It’s the first Saturday of the month, and so it’s Six Degrees of Separation day. To find out more about this meme, check out Books are My Favourite and Best where all will be explained.
So, the starting book is Siri Husdvedt’s What I Loved. I could have sworn that I have read this book, but I have no record of it at all, and when I read the synopsis it doesn’t sound familiar either. But I gather that it starts off with an art historian and a painting, so that leads me to….
Alex Miller’s The Sitters which is about an aging portrait painter and his young portrait subject, a visiting academic. It’s only a small book, and like much of Miller’s work, it has layers under its apparent simplicity. Talking about sitting for a portrait leads me to…..
Candace Bruce’s The Longing, which has a dual narrative: one set in the mid 19th century where a young indigenous woman working as a domestic servant in one of those large Western Districts homesteads, observes her mistress’ infatuation with a visiting portrait painter, and a second narrative where 150 years later an art historian visits the same homestead to make a significance assessment of a portrait kept by the family in their now-decayed mansion. That Western Districts of Victoria setting takes me to….
Margaret Kiddle’s Men of Yesterday: A social history of the Western District 1834-1890. This book, written in 1961, is written by a daughter of the Western District herself, celebrating the white settlement of western Victoria. Its reverence for ‘settlement’ and ancestral pride, without considering the theft of indigenous lands, does not sit well today but it is beautifully written by a young historian who died before it was published. Another historian who discovered Margaret Kiddle’s work was Maggie Mackellar, who used it in writing her own work on Western Districts squatter Niel Black. I haven’t read that work, but I did read Maggie Mackellar’s memoir which led me to….
When it Rains, Maggie’s memoir of packing up after a family tragedy to return to her grandparent’s property in outback New South Wales. She steps into small town life, while continuing to write through her grief, which she expresses as a series of short chapters, acting as a voyeur in her own life, circling around the pain. The isolation of pain and grief leads me to….
Chris Womersley’s Bereft, set during the influenza epidemic of 1919, when Quinn Walker returns from the Western Front of WWI to his childhood home. There is no grand home-coming for him because he had fled his hometown ten years earlier, when he was accused of a rape, and had been reported dead on the front.. Realizing that his mother is very sick with influenza, he approaches the house when his father is absent, and speakers with his mother, who thinks she is hallucinating. The setting of the book during Australia’s influenza epidemic leads me to….
Laura Spinney’s Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and how it changed the world is a global account of the influenza pandemic that reached Australia in 1919. It is well researched and fascinating. She focuses on the disease, its manifestations and the scientific response, but she also interweaves this with a consciousness of how the experience of suffering and recovering from the flu leached out into music and literature in the succeeding decade.
How odd. I seem to have spent quite a bit of time in Australian literature this time, with only my book-end books set internationally.
Usually the first Saturday of the month passes me by and I miss out on the Six Degrees of Separation meme from Kate’s blog 
Australia had its own Bright Young People too, but they generally did not have the entrenched wealth of those in Britain, and they gravitated more towards the arts and the intelligentsia. 
A real live Bohemian is the late Mirka Mora, whose biography 
Emily Bitto’s 
When I think of strays, I think of dogs which takes me to Ceridwyn Dovey’s 
Dovey? Dovey? Where have I heard that name before? That’s right- Margaret Whitlam was Margaret Dovey before she married Gough. I haven’t yet got round to reading Jenny Hocking’s two-volume biography of Gough Whitlam. However I did read her 
Ah! they’re a gang of larrikins – such a beautifully Australian word!- which is explored in Melissa Bellanta’s history 
Bob Hawke was a bit of a larrikin, and played up to the image. His America’s Cup jacket and white bathrobe were a bit cringe-inducing, but many Australians had a soft spot for his wife, Hazel. She was a dignified Prime Minister’s wife, especially after he left her for a younger woman, and she was courageous in her openness about her battle with Alzheimer’s (or ‘The Big A’ as she called it), documented in her daughter Sue Pieters-Hawke’s book 
Before there were Australian Prime Ministers, there were Governors, and Lady Jane Franklin was the wife of Governor Sir John Franklin in Van Diemen’s Land in the late 1830s and 1840s, before he sailed off into the Arctic in the Erebus, never to be seen again. On a much smaller scale, Jane Franklin was pretty intrepid too, traveling alone to Port Phillip and Sydney, and in 
Jane Franklin has spawned a number of biographies and has been incorporated into fiction as well, most recently in Richard Flanagan’s 
Peripatetic English author Nicholas Shakespeare was not born in Tasmania, but felt drawn to it by its beauty, only to find that he had family connections there as well: Army officer and merchant Anthony Fenn Kemp and Petre Hordern, a failed alcoholic from a wealthy family, who submerged himself in the bush and dragged his family into poverty. In his book 
And with a surname like ‘Shakespeare’, of course one thinks of plays – especially ‘Hamlet’. The play-within-a-play is a motif that Sue Miller, whose books I’ve been reading for decades, uses in her 
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 