- I’m late to this multi award-winning book, first published in 2014, and now in a new edition in 2018.
- It is a magnificent work, and an exceptionally well researched and written story of the complexity and sophistication of the civilisation, economy and social cohesion of Australia’s Aboriginal people for at least 80,000 years.
- Extensively quoting from the diaries and journals of the early colonial explorers, surveyors and pastoralists, Pascoe demolishes the myth of the spear carrying ‘hunter-gatherer’ and details the extensive agricultural and aquaculture practices of our first peoples, their housing, food, storage and preservation, their expert management of the land and use of fire, and, critically, their ability to construct societies that were democratic and peaceful.
- There are so many quotable lines in this beautiful book. I underlined paras on virtually every page. Here’s an example:
‘If we look at the evidence presented to us by the explorers, and explain to our children that Aboriginal people did build houses, did build dams, did sow, irrigate, and till the land, did alter the course of rivers, did sew their clothes, and did construct a system of pan-continental government that generated peace and prosperity, it is likely that we will admire and love our land all the more.’
- This book should be compulsory reading on every school curriculum. It is that good and that important.
- I’m an avid reader of anything Michael Lewis writes. This shorter than average book is rather narrow in focus but riveting reading.
- Lewis’ style is to isolate particular individuals central to his argument and tell the story from their perspective. They are usually skilled and senior operatives and they are honest, exceptionally clever, highly intelligent and articulate.
- As usual he skews his targets with pinpoint accuracy, this time at the Trump administration’s utter incompetence during the transition period in particular, then the appointments or lack thereof to management positions subsequently.
- This book made me squirm. It tracks the corruption of the civil service under Trump. The pig-ignorant, anti-science clowns Trump sent in to manage the massive government departments and agencies that spend tens of billions of taxpayer dollars each year.
- It emphasises how critically important government programs, big and small, are to the community and economy generally, and how this underlying fabric of civil order is so taken for granted. Very few people know about them. They’re under the radar.
- The ‘seeming commitment to scientific ignorance’ started very quickly to permeate the senior levels of huge government departments like energy, agriculture, commerce. Troves of data collected over decades and ripe for mining were deleted, suppressed or made unavailable for public access. ‘Under each act of data suppression usually lay a narrow commercial motive: a gun lobbyist, a coal company, a poultry company...It was between the people who were in it for the mission, and the people who were in it for the money’.
- Sections of the book seem rather tedious and pointless at first - portraits of NASA’s first female astronaut; the first ‘Chief Data Scientist’ - but these people are academically brilliant and motivated public servants who are brutally sidelined by the Trump administration. The perverse and disgraceful undermining of NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) to favour the private weather forecasting industry, particularly one player just because he’s well-connected and a Republican donor, is just one of many examples.
- It’s a war against knowledge, expertise, science, skills and basic competence. Utterly shameful and stupid beyond belief. But there you go - welcome to Trump's real America.
- This is a magnificent and beautifully written novel. Jock Serong’s best.
- It is a fascinating, engrossing tale, full of fleshed out characters and relationships, and a highly credible story line based on an actual historical event in the early days of the colony of NSW.
- At its core is the contrast between the cruel, miserable, ignorant but entitled English plunderers and the Indigenous communities who reach out to them and try to make them welcome.
- The brown skinned Bengali ‘lascars’, or sailors, are also treated by the white masters like slaves.
- The Indigenous leaders such as Pemulwuy, and the young domestic servant Boorigul, are painted sympathetically, in contrast to the ugly, opportunistic and thuggish white colonials. ‘Pemulwuy, out there in the darkness somewhere, was the fire that threatened them from without. But ultimately he would flicker and die. The greater danger was the malignancies within: Macarthur and the Corps.’ A young Aboriginal girl, for example, is brutally raped by two out of the four white survivors of the shipwreck of the Sydney Cove.
- The common trope of a thin crust of civilisation in danger from the unknown dark forces underneath is reversed here.
- There is a brief but devastating portrait of the 'legendary' John Donald Macarthur: ‘The man was a tyrant in the making: a grasper made powerful by influential friends’.
- In the end the malignancy within is never defeated. It continues.
- This book is deeply flawed by the author's male obsession with cheap sex. It's really two different novels shoved together - one focussing on the marriage and careers of two highly respected writers; the other a vulgar, pornographic tale of a young woman's sexual exploits.
- Amy Winston is a young book editor. She’s bright, irreverent, talented and ‘exceptionally beautiful’ according to virtually everyone. As the novel progresses however it becomes quite clear she’s just a cheap male fantasy. A sex object.
- The $2 million advance to the ageing literary novelist Helen Owen is absurdly unrealistic. It’s comic. But it highlights the theme of the book - artistic integrity under commercial pressure.
- The constant descent to outright pornography becomes extremely annoying. It is so cheap. Presumably Purcell is caricaturing popular taste in contrast to quality literature. Or satirising modern commercial publishing. Whatever, it fails dismally.
- Amy is a literary ignoramus. She’s aware of popular fiction and thriller writers and that’s it. She’s also a borderline alcoholic, continually drunk, hanging around bars for sex.
- Thankfully, however, Purcell can write. There are wonderful lines: ‘No one bothers to talk about the second time Lazarus died’; ‘He thought of the book now as some sort of disease, like syphilis - a disease you catch while doing something pleasurable’. Both Helen and Malcolm are insightful and wise. And as they age they question their fading relationship. It’s heartwarming as it progresses to a tragic ending.
- Halfway through I was convinced that this book was simply trash. Easily the worst novel I'd read all year. It cloaked itself in literary righteousness but was really just a low rent pornographic indulgence. It was name dropping countless books and authors, literary and popular, as this was a novel about novels and their authors, but it continually subverted its main narrative by the sexual vulgarity. The real and substantial story never got off the ground.
- That story, the Helen and Malcolm one, is beautifully told and comes into its own in the final 70 or so pages. The potentially good novel, on the brink of ruin, re-emerges.
- Under Helen and Malcolm’s influence, Amy, estranged from her own parents, finally begins to mature as an adult. When the sex stops the real and satisfying story is immensely enjoyable.
- Malcolm’s reflections on commercial and literary fiction at the Sydney Writers Festival are just brilliant.
- Beautifully and fluidly written, even poetic at times. A personal journey for the author as well as an essay on what it means to really be an Australian.
- Persuasive in its central argument that Australian patriotism must be rooted in our ancient, indigenous past.
- The centrality of the First Fleet arrival in 1788 and Anzac Day to our national identity is bullshit. As is our pathetic unwillingness as a nation to not see January 26 as Invasion Day, and not see the Uluru Statement as an essential way forward.
- Read this in conjunction with Mark McKenna's brilliant and illuminating Quarterly Essay Moment of Truth.
- How good is this book - it’s remarkable. So satisfying in every way - the story, the characters, the setting, the period.
- It’s the late 19th century transitioning to the first decade of the new 20th century. Horses and buggies are giving way to automobiles. Electricity and sewerage are transforming ordinary domestic life and society. Boyd brings it all to life.
- This is a story of music, love, family tensions, hate and passion. Boyd is a master at this sort of social and domestic drama. Notwithstanding the historical timeframe, all the issues dealt with are significant, contemporary, and powerful, all propelled by rich and invigorating dialogue.
- I particularly loved the Paris setting. We walk and travel with the characters; we share their hotels and residences; we travel in their carriages and trains. And they stay for long periods in other French and European cities, including Russian.
- The food, the restaurants, the cafes, the dinner parties, the clothes, the shops, the factories - all are magnificently brought to life. As are the often difficult personal and work relationships.
- And the illicit, highly sexual, and as it turns out, dangerous love affair between the two characters at the dramatic core of the book is superbly handled by Boyd. Their stories are absorbing.
- This is a book you simply can’t wait to get back to. It sucks you in. Just right for reading during the forthcoming holiday period. Put it on your list.
