Literary love stories tend to follow a raft of expected conventions. Heightened sexual tension (usually between young-ish protagonists) is one of them; an initially antagonistic charge between the eventual lovers is another, as is the pairing of a couple who will need to overcome considerable odds in order to be together. Indeed, such trajectories are so common that when a book comes along which contests some of these ideas, it raises more than a few eyebrows.

Such is the case with Victoria Thompson’s The Secret Seduction and the Enigma of Attraction, a love story with a difference. Opening in the 1930s, we witness through the eyes of a young boy, the sad and untimely death of his nanny. Fast forward forty years, and that same boy is now a renowned psychotherapist (Andreas Zill) attending a formal function at which he meets the beguiling young wife (Annabelle Eichler) of another doctor. The attraction is immediate and they each leave each other that night knowing a special connection has been made.

Soon after their first encounter, Annabelle begins to see Andreas as his patient. It is a deliberate strategy on her part to seduce him and yet the psychotherapeutic process will be one which unearths complex issues for both patient and therapist. And therein lays the main point of difference between this novel and others of the genre. The sanctity of the patient doctor relationship is one which many writers are loath to broach for the precise reason that it presents a moral minefield. And yet Victoria Thompson, once a psychotherapist herself, wanders directly into the vortex of that very minefield with confidence.

As the affair burgeons over time, and both Annabelle and Andreas are forced to confront difficult realities about themselves and each other, the novel takes an interesting turn, examining the nature of those elements that draw us to our lovers and the psychology of intimate relationships. And it was at this point that the story began to really hold my interest.

Author Victoria Thompson – wandering into the vortex.

I have to admit that I wasn’t particularly enamoured (pardon the pun) with the initial scenes encompassing the early days of their relationship; however, by the time (a few years into their affair) that the cracks were apparent and growing I began to enjoy the story more. I was also intrigued (and alarmed) by the justifications used by both characters to condone and continue a relationship that challenged the sanctity of both marriage and the therapist/patient relationship.

In all, I found this to be an intriguing novel, primarily for the issues it raised and the discussions it would no doubt inspire. Definitely one for the book club.

For more information on Victoria Thompson go to: victoriathompson

The Secret Seduction and the Enigma of Attraction

By Victoria Thompson

Arcadia, 242pp, $29.95

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Even if you had no idea that Russell Eldridge had ever been a newspaper man – there’s a dead giveaway, the moment you walk into his study. An absolutely utilitarian solid brown wooden desk, of the kind that populated the Fairfax and News Limited offices in the dim and distant pre-computer days.

“You’ve got it in one,” Eldridge says at my instantaneous guess. “It was the sports editor’s desk at the Sydney Morning Herald, and I was working at Fairfax when they were getting rid of them, so I put my hand up.”

The desk, which would have seen many thousands of stories cross its bows before it came into Eldridge’s possession, has certainly seen many since, but none quite as important to its owner has his most recent creation – his first novel, Harry Mac, which came about, he says, almost by accident.

“I’d retired as editor of the Northern Star,” he says, “and I’d actually written a crime novel. I was waiting to hear back from a publisher about it, and I was wondering what to write in the meantime, and suddenly the idea popped into my head. I think it had been sitting there in a little dark corner, but I’d never felt able to address it.”

The ‘it’ he is referring to his is childhood growing up in South Africa during the troubled years of apartheid, and Eldridge’s own experience of his father – the Harry Mac of the title, who was a newspaper editor and had been a POW in Italy during WWII.

“What I wanted to do was to try and distil the essence of those turbulent times,” he says. “When I was growing up in the fifties and sixties South Africa was a regimented society, a place which was still feeling the after-effects of World War II, and of the Boer War – there was the Secret Police, the Afrikaner Boers with their Dutch background, some of the Germans that were still on the side of the Nazis, and those of us from an English background who were caught in this middle-ground – seeing the oppression of the black population and at the same time living very comfortable lives that many of them did not want disturbed.”

The central element of the plot is that young Tom, Harry Mac’s son, overhears his father being told of a political assassination plot, and becomes terrified to think that his father is going to be caught up in what Tom is already sensing is a net of trouble closing in around not just his neighbourhood but the larger world outside.

Nelson Mandela as a young man – already a dissenter, he took part in student strikes.

For Eldridge, the plot was the pivot around which the rest of the book could grow. “It was actually based around the fact that our father had told us about a plot, but he’d dismissed it, but I began to think how that could play out as a fictional story, and that this was also around the time that Mandela was about to be arrested – he even hid in a house in our grandparents’ street at one point – and suddenly everything started to come together.”

It was the idea of how a child might have felt if he had imagined that his father was involved in something dark and dangerous that prompted Eldridge to use a child narrator. “It was liberating to use a child’s voice,” he says. “It allowed me to write about complicated things in a straight-forward way, with no adult baggage or cynicism attached. Of course, I had to pay a lot of attention to keeping up the child’s voice – not allow it to slip into using a more complicated vocabulary and at the same time keep it from being too childish.”

But young Tom has a way with words and a quiet observational skill – not unlike his creator. Working at the Northern Star with Eldridge when he was editor was a pleasure, although he says, he was not really cut out to be editor material.

Russell Eldridge: “I wasn’t really cut out to be editor material.”

“I moved to Australia in 1979,” he says. “My older brother had already moved to Australia, and my then wife and I were living near Soweto – close to the middle of the trouble spot for the riots, and I really felt it was time to get out. When we arrived I worked on the Sydney Morning Herald for a few years, and then I discovered the North Coast, and came up here to be a hippy in the hills which was good fun for a couple of years, but I gradually got sucked back into journalism, first of all working as a reporter and then as chief of staff.”

Eldridge was not, he says, automatic Northern Star editor material. “The Star was terribly conservative back in the day,” he says, “I really didn’t fit the bill. I was chief of staff for ten years before I was offered the editorship.” He found working on a local newspaper a rewarding experience. “It has its challenges,” he says. “You feel accountable to the people around you in a way that you don’t when you are working on big city newspapers, and of course it can often test your independence as a journalist.”

Something Eldridge took to heart however, was the importance of belonging to community, and for those of you who haven’t seen him act, he is a fine actor, as well as an active member of the Byron Bay Writers’ Festival Committee, and over the years he has immersed himself in many causes dear to his heart.

Some of the tests of independence Eldridge gives to Harry Mac as he struggles to make sense of the increasingly rigid regime bearing down on them – his mood swings and drinking affecting the Mac family, in particular Tom’s Mum, who treads around her volatile husband cautiously, trying – usually unsuccessfully – to prevent an outburst, or worse, a silent treatment that goes on for weeks.

‘I can’t help feeling the lane where we lived had something to do with it all. As though these families had been put there for a reason… it was so still, like everyone was holding their breath a lot of the time.’

Tom, however has an outlet for his worries – the lane in which he lives, which is populated with a cast of colourful characters, and most specifically his friendship with Millie, a girl slightly older than him. Tom and Millie have a bond – both of them are slightly physically disabled, Tom from the after-effects of polio, and Millie, whose neck is shortened. “I don’t know if Millie’s mother took thalidomide,” Eldridge says, “but I wanted to point to that time as being the peak era for thalidomide and polio, and how children with a physical disability were commonplace – and to create a connection between the idea of these damaged children, and the damaged system in which they were living. For me a central part of the book is the idea of ‘bearing witness’. That is that perhaps as a journalist or writer you are not always on the frontline, but it’s your job to observe and report – and I wanted to bear witness, not just to the dark politics of the day, but also to other, more personal issues.”

Russell Eldridge and his partner, writer and designer Brenda Shero.

There was too, a personal connection with the idea of disability, since Eldridge has suffered on-going after-effects in one leg of an inherited condition similar to polio, although he has not let it stop him from climbing, even including hiking into the foothills of the Himalyas. At the house in Ocean Shores where he lives with his wife Brenda Shero, an artist, designer and writer, the couple have a kayak Eldridge frequently takes on the river, and it’s often, he says, when he’s out on the water that the next step in his writing will come to him.

Which leads me of course to the inevitable question of what he’s working on next. “To be honest the tank feels a bit empty at the moment,” he says, “but what I am very heartened by is the response from a lot of people who are saying they don’t want to let go of the characters – they want to re-visit them.”

In the mean time, of course, there’s always that crime novel sitting in the drawer.

Marele Day will launch Russell Eldridge’s book, Harry Mac at the Launch Pad at the BBWF on Saturday August 8 at 3.00pm. For more information on the Festival go to www.byronbaywritersfestival.com

Harry Mac is published by Allen & Unwin: https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/books/fiction/Harry-Mac-Russell-Eldridge-9781760113209

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Book Review by Barry Eaton

The Love of Spirit

by Liz Winter, Balboa Press

Liz Winter is a medium living and working in the Northern Rivers area – like many of us in the area she felt guided by some unseen presence to leave the big city life, head north and start a new life.  Although Winter had started her training as a medium in Melbourne, it was only after she summoned enough courage to start working professionally in her new location that her true purpose in life started to unfold.

For the Love of Spirit is Winter’s personal story, a single mother who battled the odds to help people connect with their loved ones in Spirit, and in doing so grew both personally and spiritually. For the Love of Spirit is an easy read and will certainly help others either in their quest to develop their own psychic abilities, or simply to understand the process and benefits of contacting spirits in the afterlife.

Liz tells of connecting with her spirit guide, White Owl, who is able to communicate with her with clairaudience with words of support, as well as helping her to connect with those in Spirit. Every medium needs what is often referred to as a ‘spirit control’ or a ‘gatekeeper’ to connect our world with the world of spirit and help establish and maintain clear communication. These powerful guides often present themselves in various archetypal forms, such as Red Indians, Buddhist monks and the like, to make us feel more comfortable. White Owl’s relationship with Liz has certainly been a strong influence in her work.

Many books written by mediums and psychics are full of anecdotes about their work and the people they encounter. I feel that these authors are often trying to prove to people that they are genuine, asking for a pat of approval on their collective backs. Not so with Winter – she has left her ego safely locked away with her story. Winter does include some of her encounters in the world of spirit, but this book is essentially a memoir, and this is the true strength and appeal of the book. One story made me chuckle when I read it. Winter was expecting her next client to arrive, only to see a man in a police uniform stride through the door. Like most of us in the same circumstances her heart missed a couple of beats as she assumed she must be in trouble. It turned out that ‘Ken’ was on his way to work and had to come for his reading in uniform. Winter was able to connect with his late wife who had passed shortly after their honeymoon and the messages that she had for Ken helped him to move on with his life.

Liz also writes openly about her own relationships and family situations, taking the reader into her world in a warm and embracing manner. All-in-all For The Love of Spirit is a very enjoyable book.

To purchase Liz Winter’s For the Love of Spirit go here: amazon.com/Love-Spirit-Medium-Memoir

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The 2/7th Infantry Battalion, including Sgt Reg Saunders, wait at a troop train in QLD, 1943. (Credit: Australian War Memorial)

Flappers to Vietnam, The third book in Thomas Keneally’s series Australians is a fascinating look at a broad sweep of history covering two wars, the beginning of a third, and the seeds of decades of cold war, writes Digby Hildreth.

Aboriginal soldier Reg Saunders, from Framlingham, Victoria, hid in the White Mountains of Crete for months after the German army invaded the island in 1941. He was later secreted aboard a fishing trawler named the Hedgehog and taken to Egypt.

Saunders got back home and served as a platoon commander in New Guinea until 1944 – the first Aborigine to be commissioned as an officer. He also fought in Korea, where he was a commanded a company. His brother Harry was killed in New Guinea in 1942 while attacking enemy positions at Gona.

The headline title of Thomas Keneally’s magisterial history is Australians: in other words, the story of us. The subtitle of the third volume, Flappers to Vietnam, defines the start and finish of the half-century examined here: the euphoria at the conclusion of the war to end all wars and the beginning of the deadly quagmire of war in south-east Asia. One of the intriguing aspects of the book is that Keneally is more interested in the lives of rank and file characters such as Saunders than he is in the higher echelons. Harry Saunders appears about a quarter of the way through this dense and detailed tome, fighting in the Desert War, and reappears much later in the Pacific theatre.

It’s a typical Keneally technique: to relate as much of the experience of as many ordinary men and women as he can pack in, breathing life into the political principles, aesthetic theories, moral beliefs and ideas of nationhood that were challenged by the upheavals of the age.

The indefatigable Keneally was explicit about his approach earlier this year: “I’m fascinated by obscure figures who show the whole sweep of an event … although I mention generals, I’m interested in lieutenants and downwards,” he said.

As a result, these pages teem with life, with characters good, bad and ugly – but never indifferent, illustrating the turbulence and fractures of the era and how ‘obscure’ Aussie men and women dealt with them.

No history, however, could be comprehensive without a detailed look at the pollies and the top brass, but even here Keneally’s interest is primarily in the human being behind the public persona.

So we see wartime PM John Curtin, whose fighting of (and winning) the war cost him his health and his life. Hyper-sensitive, tormented by the suffering of others, idealistic, driven, he would lose himself on long night-time walks around Canberra in attempts to shore up his failing psychology.

John Curtin and US General Douglas MacArthur meet at Parliament House on 26 March 1942.

Keneally clearly has a soft spot for the doomed Curtin, but is less sympathetic towards some of those the poor man had to stand up to on behalf of Australia, especially the ‘narcissist’ Douglas MacArthur, and Churchill, with whom he grappled frequently over the question of bringing Australian troops back from the Middle East and Europe to defend their own country from the advancing Japanese.

World War II was at the chronological heart of the century, and with the fall of Singapore, the war, with its dramas of life and death, suffering and heroism, provides the beating heart of this volume. The threat was very near but, despite our era’s obsession with ‘terror”’ it takes some imaginative effort to comprehend how truly terrifying it must have been for Australians to learn about the Japanese bombing of Darwin, Broome and half a dozen other towns in 1942, with the loss of hundreds of lives.

Keneally’s skill is to evoke that fear, which was perfectly reasonable, after all, given that everyone who went to the ‘flicks’ had seen how the sons of Nippon treated their enemies, civilian as well as military, and that the bombing raids were seen, understandably, as a prelude to invasion.

The Neptuna exploding at Darwin Wharf on February 19, 1942

There is plenty to learn and enjoy here about the social, cultural and political changes of the Twenties – the theatre, the struggle to create ‘an Australian art’, the rise of fascism and communism, the increasing demands for recognition by women and Aborigines – but it is the inexorable movement of events towards the carnage of World War II that engages and bewilders. The White Australia Policy and Billy Hughes’ obstruction of a racial equality clause in the Treaty of Versailles are apportioned a chunk of blame for this. Keneally even risks asking a ‘necessary but almost blasphemous question’: could the barbarism of the Japanese soldiers have been because they were ‘specifically indoctrinated’ about the policy? Perhaps such questions are merely a function of Keneally’s desire to see the whole picture of history, to understand and rescue the human from the bestial.

Racism generally led to all sorts of absurd restrictions and outrageous injustices, and must have hampered Australia’s fighting capacity. Despite the experience of the Saunders brothers, Aborigines were initially excluded from combat forces, and were even feared as possible collaborators; black American troops were ghettoised in Brisbane, beaten by military police and even shot dead. Understandably, they rioted.

Keneally charts the shifting fortunes of the darker ideologies of the day – communism and fascism – including after the war, and the emergence of less violent but more meaningful ruptures and rifts in the nation: the demands of women and Aborigines for equality and autonomy, the breaking up of the colonial subservience to Britain and the emergence of a new buddy/master in the United States, an equally problematic alliance summed up rather childishly by Harold Holt with his ‘all the way with LBJ’ line. Holt’s drowning concludes this chapter of our history.

Keneally reports on these cataclysms in the geopolitical life of the adolescent nation as it strove for identity and a global voice through the men and women at its centre and on its edges, and he does so with a journalist’s eye for detail and a humanitarian concern for the individual lives, saved, restored but too often wasted in the process.

His history is a magnificent read but does show some signs of too much haste. Some sentences jar: ‘The Papuan bearers collapsed on the track, sick, and some deserted, escaping that muscle-splitting, breath-sapping and health-depleting track.’ He never fails to mention if someone is of Irish descent and some of the personae seem wheeled out for no good reason other than to show that the researchers could put a name to them.

When Gough Whitlam enters the narrative the epithet ‘young’ attaches itself to him and won’t let go. In two pages he is described as the young lawyer, the young aviator, the young flyer, the young navigator.

And 420 nautical miles does not convert into 780 metres.

But these are minor quibbles in what is a major work, a broad sweep of history covering two wars and the beginning of a third, and the seeds of decades of cold war.

Finally it is the social and cultural wars that provide the web and woof of this story, and the people driving them, which make this an indispensable book.

AUSTRALIANS: Flappers to Vietnam By Thomas Keneally

Allen & Unwin, hard cover, 640 pp, rrp: $49.99

Thomas Keneally ‘In Conversation’ with Bob Carr

Where: Lennox Cultural and Community Centre, Mackney Lane, Lennox Head.

When: Saturday 29^th November, 5.00 pm.

How: Book Tickets at: https://bobcarrandthomaskeneally.eventbrite.com.au

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