Susan Green

The silence is intense. Yet even in the absence of voices or sound, Ding Village lives on. Choked by death, it will not die. In the silent shades of autumn, the village has withered, along with its people. They shrink and wither in tandem with the days, like corpses buried underground.
The grass upon the plain has turned brittle and dry. The trees are all bare; the crops have withered. The villagers are shrunken inside their homes, never to emerge again.
Ever since the blood came. Ever since the blood ran red.

 Dream of Ding Village by Chinese writer Yan Lianke was our most recent book club novel. Here’s the story for you: imagine there’s a lucrative international market for blood products, and China is cashing in. Government officials are visiting rural villages to encourage the inhabitants to sell their blood but the people of remote, backward, impoverished Ding Village aren’t keen…until a group of them are bused to neighbouring village to see for what’s in it for them. Concrete floors! Tiled roofs! Whitegoods! Just a little bit of blood…and after all, in the words of the government official, ‘blood is a natural spring that never runs dry’, so …why not?
Soon Ding Village is also benefiting from the plasma boom. One ambitious man, Ding Hui, sees a business opportunity. He persuades the gullible and ignorant villagers to sell their blood to him, and to sell more, more often. Instead of the villagers having to go to the blood collection centre, he goes to them, to their homes or even to the fields where they’re working, peddling round the district on his bike loaded with bottles, tubes and needles.  As a middleman, a ‘blood head’, soon he’s rich.
But as time goes on, the villagers begin to get sick with an illness they call ‘the fever’. They start dying. And the government officials arrive to explain that these people have contracted an incurable disease from reused needles and cotton swabs. It’s called HIV.

The story is narrated by a dead 12-year-old boy poisoned by one of them to punish his father Ding Hui, the ‘blood head’ responsible introducing the disease to Ding Village. But defiant and undeterred by the consequences of his greed, Ding Hui manages to keep on making money, only now he’s dealing in coffins and arranging marriages for dead people so they won’t be alone in the afterlife. The young ghost keeps watch over the fate of his home village, following the fortunes of his father, his beloved Grandpa Ding, his relatives and neighbours as they live or die in this this appalling, tragic time. He sees the people of Ding Village at their best – especially indefatigable and caring Grandpa Ding – but more often the worst prevails.

The wine-and-cheese book group is a very convivial evening. Of course it is! There’s wine, and cheese. Also cake – always cake – and often the actual book is a side issue for a little light literary conversation. But oh, not so with Dream of Ding Village. ‘Harrowing’ and ‘disturbing’ come to mind, as well as grotesque, bizarre and fantastical. Sadly, it’s not a dystopian satire but is based on real events in Henan Province in the 1990’s when greed and recklessness were a perfect match for widespread corruption at many levels and whole villages were emptied of life by the AIDS epidemic.

It seems strange to say it was ‘a good read’ but it elicited one of the best discussions we’ve had. Including the question of how the author ever managed to get the book published in the first place.

I have some friends who are staying in a village house in Tuscany for ten days. I keep getting wonderful photos on WhatsApp (thank you, Trish Sharkey!) and I get the feeling they’ve strayed into a book or a film. Terracotta pots, cobblestones, wild cyclamens, lichened roof tiles, stone walls, a chestnut wood with villagers gathering the nuts, weathered carvings, ancient trees, amazing views over the rooftops of the village… It’s picture perfect and could well be the setting for Villa Coco.

The narrator is first introduced as ‘our young man’:

I call him “our young man” because the sight of him – all gangly, double-jointed limbs, waves of filbert hair, and a raised eyebrow expression of both innocence and arrogance – is so much more like a soulless marionette, an unenchanted Pinocchio, than a a twenty-one-year-old American near the end of the millennium, that I can hardly bring myself to write about him in the first person. I’m sure an elderly toad, if magically presented with his younger tadpole form, would sooner eat it up than recognize the creature as any version of himself. So it goes with time.
Because the truth is “our young man” is me.

With a qualification in Archives and Record Management from an American university, our recently graduated, directionless, poor and very gay young man has found a job as ‘assistant’ to the Baronessa Lisabetta – Coco to her friends – in Italy. He arrives in the small village to find an elderly eccentric employer and an equally eccentric household of staff.  The collection is a motley one of antique furniture and objects, antiquities and artwork, some valuable, some not –  and he supposes that its cataloguing will occupy his time. Wrong. He is drafted into Coco’s outrageous schemes; there are friends and relatives to entertain, messages to run, trips to take, roses to prune and mad escapades to barely wriggle out of. Coco herself is a mixture of fabulousness and annoying craziness (I would have liked to sedate her at times); I was reminded of Aunt Augusta in Grahame Greene’s Travels with my Aunt‘. Or Patrick Dennis’s Auntie Mame.

This is a sweet, funny, charming, happy, touching, delightful book if you’re in need of such a thing. The writing is luscious and lyrical, the characters sharp, and it doesn’t all go as you’d expect.

The Correspondent had a queue of 53 eager library borrowers at the time I put it on reserve; it was the ‘sleeper hit novel’ of 2025 according to review I read on the Internet. A epistolary novel, no less – I haven’t read one of those for a long, long time – and one could have thought a story told entirely in letters might be a hard sell, or a hard read. But no.

The correspondent of the title, Sybil Van Antwerp – retired chief clerk to an eminent judge, single, 73 years old –  lives in a quiet leafy street in a Annapolis. She puts aside time every week to write letters. They can be witty, newsy, warm, sensitive, demanding or downright  cranky; the different sides to her character and her relationships are there on the pages she posts or emails off to her gay brother Felix in Paris, her best friend Rosalie, a troubled teenage boy, a worker at a DNA testing company, a college president, a kindly neighbour, her son and daughter, her favourite authors…though there’s one letter, to the mysterious Colt, that never seems to get finished, or sent.
It’s clear that Sybil uses her letters to keep other people at bay, but over the nine years of correspondence in the novel, the reader sees her forced out of her comfortable, protective distance and into real life again.

Sybil is an engaging protagonist, with a complex backstory and plenty to write about, including not one but two determined suitors. I can see why the book has been so successful. I did enjoy it and certainly read it very quickly. One of those make- you-laugh, make-you-cry books that in retrospect leave me feeling a wee bit manipulated. Was the sentiment piled on a bit thick, or am I just a hard-hearted monster?

…in childhood, at three separate times, I died.
It was not medical death in the way that it can now be defined. It was the opinion of doctors, humane men, around the bed of an organism under the rough ceiling of a cottage below Alderley Edge. The child was technically alive, but all his systems were collapsing, and there was nothing more to be done for him. In one instance, meningitis, I heard my mother being helped to accept the imminent death by being told that for me to recover would be a cruelty, because the damage to brain and spine would be massive, and I should be a bedridden thing for the rest of my life: not a person, not a son.
…I heard myself dismissed, written off. It was, to the animal in me, an attempt to kill my life.

Garner goes on to describe that internally he raged against this death sentence, with a ‘fury…greater than death’ – and that is why he lived.

I was too angry to die.
Mine was a glorious childhood. I would not wish it on anyone, nor on me again. But it happened. And my good fortune was that I was able, as a child, to know my death, to face the ultimate, before experience scrambled my brains.

This experience of childhood illness seems to be a common one for writers, though not always as traumatic and dramatic as Garner’s. I seemed to spend weeks in bed every winter. Only upper respiratory tract infections, but I had almost died of pneumonia when I was six weeks old, which obviously scared my parents. The idea that I had ‘a weak chest’ meant I was coddled through every cold. I would get taken to the doctor and given antibiotics in the form of a syrup flavoured with raspberry or more often banana which didn’t do much to hide the disgusting taste. I still can’t eat a banana without wanting to retch. I remember long, long days. Razor blade throat, cough, streaming nose, headache and an obscene amount of phlegm (sorry) would give way to a quite enjoyable period of convalescence. My father believed bed rest, soup and napping were the essentials of recovery. Before I could read, I’d look at the pictures in books, and day-dream my way into the stories. Even when I could read, I’d usually be too weak to concentrate for long so I continued to look at pictures. Dad would bring in the transistor radio so I could listen to The Argonauts (a famous ABC children’s radio show) and serial stories. One of the stories was Alan Garner’s The Weirdstone of Brisengamen. Primed by fairy stories, folk tales and long hours leafing through my Dad’s Discovering Art magazines, I was absolutely ready to go adventuring with Susan and Colin on and under Alderley Edge, a landscape of myth, legend and wonder.

The above is a roundabout way of saying I’ve been acquainted with Alan Garner for a long time – more than 60 years – and that I can understand the experience of a sick child confined to bed and finding himself in other worlds.

This is a magpie collection of essays and lectures, written from the 1970s to the 1990s, encompassing inheritance and place, family history, local history, mythology, folklore, archaeology, landscape, his research and writing practice, literature, memoir – including a really distressing account of his struggles with depression – and a great deal more. I am re-reading the ones that spoke to me the loudest. And thinking about ideas and phrases. Like ‘The Beauty Things’.

Alan and his wife Griselda have been staying in a house in a Wales while he works on The Owl Service, and he makes friends with a neighbour, an old man called Dafydd.

Dafydd sat me by the the fire, and spoke softly. He said, ‘I think I shall close my eyes soon’. It was a statement of intent, not a prognosis of an ailment. ‘When I am gone, my sons will sell all that they can, and throw the rest in the river. You are to take the Beauty Things now, in case we do not meet again.’

The Beauty Things were a set of horse brasses, a broken fishing rod, his grandmother’s medieval quern stone (I had to look it up; it’s a grinding tool), a grindstone, his father’s rusted adze head, an 18th century mattock, part of a 17th century sundial, a piece of limestone, and more… Alan was in tears; it was ‘junk beyond price’, ‘the essence of Being’. At the time of writing the essay, he’d kept Dayfydd’s Beauty Things for 30 years, but was wondering what would happen to them when he also closed his eyes.

I also had tears in my eyes. I have so many Beauty Things. From my own life, but from my parents and grandparents and perhaps back further. There a few objects that are clearly not junk, and possibly even Antiques but also buttons, broken china, tiny china ornaments, a miniature telescope, scraps of fabric and ribbons, a brooch with a missing stone, Edwardian postcards, 1920s greeting cards, a fossilised eraser in a metal container, a pencil with a tassel on the end. I don’t know (but wish I did) the provenance of them all.

It took me a very long time to finish The Voice That Thunders. There was so much to think about in each essay; they were so rich, deep and nourishing that I wasn’t able to do my usual and bolt through the book. I took so much of it personally, in the best way – to heart.

A wonderful book.

I…lay listening to the mad, abandoned cries of flocks of pink-and-grey galahs that raved over me now and then, rolling and tumbling, revelling in their early-morning aerobatics. Some of them alighted briefly in the slender bare white arms of a solitary ghost gum that stood fifty yards from the foot of my bed. Its pale, smooth trunk gleamed pinkly in the morning sun. The ghost gum is a dancing woman in the Arrernte songs that tell the dreaming stories of the creation of this land. The tree’s graceful from was actually created by the gallantry of generations of amorous cock galahs: they would roost in it, break off the terminal shoots of its twigs with their strong parrot beaks and offer them as love-tokens to the hens, which always politely accept them, then discreetly drop them. the constant pruning causes the branches to grow in curves from their lateral shoots and gives the whole tree the fluidity of a dancer.

I have yet to get hold of Roger Deakin’s first book, Waterlog (1999), but I know that it’s a wild-swimming odyssey around Britain, and it sounds wonderful. He died of cancer shortly after finishing the manuscript of Wildwood, and it was published posthumously in 2007. So there won’t be another book like this…wandering, eccentric, obsessed, unique. He writes in his introduction:

Wildwood is a quest for the residual magic of trees and wood that still touches most of us not far beneath the surface of our daily lives… Human beings depend on trees quite as much as on rivers and the sea. Our intimate relationship with trees is physical as well as cultural and spiritual: literally an exchange of carbon dioxide for oxygen. Once inside a wood, you walk on something very like the seabed, looking up at the canopy of leaves as if it were the surface of the water, filtering the descending shafts of sunlight and dappling everything…

What a pity Roger didn’t live to write another book, about the sea.

He starts with English woods around his home in rural Suffolk and moves outwards within Britain and then overseas in wandering trails of family stories, folk tales, craft and tool-making, history, memoir, environmental and ecological science, zoology, botany, literature, myth and legend, travel, art. It’s the kind of wide-ranging, wondering book I love. Wildwood had a couple of sections on British artists that didn’t interest me all that much, but after ploughing through them I was rewarded by an account of his visit to Australia. He travelled with artist John Wolseley and stayed at Wolseley’s home in the Whipstick forest near Bendigo, not so far from where I live. So while I can imagine in soft focus the European and British forests he writes about, I know the Whipstick landscape well, and that feels quite special.

I loved reading about my own country – Central Australia, the Pilliga forest in NSW, my own Central Victoria –  my favourite part of Wildwood was his journey in Kazakhstan. He wanted to see the wild apple and walnut forests, and to meet the people who live and work there.

…we dip and thread our way through the fruit forest, past a solitary yurt in a wooded glade, then two or three tented settlements of simple farmsteads. Outside a very simple wooden hut, barely more than four or five packing cases, sit a little family with their horses and cattle tethered nearby. Two small girls are braiding their mother’s waist-length hair, proudly brushing it for her as it shines in the sun. Climbing a steep holloway past exposed roots of elms, apples and apricots, we come to a cottage and farmstead in the woods. Here… we are invited to lunch.

It could have been taken from Paddy Leigh Fermor’s pre-WWII adventures. And yes, yes, yes, I know that life in this ex-Soviet ‘stan’ would not have been all apples, apricots and unicorns, but oh, how delicious and paradaisical to imagine.

Not a quibble, just a thought. This genre of book – which I love –  is usually written by a white Englishmen (Robert McFarlane, etc); perhaps my next search is for one by a black woman, for there surely are some, just as there are now books by Black women gardeners. As an aside, I have been listening to lots of gardening podcasts. While definitely enjoying posh Englishwomen waxing lyrical about their borders, it’s also been good to hear, for instance, about the Black Southern agrarian tradition from actual Black Southern women who spring from 8 or 9 generations of farmers and gardeners in the same ‘home place’.

(Crocus)…recall those miniature works of art created by the great Russian artificer Faberge in the luxurious days when the very rich could afford such extravagances… One wants to see them close to the eye, fully to appreciate the pencilling on the outside of the petals; it seems to have been drawn with a fine brush, perhaps wielded by some sure-handed Chinese calligrapher, feathering them in bronze or lilac.

Spring in our Central Victorian garden is almost a frenzy because everything happens all at the same time, with feverish haste, plants erupting into bud and bloom and some of them, already setting seed. I waited months for the crocus – ‘Pickwick’ and ‘King of the Stripes’ – to flower, and they were a joy, utterly exquisite, but after a couple of weeks, they’ve gone and I have two pots of leaves which I must leave to die off and wither away so that I can lift the bulbs for next year’s brief show. The plum blossom, hardenbergia (‘Happy Wanderer’) and tulips have all ‘gone over’ (apparently this is what English gardeners call it) and the weeds and the congested succulents I’ve been trying to thin out are festering in big piles. Grass is growing in the gravel courtyard and between the paving stones; parrots and cockatoos are ravaging the gums trees for blossom, scattering leaves and twigs everywhere I’ve swept. By the end of  a month, it will be dry and browning off. My dreamy vision of roses and flowering perennials will hit reality and I’ll be out there in the evenings watering to keep my plants alive.

So how wonderful, reading Vita Sackville-Wests’s Sissinghurst: The Making of a Garden, to enter the fantasy of a glorious garden in more well-mannered climate, with an Elizabethan tower, stone and old brick ruins, ancient walls, pillars and archways and urns, paved paths, courtyards, orchards, meadows and with every divine, fragrant, romantic plant and flower you can think of in drifts and clumps and swathes and swags…and, it has to be said, with a team of gardeners to keep it all going.

Sissinghurst is supreme in the English pantheon of gardens, and its creator Vita Sackville-West is a goddess, or perhaps a saint. St Vita of Sissinghurst? She is certainly the patron saint of the one-colour garden, and her famous White Garden has sparked innumerable pale imitations. Caught up in my current gardening craze, this book was the perfect bedtime reading. Though I’ve seen lots of pictures and video footage of Sissinghurst, reading about its actual planning and construction was unexpectedly interesting. Though they collaborated, it turns out that Vita’s husband, Harold Nicolson, was mostly responsible for the structure and Vita handled the planting schemes. She loved full, voluptuous, lavish planting – ‘cram’ was apparently her advice to novices and experts alike –  and bought plants and trees by the hundred. Though she did have a team of gardeners, she also dirtied her own hands, and her gardening ‘uniform’ of silk shirt, breeches and long lace-up boots looks both posh and eccentric.

From 1946 to 1957, she wrote a weekly gardening column for the Observer newspaper and Sarah Raven, who is married to Vita and Harold’s grandson, the writer Adam Nicolson, has interwoven her text with Vita’s own words. It’s a lovely combination. Vita writes so lyrically that I don’t actually care if I have no idea what she’s writing about. Fritillaries? Aconites? Bouvardias and auricula? The names are like charms, the descriptions like dreams. Soothing and delightful reading.

I recently stumbled on Jon Appleton’s website when I searched ‘second golden age of children’s books’. It’s a celebration not just of writers, illustrators and books, but of publishers, editors, reviewers and commentators as well. At the time, I was only thinking of British children’s books, and creators like Alan Garner and Brian Wildsmith.  But although Jon has lived in the UK for many years, he is Australian. And so Australian writers, like Gillian Rubenstein and Robin Klein are well represented too.

He produces a limited edition hand-made zine called the GAB five times a year. Luckily it’s available as a PDF (free!) to subscribers. You can contact Jon at via his site and ask to be added to the mailing list.

The latest issue has a review by Brian Alderson of The Thorny Paradise, edited by Edward Blishen: an appreciation of Anne Wood, an unsung heroine of children’s literacy in the UK: a discussion of a book I’d never heard of (but which I’d like to get my hands on as well) by Irish writer Janet McNeill called The Battle of St George Without: and a profile of writer and editor Aidan Chambers.

The garden was a drug and I was hooked. I needed money to finance the habit. I began to understand completely why debtors resort to uncharacteristic, extreme crimes… Every penny spent was more than we could afford, and the knowledge and pressure of this was a constant, grinding burden.

In dire need of solace, I turned to ABC iview for Monty Don. I can’t be the only woman – or man for that matter – with a major crush on Monty. Rhineland Gardens and British Gardens were just the ticket but I should have known that reading The Prickotty Bush was not going to be the soothing experience I was hoping for. It is Monty Don’s first published book, out of print and hard to get hold of – but I did, at stupid expense, from a second-hand dealer in the UK. Worth it? Yes, and no – it is  a beautifully written story of gardens and madness, and so makes uncomfortable reading.

It’s hard to imagine Monty Don as anything other than the amiable lanky fellow in loose blue linen shirts guiding viewers around beautiful gardens, but in the late 1980’s, he and his wife Sarah had a business making high-fashion costume jewellery for the international market. They also had young children and a strong desire for country life as a counterbalance to their high-stress London life. Gardening was already a passion with him, and he’d done a few gardening programmes for TV, but this was before he became famous as a writer and presenter. After looking for a couple of years, they found The Hanburies in rural Herefordshire and Monty set about transforming the overgrown, neglected garden into into something wonderful. With insights from Monty and Sarah Don’s The Jewel Garden, I knew that the garden at The Hanburies nearly broke them both.

Oh the Prickotty Bush, the Prickotty Bush,
Will I never be free of the Prickotty Bush?

With the jewellery business failing, their London house on the market but not selling, a mortgage and a bridging loan to service, after a year or so the Dons sank into deep financial trouble. But Monty remained obsessed with making the garden of his dreams at The Hanburies. He thought of little else. He wrote and planned and drew up planting schemes, and worked in the garden – digging, weeding, clearing, planting – to the point of exhaustion and often into the night. There was massive earth moving work to re-shape the layout. Trees were relocated; walls and terraces built; enormous numbers of plants bought; tradespeople, labourers and machinery were hired. Everything cost more, in time and money, than he’d planned. And he and Sarah were constantly physically overstretched, with small children who hardly slept and Sarah herself unwell. When the financial crunch came, they had to sell The Hanburies.
As Sarah writes in The Jewel Garden,

When it came down to it, Montagu was a loony and I was ill all the time. How did we ever believe we could save the situation?
I suppose the lowest point for me was when I was hidden away on my sickbed while potential buyers traipsed around the house. I found it astonishing that Montagu never mentioned my bedridden weeks in The Prickotty Bush. I can only assume that he was so obsessed with making the garden that I was, during that time, peripheral.
Despite everything, Montagu had the garden and a book. I am sad that I have so little to show for that time. At least the children were happy and healthy. 

Much of the book is beautiful to read. Planning and making a garden is such a creative act, full of hope and belief in the future. And as I know from his later books, Monty is has a gift for what you might call ‘nature writing’. Like this:

…A yellow moon hitched its skirts over the wood and there was the faintest streak of light over the western horizon.
Silence. The noise suddenly swung down the hill again, an excited squabbling yittering. I could just make out the undergrowth moving through the gleaming trunks of the birches. It was fox cubs, tumbling and fighting through the docks, foxgloves and elder.
As I went indoors, I could hear them again, playing their last midsummer games before adulthood.
The greenhouse is overflowing with plants and pots and seed-trays, all growing, growing.

Warning: A big old whinge ahead, so if you’d rather not read it, skip to the next paragraph.
The world is awful. The weather is awful. My back hurts, and I have a toothache and a root canal to look forward to. I have a book on the go, but it stops and starts and stops again. I am low-key vaguely miserable for no good reason. Actually, there is a good reason. It’s been a very grey winter. Usually in Castlemaine we have a fair few frosts followed by bright, sunny, cold winter days, but not this year. So for the past month or so, my pile of new novels is gathering dust, and I’m going through a phase of what I can only describe as ‘restorative reading’. Not comfort reading, which is a pot of tea and too many biscuits while lying on the couch; undemanding, familiar, maybe a bit cloying and sweet, my bestsellers of yesteryear and Elizabeth Goudge. No, this is more like sitting up straight with a bowl of nourishing soup.

I re-read three of May Sarton’s diaries, Journal of a Solitude, The House By the Sea and At Seventy and Monty Don’s The Jewel Garden and My Garden World. Kate Grenville’s Unsettled counts as well. These writers made me want to sit up a little straighter, look at the natural world around me, and to think about my home – house, garden,  my home town of Castlemaine, the area of Central Victoria. They encouraged me to finally investigate the signs of spring, even getting outside on the odd occasion when the rain held off. I walked around the block, into town, did the circuit of theBotanical Gardens. I pulled some weeds, I bought some dill and chive seedlings.  Now I am scouting out new growth, the flowers and blossoms and green shoots; I am trying to encourage myself into a few green shoots as well.

I can’t report on any finished books right now. It’s time to get cracking on my two book group novels, though I know I will be forgiven if I don’t make it to the end. I’m taking my time with Alan Garner’s Powsels and Thrums and The Voice That Thunders. Each essay deserves a little break between the next, time to think and reflect. And Roger Deakin’s Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees and Vita Sackville-West’s Sissinghurst by Vita Sackville-West and Sarah Raven demand pauses as well.

There’s a common thread here, which is a strong sense of place, and that place is England. After our book group discussion of Unsettled, I was talking to Norman, one of our members, and I commented that the landscape in which I feel most at home is right here. The undramatic hills and valleys, the creeks, the paddocks and farms and tracks are set in among tracts of native forest, but you’ll see many non-native – and I guess, feral – trees and plants when you drive along the country roads. Hawthorn, wild plum, briar roses, gorse, broom, clumps of jonquils and daffodils. There are occasionally magnificent oak trees in some of the paddocks, and of course cypress windbreaks. Even the bush, which has regrown after the mining era, is only wild-ish, because it so often contains mine shafts and mounds of disturbed soil and rock, rubbish dumps and the ruins of small dwellings.

I said to Norman that I’d been wondering whether it is some atavistic thing, inherited along with hazel eyes and skin that burns in the sun. He offered another explanation. He said that we were probably in the last generation of children brought up almost exclusively on English culture. When I thought about it, I agreed. My early diet was fairy tales and English children’s books like The Wind in the Willows, The Secret Garden and The Railway Children. When I could read for myself, it was The Weirdstone of Brisengamen, The Dark is Rising trilogy, the Old Knowe series and so many  more. Did they form my inner landscape?

Something to think about…

Deep under the surface, a seam of coal has been burning for who knows how long. The colonists gave the mountain the banal name it goes by on the map (Burning Mountain), but it was burning long before they saw it. Standing there looking at the smoke drifting up from the invisible smoulder, it seems clear that this place of powerful, rather scary presence would always have been a site of story and meaning in Aboriginal cosmology.  

What story? What meaning? Beyond the sketchy account on the tourist information board, I don’t know, and that feels right. It’s not my story, not my meaning, not my world. I don’t have to go under the surface of the smoking mountain to know there’s a world there. Running alongside the known, the familiar, is difference. I don’t want to erase it or make it mine. I don’t need to understand or come up with answers to unanswerable questions. I just need to stand back, as I’m standing back from this burning fissure in the earth, with respect.

When I first read Unsettled, I read quickly – as I do. Too quickly. As I do! I promised myself that I would read it again, and now I have, because it was last month’s Book Group pick. And one of the best discussions we have had all year. Most of our group commented on the gentle, curious and exploratory tone of the writing. How it felt like a personal story; how you could hear Kate Grenville’s voice talking to you, taking you along on her journey, her pilgrimage.

Many of our group are very well-informed about the history of Australian colonisation and Aboriginal dispossession. One of the aspects of the book they liked was the relatable experience of wondering and wandering over their family places. How do our own family histories sit in the big picture? A Jewish member talked about inherited trauma, the legacy of grief that comes with a whole people being likened to vermin, something to be removed and got rid of. We talked about how white, Anglo-Celtic, fifth or sixth generation Australians (like me) feel about this violent history compared to the waves of more recent arrivals – say, the post-war Greeks and Italians, the Vietnamese of the 1970’s, the Indians now. We talked about guilt and shame. About ‘what now?’ ‘What next?’

And several of us noted the beautiful, careful language she uses in describing the landscape, talking about country. We thought she seemed to be seeking to go deeper into looking at the land, beyond the superficial first glance, distinguishing more deeply the colours and textures of vegetation and landforms and rocks, the sensations and also the feelings she experiences. A slower, closer way of looking.

Earlier in the year, we took a drive to Warrnambool and stayed there for a few days. I’d intended to go to the cemetery to find some family graves, and also to a settlement a few kilometres out of town where family first lived when they arrived in Victoria.  I didn’t – it was rainy – but I visited the local historical society’s rooms, where the volunteers immediately found records relating to that branch of the family. So in sunnier weather I will try again. A simple search tells me that the Gunditjmara and Kirrae Whurrong people were the traditional custodians of that country.

And though I’ve known this family story, from my maternal line, for a long time, I had never thought to find out. This was written by my mother, Helen Green, as told to her by her grandmother, Jessie North.

A family story tells how Elizabeth was left on her own with young Joseph while Joseph (her husband) and William drove by dray to Geelong to buy stores for the next three months. A party of Aboriginal people invaded her kitchen and took away young Joseph. Elizabeth was frightened but took comfort from remembering that she and Joseph had always been on good terms with them. It was even more reassuring that they had left one of their own small children with her. But as days passed Elizabeth grew more frightened. At last Joseph reappeared, happy and full of his adventures. Whilst he told his story to Elizabeth, the little Aboriginal boy slipped away. Elizabeth gathered from young Joseph that the Aboriginal men thought Joseph was not being taught the necessary skills of life in the bush. So they had undertaken the task, teaching him swimming, tracking, finding food and shelter. They had done this because Elizabeth and Joseph had shared food with them and had encouraged young Joseph to play with their children. Elizabeth was glad that she had not given way to panic but had gone about her chores and taken care of her young visitor. Joseph never forgot this strange experience of his youth and always spoke up for Aboriginal people and whenever he could helped them. He called them his brothers.

Elizabeth (Jeffcoat) is my great-great-great grandmother, and grandmother of Joseph (Jeffcoat North), the little boy. I hope this relatively benign story is true, however if you think about it it becomes more and more complicated because of course Joseph and Elizabeth were on Gunditjmara land. The Gunditjmara people seemed to be willing to share  resources and skills…but were the Jeffcoats? Unsettled has made me ask new questions as I potter away at my family history.