FACP

Where would the picture book industry be without animals? Talking or non-speaking, cute or obnoxious, mischievously alive or poignantly dying, animal characters can be utilised to teach life lessons, and to make complex issues accessible and less confronting for young children. Add humour, passion and strong original writing, and you have a winner.

On the night of 13 September 1993, flight lieutenants Jeremy McNess and Mark Cairns-Cowan were killed when their F-111 crashed at Guyra, in northern NSW. Written by Jeremy’s mother, The Thirteenth Night dwells on the complex fatality of that night, which permanently changed several life stories in an instant. For his mother, who had coped with his exceptionally difficult childhood, winning through in his early teens to a remarkably close relationship, Jeremy’s death was and remains a dark frontier. Beyond lay a strange and cold country. Totally disoriented at first by devastating grief, she found the courage and stamina to pursue the true story of the accident’s cause for five years in the face of institutional defensiveness and media ignorance. This book began as a story for the family, but it is an important book for other readers on several counts.

These two unusual books reflect on aspects of the prisoner-of-war experience in Singapore, Thailand and Burma during World War II that have not been much canvassed in Australia. One Fourteenth of an Elephant, Ian Denys Peek’s sometimes irascible ‘memoir of life and death on the Burma-Thailand Railway’, relates the experiences of a member of the Singapore Volunteer Armoured Car Company. Peek was British and had grown up in Shanghai, but was not taken into captivity there as was novelist J.G. Ballard (who recalled the experience in Empire of the Sun). Peek and his brother Ron were at the fall of Singapore. Soon afterwards began their movements between a series of hospital and labour camps along the railway. Peek’s story – his first book, published sixty years after his capture and told in the first person – gives a British perspective on a fate that he shared with thousands of Australians.

This is the tale of a quest driven by an obsession. At its heart are the Krakouers, an Australian family of five generations. The author is a descendant of the first Krakouers to settle in Western Australia. Terri-Ann White’s project is to record the gaps and silences, to piece together fragments, and ‘rescue’ family members ‘from obscurity’.

In my student days in Europe, I often heard the name Eileen Joyce bandied about as a figure of respect, eccentricity and past pianistic accomplishment. Geoffrey Parsons, one of my enduring musical mentors, regularly spoke of her; it came as no surprise to read in Richard Davis’s recent biography that Parsons collaborated in Joyce’s last major public appearance, at a fund-raising concert at Covent Garden, late in 1981. I rather doubt, however, that many familiar with Parsons’s pianistic stature would readily agree with Davis’s judgment that the ‘power and dexterity’ of the seventy-three-year-old Joyce, who had not performed in public for over a decade, ‘easily’ matched Parsons’s own.

It had to happen – a rush of books about the Olympics. But that doesn’t mean they’re all bad or that they won’t last now that the fuss is over. Celeste Walters’ The Last Race, her second book for young adults, should certainly be around for a while. The cover alone could sell the book and word of mouth should do the rest.

‘I remember only peripheries, not centres,’ Michèle Drouan says in her memoir of marriage to a Jordanian and life with his family in a village near Jordan’s borders with Syria and Lebanon. Her perspective is deliberately oblique. Elegantly shaped, and or the most part gracefully written, her story bypasses the obvious cultural divisions. Political, religious, and sexual tensions are given minimal treatment. No dates are given: you would hardly know that the Gulf War comes within the book’s timespan, and when the sound of bombs is heard from across the border, someone quietly says ‘Lebanon’, and leaves it at that.

Those Who Remain Will Always Remember is a fitting successor to Paperbark, the Muecke, Davis, Shoemaker, Mudrooroo anthology of a decade earlier. Though it is a regional publication, restricted to Aboriginal authors from Western Australia, it follows the same catholic principles of inclusion that made Paperbark a book of its time. Its editors Anne Brewster, Angeline O’Neill, and Rosemary van den Berg provide a kaleidoscopic image of Western Australian Aboriginal life in assembling writings which include critical essays, cultural-political statements, prose fiction, life histories, personal testimony, interviews, and poetry. Importantly, these disparate genres leave the reader with a sense of the editors’ unity of vision rather than ad hoc opportunism.