“Wanting” with its two meanings—“desire” and “lack”—forms the thematic underpinning of this novel, with intriguing plot lines and settings which move from the British penal colony of Van Dieman’s Land (now Tasmania), with its on-going battles to control, if not eliminate, the aborigines, to London’s highest levels of aristocratic and literary society. Famed explorer Sir John Franklin and his wife Jane, who represent the Crown in Van Dieman’s Land, share the stage with aborigine King Romeo, his wild and mysterious daughter Mathinna, an assortment of local workers and tradesmen, and eventually, with Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and even, on one occasion, the royal families of Europe. An unusual novel which shows the damaging effects of empire-building, on both the conquered and on the arrogant “conquerors,” Wanting makes the reader understand why the surviving aborigines ultimately believe “the world was not run by God but by the Devil.”
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Set on the remote southeast coast of Tasmania, the isolated island at the southernmost tip of Australia, Nicholas Shakespeare’s latest novel examines the hard-scrabble lives of Alex and Merridy Dove as they try to create satisfying lives, cope with traumatic childhood memories which have forever affected their sense of security, and ultimately decide that “We’d better start living. We’re dead an awfully long time.” Shakespeare, who lives in Tasmania for four months a year (and in England for the other eight months), creates a vibrant picture of life at Wellington Point, and of the connections the inhabitants forge with each other and with the land and the sea. Moving back and forth in time, the novel provides the individual backgrounds of all the characters, their courtships and love affairs, their hopes for the future, and their personal interests. The leisurely, domestic pace of the novel quickens with the arrival of Kish, a teenage orphan whom Alex and Merridy rescue from a ferocious storm at sea. Merridy and Alex give Kish a place to stay temporarily, along with a job, each of them trying to fit Kish into their memories of the past and their dreams for the future.
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Nominated for the Booker Prize in 2000, THE ENGLISH PASSENGERS is, on the surface, a picaresque adventure of sailors going to Tasmania, but it is also the vivid, sorrowful drama of the extermination of the aborigines there. With a cast of characters engaged in all manner of mischief during their voyage from the Isle of Man to Tasmania, this engaging and thoughtful novel uses nineteen different voices, four of them major characters, incorporating personal memoirs and/or letters which provide depth and interest. Through the wide variety of characters and their attitudes and beliefs, the seemingly incompatible plot lines, both comic and tragic, come to life and provide focus for the ship’s meanderings.
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In this unusual and imaginative novel, Flanagan presents a multi-leveled story which is full of wry, sometimes hilarious, observations about people and history, at the same time that it is a scathing indictment of colonialism’s cruelties and its prison system, in particular. Sentenced to life imprisonment on an island off the coast of Tasmania, William Buelow Gould cleverly plays the survival game, ingratiating himself with the authorities through his willingness to paint whatever they want him to paint. It is through the fish paintings that Gould paints for himself, however, that he tries to hang onto his sanity against overwhelming cruelty, continuing to believe that life has meaning, though “[it] is a mystery…and love the mystery within the mystery.” (WINNER in 2002 of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize.)
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Aljaz Cosini, a Tasmanian river guide, is trapped under water, his body wedged between rocks in the Franklin River, into which he has dived in an effort to save a reckless rafter. As this remarkable narrative unfolds, it alternates between Aljaz’s dying, first person memories of his family’s past and his objective, third person observations about life in contemporary Tasmania. Through Aljaz’s memories, the reader learns the sad history of the island, a former penal colony for the most hardened criminals, the site of total genocide for the aboriginal natives, a remote colony with little hope and no tolerance for differences. What unites the generations (and keeps the reader going) is the clear and abiding respect for nature we see throughout the book–for the power of the river, for the unique animals of the island, for the stories and myths of the old people–and the belief that there is a unity of man and nature.
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So powerful that it will take your breath away, this finely crafted novel deserves to be resurrected from the oblivion in which it now resides. Carefully choosing a form which perfectly suits his message, British author Robert Edric presents a shocking and graphic account of the genocide of the aborigines in Tasmania by British imperialists in the 1860’s. The novel consists of a series of voices and vignettes, but gradually, a story emerges, and the reader comes to sympathize with William Lanne, “King Billy,” an aborigine who walks the fine line between his love of his own people and culture and his desire to prevent additional bloodshed.
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BEHIND THE MOUNTAIN is a unique creation, much more than a close, personal look at a most unusual place, Tasmania, described as “an appendix, an after thought” to the mainland of Australia. It is also the memoir of a brilliant, scholarly self-exile’s return after twenty years and his coming-to-terms with the people and places that made him who he is. At age twenty, he had left his home and family behind, intending never to return, believing that “Home was where you started from, not where you stayed.” Twenty years older when he writes of revisiting Tasmania, he has discovered that despite his attempt to escape, “Tasmania had set the terms of [his] life.
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When a strange, seal-like offspring is “born” in 1821 to a former convict woman in Van Dieman’s Land, now Tasmania, everyone gets in on the action. Thought by some residents to be a sooterkin, a kind of goblin, we see that the creature, “Arthur,” is a brother to Ned, a meal ticket for his larcenous mother, who sells peeks at him, and a source of much curiosity to the townspeople. Poking fun at everyone’s views of reality, Gilling here satirizes all levels of Tasmanian society, from the local pamphleteer, who declares that if it looks like a seal and acts like a seal that it is a seal, to the Reverend Kidney, who tries to find a place for it in the theological chain of being.
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