Christina Hill

The Gospel of Gods And Crocodiles rewrites the boys’ own adventure tale of the nineteenth century. In an intertextual gesture, R.M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island (1857) is the favourite book of one of Elizabeth Stead’s main characters. The thrill of conquest and the titillation of cannibal atrocities typical of Ballantyne’s imperialist fiction are thus replaced by a humanitarian concern with competing foundational myths and the clash of cultures. Stead’s narrative opens, like Genesis I, with the creation stories: the moon and crocodile legends of the unnamed coral island, situated ‘two degrees below the equator’. The arrival of white missionaries brings the attempt by the newcomers to overwrite this indigenous mythology with the Christian message. With this comes the inevitable introduction of Western ways.

In his latest novel, Everything I Knew, Peter Goldsworthy uses this famous quotation. Indeed, it is so apposite that it might well have provided the epigraph. Everything I Knew is, in part, a self-conscious reworking of Hartley’s The Go-Between (1953). The first-person narrator, Robert Burns, is a naïve fourteen-year-old boy in desperate thrall to a young woman. But where the emotional life of Hartley’s boy protagonist is destroyed by the precipitate arrival of sexual knowledge, Everything I Knew subverts this notion.

The year is 1964 and the setting is Penola, a country town in South Australia. Robbie is a Year Seven schoolboy, precociously intelligent, restlessly pubescent. His father is the town policeman and his mother a well-meaning but stolid housewife. The community is narrow; everyone knows everyone else. At the beginning of the novel, Robbie is beginning to outgrow Billy, his best friend from primary school, an Indigenous boy with a reputation for getting into trouble that Robbie, to a lesser extent (being white), shares.

The Well in the Shadow, whose title is drawn from Katharine Susannah Prichard’s Coonardoo (1929), is an unconventional book, shaped entirely by Chester Eagle’s idiosyncratic responses to certain writers and their work. Eagle’s engagement with, and enthusiasm for, the texts he considers are undeniable. So too is his close knowledge of the books and writers discussed. The range of subjects is broad and reasonably inclusive, but I did wonder, given the book’s subtitle, about the absence of well-known writers such as Peter Carey, Tim Winton, David Malouf, and Christina Stead. Nonetheless, the choice is diverse.

The Great Arch has considerable if unlikely charm. It is a history of the building of the Sydney Harbour Bridge in a novel about real and imagined people living near its construction site. Hastrich brings to life (potentially dry) detail about huge steel plates, creeping cranes, rivets and cables. We see this mostly in the writings and photographs of her central character, an Anglican vicar who records the progress of the bridge-building in his parish paper and also writes a two-volume book about it. The Reverend Ralph Anderson Cage, rector at St Christopher’s at Lavender Bay (based on a real person, Frank Cash), is an endearingly hapless yet decent man who becomes obsessed with the unfolding engineering marvel that reshapes the population and topography of his once-thriving parish.

This novella is crammed with incident. It includes domestic violence, a decomposing corpse, incest, child abuse, alcoholism, murder, attempted murder, an unnamed and oddly passive baby, guns and a hair-raising cross-country chase. Roy Stamp, a one-legged alcoholic in a car (he can drive), pursues his fourteen-year old daughter, Ruby, and his twelve-year-old son, Mark, because the boy has seen, through the window of a locked shed, the body of their mother. Realising that their father has killed her, the children flee in a van. Despite being bashed over the head (with his wooden leg), being shot in the eye with an air rifle, and being run off the road at high speed, like a cartoon character, Roy seems indestructible and keeps popping up, whatever the children do to get rid of him. Unable to drive, Mark’s contribution is to hold the uncomplaining baby, to shoplift food and disposable nappies, and to steal petrol.

Aphelion can be called a family epic in that it is long and has many characters. The title of the novel refers to the sun; a character explains that ‘there is a point in astronomy when a planet is at its furthest point from the sun, the slowest point in its orbit. It’s called aphelion. I guess it’s the darkest point.’ In this, her second novel, Emily Ballou uses overlapping and intersecting voices. Six characters – five of them female – contribute to the novel’s complex chorus of memory and reflection over time.

Steven Carroll’s The Time We Have Taken is the latest in his trilogy – with The Art of the Engine Driver (2001), The Gift of Speed (2004) – about a northern suburb of Melbourne. Referred to only as ‘the suburb’, this anonymity serves to make it a universal place on the fringes of any Australian city ...

This novel is about the redemption of a man believed to have committed murder. E. Annie Proulx, in her discontinuous novel Postcards (1993), sympathetically traces the tragic life of a protagonist who raped and accidentally killed his lover. Heather Rose poses a similar ethical question about a protagonist who was a real person; she imagines a post-murder existence for the infamous Lord Lucan, who in 1974 was accused of murdering his children’s nanny and of violently attacking his estranged wife.