words and images
Anything to do with books and writing, but mainly book reviews
Richard Flanagan is an important novelist by any standards but he is particularly significant in his home state of Tasmania. While I was in Hobart before tackling the Three Capes Walk recently I spent a morning in the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG). The exhibition in the largest of its spaces was inspired by five of Flanagan’s novels while the more traditional art upstairs has close links to one of them. Let’s start downstairs.
• This post replaces and updates my original (2023) introduction to Bruce Pascoe and his Dark Emu in The European colonisation of Australia on this blog, and the comments and additions which followed it there.
As I said in 2023, it has gradually become apparent that the Australian history we learned in school fifty years ago obscured much of the truth about the early years of European settlement. Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu (2014) is a key work in our rethinking of that narrative.
I knew about the book for some years before I finally found the time and courage to read it. I had avoided it because I really didn’t want to read yet another account of white injustice and brutality, but I needn’t have worried: the book is not confronting in that way but is primarily about pre-contact indigenous communities and their food.
Mapoon is a small community on the Western coast of Cape York Peninsula, 200 km South of Bamaga (which is almost on the tip) and 100 km North of Weipa.
This is the story of Mapoon according to the Aboriginal people of Mapoon as they wrote and recorded it in the Dry Season of 1974 and the Wet Season of early 1975.
There was at Mapoon at that time about six families, pioneering the rebuilding of their destroyed settlement…
So begins the Introduction to the first of this pair of books, published in Melbourne in 1975 by an activist organisation. The second volume, much longer, tells the story of the “Invaders” largely in their own words, quoting extensively from church and government records.
The fiction we now call Fantasy is largely a mid-twentieth century invention with roots in older mythologies. Here I want to look at some novels from the Dark Ages of the genre, the 1960s and early 70s, rooted explicitly in the Dark Ages of Europe. All of them are far too good to forget.
Finding a good new-to-me writer and series is always a delight and I’m celebrating my discovery of Aaronovitch and The Rivers of London by putting them in the context of some books I’ve known much longer.
A mash-up of Fleming – Deighton – Le Carre spy novels and Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos? Why not? And some cubicle-life workplace humour for light relief? Sure. The result won’t be to everyone’s taste but some of us will find it to be great (gory, gruesome) fun.
Continue reading “Magical London – Gaiman, Stross and Aaronovitch”