Read it, then read it out loud. Let the language of noorn snake into you. ‘Stories grow from the exchange of breath, from moving to and fro, from investment and exchange, that is, they grow from story-business’ (39). Such a generous gift.
To read hard copy will be differently moving, lines running loose, but the audiobook, the author precisely reading her own work, has me reeling. The story too, has a dangerously sharp edge, like that ‘fairytale inheritance’, reeking apricots, ripening to death.
Bold lush big sister poetry that watches feral dogs in Nimbin, feels the rip of a done-with-it-all young man’s departure. She rubs shoulders with ‘indifferent angels’, uncovers Britannica dream sellers, breathes in places close to my own. Desire is different to wanting.
Déjà vu reading this book, recognising the detail of a whorl of hair on a man’s back, the truths in voices unfurling to attention, transitory lives, various meanings. Plot-lovers, stay away. Those who seek the nudge of submerged truths, this is yours.
Call these stories anecdotes, call them ethnography. A cat wails, mourning her sister. A little Gothic. Elephants, shaking dirt off their ancestor’s bones. Close to Greek Gothic. Dolphins and monkeys, carrying their rotting infants. Gothic as all get out. All true. It’s uncanny.
To witness, to be respectful, ‘to look more closely’ in order to ‘recognise that the nonhuman has a life that means something to herself’ (25). Respect involves learning, to know ‘the sensitive beak contains more nerve endings than a human fingertip’ (141).
Being read to at its best. Cathleen McCarron performs the polyphony of this work with a Glasgow lilt and other dialects I cannot place but know. A love story as tinsel to trauma, all too much Mummy Darling but, oh, that voice.
A mesmeric voice, hypnotic from the first page to the last. Would like to read straight away again, cover to cover. Civil engineer, sun-charred calcium. An eye to the world that would see it made better. More planning, fewer politicians, more care.
Uncomfortable shoes for everyone benefiting from the Empire’s stolen property. Brilliant set-up that shifts stagnant pooling perspectives with a splash. Settling at its most unsettling. Australia’s bitter colonial story told with devastating freshness. (Yet alas, poor toads, again the butt of metaphor.)
Plotlines like rivers. Major tributary, the stupidity of gaols. Ancestral waters murky with the pain of colonisation. Damages done. Then that place so sacred that all visitors must shake the dirt off their feet to keep the rest of Country on kilter.
