and about their stories. They are often around, the flapping of their wings and their cawing voices adding to the daily rhythms of my living steps, but inside, with my unseen companion, Anger, they seem to offer obscure warnings of imminent and dire happenings. (p. 34)

So what has happened between her first and second books? Certainly in We Come With This Place there is violence and injustice but her Anger/Regret in this book starts as whispers from aunties who tell her of voices “all them kids” that cried at night, and older women in the community who urge her to go up to the islands in the north because her father had family there. When she asked her father, he denied that he had any other unacknowledged siblings. There was an appointment with an Aboriginal agency trying to link up families again that seemed to be fruitless. Then there was the unsolicited and unexpected phone call from a woman who was putting together and thought that they might be related on account of their shared name. There was silence when Debra told her that she and her father were Aboriginal. There was a silence. “Oh well, um, that’s nice. Er, you have a nice day”. (p. 81)

Then there is finally, definitely, the documents that she located in the National Archives.

Time collapsed in those moments of opening the attachments and doing the cursory read that I thought would be adequate to find what I had assumed was waiting to be found. I was looking for an easy telling of names and places and times that I already knew, not this thing that greeted me with a wicked and vengeful eye. In that moment I was so very grateful for those documents but there was an awful, almost hateful, separation too. I discovered that my father had not one sibling but four, who were taken, that my paternal grandmother had given birth to ten children, not the six that I had known about. Those four others seemed to be part of the Stolen Generations, and later, as I sat in silence to process that, I remembered that there had been whispers. (p. 62)

What seems to be particularly galling is that these four children are an absolute void. They are not named, or numbered. The document from the National Archive was a letter advising of the death of her maternal grandmother, the mother of 10 children. Her youngest child had died, and the other living five children were on the Alexandria station. The author of the letter didn’t know where the other children were.(p. 94) When the protector arrived up at Alexandria station, he expected to find the children there, but “I understand it is the practice to trade workers between this one and that”. (p. 87)

In the Redfern speech in 1992, Paul Keating (or Don Watson his speechwriter) spoke of the failure of imagination on the part of White Australia. Despite the bland language of the time, it doesn’t require a great deal of imagination to recognize child removal or slavery.

Here is the ‘Ankami’ of the title: “to give life to”. Her book gives life to these children of the absence. She recognizes that it is not anger, but sorrow at the ‘should have beens’ of these four missing siblings, aunts and uncles, and the web of cousins that might have been wrapped up into the family, as she had been.

I realize that I’m not angry at all, that what I’m feeling is loss, loss that is pervasive and soul deep and profound. I see now that wandering through my body to eventually arrive at what may be close to my soul, that careful travelling gaze found the site that hosts my sorrow. I live with long term loss that is impossible to grieve for because I don’t know who I should miss. I didn’t learn their faces. I didn’t feel their joy or wrath; they never taught me the things they needed to teach me as much as I needed to learn them. Mostly I don’t know how to miss them because they were never there, merely half-imaginings on that opaque edge of my knowing of what should have been, but they’re there in ways that I can never escape because they’re in my blood. And somehow I’m grateful for that because they deserve so much more than to only exist in that horrible arrangement of ink. (p. 177)

Danks spends quite a bit of time in this book talking about fruit cake, which seems a paradox. It is a fruitcake from a recipe brought from Scotland with the ‘settlers’ of her family, that has been handed on from daughter to daughter. She talks about her non-indigenous father-in-law’s stories of his childhood and the perils of surfing and the sea, stories that he had told many, many times before. We all have history, but only one history is told; only one history is recognized.

I think there is a particular kind of superficial living gripped by folk who hear only one history, only one way of thinking…let’s all be truly courageous about owning our entire history and acknowledging all of it, and then be proud- an informed pride, rather than one that is steeped in wilful ignorance. (p. 111-2) …. The central truth in this story is that all Australians now benefit from what was done to my family and to almost all other Aboriginal families in Australia and it can only heal us all to admit that much at least. But I don’t know that such a young country has the maturity to accept that. (p. 179)

It doesn’t. This is what Australia said ‘no’ to.

This book is confronting and asks difficult questions that we don’t want to answer, but it is not bashing you over the head with guilt. As Antonia Pont, who wrote the Foreword notes, the book “circles, spirals, sidles close to, and also confronts legal, political, communal and personal facts and happenings, with a rigorous yet not overplayed scholarly knowledge of the detail” (p.xii) It is a bit like probing the skin around a wound: touch, flinch, but touch again more gently. Such grace in allowing us the space to be so tentative, but still quietly insistent that there is much work yet to be done. ‘Ankami’ has been shortlisted for the 2026 Victorian Premier’s Award. It didn’t win, but it would be a worthy winner.

My rating: 9/10

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‘The Other Americans’ by Laila Lalami

Posted on March 26, 2026 | 1 comment
2019, 301 p.

The front cover of this book shows a stylized drone-view type drawing of a suburb in America, with gabled houses surrounded by lush green lawn and trees. It looks just the way I imagine American suburbia to look, full of Leave-it-to-Beaver and Brady Bunch types. The ‘Other America’ in this book live in a rural town on the edge of the desert and the “other Americans” who live there are very different to this white, sanitized image.

Late at night in a small town in the Mojave Desert, California, middle-aged Driss Guerraoui, a cafe owner who originally emigrated from Morocco, is killed in a hit-and-run accident. It is assumed that it is accidental, but his daughter, Nora, believes that it was a deliberate ‘accident’ even though her grieving mother Maryam and sister Salma do not follow her in her obsession with finding the perpetrator. The local police are brought in, including Coleman, a female officer that we later learn is of African-American descent, and deputy sheriff Jeremy Gorecki, an ex-Iraq veteran who had grown up in the town and had long had a school-boy crush on Nora. Before the accident Nora had been living in Chicago, trying to carve out a career as a musician, and involved with a married man who had not followed through on his pledges to leave his wife. But when her father is killed, she returns to her home town and again becomes involved with the boys she went to school with, including Jeremy and A. J. and his father Anderson, who owned the bowling alley beside her father’s cafe. However, the accident did not go completely unseen. Efrain, an undocumented immigrant, saw the collision but fear of the authorities stopped him going to the police. He only came forward when Nora offered a generous reward, possible because of a bequest left to her by her father (a bequest resented deeply by her sister).

The story is told in a chorus of nine voices, including that of the dead man Driss. Because they are all telling the story from their own perspective, we learn much more than about just the accident and the investigation, which is rather an anti-climax as far as a police procedural goes. We see parallels between Driss and Efrain, both making a life in a new country; we learn of infidelities in Nora’s own family; we see racism and resentment being played out at multiple levels. Because they are told from each character’s point of view, we gain multiple perspectives on the same event but I feel that, as a writing technique, it’s a bit of a cop-out. The voices were not sufficiently different from each other and the author is relieved of the responsibility of tying them together. It has been done before, and it just felt a bit tired as a style.

My rating: 7/10

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library

Read because: I have Leila Lelani’s new book reserved, and I thought I’d read one of her earlier works first.

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‘We Come With This Place’ by Debra Dank

Posted on March 22, 2026 | 1 comment
2022, 249 p.

As a local historian and having lived all my life within a 10 km radius, I have a strong sense of place, but I acknowledge that it is not the same as the First People’s sense of Country. That’s Country with a capital C, and there’s no ‘the’. It’s just Country, and I respect First People’s embeddedness in it, but deep down I know that don’t really understand it in the same way. Debra Dank’s We Come With This Place is probably the best explanation and expression of it that I have read.

Dank is a Gudanji/Wakaja woman: teacher, wife, mother and grandmother. She grew up in Camooweal in Queensland but her family, are from the south-western Gulf of Carpentaria and their dreaming is the three travelling Water-women, birthed from the salt water, who became the first tellers of stories and grew the country as they moved through it. The Water-women, and the knowledge of water runs through this book, opening and closing the narrative. This is probably the only conventional part of the telling, as different generations’ stories are interwoven without clear signposting, and as pain and abuse occur over and over again.

The introduction to the Yoorook ‘Truth be Told’ report spoke of putting First Peoples’ Stories against the written, European histories. A number of years ago, historian Ann McGrath wrote a history Born in the Cattle (1989), which used oral histories to tell the stories of Indigenous people living on pastoral stations in the Northern Territory, a ‘no-shame’ job which enabled the cattle workers and their families to live on Country, maintain traditional obligations, and earn a living. It seemed a rather rose-tinted analysis even at the time, and seems even more so thirty years later with our later knowledge of the Stolen Wages, and the Massacre Map. Dank herself gives a different view of the pastoral workers’ life through her father’s story, and through her own as well, as she spent several living on stations with her family, where they were treated with varying degrees of acceptance.

Her father, Soda, was born on the banks of the birthing creek on Wakaja Country, on what became known as Alexandria Station. After witnessing his mother being raped, and accused of poddy (calf) stealing and pursued by white co-workers on the path of vengeance, he escaped the Station and crossed the Queensland border into Camooweal, where he met Dank’s mother and married her and established a family. The indigenous community is not necessarily supportive of marriage between indigenous partners: Soda’s mother-in-law, an Indigenous woman who was protective of her status in a small, tightly-knit Methodist community, reported Debra’s birth to the Aboriginal Protector, who at that time had the power to take lighter-skinned children from their families. It didn’t happen in this case. Debra’s mother, who had benefited from Westernized schooling, put a heavy emphasis on education, and indeed she oversaw not only her children’s education when the family was living on a pastoral station, but that of the station-master’s children as well. Her father could neither read nor write. Her love for both parents is unmistakable, but she is clear-eyed about domestic violence within her family, and the recurrent injustice, racism and pain that recurs across the generations.

Despite her maternal grandmother’s hostility, Dank had a close relationship with her grandparents and from them she learned about Country. Her descriptions of camping, of tramping through desert scrub looking for water, and the vast landscape are beautiful. Through a series of short chapters, she tells of the lives of her grandparents (and further back) and parents but she does not necessarily help the reader by giving a straight-forward chronological account. At times, I found myself flipping back to see whose story it was – her father’s? Her grandfather’s?- but I’m sure that this is intentional. Violence and dispossession seeped through the generations, as did the love and knowledge of Country. It’s a love and knowledge that she is giving to her children, and to us too as readers. The cyclical story pattern reflects First People’s story-telling and its sense of time and patterns. She uses language as well, without the support of a glossary at the back, and so you need to deduce the meanings of words which, ever the teacher herself, she uses several times within a few paragraphs so that you can work out the context.

I was particular struck by one passage where she describes looking for food in desert country with her father, on land that was not their country. I realized that our Acknowledgements of Country embody similar sentiments, but without the promises of benign intention.

We had been cautious when we approached. Dad had been extra careful to talk to that place and to assure the old people there that we were coming to gather some food, and to let them known who we were and where we had come from. He went on to tell them we meant no harm and we would take only enough to feed us on that day, that our country and our people, like us, were grateful to be given food there. We would leave enough to share with the turkeys that would arrive soon, he assured those that dwelt there. And they were kind to us. We had enough to satisfy our needs, but it was always like that. Talk to the country, talk to old people, talk, talk, talk. Talk your story into this place to sit there with the ancestors. (p. 104)

If only we were able to acknowledge country so honestly.

This book was shortlisted for several awards in 2023, and it won four categories in the NSW Literary awards, the Australian Literary Society Gold Medal and the University of Queensland Non-Fiction award that year. It deserved such recognition. It is very, very good.

My rating: 9/10

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library

Read because: I borrowed her most recent book about her family story, and I realized that I should read the original book first.

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‘Broken Heart: A True History of the Voice Referendum’ by Shireen Morris

Posted on March 10, 2026 | 1 comment
2024, 222 plus notes

I was crushed by the defeat of the Voice referendum, appalled that such a simple request would be rebuffed by so many people through fear and -although no one wanted to own it – racism. No wonder First Peoples kept silent immediately afterwards, because the implications were just too awful. I can’t imagine how the people who had been the ‘face’ of the Yes case felt. Broken Heart by Shireen Morris tells us.

Shireen Morris starts off by explaining her own position: neither Indigenous nor white. She is of Indian Fijian ancestry, the daughter of parents who migrated to Australia in the 1970s. This placed her in an ambiguous position. It was a political reality that the Indigenous 3% minority would need supporters and the advocates from the 97% for the referendum to pass, and somehow the white constitutional lawyers and advisers, seemed revered and respected. But as a non-white ally, she was often accused of being ‘not blak’.

She is a constitutional lawyer, whose primary focus under the mentorship of Noel Pearson and the Cape York Institute over the previous 12 years had been Indigenous constitutional recognition. Now, I’m no great fan of Noel Pearson, I must admit. I find his Old Testament Prophet, hectoring tone abrasive, and his alignment with right wing politicians off-putting. However, in relation to referenda (referendums?) they will only pass with bipartisanship, and the referendum often has to be introduced by the party less ideologically likely to do so. For example, the much-vaunted 1967 referendum was introduced and carried by the Liberal Party, and the neo-liberal economic reforms of the 1980s could only have been introduced by a Labor party. It would have been far better (albeit rather galling as far as Labor voters are concerned) if constitutional recognition had been introduced by the Liberal Party. But as Morris showed in her previous book Radical Heart, once the then-prime minister Malcolm Turnbull rejected the Voice proposal in October 2017, there was little hope of bipartisanship. There was only ever bipartisanship for an amorphous and wholly symbolic form of recognition, and that proposal was explicitly and firmly rejected by Indigenous people. There were four choices: 1. accept a symbolic statement which would be rejected by Aboriginal people 2. wait for bipartisanship- but when, if ever, would that happen? 3. Abandon all hope 4. Try to win it without Bipartisanship. They went for the fourth option.

Noel Pearson and the Cape York Institute promote the idea of the Radical Centre:

Finding the radical centre requires engagement across divides, in contrast to the entrenched ideological positions and point-scoring of ordinary partisan politics. It is not simply about splitting the difference between two opposing principles to reach a lowest-common denominator. Rather, it is about harnessing the ‘dialectical tension’ in enduring disagreements to uncover a creative and ambitious reform solution… A thesis is proposed, which attracts a counterargument, the antithesis. The radical centre endeavours to synthesise these contradictory insights into a richer truth or a more correct and consensus-building position….The radical centre thus eschews simplistic categories like left and right. Finding it is an empathetic endeavour, requiring us to see the humanity and intelligence in our opponents and the kernels of truth in their opinions. (p. 26)

This is where Pearson and Morris aimed their activities, but there’s not much evidence of it here. People changed sides, allies became opponents, people lied. I wonder if they still have faith in the Radical Centre.

The book starts with a timeline, starting in 2012 through to the referendum on 14 October, when 40% voted ‘yes’ and approximately 60% voted ‘no’. It wasn’t always that way: there was around 60% support at first until mid-2023. There were many meetings and several drafts, and the accusation by the Coalition that Albanese presented it as ‘my way or the highway’ was just not true. There were many, many compromises but never from the Coalition. In retrospect, Morris thinks that they gave ground too early, which left them no where to go.

In 2014 Peter Craven, Julian Leeser, Damian Freeman and constitutional lawyer Ann Twomey proposed a constitutionally guaranteed Indigenous body to provide ‘advice to the Parliament and the Executive Government on matters relating to’ Indigenous people. Yet, at various times, all except Twomey distanced themselves from this initial suggestion. Frank Brennan opposed it from the start- he only wanted symbolic constitutional recognition. Others flip-flopped: Turnbull said yes, but with equivocation and probably did more damage by giving people reasons to vote no when he voiced his misgivings. Peter Craven seemed to live up to his name. Julian Leeser was a co-creator and longtime supporter of the Voice but then he recommended gutting the advice-giving aspect of it. But at least he had the courage of his convictions to resign his position. Morris dubs him ‘a noble politician’ for standing up for what he believed in, notwithstanding negative career ramifications. Given Leeser’s equivocation, I think she’s giving him a free pass. Ex-ministers Cheney, Peter Baume and Ken Wyatt declared that they would vote ‘yes’, and finally Leeser switched to genuine advocacy, along with Andrew Gee and Brigid Archer.

As far as Albanese is concerned, Morris claims that he committed the first error when announcing the referendum at the Garma festival without include the title of the law that was being proposed (I reckon – gees, it was a music festival, not a court of law or parliament). The announcement was a surprise, and it came over as a Labor policy. Albanese did offer to negotiate with Peter Dutton, but Dutton didn’t take up the offer. Why didn’t Albanese let that be known? And should Albanese have cancelled when the support collapsed? She suggests that perhaps Albanese thought that it better that the country reject it, rather than that he break a promise. Should he have delayed? Well, it probably wouldn’t make any difference: it was too late, not too early.

I think that she gives Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and Lydia Thorpe a free pass. I know for myself, my support wavered at the thought that Indigenous people themselves might not want it. As it turns out, there was overwhelming Indigenous support.

The Yes side made mistakes too. They were advised that most people only engage with a referendum question 4-6 weeks before hand, and that powder should be kept dry. But it was a mistake: the NO campaign got a head start, especially over Christmas when the YES campaign just went to ground. They had no answer to the NO’s objection that everyone was equal and that the Voice would divide the country by race.

There’s a lot of if-onlys here: if only the Coalition had championed a Voice during their time in government; if only Turnbull had not rejected it in 2017;if only people like Tony Abbott, Christian Porter, Jeff Kennett, Alan Jones and many others had not switched from Yes to No; if only the constitutional drafters Greg Craven and Frank Brennan had not attacked the constitutional drafting; if only the compromises Indigenous people made had been saved for when people were paying more attention. If only the Labor government had explained the constitutional change better, and been able to encourage Coalition co-ownership. If only the YES campaign had started campaigning in earnest much earlier; and if only it had better strategies for countering disinformation. If only the media had not prosecuted false balance, and had critiqued mistruths. If only we had better politicians: a bit smarter on the left and much kinder on the right.

And most importantly:

If only we were better Australians, more generous with our love and less susceptible to fear. p. 219

I don’t know where to go with this, and I don’t think that Shireen Morris does either. Her mentor, Noel Pearson, said that he would step back from politics if the Referendum failed and he has kept to his word. What a depressing book.

My rating: 8/10

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library

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