Category Archives: Ivanhoe Reading Circle

‘Wandering with Intent’ by Kim Mahood

Posted on July 31, 2026 | Leave a comment
2002, 256 p.

A collection of essays is a strange beast. In Australia’s relatively circumscribed literary/commentary scene most essays seem to orbit around a small number of journals: Griffith Review, The Monthly, Meanjin, ABR. Nine of the essays in this collection have appeared in such journals between 2007 and 2019, and this is Mahood’s third book. The first, Craft for a Dry Lake (2000) was written in the wake of her father’s death and the second Position Doubtful: Mapping Landscapes and Memories (2016) covered similar material to that found in several of these essays.

‘To essay’, as her very first sentence announces:

means to try, to endeavour, to attempt. It implies risk and failure. It is also the only way to find out whether something is possible. These essays are a sort of written equivalent of hunting and gathering with intent. They are the product of my own wandering among the conundrums and contradictions of the cross cultural world I’ve chosen to inhabit, and of my intent to understand and honour it.

She is aware of the perils of a white woman writing about her engagement with the black world.

The essays in this collection were written over a period of more than fifteen years, during which time the attitudes and sensitivities around who has the right to speak and write about Indigenous issues have become increasingly charged and complex. This has left me wondering about what the implications of cancel culture and identity politics might be for me. Some of the previously published essays would likely not make it into print in today’s cultural climate, but I have chosen not to edit out what might now cause offence and attract criticism. To do so would be disingenuous, and a betrayal of my endeavour to understand and communicate as honestly as I can, something of the unique cultural interface I’ve been enmeshed in and witness to for much of my life…. That I exercise cultural privilege when writing about desert Aboriginal people is a given. The question is whether I exercise this privilege in a way that can be justified. I have been grappling with this conundrum since I began writing, and it never gets any easier.

It this humility and honesty about her own limitations and the ‘conundrums and contradictions’ that bestows on her an authority to speak from the position she is standing on, not pretending to be more than she is. She grew up on a pastoral station in the 1960s- a situation in the pre-WalkOff days that evokes the depiction of outback pastoral life in Ann McGrath’s Born in the Cattle – and she grew up with Aboriginal children. In the essay ‘Flowers for Evelyn’ she attends the funeral of Evelyn, whose brother worked as a stockman on their station back in the 1960s. Although part of the white pastoralist’s family, for the aboriginal people gathered there, “I am family and this is something I have to do” and she is asked to speak first. The funeral, and the people attending it, are all familiar to her and yet she is on the edge as well. At another funeral, she hesitates to speak, and she can feel the waves of disapproval – another whitefella has let them down again.

For me, the stand-out essay of the collection is ‘Kardiya are like Toyotas: white workers on Australia’s cultural frontier’, an essay that ended up being included in the induction material of many indigenous organizations. She calls it straight. As she points out, a new worker heading to Antartica would undergo physical or psychological assessment of their ability to stand up to the stresses of isolation, the extreme environment and intense proximity to other people. Yet there is no criteria to weed out the “mad, bad and incompetent who prowl the grey zone of Indigenous service delivery”. Like the ubiquitous white Toyota ute provided to organizations, white workers (kardiyas) break down, are abandoned and in the fullness of time another one will be delivered to commence the cycle again.

There are many reasons why kardiya break down. Some break themselves, bringing with them baggage lugged from other lives, investing in the people they’ve come to help with qualities that are projections of their own anxieties and ideals. Eager and needy, they are prime material for white slavery, rushing to meet demands that increase in direct proportion to their willingness to respond to them. They create a legacy of expectation and dependency, coupled with one of failure and disappointment.

This is heightened by the constant and demanding interaction with Aboriginal people themselves, and fact that ‘blaming the kardiya is the lubricant that smooths the volatile frictions of community life.”

There are the good people, who are overworked and undervalued; and there are the sociopaths, the borderline criminals, the self-righteous bullies and the mentally unhinged, who gravitate to the positions that no one else wants, entrench themselves, and contribute in no small degree to the malaise that haunts Indigenous communities….The famous quip about mercenaries, missionaries and misfits has a lot of truth to it, and each type covers a spectrum, from highly functional through incompetent to downright destructive.

It’s interesting that she writes this chapter in the third person, whereas many of the other essays are written in the first person. She tells a fable of New Kardiya who is taken in hand by one or more friendly Aboriginal people, given a skin name, regaled with stories of the incompetence of the first kardiya, co-opted into becoming driver to take people hunting in the ubiquitous Toyota or troop carrier, becomes romantically involved with another worker, ends up being assaulted by a community member and finally terminated, only for another to take her place. Or the fable of Super Kardiya and his Super Nyupa, he a self-righteous bully and she a self-righteous protector of the helpless Aborigines. It’s interesting that she stands outside observing this when we often see her at the wheel of the troop-carrier, or frantically trying to appease a key player in a consultation over a project in which she is involved in ‘Trapped in the Gap’. However, when she moves into working on a project with urban community groups, she finds herself out of place and uncertain how to proceed.

She is largely sidelined from capital-letter Aboriginal Politics, beyond noting that the revelations about child sexual abuse provided an opportunity to “speak aound truths that would previously have seen the speakers branded as racist and their voices neutralized”. She criticizes the Northern Territory Invention which she claims

…exposes the government’s unerring capacity for wrong action under pressure, and its default response of coercive control

Based on Emma Kowal’s academic work in ‘Trapped in the Gap: doing good work in Indigenous Australia’, she dares to raise the tendency of ‘white anti-racists’ (i.e. white, left-wing middle-class professionals who work in indigenous affairs) to identify structural rather than cultural issues as the cause for any of the string of ‘problems’- poor health, poor education, unemployment, high crime rate domestic violence etc. etc. This sets up a dilemma for white professional health workers (although it could be extended to any of the other ‘problems’:

That Aboriginal people might not want the things that will make them healthier throws into question the purpose of the work the white professional is doing. It also raises the spectre of differences that run much deeper and are cultural rather than structural in their origins. And if the difference is cultural, and achieving better health outcomes means changing cultural attitudes, the white health professionals must participate in social engineering, which is the antithesis of what they believe in. Kowal’s protagonists are confronted with the irreconcilable contradiction that, in order for the frequently cited ‘gap’ to be closed, Aboriginal people must surrender or dilute their aboriginality, thus relinquishing or diminishing their power and their identity. This is their crippling moral dilemma: in their attempt to do good, they may in fact be doing home. In a situation desperate for resources and support, the most highly skilled and scrupulous people are paralysed by the effects of this contradiction.

Much of her own work in the community involved map-making. In ‘Where Words Don’t Have Edges’ she describes facilitating a writing workshop among participants many of whom were illiterate and for whom standard English was a second language. She describes a national museum exhibition Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters in which she was heavily involved, and gives a far more sexualized account of the Seven Sisters songline than I was aware of! In other projects she is drawing out traditional stories of the land, many of which map closely to multi-layered digital maps. I found some of these chapters a bit repetitive- in fact, I’m sure that some paragraphs appeared more than once- and I find myself allergic to ‘gallery catalogue’ art-speak with its tendency to complicate everything with words. As it happens, I’m reading quite a bit about AI and Large Language Models at the moment, and these chapters about indigenous ways of knowing, shorn of their ‘gallery speak’, give some hope that there is still knowledge that can’t be hoovered into a LLM because it does not exist in words. Juxtaposed against this is her chapter ‘Lost and Found in Translation’ where she discusses the literary attempts by Australian writers to capture ‘country’.

And as a bird-watcher myself, who could resist chapters on the Night Parrot?

While reading all these chapters, I was interested, but did not feel particularly emotionally invested in the author herself. It was only in the last chapters, most particularly ‘Looking for Mushrooms’ that I gained some sense of her own life-story, and that of her mother. From what I have read, it seems that this third book balances out her first one, where she looked back at her father and his story, by taking her mother’s writing and holding it up against the mother she remembered- that some mother to whom she dedicates the book. Why did she wait so long to bring her own story forward because it is her life story and experience that gives her the authority (author-ity) to write the way she does? I’ve since realized that the chapters are more or less chronological in order of publication, but I think that this is an editorial choice that mis-fired.

Nor did I do myself (or the author) any favours in reading the book through Libby, the library app for borrowed books. In this case, I needed to know how far through I was, or how long this essay was going to be, and although I could work that out, it was clunky. This forced me to read it on my tablet rather than my Kobo which I find better approximates the experience of reading a book, and hence my inability to locate any of the quotes I have used on a designated page, not altered by the size of font I have chosen. I’ve enjoyed the book even more dipping back into it while writing this review, supplemented by an excellent discussion at the Ivanhoe Reading Circle.

My rating: 8.5 (an increase, on re-reading for this review, on what I would have given it previously)

Read because: Ivanhoe Reading Circle selection for July.

Sourced from: Libby via YPRL.

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‘What We Can Know’ by Ian McEwan

Posted on July 19, 2026 | 1 comment
2025, 320 p.

Ian McEwan might have eighteen books under his belt, but I think that he’s right at the top of his form with his most recent book What We Can Know. It reassures me that (so far) AI could not generate a book with so many twists and so much complexity, humour and erudition. And that’s something that the characters of his book, set in 2119 would heartily agree with.

A book set in two parts, the first part is written in 2119 by literature professor and researcher Thomas Metcalfe, a scholar of the literature of 1990 to 2030, a period viewed by his undergraduate students as particularly dull. Metcalfe’s research interest and obsession is the British poet Francis Blundy, who regaled his dinner guests at a dinner party held in his country house in 2014 with a poem he had written especially for his wife Vivien. This poem, written in the form of a ‘corona’ involved fifteen sonnets on a theme, where the last line of each sonnet becomes the first line of the succeeding sonnet, linked together by a final sonnet which gathers the first lines together to make something new. It is a circular structure, gradually revealing something new, just like McEwan’s book. Only one copy of the corona had ever existed, written on vellum as a gift to Vivien, and it has disappeared. Metcalfe, like other Blundy scholars who had preceded him, has dreams of finding this corona poem, hailed as a vanished masterpiece. Instead his research is deluged by the digital sludge generated by 21st century daily life: the emails, the databases, the digital footprints that we leave without noticing. In the face of so much dross that tells so little, Metcalfe faces the dilemma of all biographers: how much to stick to the documented facts, and how much to indulge his imagination. The epigraph that McEwan has chosen for his book – reflected in the title- comes from one of my favourite biographers Richard Holmes, in his book Dr Johnson and Mr Savage. The author of many literary biographies, Holmes says of biography:

It concerns the kind of human truth, poised between fact and fiction, which a biographer can make as he tells the story of another’s life, and thereby make it both his own (like a friendship) and the public’s (like a betrayal). It asks what we can know, and what we can believe, and finally what we can love.

So Metcalfe proceeds in his research, inventing conversations and events, much to the disapproval of his fellow-academic and partner Rose, who takes a far more doctrinaire view of biographical research. The first part comprises alternating chapters when Thomas reflects in first-person narrative on his academic endeavour and progress, intersected with his own imagination-fired writing on Blundy. Blundy, in Metcalfe’s reconstruction, is a literary lion, somewhat pompous and vain, who revels in his literary fame and who subjects his dinner guests to a long recitation of the corona poem which he himself thinks “too good not to escape into the public realm one day”. Metcalfe imagines the dinner party, later characterized by literary scholars as ‘The Second Immortal Dinner’ with a nod, I think, to Mrs Dalloway as his wife Vivien prepares for the dinner party, and as the guests arrive. They all have different responses to the lengthy recitation of the poem- boredom, jealousy, bemusement- which they disguise with the clinking of glasses and raising of toasts of congratulations at Blundy’s brilliance. Vivien, on the other hand, Metcalfe sees as a brilliant woman who has subjugated her own career as an academic in order to support her husband’s, evoking shades of Anna Funder’s Wifedom or Drusilla Modjeska’s Stravinsky’s Lunch. This is her second marriage, her first having ended with the death of her husband Percy after years of dementia.

But all of this was long ago, and of only minimal interest to the undergraduate students of 2119. We learn that the world has changed much since the Second Immortal Dinner in 2014. An Intercontinental Ballistic Missile aimed at the USA exploded in the Atlantic Ocean, triggering ocean tsunamis that inundated the major cities of the world, leaving just peninsulas and islands in a flooded landscape. Networks were broken and the industrial system collapsed, resulting in a drop in population- something unforeseen in the doomsday predictions of the time. Then followed a number of wars: India against Pakistan; Saudi Arabia and Israel ranged against Iran (rather prescient, yes?) and China against the United States over Taiwan. The dust that rose from multiple nuclear explosions on several continents cooled the earth until it didn’t, as carbon emissions continued to climb. The students of 2119 have nothing but contempt for the pre-Inundation people:

Those ancients were ignorant, squalid and destructive louts. As one of the brighter students pointed out, surely they could have done something other than grow their economies and wage wars. Behind this, though never stated, is the nation that they deserved the mega-deaths they brought upon themselves.

An attempt to evoke some sense of empathy for the pre-Indudation people backfires, and Thomas and Rose’s relationship breaks up. Thomas throws himself back into his Blundy research and is on the verge of a breakthrough… then the narrative stops.

Part Two then takes up in a completely different format, written by a different voice in a different time. It took me longer than I like to admit to work out what exactly I was reading. I’m not going to spoil the book for you by explaining…read it yourself!.. and consequently, I’ll say less about the second part of book that the first even though I enjoyed them both equally. Suffice to say that we find, as Richard Holmes suggested, that “what we can know” is very limited. Events and observations are subverted by another voice, and that absent corona poem takes on a whole other meaning and purpose. There is some harrowing and all too realistic writing about dementia, and events presented in the golden glow of dinner-party candles become far more sinister.

McEwan has taken us on such a varied narrative journey: from literary mystery, a dystopian future, a reflection on history and biography, knowledge, truth and invention. I think that he’s having rather a lot of fun with the literary scene of the 2020s as well because he would know it well. His prose is so accomplished and seemingly effortless as he ranges so widely across genres and times. It reminded me of A. S. Byatt’s Possession in its intelligence, density and sheer erudition. It’s one of the best books that I’ve read in ages.

My rating: 10/10 (is it too early in the year for a 10?)

Read because: Ivanhoe Reading Circle selection

Sourced from: purchased e-book.

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‘The Choke’ by Sofie Laguna

Posted on June 24, 2026 | 1 comment
2019 (2017) 369 p.

You’ve got to hand it to Sofie Laguna: she knows how to write a child’s perspective in such a stripped-back guileless style that you, as the adult, have your heart in your mouth, fearing for this child and what is to happen to them.

Set in 1971, ten-year old Justine lives with her Pop on the banks of the Murray river, close to the Barmah Choke, for which the book is named. Her mother shot through years earlier, and her father Ray, who appears and disappears throughout her life, seems to be dabbling in criminal activities. She has two older half-brothers, Kirk and Steve, but their mother is still resentful at Ray’s desertion and you never feel that Justine is safe with them. Likewise the family down the track, the Worlleys, just as dysfunctional as Justine’s family, are a quiet menace, and when both Justine and her father become involved with them, it brings only trouble and heartbreak.

Her Pop loves her, but he is still battling his own demons from WW2 and he has no idea of bringing up a pre-adolescent girl. She rarely washes; her clothes smell and her shoes are so tight that she can barely walk. Living in squalor, they eat mainly eggs from their hens. There is too much alcohol and cigarette smoke here, and she is not safe. Her Aunty Rita visits occasionally, but usually ends up arguing with Pop and her brother Ray over her lesbianism, which neither can accept. It seems that Aunty Rita might provide some comfort in this stripped-back masculine world, but her promises to Justine seem unfulfilled and she moves out of Justine’s life just as randomly as she entered it.

The story is narrated in Justine’s voice and through this we know that Justine cannot read. She is largely shunned by the other girls, and she is sent to sit beside Michael, who has cerebral palsy and is the butt of cruelty amongst his classmates. They are thrown together by proximity and isolation, and she comes to realize that despite his often-unintelligible speech and physical awkwardness, he is very bright. He helps her with her school work and they become friends- the first friend she has had, and Michael’s parents are aware of her parlous home situation. However, they decide to move to Sydney, leaving both children bereft. Justine closes down, and as adolescence dawns, becomes infatuated with Jamie Worlley, who embedded amongst his own male peer group, treats her poorly. You just know where this is heading.

And when the inevitable happens, it seems that there is to be no happy ending here. However, after being led to fearing the worst, the ending is unexpectedly uplifting- perhaps implausibly neat?- even though the reader is left with questions about Justine is to fare in the future. Justine’s voice has been so clear and convincing that you want a happier ending for her. The descriptions of landscape- the river, the narrow banks, the scrubby bushland- all ring true, and the book has an authenticity that runs right through it.

My rating: 9/10

Read because: Sofie Laguna spoke at the Open Meeting of the Ivanhoe Reading Circle. Given the darkness of both The Choke and The Eye of the Sheep, I was surprised at her bubbly, rather theatrical public persona.

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‘Australian Gospel’ by Lech Blaine

Posted on May 11, 2026 | Leave a comment
2024, 358 p.

Sometimes a memoir says more by what it doesn’t say. The subtitle of this book is ‘A Family Saga’, and saga it certainly is, as it tells the long, drawn-out struggle between birth parents and Christian fundamentalist fanatics Michael and Mary Shelley and the foster parents of their three of their children, Tom and Lenore Blaine. It came as a rather guilty relief when Michael and Mary finally die by the end of the book, and you can let go of the breath that you have been holding and think “well, thank God that’s over”.

This is not a straight generation-to-generation family saga. The book starts in 1983 when Michael Shelley, accompanied by a 19 year old hitchhiker Glen, burst into the house of Fran and Neil Williams, the foster parents of Michael’s three year old son Elijah. To the background theme song of Play School, Michael and Glen literally snatched Elijah in front of his foster sisters, Debbie, Linda and Cindy, and took him back to join Mary Shelley as they continued on their peripatetic life proclaiming God’s providence and sponging on everyone they met. We don’t meet this event again until about a third of the way through the book, after we have learned of the family tree, history and relationships of the four main protagonists- the brilliant, egotistical Michael Shelley; his psychotic and dependent wife Carole Newgrosh who changes her name to Mary Shelley on her husband’s instructions; rough-and-tumble, overweight and raucous Tom Blaine; and his wife the conscientious Lenore Meurant who suffers miscarriage after miscarriage and whose love for children can encompass an ever-increasing number of children as foster carer

As Blaine notes in the preface, he wasn’t around for much of the action of this story, which had hardened into deep ruts of suspicion and wariness by the time he was born as Michael and Lenore’s only biological child. . The youngest child in the family, he is more observer than participant as Michael and Mary Shelley continue to confront the Blaine family demanding the return of their children, causing multiple shifts of residence as Tom buys up one hotel after another, a successful publican who builds up failing hotels into successful concerns.

Michael and Mary have multiple court appearance for harassment and stalking, not just of the Blaines but also of Queensland politicians who they hoped would take up their case- a strange way of trying to win support. Within the strict tunnel vision of their religion, they are quick to label women lesbians and men pedophiles. When they do manage to make contact with their children separately, they soon alienate them by their bitterness against the Blaines and their messianic fundamentalism.

Class is not directly addressed in this memoir, but it pervades it throughout. Both Michael and Mary Shelley had enjoyed privileged upbringings in Sydney, beautiful Mary appearing in the women’s magazines as the wife of singer Lionel Long, before meeting Michael Shelley. Tom and his hotels, with the Rugby trophies on the walls, the alcohol and the pokies are everything that Michael Shelley abhors, seeing it not only as evil but also working-class and demeaning. Certainly, contraception seems to be completely unknown throughout, as the Blaine/Shelley children grow up into adulthood with unplanned pregnancies catapulting them into responsibilities that they treat with varying degrees of maturity and avoidance. As their adult personalities emerge, so too does mental illness and addiction, but who can tell if it’s “in the blood” or a result of the constant evasion and escape prompted by yet another arrival of the Shelleys on their doorstep.

There is no grand plot twist at the end- or even a plot at all, for that matter- and the book is more observation than analysis. The book moves chronologically, focussing on one character and then another, with a number of small sub-chapters, each with its own subheading subsumed into larger chapters, which are in turn organized into three parts. The author withholds judgement, trying to present the perspective of each of his characters, and leaving the reader to pose the questions: what is a family? whose rights are paramount? what does it mean to be a parent? how well has the child protection system worked here? are we doomed to repeat the destructive patterns of our parents? can trauma ever be shaken off? is ‘alternative’ parenting abuse or just a choice?

What comes over most strongly is love – as a form of obsession and persistence, in the case of the Shelleys, or as a glowing coal of acceptance and protection, in the case of the Blaines. Although the author has withheld judgment, he hasn’t withheld his own gratitude and love for what Tom and Lenore Blaine gave to all of their children, himself included.

My rating: 9/10

Sourced from: Purchased from Ladyhawke Books, Ivanhoe

Read because: Ivanhoe Reading Circle selection.

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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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‘The Watch Tower’ by Elizabeth Harrower

Posted on January 13, 2026 | 2 comments
1966, reprinted 2012, 335 p.

SPOILER ALERT

I often find that there is a sort of brittle formality about books written in early-mid twentieth-century Australia, echoing the slightly-British, self-conscious tone of newsreaders and documentary narrators that you hear in black-and-white footage from the 50s and 60s.This book, first published in 1966, and reissued by Text in 2012 starts off in a similar way. The scenario of two sisters, Laura and Clare, being brought into the headmistress’s office to hear of their father’s death and their removal from school evoked children’s books of the past (Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess, anyone?) The focus at first is on sixteen-year old Laura, who had had aspirations to be a doctor like her father, and she is more conscious of the economic and social fall in their circumstances when their fey and selfish mother turns to Laura to be the breadwinner of the family. At this stage, neither Clare nor her mother are particularly well-rounded characters, Clare (seven years younger than Laura) being merely childish and her mother Stella a languorous, demanding presence who decides to sail back ‘home’ to England, leaving the girls to fend for themselves.

Instead of a medical degree at university, Laura finds herself packed off to business college and a secretarial job at a box factory, owned by Felix Shaw. Although she feels no great attraction to him, when Felix Shaw proposes to her – largely as an economic arrangement – she accepts, seeing it as a means of financial security for herself and her younger sister Clare. Felix offers to support Clare to go to university- a dream that Laura had had for herself- but this promise is soon broken once Laura and Felix are married. I can’t really decide whether Felix is a complex character or a caricature. He almost willfully makes unwise financial business decisions, selling off mildly successful companies to spivs and incompetents, while expecting Laura to pick up a heavier work burden as a result. They are not poor: they live in a large house overlooking Sydney Harbour, and he enjoys driving luxury cars dangerously while abusing everyone else on the road. He sells the house – the one thing that Laura loved- from under her to underline her financial impotence in this dependent relationship.

Harrower skillfully juxtaposes the glittering sunshine of the Harbour, with the darkness of their house. It is as if a shadow lies over this beautiful home and its extensive gardens. The book is set in the 1940’s and 50’s, and although neighbours are aware of the arguments next door, nothing is done to help them. In fact, in spite of living in the midst of other houses and working with other women, Laura and Clare are socially isolated, with Felix’s happiness their main concern.

The term ‘coercive control’ did not exist when Harrower wrote this book, but all the signs are there: the emotional blackmail over the prospect, later withdrawn, of Clare’s university education; the changeability of mood; the oscillation between extravagant generosity and meanness; the rigidity in expectations for the women in his life compared with his own recklessness. Felix is physically violent towards Laura, and the possibility of sexual violence towards her sister Clare lurks in the shadows.

Most insidious of all is Laura’s own coercion of Clare to remain in the family home as a peacemaker and mediator, and her adoption of Felix’s own sense of victimhood as a reason to make her stay. Felix has made his own wife the enforcer. At times Laura dreams of an escape, but faced with the consequences, she represses her own will and becomes an extension of Felix.

Meanwhile, as the novel progresses, Clare becomes the main focus when she resists the narrowing of her own horizons and as all of the colour leaches out of Laura. The arrival of Bernard, a young refugee, to stay in the house to convalesce breaks the spell, even though for a while it seems that he, too, is going to be lured into Felix’s orbit by the promise of academic support, similar to that offered to Clare. In fact, there is a latent thread of repressed homosexuality in most of Felix’s relationships with other men, be they fellow entrepreneurs or employees.

The threat of violence runs through this book and it is clearly felt by Laura and Clare as they scramble to meet Felix’s standards and demands. Knowing, as we do, the physical danger to women at the point where they finally decide to leave a coercive partner, as readers we feel unsafe as Laura, and increasingly, Clare contemplate an escape

The title ‘The Watch Tower’ is interesting, because it can be interpreted in many ways. It has connotations of punishment and incarceration, which the beautiful house on the Harbour becomes. But it also suggests a lookout as well, and as the book progresses Clare is increasingly looking out, to a wider world, even while Laura becomes more deeply entombed in her relationship with Felix.

So, for a book which I thought was going to be rather insipid and old-fashioned, I found a book that in many ways predates Jess Hill’s See What You Made Me Do (my review here). I read this as part of the Ivanhoe Reading Circle’s program, and one of the questions raised was whether we know of another Australian book of similar vintage that deals with the issue of what we now recognize and name as ‘coercive control’. I haven’t read it, but I suspect that Elizabeth von Arnim’s Vera treads similar ground (The Pastor’s Wife (my review here) does too, to a lesser extent. I can see why Michael Heyward at Text Publishing re-published this book. Unfortunately, it reads just as true today – possibly even more true now – as it would have sixty years ago.

My rating: 9/10

Sourced from: Brotherhood Books

Read because: November book selection for Ivanhoe Reading Circle.

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‘The Season’ by Helen Garner

Posted on December 30, 2025 | Leave a comment
2024, 208 p.

This book should have ticked all my boxes: set in Melbourne, written by a much-loved Australian author, written with a nanna’s-eye (and I do embrace my nanna-dom). But it sounded as if it would be a bit slight, and I probably wouldn’t have read it had it not been an Ivanhoe Reading Circle selection, read and discussed amongst all the other nannas.

Even Garner herself sounded a bit ambivalent about the whole project, admitting that she wrote the book because she needed something to do, but didn’t have the energy to embark on one of her investigative non-fiction books. It traces the footy season of her grandson Amby’s under-16s footy team, at the J. J. Holland reserve in Kensington. As she always does, Garner conveys a strong sense of suburban place, and in this case, the football ground she describes so closely fitted with the oval that I walk through to my volunteer job in Kensington that I actually researched the club and found that, indeed, it is the J. J. Holland reserve. She’s there for the team’s matches; she’s there for their training sessions on cold weekday nights, and she’s there for the conversations in the car driving there and back.

Although ostensibly about football, it’s even more about young men growing into masculinity, and at under-16 Amby is at that liminal stage, with signs of the little boy still visible under the swagger of adolescence. Garner’s daughter lives next door, and she has a strong and enviable relationship with her grandchildren, especially Amby. At the same time, she is aging and feeling irrelevant and frustrated by her increasing deafness. In places she veers into idealization of these young men, seeing them as warriors, and even admitting to a slightly ‘off’ recognition of their adolescent sexuality (Garner has always been, and remains, perhaps more honest than she should be).

It is the football season that gives this book its beginning and ending, and the book was more a reflection than a plot-driven story. I had feared that it would be slight, and unfortunately it was.

My rating: 6.5/10

Sourced from: purchased e-book

Read because: October 2025 selection for the Ivanhoe Reading Circle.

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‘Prophet Song’ by Paul Lynch

Posted on December 15, 2025 | 1 comment
2024, 320 p.

SPOILER ALERT

I am writing some weeks after I finished reading this book, and I really regret that I didn’t sit down and write it immediately afterwards. My response to it has dulled with time, but I do remember slamming it shut and announcing “Fantastic!!” I read it for the Ivanhoe Reading Circle immediately after finishing Sally Carson’s Crooked Cross (review here) and the two books complement each other beautifully. In fact, I think I will always link them mentally because they seemed to be a similar response to an uneasy, suffocating situation, separated by nearly ninety years.

The book is set in Dublin, at some unspecified time, two years after the National Alliance Party has passed the Emergency Powers Act, which gives expanded powers to the Garda National Services Bureau, (GNSB) a new secret police force. Eilish, the mother of four teenaged children, the last only a baby, answers the door to two policemen seeking her husband Larry, a teacher and trade union organizer. Within the first chapter, her husband disappears after a peaceful union march, and her attempts to find where he has been taken fail. Eilish is a mother, daughter, wife, scientist and a long-time resident of Dublin. For much of the book, and as the world becomes a sharper place, she concentrates on the mundane, the quotidian, trying to keep routines together. She holds on to the life that she had before, that she thought was immutable, too afraid to look beyond her house, her community, her family. Catching sight of herself in the mirror in the hallway

[f]or an instant she sees the past held in the open gaze of the mirror as though
the mirror contains all it has seen seeing herself sleepwalking before the glass the
mindless comings and goings throughout the years watching herself usher the
children out of the car and they’re all ages before her and Mark has lost another
shoe and Molly is refusing to wear a coat and Larry is asking if they’ve had their
schoolbags and she sees how happiness hides in the humdrum how it abides in
the everyday toing and froing as though happiness were a thing that should
not be seen as though it were a note that cannot be heard until it sounds from
the past seeing her own countless reflections vain and satisfied before the glass (p.43)

Her friend Carole, whose husband has also disappeared, urges her to resist and to look at what is going on around her as people in her street beginning hanging National Alliance Party flags from their windows, and as her house and car is vandalized. People stop talking:

…the brilliance of the act they take something from you and replace it
with silence and you’re confronted by that silence every waking moment and cannot
live you cease to be yourself and become a thing before this silence a thing waiting
for the silence to end a thing on your knees begging and whispering to it all night and
day a thing waiting for what was taken to be returned and only then can you resume
your life but silence doesn’t end you see they leave open the possibility that what you
want will be returned someday and so you remain reduced paralysed dollars an old
knife and the silence doesn’t end because the silence is the source of their power that
is its secret meaning silence is permanent. (p.165)

Eilish’s father Simon is living alone and subsiding into dementia, but he still has flashes of clarity which pierce through the domestic cotton-wool that Eilish is trying to cocoon herself within.

…if you change ownership of the institutions then you can
change ownership of the facts you can alter the structure of belief what is agreed
upon that is what they’re doing Eilish it’s really quite simple the NAP is trying to
change what you and I call reality. If you say one thing is another thing and you say it
enough times, then it must be so and if you keep saying it over and over people
accept it as true this is an old idea of course it’s really nothing you but you’re
watching it happen in your own time not in a book. (p 20)

Her sister Aine in Canada is urging her to leave while she can, but Eilish feels rooted to Dublin, still hoping that her husband Larry will return. She tries to protect her eldest son Mark by sending him away; and it is only when her thirteen year old son Bailey is killed -and she finds his body in the morgue, tortured- that she finds the strength to act. And here we come to Lynch’s purpose in writing the book. As the world hardened against refugees, he asks us to engage in ‘radical empathy’ by seeing the leaving and flight from a repressive regime from the perspective that it could happen to us, just as it has with Eilish, just as it has again and again throughout history:

…it is vanity to think that the world will end during your lifetime in some sudden event, that what ends is your life and only your life, that what is sung by the prophets is but the same song sung across time, the coming of the sword, the world devoured by fire, the sun gone down into the earth at noon and the world cast in darkness, the fury of some god incarnate in the mouth of the prophet ranging at the wickedness that will be cast out of sight and the prophet sings not of the end of the world but of what has been done and what will be done and what is being done to some but not others, that the world is always ending over and over again in one place but not another and that the end of the world is always a local event, it comes to your country and visits your town and knocks on the door of your house, and becomes to other but some distant warning, a brief report on the news, an echo of events that has passed into folklore… p. 304

There is only one perspective in this book- that of Eilish- and as you can tell from the quotes, it is told in a breathless, relentless suffocating urgency with no punctuation and few paragraphs. Yet, it was not hard to read once you relaxed into it- just as the people of Dublin relaxed into autocracy and violence, I guess. I can think of few books that frightened me as much as this one did. Absolutely fantastic.

My rating: 10/10

Read because: Ivanhoe Reading Circle selection

Sourced from: own copy

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‘The empty honour board: a school memoir’ by Martin Flanagan

Posted on November 25, 2025 | Leave a comment
2023, 208 p.

When it comes to the Catholic Church and sexual abuse of children, there is little space for nuance without it being mischaracterized. However, nuance is what we find in Martin Flanagan’s memoir of his school days at an un-named Tasmanian Catholic boarding school between 1966-1971. As he says in his opening line “I was warned against writing this”. Not only was there the danger of stirring up pain and controversy, but there was the danger of being forced to rethink one’s own story that had seemed certain.

By the time you get to my age-67 at the time of writing- people’s sense of their personal history has taken a mythological turn. Most of us cling to the notion that there is meaning in our lives and, whether we know it or not, arrange the furniture in our minds- our memories- accordingly. We acquire a personal mythology, and personal mythologies, when they clash can do so violently. This is a region where demons lurk. (p. 2)

But as a stream of claims from former student from his school surfaced, the demons found him:

Each disclosure took me back to a time in my life when I thought I inhabited a concrete reality. Now that concrete reality was bending and breaking like buildings in an earthquake. (p.3)… Behind the issue of what actually went on at my school on an island off the southern coast of the world’s most southern continent, global forces were at play- ancient controversies to do with the Catholic church, the Pope, the authority of priests, celibacy, the Vatican’s exclusive maleness and the epidemic of sexual abuse that has followed it around the world. Somewhere inside all that of that, being thrown about like a leaf in a storm, was me, my story. (p.8)

Flanagan was not sexually abused himself – or at least, he did not perceive that he had been sexually abused. But at the age of sixteen he was invited into the room of one of the priests where the priest, Eric, gave him a massage with his pyjama bottoms removed, face down on the priest’s single bed, nude from the waist down. After a vigorous massage of his legs with oil, he rolled over and the priest glanced at his limp and uninterested cock. “End of story” (p. 86)

Completely inappropriate though this clearly is, Flanagan did not consider himself to have been sexually abused, even though other people thought that he had been. As far as he is concerned, “to be abused you must surely feel as if you’ve been abused”. He feels that he was inoculated from a strong response because he never did believe in the Catholic church, and because by then he was already quite certain in his own sexuality.

However, he knew other boys who were sexually abused by the priests. At much the same time as this happened to him, he was the school captain, and he was led by another boy to where he found a 12 year old shaking and shuddering in his pyjamas, with a spray of semen up his back. He and other boys reported the priest to the school rector. Some thirty years later, he gave evidence against one of the three priests from the school who were charged with sex crimes.

Flanagan may not have been sexually abused but he was abused by the ingrained cruelty of the school that filtered down through the priests and bubbled up among the boys themselves. He felt ashamed of many things: his abject begging not to get the cuts for some minor misdemeanour, his failure to intervene when he saw other boys being bullied, his desperation to appease the bullies who had decided that he was a ‘teller of stories’ as a ‘fear like a sort of radiation illness infiltrated my being’. (p.74). Years later, he began having panic attacks at night. For about six months he was in mental tumult until

In the end, one hot day I was standing beside a blackwood tree in the paddock beside our little home, when a shadow hurried across the grass towards me. With it came a great fear that I was about to be extinguished or swallowed up, and I cried out ‘I have a right to be!’. Pure madness, I know, but I’m glad I did it. Glad I shouted at my shadow. At the negative imprint of those early years. I have a right to be, everybody has a right to be. What do I believe in? Human dignity. (p.102)

What saved him was sport, especially football, and writing about sport. It was through sport and writing that the boys he had gone to school with, now men, circulated back into his adult life. These men came with their own stories, their own pain and the author’s response and reconciliation with this shared, and yet so private, experience takes up the last third of the book. The report that he had made as school captain on discovering the shivering boy in his pyjamas all those years ago resurfaced as part of the controversy over the school 43 years later. He reads the letter from the rector to the head of the order detailing the report that Flanagan himself had made, which the rector described as ‘fooling around’. Here he learns about the evasions and plans to withdraw the priest from classes, to move him around the state, or divert him into working on the school magazine. As a result of the Royal Commission into Institutional Sexual Abuse that he learns about ‘Father GMG’, sent to his school to avoid the repercussions of another interaction of a sexual nature, who is moved from one school to another. There is a pattern here.

Over the years, the author attends three Catholic ceremonies. The first was a vigil at St Ignatius, Richmond as 25 year old Van Tuong Nguyen was hanged in a Singapore jail for drug running. The second was Ned Kelly’s funeral in a Catholic Church in Wangaratta in January 2013. The third was a Ritual of Lament in 2021 run by his old school. He struggled over whether to go: he didn’t like ceremonies; he feared inauthentic emotion; he feared doing it the ‘wrong way’. He went.

What is striking about this book is the way that Flanagan holds many things in tension: acknowledgement that the same men who whipped him also imbued in him a love of literature and writing; disgust at the sexual abuse and yet compassion for the situation that, at least for the priest that he gave evidence against, he

could be well described as a maladjusted, sexually immature, lonely individual… [who] had virtually no possibility of a sexual relationship with a woman given his living circumstances. (p. 7)

He accepted the word that two of the priests at the school were unaware of what was going on amongst their brother priests. He did not characterize what he observed at his school as a long display of cynical behaviour. Instead,

[W]what I see at the core of this whole business is abject human isolation surrounded by a floundering belief system. (p. 142)

The book is not divided into chapters, and although it moves forward chronologically, it is divided into dozens of small shards, separated by asterisks. It’s almost as if the truth he is grappling to explain is also fragmentary, without an overarching structure that can be imposed onto it. There is some sort of resolution – not ‘closure’- with the Ritual of Lament performed by the now-coeducational school, no longer an all-boys boarding school. He sees this book, which was almost finished at the time of the Ritual of Lament, as his way of honoring the experience from 40 years ago as he sees it now. He speaks only for himself.

The old school’s honour board doesn’t have an entry for my last year. Perhaps it’s because the following year the school started a new era by going co-ed, perhaps it’s because my last year ended in a scandal. The tide of golden print records the year – 1971- but after that are empty spaces of varnished wood. The real names in this book are my honour board, although the list, I must add, is far from complete. (p.11)

My rating: 8/10

Read because: Ivanhoe Reading Circle August selection

Sourced from: own copy

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‘Homegoing’ by Yaa Gyashi

Posted on October 25, 2025 | Leave a comment
2016, 300 p.

Despite its modest 300 pages, this book covers a huge scope, covering three hundred years over two continents: Africa and America. It opens in Ghana in the mid 18th century, with two half-sisters who are unknown to each other. One sister Effia, of Fante tribal heritage, is coerced into marrying a white British officer sent to oversee Cape Coast Castle, a staging post for enslaved Africans prior to being shipped across the Middle Passage. Living in luxury at the Castle, she is oblivious to her half-sister Esi, of Asante tribal heritage, imprisoned as “cargo” in the basement holding pens, before being shipped to America. The two family trees bifurcate at this point as Effia’s line stays mainly based in Ghana, with the ongoing effects of colonization affecting the life events of generation after generation. Esi’s line is based in America, spanning slavery, Jim Crow legislation, the Harlem Renaissance and drug-fuelled urban life.

The opening pages of the book have a time line, tracing the generations in two distinct branches. The narrative alternates between the two branches, in a series of fourteen separate but linked short stories. They could be read separately because each one in effect starts again in its opening paragraphs, although there are small familial references that allow the reader to place the character within their familial context. In many ways this disjointed narrative reflects the dislocation of slavery and the rootlessness of not knowing where you come from. It was a rather jarring reading experience: you would come to be invested in a character, only to have the narrative whisk you across the ocean and time into a new story.

Running through the book is the theme of betrayal and complicity. The coastal Fante tribe capture and sell the Asante people to white slavers. In Harlem Renaissance New York, a black man who ‘passes’ as white leaves his wife to marry a white woman. Step-mothers are cruel to their step-children; families shun their gay children. There is also the theme of severance: two half-sisters growing up on different sides of the globe; and particularly in the American part of the narrative, severance between parents and children, one of the tools of enslavement, but which recurs from generation to generation. This severance lies at the heart of identity and reflects the title of the book: one of the characters, speaking of the Back to Africa movement says “We can’t go back to something we ain’t never been to in the first place. It ain’t ours anymore.”

A rather heavy-handed motif of the book was a pair of gold-flecked stones, one each given to the two half-sisters by their mother Maame. Esi’s stone was soon lost, buried in the mud of the holding cell at Cape Coast Castle, while the other stone was handed from generation to generation. I was dreading a rather mawkish resolution of the two stones at the end of the book but fortunately Gyasi was an astute enough writer not to fall to such an easy trope.

I enjoyed the book, with the equal weight given to the Ghanan and American experience, a weight judiciously and scrupulously meted out. I did find myself thinking of Alex Haley’s Roots which took a similar generational approach but from memory, there was not the bifocal approach of both African and American stories in that book.

It is particularly impressive that this is a debut novel, as the author has such control of a tightly structured dual narrative. The structure did feel a bit like a straitjacket at times, and not all characters were as fully developed as others. But it is a good exploration of slavery, colonialism, inter-generational trauma and the intersection of colour, class and gender- in many ways a book of its time, despite its historical focus.

My rating: 8/10

Read because: Ivanhoe Reading Circle selection. I wish that I had written this review soon after reading the book, instead of waiting weeks. You’d think that I’d know by now.

Sourced from: Readings paperback.

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