As we keep hearing in the relentless coverage of the federal election campaign, there is a (worldwide) cost of living crisis, and the more perceptive As we keep hearing in the relentless coverage of the federal election campaign, there is a (worldwide) cost of living crisis, and the more perceptive reporting of it notes that the pain of it is borne inequitably by different segments of society. So what better timing could there be for a biting satire that skewers the rapacious wealthy when the authorities are about to catch up with them, eh?
Robert Lukins is a versatile author. Somebody Down There Likes Me is quite the contrast with his debut and because while they were very different to each other in preoccupations and setting, both were infused with a sense of dread and menace that made them unputdownable. Somebody Down There Likes Me, OTOH, features characters who are also kind-of dreading what comes next but *chuckle* I think most people will be cheering the FBI et al so that the Gulch family gets its comeuppance.
The characterisation is masterly. While the younger generation and beneficiaries of their parents' ill-gotten gains Kick and Lincoln are surprised by the news that the the FBI is on its way and that prison is in the offing, (not to mention the loss of their fortune), their parents Honey and Fax greet the news with more equanimity. Fax is sanguine because he's off his face on expensive drugs and hasn't been present in the real world for a very long time, and just as the reader is starting to wonder how exactly it is that these two have advance notice of the impending catastrophe, there's a chapter where we learn how Honey has been (a-hem) nurturing a friendship with an FBI agent.
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Mostly about discontented young people who'd left their rural origins. Lots of swearing. Not engaging. I don't rate books I don't finish. Mostly about discontented young people who'd left their rural origins. Lots of swearing. Not engaging. I don't rate books I don't finish. ...more
After , I wasn't sure that I wanted to read much more about the role of Australian forces in the OccAfter , I wasn't sure that I wanted to read much more about the role of Australian forces in the Occupation of Japan, but Robin Gerster's prize-winning Travels in Atomic Sunshine, Australia and the Occupation of Japan turned out to be very interesting reading indeed. More importantly, while it acknowledges the less edifying aspects of the novel, it counters Hungerford's somewhat sensationalised account and pays credit to the soldiers of the occupying forces where it's due.
According to the author info in the front of the book, Robin Gerster is a professor in the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University. He is the author of several books, including the award-winning Big-noting: the heroic theme in Australian war writing (1987) and other books focussed on Asia. Travels in Atomic Sunshine won the New South Wales Premier's Prize for Australian History in 2009, and was shortlisted for the Queensland Premier's Non-Fiction Book Award and the Prime Minister's Prize for Australian History. I think that's because he writes in an approachable way, avoiding academic jargon while retaining a scholarly approach so that his account is obviously trustworthy.
Histories about this issue need to be trustworthy, because anything that casts doubt on the heroic myth-making about Australian military service has to be backed up by research...
It seems that the soldiers of the Occupation forces felt the pressure of the heroic Anzacs, and felt discouraged and dispirited because of it. Their tasks in Japan were more mundane than the fierce fighting that had led to Japan's defeat, and they were more like workers or labourers involved in doing a job that many found dreary and even demeaning. Today, that means that some whose health was affected by atomic radiation in Hiroshima, are denied the benefits that fighting forces receive in recompense for their active service.
BCOF [British Commonwealth Occupation Force] performed many useful tasks during that first year of the Occupation. After completing its initial deployment, the force settled down to begin its essential operations of sea, ground, and air patrols � a variety of Intelligence tasks, including (in the early, uncertain days) road reconnaissance; to seek out resistance elements and potential guerrilla activities; checks on illegal immigration; the control of black marketing and smuggling activities; the confiscation of narcotics and other contraband; port and dock control; the demilitarisation and dispersal of repatriated Japanese servicemen; the collection of weapons; the disarmament and disposal of hidden enemy ammunition and equipment.
Both skilled and hack work had to be done to get the region back into some kind of working order. Soldiers were engaged in various clearing, building and maintenance tasks, in concert with a force of Japanese workers that totalled more than 40,000 at its peak, in October 1946. (p.78)
For an example of the essential infrastructure that urgently had to be made functional, Jim Grover, a signalman, helped rebuild the communication system with a modern telephone exchange in Kure. American B-29 bomb damage had destroyed the hygiene infrastructure, but as Gerster acknowledges erecting lavatories is not quite in the same league as scaling the rocky slopes of Gallipoli under raking Turkish fire. (But if it had not been done, outbreaks of disease would have been catastrophic.)
These soldiers were, however, also achieving historic if not heroic change. The Occupation brought Japan out of the feudal age and introduced democracy, including women's suffrage. It also prepared the way for lasting stability and economic prosperity and a normalisation of Japan's relationships with other countries in the west.
However, the Australians had more to contend with than the ghosts of the Anzacs. For a start there was also poor leadership. Their CO had an outstanding WW1 and WW2 military record but from Gerster's analysis, was not the right man for a different kind of job in such an unfamiliar place. (In the Afterword, Gerster tells us that he refused to shake a Japanese hand, and he publicly admonished the citizens of Hiroshima for creating their own mess.) Briefings about what to expect were inadequate and littered with stereotypes. Hectoring about fraternisation being forbidden didn't stop randy young men from getting what they wanted (and VD into the bargain), but it did make it difficult to develop friendly working relationships between nations who had been at war such a short time ago. Worst of all, the soldiers were not warned about avoiding radioactive sites, and it is quite shocking to read about soldiers sightseeing in Hiroshima and bringing souvenirs back home.
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Dame Nellie Melba GBE (1861-1931), Australia's first and some would say greatest opera diva, had such a fascinating life that it is no wonder that theDame Nellie Melba GBE (1861-1931), Australia's first and some would say greatest opera diva, had such a fascinating life that it is no wonder that there are multiple biographies about her. Each one offers something different, as I know from reading two of them, and browsing a third. I have already read Ann Blainey's 2008 biography and later, Robert Wainwright's more tabloid (2021). I also read some of John Hetherington's ²Ñ±ð±ô²ú²¹Ìý(1967) to my piano teacher Valda Johnstone when she was in aged care, and in different ways, I enjoyed them all.
But still, I wasn't entirely sure that I wanted to read ²¹²Ô´Ç³Ù³ó±ð°ùÌýbio of Nellie when Nellie Melba, The Legend Lives arrived. However, is the acclaimed biographer of several famous Australian musicians, whose biographical oeuvre was recognised by the Richard the Joan Sutherland and Richard Bonynge Award for the Arts, and I have really admired his previous work.
Nellie Melba, The Legend Lives is Davis's fifth biography of a musician; these are the others (links are to my reviews).
Eileen Joyce: A Portrait (Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2001) Geoffrey Parsons: Among Friends (ABC Books, 2006) (Wakefield Press, 2012), and (Wakefield Press, 2017)
So why another one? Davis says it's because those four were focused on Melba's life rather than her art.
As well as recounting the singer's life, my intention has been to provide more detail about Melba's voice, singing style and the musical milieu in which her career was conducted. It is my hope that this book will also persuade readers to explore Melba's legacy of recordings and that they will, like me, find endless delight in the sounds she bequeathed to us more than a century ago. (p.2)
We can see this difference early in the biography in the treatment of Melba's first public performance. Her early career was held in check by her father, who was not keen on a musical career for Nellie, (and especially not in opera!)Â But , he allowed her to take up the opportunity to sing at a fund-raiser for the very popular local musician Carl Gottlieb Elsassar, after he had a stroke.
Davis brings this musical milieu alive. He lists the prominent musicians who shared the bill with Nellie and notes that every item on the program had a different conductor, with these including another four of Nellie's former teachers: Joseph Summers, Julius Buddee, Thomas Guenett and Otto Vogt. And while Blainey's bio acknowledges the difficulty of her song � a testing showpiece from the first act of Verdi's La Traviata —�it is Davis who provides the detail that explains why her debut was so notable (and if you listen to that link below you can pick out the parts that made the work such an ambitious choice for a debut):
Cecchi [her teacher] persuaded Nellie to choose as her offering the great ²õ³¦±ð²Ô²¹Ìýthat ends the first act of Verdi's La Traviata ('), in which the courtesan Violetta first ponders on whether her depression is due to falling in love with one man, and then dismisses love as folly and swears to remains free and devote herself to pleasure. This is a long solo and offers the singer an opportunity to display her voice in a range of tempos and dynamics, as well as her capacity to sing wide intervals and her trill and scale work, and finishing with a climactic top note, guaranteed, if sung well, to rouse an audience. (p.41)
Nerves troubled her for the first few bars and then, rising to the occasion � as she would on so many more watershed moments in her career � Nellie let her voice soar freely over the vast assembly, and, as each vocal challenge arose, she overcame it in masterly style. As the last note died away, the audience rewarded her with thunderous applause. Because the program was long, encores had been banned, but the audience demanded Nellie return to the platform twice to receive their acclamation and to accept the floral tributes passed up to her. (p.42)
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You Must Remember This is the second novel of Sean Wilson, a writer from Perth, now based in Melbourne. Derived from the author's experience witnessiYou Must Remember This is the second novel of Sean Wilson, a writer from Perth, now based in Melbourne. Derived from the author's experience witnessing his grandmother's decline into dementia, it is a deeply heartfelt meditation on ageing and memory.
Written from the confused perspective of Grace, the novel begins with Chapter 10, portraying her chaotic thoughts in a non-linear way. Episodes in the present feature her daughter Liz, who struggles to navigate the loss of her mother's capacities, apparently without having much guidance about how to communicate with her. Where the staff at the aged care home go along with Grace rather than confront her when she has lost her grip on reality, Liz can't always control her irritation and distress, confusing Grace even more. But like many, Liz is doing her best, paying for the best of care that's available and visiting regularly even though it's a dispiriting experience. She's one of the so-called 'sandwich' generation, dealing with a stormy relationship with her own daughter while losing the emotional support that a grandmother might have been able to provide.
As the chapters progress, Grace's past life is revealed through her memories. She had a terrible childhood, at the mercy of an alcoholic mother called Annie and a feckless father called Des. She was often left to fend for herself and to care for her twin brothers, trying to keep them quiet when they screamed in hunger because no one had provided food or money to buy some. An opportunistic policeman flirts with Annie while waiting for his moment with fifteen-year-old Grace, and it is just luck and good timing that Annie comes home from the pub in time to throw him out of the house. And although there are good memories of her escape from her parents and falling in love with her husband Howard, it seems terribly sad that in her confusion there are not more happy memories of her time with him.
There are many different kinds of dementia but all of them involve a deterioration of mental faculties in some way. As advances in medicine progress so that people live longer, most of us will encounter this distressing condition at some stage. In my experience, getting educated about it was crucial to being able to support my father in the last phase of his life. I completed the offered by the Wicking Dementia Research and Education Centre at the University of Tasmania, and I also learned some helpful strategies for communication at a day-long workshop at, then known as Alzheimer's Australia. These also turned out to be helpful when my MIL succumbed to Alzheimer's.
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I've read a fair few family history memoirs in my time, and each one is different in its own way, but this one really is unique. It's a hybrid of famI've read a fair few family history memoirs in my time, and each one is different in its own way, but this one really is unique. It's a hybrid of family history and Holocaust memoir, of mystery and history... and the history involves not only the desecration of one of the world's most valued books, but also some enjoyable gossip about Sydney's Kings Cross in the 1950s.
Michael Visontay was using the pandemic lockdown to research his family history when he became intrigued by the silence about his grandfather's second wife Olga. The family was of Hungarian origin, and Visontay reveals a little-known aspect of the Nazi genocide:
Today, the Holocaust has come to feel like a shapeless monstrosity that butchered the Jews simultaneously across the breadth of Europe. The episodic reality of its unfolding has been blurred. The Poles, Czechs, and French were deported and murdered from the early years of the war. By contrast, the war came late to Hungarian soil, thanks to a government that was sympathetic to Hitler when he came to power, hoping he could help it recover territory lost in World War I.
The Hungarian leader Miklós Horthy joined the Axis alliance in 1940, helped Germany fight the Soviet Union, then declared war against the United States after Pearl Harbour. During these early years, Hungarian Jews were largely untouched by the Nazi killing machine. Although they had to contend with forced labour camps and antisemitic laws that eroded their freedoms, collectively their lives remained relatively intact. That all changed in 1943, when Hungarian forces suffered heavy losses in Hitler's defeat at Stalingrad. The government saw the writing on the wall and tried to renege on its alliance with Germany. Hitler was furious at the betrayal; he invaded Hungary in March 1944 and installed a pro-German government. (p.48)
The Occupation precipitated the genocide of Hungarian Jews. Restrictions were intensified, and ghettos were set up to facilitate deportations to concentration and death camps. Visontay’s grandfather, Pali Weiszmann, was deported to Mauthausen in Austria, while his grandmother Sara and his father Ivan, were sent to Auschwitz in Poland. Ivan survived the selection process but his mother did not. Aged only 14 when put to work at divesting corpses of any valuables, Ivan witnessed the devastating image of his own mother's body in a mound of murdered Jews. Words cannot convey the impact of that, nor the courage it must have taken to go on living afterwards.
Most of their extended family perished, but Pali and Ivan somehow survived and were reunited after the war in their village of Gyöngyös, where Pali was able to re-establish his gourmet delicatessen. And � before Ivan was psychologically ready for it � Pali also married their landlady, a woman called Olga Illovfsky.
Hungary soon came under Communist rule, and when the delicatessen was confiscated for a second time, the Weiszmanns decided to escape. In 1952, they settled in Sydney, and opened the Minerva Deli in Kings Cross. They achieved that, not just with hard work and initiative, but also with the proceeds of a small fortune that Olga had inherited from her childless uncle in America, Gabriel Wells... a man she'd never heard of until after the marriage.
Most family histories are, alas, of interest only to the family (and sometimes not even then), but if there is someone interesting in the family archive, it is usual for that person's story to be told again and again... and again and again and again until everybody knows it off by heart. Not so with Olga. Olga Illovfsky was only a shadowy presence in the author's life because she died aged only 53, before Michael Vistontay was born, when his father (Olga's stepson) was 23. Far from talking about this extraordinary stroke of luck that facilitated the family's success in Sydney, those that knew her maintained a silence. A silence that piqued Michael's interest when he was old enough to know that there was a story to ferret out. He is a journalist, after all.
The story is extraordinary. To read the rest of my review please visit ...more
My first book for 2025 is by one of Australian best-loved authors � Rosalie Ham, who brought us in 2000, which was made into My first book for 2025 is by one of Australian best-loved authors � Rosalie Ham, who brought us in 2000, which was made into in 2015 where the real star of the show was who made the dresses for the film. Ham went on to write a sequel, in 2020, and now we have the prequel � Molly.
With the dark humour, richly detailed settings and vividly drawn characters we've come to expect from Rosalie Ham, this prequel to the international bestseller The Dressmaker is an unforgettable story of hopes lost, love found - and corsets loosened. Ham's Gothic blend of feisty females, satire and historical detail was just what I wanted after a run of Serious Books. By the end of the novel Molly is the mother of Tilly Dunnage who in the next book goes on to be the dressmaker who returns to the fictional town of Dungatar to wreak her revenge. Like the rest of the books in the series, Molly's themes showcase malice, vanity, hypocrisy and bigotry but � as was historically accurate for the pre WW1 era in which it is set � Molly also explores the wasted talent of working class people, condemned to lives of poverty and disadvantage.
In Molly, Ham shows that small mindedness isn't confined to small towns. A dedicated activist for women's rights, Molly is the target of an obnoxious conservative called Mrs Sidebottom and also of Mr Addler, her boss at the corsetry factory who makes her life a misery. A lowlife called Evan Pettyman is there to represent the way even mediocre men can survive and prosper, but the wealthy have a mean streak too, as we can see in the character of Alethea Pocknall who offers false hope when she inherits her father's factory.
It is the wealthy who give Molly (and the author) a chance to flaunt haute couture. Talking about this novel with a friend yesterday, it was nostalgic memories of our mothers wearing 1950s fashion that made us love The Dressmaker because we could imagine the dresses that were described in lush detail. But while, yes, feminists can rejoice in Molly's quest to redesign ladies undergarments to allow freedom of movement, the (rather long) descriptions of corsetry never quite worked for me because I could not really imagine their designs or appearance. When I think of corsets, I think of the film of Gone with The Wind and Mammy lacing Scarlett O'Hara into a gruesome concoction, and how women ever managed to dance wearing them I do not know. My generation of feminists but also my mother would not have dreamed of wearing any such thing or variation of it. Feminists of the seventies and women who had serious work to do in WW2 are/were not interested in the idea of shaping our bodies to suit a male gaze, not at all.
But although I failed #Fashion101 I was interested in the dresses that transform their wearers due to the shaping that Molly's creations allow.
Stuck in a factory where she is bullied daily by Mr Addler, Molly dreams of a career in design. She wants to liberate women and herself, and from her physical confrontations with others at the demonstrations she attends, she knows that freedom of movement is critical.
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Melbourne author Irma Gold is the adventurous author of (2021), a thoughtful debut novel which explored ethical issues involved in toMelbourne author Irma Gold is the adventurous author of (2021), a thoughtful debut novel which explored ethical issues involved in tourism in developing countries such as Thailand. As you can see from her , she has travelled the world but not as an idle tourist in luxury hotels. Her second novel, Shift (just released today) takes the reader to Kliptown, a suburb of Soweto in South Africa, where a thirty-something photographer is at a bit of a loose end after yet another relationship breakup.
Arlie is mildly successful at what he does, but not enough to satisfy the conventional ambitions of his architect father, and his trip to Soweto is as much about escaping his father's judgementalism as it is about exploring his mother's life in South Africa under apartheid... and hopefully gathering photos that will come together in an exhibition back in Melbourne.
is not your everyday tourist destination. It was famously the Black township where the was signed in 1955, so . But you can see on the faces of the tourists in the clip on my blog, that the contrast between residential and business districts is disconcerting, to say the least.
Yet there is nothing of what is sometimes called 'poverty porn' in Irma Gold's novel. To the contrary, she paints a portrait of a vibrant community that transcends scandalous governmental neglect and an absence of basic infrastructure with an informal local economy and a rich cultural life led by the choirmaster Rufaro. As the only white man there, Arlie stands out everywhere he goes, but he is accepted along with his camera, and (almost) defies the reputation of South Africa as a dangerous place where crime is out of control.
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