University of Queensland Press

Jockey McAuley is 15 years old, with no idea what he's going to do with his life, when he somehow or other ends up working for Mr Hardaker at Paton Electrical.  His job - well it's odd.  It's mostly to shadow Mr Hardaker and watch / listen and remember everything that happens.  Somewhere in the background there's something going on at Paton Electrical though.   There's reference to "the Phoenix affair", there's police, there's the owner of the factory in his wheelchair, there's great big cars, a secretary, canteen gossip and Ludo.  Ludo is Fred Paton's nurse or companion, or something.  Something a 15 year old boy with a good Catholic mother can't quite get a handle on.

LUDO (the book) is told entirely in Jockey's voice.  It's written as a reminiscence, Jockey looking back at his role in the lives of Hardaker, Paton and Ludo (the woman).  It was a very short episode in his life, but it has obviously had a very profound effect - although the full extent of that effect isn't revealed until right at the end of the book.  Nothing much is fully revealed until the end of the book mind you - it's in the last few chapters that the full extent of the Phoenix Affair (for that matter what the Phoenix Affair actually is) is fully revealed.

Reading LUDO I have to confess to frequently feeling a distinct sense of frustration.  There's a lot of Jockey and Hardaker running around, and because the book is told completely from Jockey's point of view, there's a sense of repetitiveness, a certain floating feeling filled in by a lot of chat to cover the nothingness of the action.  Which isn't quite true - there's something going on always, but it's bubbling away under the surface, hidden within the detritus of people seeming to go about their daily lives, just a little bit on edge.  I suspect what the author is aiming for is to give the reader some sense of Jockey's own confusion - even his own frustration at sitting, and listening and watching and not really knowing why or even what's going to come of all of this.  It's all a bit mysterious - both to Jockey and the reader.  The book is set in the 1960's and the terminology and setting, seemingly accurate, does help to put the reader very much in the same position as Jockey.  Watching, listening, remembering, not quite getting the whole picture, wondering what the hell is going on here.

LUDO isn't exactly a gentle reading experience, there are points at which you just want something, anything, to happen.  Just something to break up the waiting and watching and wondering.  There are points at which you'd really swear you'd missed something - just as Jockey obviously thought he'd missed something.   It's an interesting book LUDO, undoubtedly one of those books that will divide readers, and whilst I found myself squirming with frustration whilst I was reading it, something definitely kept me with the story right to the end. 

THE BOUNDARY is the first novel from Australian author Nicole Watson.  Nicole is a member of the Birri-Gubba People and the Yugambeh language group and her novel is set in Brisbane, at the end of an unsuccessful land rights claim, soon after which high profile people start dying.

Reading this book it's impossible not to be aware of some fundamental elements.  There is a sense of anger in the book - anger at the treatment of an ancient people in their land and anger at the deprivation and desecration of those people.  There's also a sense of celebration - Aboriginal sensibility, thinking, belief systems, and society are clearly illustrated.  That's not to say that this is a saccharine view of life - there's good and bad and right and wrong on both sides.  There's so much damage to many of the people in this book, but there's also signs of self-reliance, repair and restoration.  THE BOUNDARY is told in a style which has a real feeling of difference, choppy, abrupt, scathing as many difficult subjects are tackled - politics, land rights, alcoholism, dysfunction, family tensions and the difficulties that change continues to bring.

THE BOUNDARY is most definitely not a light and easy read, nor is it a perfect, flawless debut.  The subject matter alone makes it confrontational, and the writing is often as abrupt as the content.  It provides a real sense of the "other" with a glaring distinction between the mystical and reality which starts off feeling a little choppy, but does ends up making some sense.  The use of the crime genre to tell this story rings true, the subject matter confrontational and whilst I did at one point think the writing a little patchy, the personal stories are strong, involving and very moving.  So many aspects of the story THE BOUNDARY illustrates are raw and brutal, it does makes sense that the reader should sometimes be uncomfortable.  It also makes sense that the flights into the mystical aren't explained, it makes sense that the resolution solves the immediate problem and raises a lot more questions.

What THE BOUNDARY really did for me is make me hope like hell that more and more indigenous Australian's set out to write their stories in their own language, and stylings, so that more and more of us can get an insight into the differences, understand the pain and get even just a glimpse of a reality which is quintessentially their own.