The Light Between Oceans by M.L. Stedman

Over recent years I have read several books that have all won prestigious book prizes. With many of them I have wondered just what the hype was all about, or was I being a complete philistine and missing the point, or not reading deep enough.

Then about two weeks ago a librarian and member of my book group presented me with my reserved copy of the Devon libraries summer read; The Light Between Oceans.

I started reading over the weekend and feel very tired today as I was awake finishing this book into the early hours.

The scene of the story is set when Tom, a decelerated war hero from the First World War returns to Australia and is given the chance to work temporarily at a lighthouse situated off the Australian coast, on a fictitious island called Janus.

Tom is ready for the peace and quiet of island living.Coming to terms with his war time terrors and survivors guilt he sets about living for months on the island, where the methodical process of keeping the lighthouse functioning becomes his anchor.

On a period of leave a few months later he reacquaints himself with a local girl from the shore and they spend much time together, and eventually the decision is made, Tom will marry Isabel.

It is during their time on the island that they encounter a rowing boat upon the rugged coast line of the island. The inhabitants are a dead man and a young, breathing baby. Isabel has had numerous miscarriages and this seems to her to be divine intervention. A baby for them to love and care for.

Tom struggles between duty to the procedural issues of the lighthouse, to his wife and to his own happiness. Ultimately Tom's struggle with his own conscience and doing the right thing tears his and Isabel's life apart, but once the wheels have started to turn there is no going back.

This was a beautiful book, with a lovely well researched story. There is much more that I could share with you, but I won't. Locate a copy and read it! For me this has the wow factor that many of the books that win prestigious book prizes lack. The book not only was well researched, but delivered a moral and ethical dilemma and as I turned the pages I wondered what I would have done in Isabel and Tom's shoes.

Mr Chen's Emporium by Deborah O'Brien

As soon as I was offered this book to read, I knew that I wanted to do so! It ticks so many boxes for me! I enjoy Gold Rush stories, I love the whole dual timeline story concept (and have read quite a few over the last month or so) and the synopsis sounded interesting so there was a lot to anticipate liking.

Here's the synopsis:

In 1872, seventeen-year-old Amy Duncan arrives in the Gold Rush town of Millbrooke, having spent the coach journey daydreaming about glittering pavilions and gilded steeples. What she finds is a dusty main street lined with ramshackle buildings.

That is until she walks through the doors of Mr Chen's Emporium, a veritable Aladdin's cave, and her life changes forever. Though banned from the store by her dour clergyman father, Amy is entranced by its handsome owner, Charles Chen ...

In present-day Millbrooke, recently widowed artist Angie Wallace has rented the Old Manse where Amy once lived. When her landlord produces an antique trunk containing Amy's intriguingly diverse keepsakes - both Oriental and European - Angie resolves to learn more about this mysterious girl from the past.

And it's not long before the lives of two very different women, born a century apart, become connected in the most poignant and timeless ways.

The book opens with young Amy Duncan travelling from the thriving city of Sydney to the Gold Rush town of Millbrooke. She has been summoned there by her very strict, very narrow-minded father who is the town clergyman. For Amy, this means an end to a life with her aunt who lets her read scandalous novels (one of my favourite aspects of the book), buy pretty dresses and attend charming entertainments. In her new life, she will be expected to work hard by her mother's side looking after her siblings, acting as a type of governess to another young girl in the town and to behave properly at all times.

Life starts as expected but Amy is given a glimpse into a more exotic life when she visits Mr Chen's Emporium. He gives her some tea but like so much of her life, spirited Amy must hide this gift from her father who has a very poor opinion of men like Charles Chen. This is because Charles and his brother are of Chinese origin. Charles is a little different to some of the other Chinese in town because he was in effect adopted by one of the most influential families in town and so he has the benefit of a good English education as well as his Chinese ethnicity.

Amy is at once intrigued by Charles, and when his adoptive family facilitate a meeting between the two it becomes clear that those feelings are well on their way to being reciprocated. But it is the 1870's and whilst interracial relationships would have occurred, they would have been very unusual and would most likely have resulted in a young woman like Amy being shunned by her local community. Even with just this factor, life would have been difficult enough, but this is the goldfields where the antagonism between white miners and their Chinese counterparts is simmering just below boiling point at the best of times. Those tensions rise again in Millbrooke, potentially putting those more moderate people at risk of violence from those who want to see the Chinese forced off the diggings forever.

In the modern day, recent widow Angie Wallace comes to the town of Millbrooke for the weekend and ends up staying. She rents the crumbling Manse from grumpy Richard Scott for a pitiful amount on the proviso that she will start doing some much needed renovations. For Angie, this is the chance for a new beginning away from the everyday memories of her life with her recently deceased husband. Her grown children do not understand her need to do this, and her friends are sceptical too. Angie, however, sees this as a chance to recharge her artistic batteries, and she soon finds herself drawn into the life of the town when she starts teaching art to a group of ladies who live in the town.

Millbrooke is a town that is still under the influence of gold mining and is again potentially going through a new transition period. This time though, it is a big international mining company that has it's sights set on the town. They are promising jobs and good times for the whole town, as long as they can get the necessary approvals that they need to start the process. The face of the mining company in town is American Jack Parker. It isn't long before the smooth talking Jack has taken up residence in the Manse as a boarder.

What links the two stories is a small trunk that Angie finds that contains small artefacts that have her searching the past for evidence of Charles and Amy Chen. While she searches the historical records related to Millbrooke, she finds herself drawn more fully into modern Millbrooke. I especially loved the idea of the art exhibition that she does with her painting class which focussed on the people and past of the town. The author is a visual artist as well as an author and you could really feel her passion for this side of her work shining through the pages in that section.

In terms of the characters, I was much more invested in the historical characters. I would have loved to have seen more about Amy and Charles and their relationship, but I did enjoy the glimpses that we did get to see, especially in later life. I am not sure that modern sensibilities didn't colour the relationship more than would have been possible in reality, but I suspect getting the balance right between those two differing perspectives would be quite difficult. I also really enjoyed Amy's relationship with Charles' adopted sister Eliza, who has very grand and ambitious plans for her life and I suspect that there could be an interesting story to be told about Eliza in future if the author wished to go down that track.

I was less enamoured of the modern characters. I liked the way that Angie's friendships were portrayed, and I loved seeing a 50 something heroine who brings all her experience to the novel. I really enjoyed seeing her search for the clues that she could find about Charles and Amy and the town itself. Where I really struggled was with the choices that she made and in the representation of the two main male characters - Jack and Richard. Richard in particular was a bit of a mystery. Initially he was portrayed as something of a drunkard but later as something completely different.

The dual storyline accent was very structured - much more than you would necessarily see in other similar books. For example, this week I read another book where the first third of the book concentrated on the past, and then moved forward in time with a look back over the shoulder at the past. In this book, in the beginning of each chapter we heard about Amy and her story and then we moved forward in time to see what was happening in Angie's life. I did wonder if the intention was to try and draw direct parallels between the two stories. If so, it didn't quite work for me especially in relation to correlations between Amy's relationship with Charles and Angie's relationship (not going to tell you who with, but I will say I was disappointed with this particular aspect of the story).

Whilst this book didn't work for me in all aspects, I was interested in the story that debut author, Deborah O'Brien, has brought to the page. In the notes, she mentions that she is writing a sequel  and in the Q and A that I hosted on my blog, she says this is a modern setting only which I am not sure about but still.

Rating 3.5/5

Marg's Favourite HF set in Australia

When we decided that we were going to have this week where we shared the favourite fiction set in our own countries, it sounded like a really fab idea until it came time to actually choose the books. How  to decide which ones? In the end I decided to take a Books of a Lifetime approach and choose books that I recall from various times in my life and then some more recent reads.

Kings in Grass Castles by Mary Durack - In my early teens I fell in love with Historical Fiction in the form of Jean Plaidy's books about English royalty. Before that however, I do remember loving this tale of a pioneer family in the far north of Western Australia. I am not actually sure how well this book would hold up to a reread but at the time I certainly fell in love with the story

Harp in the South/Poor Man's Orange by Ruth Park - We had to study this trilogy in high school and I found myself swept up into the hard world of 1930s Sydney. Around the same time there was a mini-series as well which really helped bring the world to life

All the Rivers Run by Nancy Cato - A classic story of life in the late 1800s - a woman with indelible spirit, the handsome man who loved her, the drama of life in the country, paddle steamer races. What more could you want! I actually rewatched the mini series adaptation of this a couple of years ago and apart from the fact that if it was made now the colourisation of the film would be very different, it still was a very entertaining watch..

Aaron Fletcher's Walkabout series - This series of books is one that I found out about through fellow bloggers. It is a big, juicy saga following one family's story of starting a huge sheep station in the Outback, the loves, the tragedies, the fight against nature. It starts with a convict settler and again features strong women, the men who loved them. The strange this series is how hard it is to find out anything about Aaron Fletcher. I suspect he wasn't Australian, but the story doesn't seem to betray that fact. Thinking about it, I am not sure that I don't still have one more book in the series to read.

A Stranger in My Street by Deborah Burrows - This is one of my favourite historical fiction reads this year. It is set in my home town of Perth during World War II (one of my favourite eras to read about) and features lots of interesting historical facts, a good mystery and an understated romance. Can't wait to read more from this author!

There are so many other authors I could mention. Maybe if you have a favourite HF novel set in Australia you might like to mention it in the comments!

A Stranger in my Street by Deborah Burrows

It's January 1943. Australia is at war and Perth is buzzing.

US troops have permanently docked in the city in what local men refer to bitterly as the American occupation, and Perth women are having the time of their lives. The Americans have money, accents like movie stars, smart tailored uniforms and good manners. What's more, they love to dance and show a girl a good time, and young women are throwing caution to the wind and pushing social boundaries with their behaviour.

Not Meg Eaton, however. The war has brought her nothing but heartbreak, stealing her young love eighteen months ago. Until, in the middle of a Perth heat-wave, she meets her lost lover's brother, Tom – standing over a dead body in her neighbour's backyard.

Suddenly, Meg finds herself embroiled in the murder mystery, and increasingly involved with Tom Lagrange. But is he all that he seems? And what exactly was his relationship with the dead woman?

Debut author Deborah Burrows has brought her skills as a historian to the fore with this meticulously researched and thoroughly entertaining novel of love and intrigue.

Like most readers, I have my favourite types of books. For example, tell me a book is set in either World War I or World War II then I will certainly consider whether it might be something that I might want to read. Tell me that book is set in my home town of Perth then I will have to do more than that! Of course, that bring it's own dangers. What if the representation of the city feels off? Luckily, that wasn't an issue here.

Perth is a city that has been invaded, mostly by the American servicemen who have been based there as a flying base and also, to a certain degree, as a deterrent to a Japanese invasion. With them the US service men bring hard to find goods that can be sold on the black market, money and good times, especially for the young ladies in town. They look good in their uniforms, and they know how to show a lady a good time with music and dancing and more!

Whilst Meg Eaton should be out living it up, she has been living a more low key life since she heard the news that her boyfriend had been killed. Her attempt to contact his parents has been shunned and so she grieves alone. She lives with her mother and older sister, and works as a stenographer at the Crown court. Her very quiet life is changed when, on a hot summer day, she overhears a conversation outside her house. When she goes out to investigate, she finds herself talking to her dead boyfriend's older brother, Tom.

Tom is the quintessential war hero. He is handsome, decorated for bravery, former Rhodes Scholar and from a well known (and wealthy) family. He is, however, also fighting his demons as he was badly injured and is constantly in pain. He therefore can no longer take part in active fighting, but he has instead returned to Perth, with his glamourous fiancee in tow, to act as a liaison officer between the Australian and American forces that both call the city home.

Tom and Meg had never actually met before the day that he visited her next door neighbour. Neither could possibly have known the impact that meeting was going to have, both immediate and long term. When they find a body, the police know who they need to find immediately. The dead woman's husband is an Italian and therefore must have a big temper. Meg doesn't believe that at all, and so it is therefore up to Meg and Tom to work out precisely what did happen to the woman.

Once Tom realises who Meg is, and that she is still living a half life as a result of her grief, he is determined that it is time for her to start living and as a result he introduces her to some of the soldiers that he knows, and starts meeting her for drinks and lunch. The most difficult thing for Meg though is to see behind the charming exterior of the men that she is meeting to see the kind of men who are underneath, and that is especially true of Tom. He is keeping many secrets, not the least of which is what the true nature of his relationship with the dead woman was.

The author did a great job of dealing with some of the social issues of the day. The husband's family has been interred as enemy aliens and yet he is off fighting for Australia. The dead woman is working at the local hospital and has a reputation for being a bit fast and so there are plenty of judgements made about her fate, and then there is the taste of animosity that exists between the Australian and American soldiers.

Sometimes when an author tries to get good historical detail, a good romance and a good mystery into the one novel, one aspect or another is weaker, but Burrows has managed to get the balance pretty much right. Throw in the places that I am familiar with like the gardens near the court buildings and the foreshore of the Swan River among others, and some unfamiliar aspects of the history of Perth, and I was a pretty happy reader. Whilst I have that extra connection to the setting, I am sure that the setting will be enjoyable to most readers even if they aren't as familiar as I was with it.

A Stranger in my Street is Deborah Burrows first novel and it is a really strong debut. I saw her mention the other day on Twitter that she has recently been signed for a second novel which will once again feature World War II and Perth, so I am already anticipating getting my hands on that book.

Rating 4.5/5

That Deadman Dance by Kim Scott

Bobby Wabalanginy never learned fear, not until he was pretty well a grown man. Sure, he grew up doing the Dead Man Dance, but with him it was a dance of life, a lively dance for people to do together...


Told through the eyes of black and white, young and old, this is a story about a fledgling Western Australian community in the early 1800s known as the 'friendly frontier'.


Poetic, warm-hearted and bold, it is a story which shows that first contact did not have to lead to war.


It is a story for our times.

Some times, as a reader, I need a bit of a push to read a specific book. Usually, this happens with books that I wanted enough to buy but then I struggle to fit it in between library reads and review copies.

So it was with this book.  I bought it last year when I attended a Melbourne Writers Festival session which featured the author, Kim Scott, along with a couple of other authors talking about writing books from the indigenous perspective. In this case, Kim Scott is an indigenous Australian, a member of the Noongar tribe which originates in the far south western corner of Western Australia.

As soon as Lisa from ANZ Litlovers announced that she was going to run the Indigenous Literature Week this week (to coincide with NAIDOC week) I knew that this was the book that I was finally going to read! (NAIDOC originally stood for National Aborigines and Islanders Day Observance Committee although now it is more the name of the week than an acronym for something else).

Was the wait to read it worth it? I would have to say yes, but there is a bit of a disclaimer, but I will get to that in due course.

This novel asks a very simple question. What if, at first contact between native Australians and the British colonisers, things were different? What if the two groups worked together with mutual benefit, rather than be a story of domination and destruction? What if true friendship could be formed between the two groups, and by extension what lessons could we possibly take from this example today?

Of course, all those what ifs are coloured by the truth of what was, and that truth is not denied in any way, but for a while there it seems as though the colonisers and the representatives of the Noongar people might have been able to find a way.

The pivotal character of the book is Bobby Wabalanginy and he in effect performs the role of guide to the reader. At various times throughout the novel he is equally at home with his tribe and also within the homes of the British who have come to colonise the area around King George Sound, which is near  current day Albany. Bobby has a special affinity with the whales that follow their migration through the sees nearby, and also a special ability as a storyteller and to mimic those around them, both in voice and in dance. We see Bobby as both a young boy telling of his life now, but also as an old man looking back through time. Far from being a conduit between the two cultures, as an old man Bobby is something of an oddity, telling his fascinating story to anyone who would listen - in effect he was a tourist attraction.

Whilst Bobby is our guide, he is not the only voice that we get to here in the pages of this book. We meet Dr Cross, one of the first men to make the trek to the area with the hope of starting a new settlement. The good doctor is keen to foster good relationship with the locals and initially it seems that will be possible. He takes Bobby under his wing, but he is not a well man.

Following in his footsteps are the ambitious Mr Chaine  (and his family) who has high hopes of making his fortune by catering to the needs of the American whaling ships that flock to the area for the annual harvest of whale oil, Mr Skelly the soon to be ex convict, Sargeant Killam, Jak Tar the sailor who escapes from one of the ships, and the Governor who comes with very set ideas on how the native issues should be resolved.

It may sound as though the focus is purely on the Aboriginal experience, but Scott doesn't back away from the hardships that the white settlers face

The narrative is both straight forward and yet somewhat convoluted thanks to the way that the book is structured. Part 1 is set in 1833 to 1835 whereas part 2 tells of the events that occurred in 1826 to 1830 but this section is told to us by old man Bobby looking back through the years. We are then back in 1836 to 1838 for Part 3 and 1841 to 1844 in Part 4. Even within those parts there are flashbacks and past questions answered. And yet, overall, at the end of the book, the story felt quite straight forward and linear. That doesn't always happen when an author plays with the concepts of time in their storytelling.

One of the things about this book is that it did challenge me, it did make me work for the pay off. There are lots of sections where the language is beautiful and yet other sections where there was repetition of phrases which becomes very obvious as I was reading. There was also a lot of information in the book about the process of whaling as it was performed in the 1800s. Not something that modern readers would necessary be comfortable with, but certainly that aspect fitted within the historical context of the time.

One of the most poignant passages in the book is one that I shared in my Tuesday Teaser post recently:

Me and my people... My people and I (he winked) are not so good traders as we thought. We thought making friends was the best thing, and never knew that when we took your flour and sugar and tea and blankets that we'd lose everything of ours.. We learned your words and songs and stories, and never knew you didn't want to hear ours....

Later in the book as the narrative wends it's way to the inevitable truths that we know of the relationship between the two groups, the observation is made about how the white man has taken everything from the Noongar: their food, the watering holes have been destroyed by introduced stock, their freedom. And yet the whites punish the natives if they try to take the food etc that they so badly need. Even though it is the story that we know, it was a very powerful section to read.

Whilst Scott makes it clear in his notes that this story is fiction, he does acknowledge that there is evidence to suggest that this idea of cooperation between the Noongar people and the white settlers did happen.

This book won the prestigious Miles Franklin Award in 2011 amongst many other prizes, and without having read the other shortlisted books, it does seem like a worthy winner to me. By focusing on the indigenous experience, Kim Scott gave me a fresh perspective on a story that seems so familiar to most Australians. It is a story that needed to be told.

I am glad that participating in ANZLitlovers Indigenous Literature Week has finally given me the nudge that I needed to actually read this book! I definitely intend to read more from Mr Scott in the future.

Rating 4/5

Spotlight on Our Australian Girl - Grace

Last year, I saw a couple of posts on an Rebecca's Book Blog (an American blog which is kind of ironic in a way) talking about a new children's book series called Our Australian Girl.  After that I saw them mentioned on an Australian blog when the books were launched, and I was interested enough to see if I could track the books down. At the time there were four girls that we could meet, but since then another two girls have been added to the series. Today, I thought I would talk generally about the series, but then more specifically about the first girl, Grace.

The concept is that we meet a girl from a particular time in history and through a series of four books we get to follow her life. So far, the girls are:

Grace - a convict who is transported to Australia in 1808.
Letty - a free settler who is coming to Australia in 1841
Poppy - a young girl of Chinese/Aboriginal heritage who gets caught up in goldrush fever in 1864.
Rose - lives in Melbourne during the year that Australia became an official nation in 1901
Nellie - an Irish orphan who is sent to South Australia in 1849
Alice - a young girl with a passion for ballet who lives in Perth during the World War I (1918).

The publishers have done a fabulous job with the packaging of these books. Each cover features a photo of the girl, a charm bracelet where there is a charm for the year, the letter of the girl's name, the number of the book of the series, and then a charm that is relevant to the story within the books. Inside the book there are maps showing where the book is set, historical information from the time that the book is set in, as well as each author and the illustrator's Australian girl story, whether they were born here or if they immigrated to Australia. There is also additional content to be found at the associated website, including quizzes as well as additional information for teachers and parents.

Whilst I am not in the target range for these books, I love the way that the publisher has put this series together, and if I was a girl aged between 8 and 11, I am pretty sure that I would love these books! If you have a girl in your life who likes history, then these may well be a good gift idea for her!

In this video, we meet the girls who have been chosen to be the faces of  Our Australian Girls.

So let's meet Grace.

Grace is an orphan who lives with her uncle in the slums of London. He is a harsh guardian for Grace, and she has to work as a mudlark, looking for items of value in the mudflats at the edge of the Thames river. Like so many young girls through the ages, Grace is obsessed with horses. Visiting the horses nearby usually gives Grace great comfort, except when she thinks that they are also being mistreated. When she steals an apple from a nearby fruit stall to give to the horse, she is caught, spends time in prison and is eventually sentenced to be transported to Australia.

On board the ship, Grace faces harsh conditions, but she is lucky enough to make friends with Hannah and her mother Liza which helps her survive her time on board the boat.

Once she reaches Australia, she is sent to work on a farm in the country away from her new friends. There she meets the indigenous Aboriginal population as well as seeing the strange animals and flora that abound in the country. She likes her mistress but she is not sure that her master is pleased with her. Will her obsession with horses cause her trouble again, even though she is doing her best in difficult circumstances.

Grace is terrified that she will be sent back to the Factory (where the girls who haven't been employed are kept to work in horrible conditions) and so she does her best to make her master happy, but with his horse sickening due to Grace's actions, it is looking unlikely that she will be able to stay.


Originally posted at The Adventures of an Intrepid Reader

Empire Day by Diane Armstrong

A heart-warming novel in the tradition of CLOUDSTREET and THE HARP IN THE SOUTH


Empire Day, 1948. A back street in Bondi is transformed as the fireworks of Cracker Night cast a magical glow over its humble cottages. But Australia as a whole is being transformed in this postwar era and the people of Wattle Street know that life will never be the same again. The ′reffos′ have moved in, and their strange ways are threatening the comfortable world of salt-of-the-earth locals like Pop Wilson, deserted mum Kath and sharp-tongued Maude McNulty.


With suspicious and disapproving eyes, the Australians observe their new neighbours -- mysterious Mr Emil, fragile young Lilija and all the other Europeans starting their lives afresh. Mistrust and misunderstandings abound on both sides. To Hania, an angry teenager struggling to cope with her hysterical mother, and to Sala, an unhappily married woman trying to blot out her traumatic wartime past, the Australians appear enviably carefree.


But behind closed doors, Old as well as New Australians suffer secret heartaches. As the smoke of fires past and present gradually disperses and the lives of the two groups entwine, unexpected relationships form that bring passion and tragedy for some, and forgiveness and resolution for others.


EMPIRE DAY is a dramatic and heart-warming novel in the tradition of CLOUDSTREET and THE HARP IN THE SOUTH. It confirms Diane Armstrong as one of our most gifted and compelling storytellers

Each year, one of my goals is to read more Australian authors. This year is my most successful year so far and I am pleased to say that I can now add Diane Armstrong to my list of new to me Australian authors.

This book covers the events in the lives of the people who live in Wattle Street in Bondi in Sydney for one year, starting on Empire Day. Whilst there are several residents that have lived in the street for many years, there are also the new arrivals - refugees from the war in Europe. The make up of Sydney's population was rapidly changing in ways that we take for granted now, especially in terms of the impact that they made in helping the city to become more cosmopolitan. For example, at one point one of the Australian characters mentioned about the strange new delicatessens that were starting to appear where you could go and buy your cured meats and cheeses, something that now we take for granted!

Among the various residents we meet Hania and her mother who have recently immigrated from Poland, the Ukrainian family whose young daughter falls in love with the Australian boy Ted who lives with his mother down the street. There is also a young married couple who have moved into a room and the mysterious Mr Emil who keeps very much to himself, causing others to think he is behaving very suspiciously. One of the other major story lines concerns the single mum Kath who holds down a job as a barmaid whilst single-handedly raising her boys, a job made even harder when the eldest of the boys, Meggsie, comes down with polio.

One of the major strengths of this book is it's portrayal of Sydney at a particular place and time. There were several significant historical events that were covered in the pages of the book, as well as topics like the terrible disease of polio and the treatments that were just starting to be used.

Each of the sets of characters get their time to tell their story - where they have come from and what they have seen, where they would like to be going to. Some of the stories are stronger than others. I was particularly moved by the stories of the new Australians, struggling so hard to try to fit into their new lives.

At the same time though, the fact that there were so many stories, so many characters to get page time became one of the weaknesses of the book in that characters would just disappear for pages at a time and then suddenly pop back up on the radar.

Not too long ago I posted about a Melbourne Writers Festival event that I went to where one of the points that was made was about the relationships between characters and place and about how characters who are living displaced lives  are very much charged by loss and by memories of the past. These characters also bring their previous places to where they currently reside through their memories and the past shapes their current lives. For me this book perfectly represented this! There were the newly arrived immigrants who had left behind the traumatic events of World War II but bought the residual fears and memories. Even for those Australian characters there were past events that were very much affecting their current lives. For me, this aspect is a very interesting one when authors choose to explore it!

As I read this book I could not help but draw parallels to the immigrant experience being shown through the pages of this book and the current political situation. It is astounding to think that for a country that often prides itself on the welcoming and tolerant attitude towards multiculturalism, much of the propaganda and attitudes have stark parallels with the immigration questions of today. I don't doubt that this was a deliberate choice on the part of the author.

I did spend a lot of time as I was reading this book wondering why on earth the title wouldn't be something to do with Wattle Street, so I was glad that this issue was resolved towards the very end of the book!

This is my first time reading Diane Armstrong, but I intend to read more and it was a good, solid read. I liked her voice, I liked her characters and settings and I am looking forward to exploring more of her work.

Rating 4/5

Thanks to Netgalley and Harper Collins Australia for the e-galley.

**Please note**

If you are interested in reading this book, you can buy it online at Fishpondworld.com. You will have to pay our expensive book prices, but there is free international postage which will help a little!

The Lieutenant by Kate Grenville

First settlement in New South Wales

Born in 1767 England, Daniel Rooke was a boy of great intelligence. He was exceptional with numbers and has a keen sense of curiosity about where numbers could lead him. Even though he had this intelligence or in part because of it he had trouble forming friendships with his peers.

Daniel was accepted to At Portsmouth Naval College on scholarship and became quite interested in astronomy. He becomes a Lieutenant in the Navy and goes on a mission to take convicts to New South Wales. On the ship he took on the role of navigator and once in Australia, that of Astronomer. Part of the mission was to get to know the natives and try to befriend them so that the convicts and others could live in safety.

As Astronomer, Rooke was given permission to build an observatory away from the camp to live and work in. After a time some of the natives started visiting him there and he built up a friendship with a young girl named Tagaran. She teaches him the native language and he keeps meticulous records about their conversations and the language. However, soon the relationship between the natives and soldiers deteriorates and Rooke has to choose between his friendship with the natives and duty.

I loved Kate Grenville's The Secret River (see my review) and was highly anticipating her next book. While I quite enjoyed it, I didn't love it like The Secret River. It took a long time for me to warm up to the character of Daniel Rooke . Once her started his relationship with the natives, I did warm up to him and loved reading about his special friendship with Tagaran. The problem is that it took well over 100 pages to lead up to this and it didn't last very long. I would have like to explore the relationship further. Also, in the last chapter when find out the Rooke had been married but nothing about the relationship. We are never introduced to his wife.

That said, I did enjoy The Lieutenant and would recommend it, especially to those interested in the first settlement in New South Wales.

3.5/5

The Lieutenant by Kate Grenville

Daniel Rooke,soldier and astronomer, was always an outsider. As a young lieutenant of marines he arrives in New South Wales on the First Fleet in 1788 and sees his chance. he sets up his observatory away from the main camp, and begins the scientific work that he hopes will make him famous.

Aboriginal people soon start to visit his isolated promontory, and a child named Tagaran begins to teach him her language. With meticulous care he records their conversations.

An extraordinary friendship forms, and Rooke has almost forgotten he is a soldier when a man is fatally wounded in the infant colony. The lieutenant faces a decision that will define not only who he is but the course of his entire life.

In this profoundly moving novel Kate Grenville returns to the landscape of her much-loved bestseller The Secret River. Inspired by the notebooks of William Dawes, The Lieutenant is a compelling story about friendship and self-discovery by a writer at the peak of her power.

There's no doubt that if I try to work out where my gaps are in terms of the Historical Fiction that I read, then Australian history is one of those gaps. It's not because it doesn't interest me, because it does, but I think because it is either difficult to find out about good books that use Australian history as the base, or because there aren't that many good books out there.

Not long before I started blogging back in 2005, I read The Secret River by Kate Grenville. Set at the time of the First Fleet it looked at the relationship between white settlers and the native Australian Aborigines who were already here. Grenville returns to this same setting in The Lieutenant.

The main character in the story is Lieutenant Daniel Rooke. He is a young man who has been chosen to receive a top notch education based on his impressive mathematical abilities, and finds himself recruited to serve in the First Fleet that it coming to Australia. Whilst he is a soldier, his main role once he gets to the new land will be as astronomer, observing the night skies and in particular looking for signs of a comet. With his skills as astronomer, linguist and orienter are very valued on such an expedition, he is also very much aware that he is something of an outcast.

When the fleet arrives in Botany Bay, Rooke sets up his observatory at a distance away from the rest of the soldiers and convicts. This places him in an ideal position to be able to interact with the local tribespeople, and he quickly begins to study the language and make friends with the people, most especially a young girl. It doesn't take long however for relations between the settlers and the natives to degenerate and Rooke finds himself having to choose between duty and friendship.

Whilst the setting is similar, there are significant differences between the two stories. In this novel, Grenville has pared the narrative right back to the basics of the story. We are very much focussed on Rooke's life, and his interactions. For me, this made The Lieutenant a much stronger, more interesting book.

I was interested in a couple of the choices that Grenville made with this book. There is no secret that this book is very much based on the life of one Lt William Dawes who was a skilled astronomer and who did document the language. On her website, Grenville explains the choices that she made. The interesting thing to me was that she chose to use different names for all the characters - not only for Rooke/Dawes but also for first Governor and for the known names of some of the other important figures from the First Fleet. I am not sure that it was necessary to make these changes, but I do understand her intent. As she says on her website:

I've taken events that took place in the real world and used them as the basis for a work of imagination.

This is a novel, then, not history.

It is a deceptively short book. The hardcover version I had had a total of 307 pages, but the text size and white spaces were definitely on the generous side.

I enjoyed this trip into Australian history, and hope to read more with this setting. This book will be published in the US and UK on February 5 2009.

The Longest Journey by Diana Patterson and Rita Turner

An Amazing Journey and Amazing Historical Fiction!

As a young child, Elspeth lived with her father, the groundskeeper of the estate of Lord Reginald Westerna. When her father died, Lord Westerna took her in and bought her up as a Lady. She was the daughter he never had.

As a young woman, Elspeth’s wealthy English gentry’ world collapses when Lord Reginald Westerna dies and leaves her alone with her cruel stepbrother, Warwick. His jealousy and hatred of her brings him to accuse her of a crime she didn’t commit and she is sentenced to deportation to Australia.

There, the Governor of the Colony, Sir Rossmore, employs her. He is widowed and once he learns Elspeth’s story, she rises in station and a romance between the two begins.

This is a beautifully written story, that really captures the time and place of both England’s and Australia’s rich gentry. We also get a glimpse at the dark "underbelly" of the two countries. It is a story of love, courage, adversity, and romance. It has a fine cast of characters and a well thought out plot. A lot of research must have gone into writing this story and describing the costuming of the day.

I highly recommend this wonderful book.

5/5

Thanks to Diana Patterson and Rita Turner for an advance reading copy!

Upcoming Release: The Lieutenant by Kate Grenville

Not too long before I started blogging I read The Secret River by Kate Grenville and I quite enjoyed it. It has taken a while, but we finally have a new book from this author, and once again it is a historical novel with the early days of Australia as the setting!

In 1787 Lieutenant Thomas Rooke sets sail from Portsmouth with the First Fleet and its cargo of convicts, destined for New South Wales. As a young officer and a man of science, the shy and quiet Rooke is full of anticipation about the natural wonders he might discover in this strange land on the other side of the world. After the fleet arrives in Port Jackson, Rooke sets up camp on a rocky and isolated point, and starts his work of astronomy and navigation. It's not too long before some of the Aboriginal people who live around the harbour pay him a visit. One of them, a girl named Tarunga, starts to teach him her own language. But her lessons and their friendship are interrupted when Rooke is given an order that will change his life forever. Inspired by the 1790 notebooks of William Dawes in which he recorded his conversations with a young Gadigal woman, The Lieutenant is a story about a man discovering his true self in extraordinary circumstances.

I for one am very much looking forward to reading this one!

The Lieutenant is released in Australia on 1 October 2008 and in the UK and US on 5 February 2009.

Barbed Wire and Roses by Peter Yeldham

It was exciting to be on our way last...but we were such innocents. We had no idea of the hell that lay ahead. Even if we had known, what could we have done about it?

They were our golden youth, seeking adventure on foreign battlefields. The First World War, everyone said in 1914, would be over by Christmas, and Stephen Conway rushes to enlist in the belief her should fight for King and Empire. Leaving behind a new wife and a baby on the way, he soon finds himself in the trenches of Gallipoli. Four horrific years later, Stephen is the only survivor of his platoon, shell-shocked and disillusioned, and during the heat of battle on the bloodstained fields of France, he mysteriously disappears.

Stephen's ultimate fate is still a mystery when more than eighty years later his grandson Patrick finds a diary that leads him to Britain and France on a journey to discover what really happened. It is a journey during which he unexpectedly finds love, and the truth about his grandfather's fate that is even stranger and more shocking than he imagined.

It seems to be very fitting to be writing this review today, on Remembrance Day. I don't know if it is just the time of year, but this book has really affected me. I think one of its main selling points is that it doesn't back away from the horrifying aspects of World War I, whereas it is often quite easy to think only of the honour and glory that our troops covered themselves in.

There are two narratives within this book - the first is by Stephen telling of their disappointment of having no opportunity to really say goodbye to his loved ones, rapidly changing to excitement at being on the way, and then impatience as they train in Egypt, worried that the fun will be over before they get there. He writes of the horrors of Gallipoli, the brief respites provided during leave in London, and then the ghastliness of the Somme. Gradually Stephen's emotions change as he becomes horrified and then emotionally numb to the things that are going around him, to the point of beginning to suffer from shell shock.

The second part of the narrative is by Stephen's grandson, Patrick. He comes across his grandfather's diary in which the entries abruptly end in 1918. His family had received condolence papers in 1918, but it soon seems as though they didn't get the diary until much, much later which is quite strange. Another puzzling aspect is that Stephen Conway's name doesn't appear on any of the lists of dead soldiers anywhere. Patrick is a struggling screenwriter who has to go to London to pitch an idea to the BBC, and so takes the opportunity to visit the parts of France mentioned in his grandfather's diary, and then to try to search to find out exactly what happened to his grandfather. At every turn, there seems to be a new obstacle, a new hurdle, but with the assistance of a new found friend, they eventually find out the shocking truth.

There were some fascinating and troubling things mentioned in this book that I had no idea about previously. For example, did you know that at one stage one of the allied armies had a policy of decimation to try to discourage their troops from deserting. Basically, decimation meant that they randomly selected one out of every ten soldiers and killed them as a warning to other soldiers. There were other, less gruesome, things as well. Another example is that in many of the towns, there is still great affection for the Australians who fought so bravely in their areas, to the point that there is a school that has their students sing Waltzing Matilda every morning.

I spent yesterday morning searching the net searching for details about Siegfried Sassoon, who is mentioned in a number of places in the novel. He was a war poet and was also responsible for writing Finished with the War: A Soldiers Declaration, which was read out in the British Parliament. I also spent time searching online videos for songs and images. There are a lot of them out there, and some of them are truly moving. I love it when a historical fiction read sends you on a quest to search for more information!

I don't think that this book is easily accessible outside Australia, but if you can get it, it is very enlightening, and enjoyable, read, and for me, left a lasting impression.

So today, Remembrance Day 2007, I will finish this review in the traditional manner, but with a deeper understanding of just what our forebears went through:




Lest we forget




Rating: 4.5/5

Silver Wattle by Belinda Alexandra

In fear for their lives after the sudden death of their mother, Adela and Klara must flee Prague to find refuge with their uncle in Australia. Later, Adela becomes a film director at a time when the local industry is starting to feel the competition from Hollywood.

But even as success is imminent, the issues of family and an impossible love are never far away. And ultimately dreams of the silver screen must compete with the bonds of a lifetime …

Silver Wattle confirms Belinda Alexandra as one of our foremost storytellers. Weaving fact into inspiring fiction with great flair and imagination, this is a novel as full of hope, glamour and heartbreak as the film industry itself.

This is Australian author Belinda Alexandra's third book. Of the previous two, I have had White Gardenia sitting on my bookshelves for at least a couple of years (I originally bought it because Paullina Simons gave the cover quote), but still haven't managed to read it. The second book was called Wild Lavender, and was set in France during WWII. I liked it well enough, but I am really pleased to say that I really enjoyed this one more.

Our story starts in Prague, in the every day life of two sisters, Adela and Klara. They live the well to do lifestyle of the relatively wealthy with their mother and step father. Klara is showing promise to be a concert pianist, but it seems as though her studies must be put on hold when the two sisters have to flee Prague and travel to Australia to start a new life with their uncle and his Indian wife, knowing that they will not be able to return to Prague until they have both reached 21 years of age, when they will be able to claim their fortunes.

As the two girls grow up in a far off land, Adela becomes involved in the Australian silent movie industry, firstly by becoming a production assistant and later becoming the director herself, with the support of some unlikely backers. Her uncle also gets involved in the film industry by managing the local cinemas. Along the way Adela falls in love, has to deal with mental illness of someone close to her at a time when psychiatry was very much in its infancy, both girls face more changes and disappointments as they fight for their dreams, and triumphs over her trials along the way. But those very triumphs bring danger back into the girls lives and lead to another tragedy in their lives.

With cameo appearances by several famous Aussies of the day, for example, May Gibbs who was the author of many books including Snugglepot and Cuddlepie (which I remember reading when I was a young girl), mentions of some of the iconic moments in Australian history, and a really good sense of time and place, the glamour and excitement of the film industry, of the 1920s and the author's love for the Australian bush and its creatures really shone through the pages of this book.

A really enjoyable read!

Rating 4.5/5