Whatever Happened to Mary Kathleen?

The jacket blurb describes Beyond Redemption as ‘a novel about falling rapturously in love in the dark ages of the nineteen fifties.’

It’s before my time, but I had always thought of the 50s as the very opposite to dark: white sugar, white flour, clean lines on cars and furniture, the white lines in the sky from passing jets. An era of expansion – the baby boom, the great push for home ownership. In Australia, a time with a great concern for the marking out of territories and boundaries, definitions: the carefully fenced lawns planted with English shrubs marking out one’s private space, the nuclear family. And on a national level, the White Australia Policy.