That Deadman Dance

Admittedly, this one was a toughie.  Tough because I will always feel guilty over the plight of the Australian Aborigines, though I personally have not done anything either way to hurt them or to help them.  There is just no way that I can feel any sort of affinity to them, I just don't know enough about them.  I have more of an understanding of the First Nations that I live and work with here in Canada.
That Deadman Dance helped me to understand a little bit, and I am grateful for that.  The story is told by a Noongar named 'Bobby' Wabalanginy at various stages of his life, and in the style of his people.  The way he weaves in and out of the narrative with his dreamings of what was and what could or should be was magical and mesmerizing.    It was a powerful way to tell this story (which was about first contact between Europeans and the aborigines), and a perfectly simple and creative way to help us see it from the Noongar's point of view.  I will be seeking out the rest of this author's work, I love his way of telling the story.

All That I Am

I liked this book.  As it is a Miles Franklin winner, I did first view it with caution, because as I stated in Questions of Travel I am tired of the ugliness of humanity and pointless or violent episodes that just make me reluctant to carry on reading this particular book or others that are probably just like it
(I suspect that it might be one of the prerequisites for an award winning novel).

Of course, any book about Germany between the world wars is not going to be a bright sunny, happy-shiny-people-holding-hands kind of story.  I liked this book because it was different  by covering an aspect  of that era I had not read of before.  Not only did I appreciate learning something new in a historically fictional book,  it was nice to know that the author based it off real people and that there is a brilliant bibliography at the back which I plan on using for further reading.  She (Anna Funder) gave these people from the past a voice, which was clear, poignant and respectful.
It was a good story, despite the subject matter, and I am glad that I read it.  I look forward to Anna Funder's next book.

Questions of Travel

Chosen because it was a Miles Franklin Award winner... you can bloody well bet I would not have picked it up on my own!  It is a challenge for me to read popular or modern fiction unless it has some element that makes it interesting for me (fantasy, etc.).  Not that I can't read it... I actually have two authors that I buy everything of;  Sandra Dallas and Fannie Flagg.  Both author's books have some pretty awful stuff happen in them but you always get something from each story as well as a restoration of faith in human kindness.  Or Miriam Toews' All My Puny Sorrows, it hurt to read that, but I did gain something important from the experience.
  It is just so much easier to read historical fiction because it is a reality far removed from mine, and I'm not crazy about all the sex, sordidness, misery and violence that seem to be so prevalent in some modern books.  I have a big problem with works that have absolutely no point to them.  I can  manage to read some truly awful stories and appreciate the effort put in to write them, like Voss for example, a truly awful human being whom Patrick White wrote quite beautifully about (he does seem to do that really well!).  
This book isn't beautiful and frankly, it was pointless.  I slogged through it, not really caring about these characters, not realizing where the author was taking me, until the very last page.  Obviously I didn't know what was important to this author, so when the finale came I was flabbergasted.  Actually my very first thought was "Well f**k me, I didn't see that coming!"  My next feeling was anger. Anger because of where the author led me, incredulous even that this is what she was working up to.  I've read something like this before when the topic was actually very insensitive and disrespectful of the real people who lived through the original ordeal.  Without giving away anything I can say that I read a real life account of this specific incident  on the last page, and I cried a great deal because the woman who wrote it was raw with pain and grief.
Maybe, at some future time in my life I might appreciate this author, but not right now!

The Irishman

My first Australian book for the year.  I always put it off, but when I get started I can't put it down no matter how it affects me.  And I get affected in a few ways.
I have lived in Canada for a little over twenty five years now, and as good as my life here is, it just isn't Australia (to be specific Canberra).  I have lived in Canada more than I ever lived in Canberra, and the last time I went home I realised how displaced I was.  Everything was sublimely wonderful while I was there, but I knew that it was no longer what was familiar.  I had forgotten a lot in twenty years absense.
I have been working on being more Australian since my visit in '06, in the ways that matter to me and in the ways that I was not able to indulge in when I lived there, and one of those was to catch up in Autralian literature ( I had always dreamed of studying it at the Australian National University in Canberra).   I have missed out on a lot in my life, and I'm making up for it now.   Now that I am free to make some choices, find new interests and indulge in what used to be just impossible dreams.
Phew.  That all being said, I thought that the best place to start would be with award winning books and The Miles Franklin Award seemed to be the best of all, the criteria being that the Award is presented each year to a novel which is of the highest literary merit and presents Australian life in any of its phases.   It has always been a good way for me to get into something new, reading award winner books.  It's a solid method for pointing me in the right direction towards other Australian authors,  and publishers.

The Irishman by Elizabeth O'Connor is quite similar to others I have read from that time (the 1920's era), but I found it different too.  The slang was unfamiliar (and also quite funny), one phrase in particular referring to someone who talks a lot as a 'magpie' (you would have to have heard a magpie to understand that one, I'm sorry), and after that making the phrase into a verb "magging".
The racist labels for the local aborigines really bothered me, and the attitude towards them was uncomfortable for me too.  But I always try to take an anthropological view point to such things.  This is what it was like then.  I try not to judge, just observe.
The overall feeling though was Australia at it's most basic essence.  I could just picture what it was like there in the Gulf Country.  Imagine the warmth radiating from the ground, the smell from the Gums and the Tea trees.  Billy tea and damper.  The storms that would appear out of nowhere in absolute exciting splendor, the black clouds, flashes of lightning and tremendous heart-stopping thunder.  That delicious smell of the first bit of rain hitting the ground. 

Which brings me to the other way reading such literature affects me.  I get homesick. It's not something I like to feel.  It makes it easier when I read stories from different eras, because that doesn't seem as real to me, but all the same, I wish I was there, experiencing rather than just remembering it.