Monthly Archives: May 2019

Book Review: The Wife Drought

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The Wife Drought by Annabel Crabb

Book Summary

‘I need a wife’

It’s a common joke among women juggling work and family. But it’s not actually a joke. Having a spouse who takes care of things at home is a Godsend on the domestic front. It’s a potent economic asset on the work front. And it’s an advantage enjoyed – even in our modern society – by vastly more men than women. 

Working women are in an advanced, sustained, and chronically under-reported state of wife drought, and there is no sign of rain.

But why is the work-and-family debate always about women? Why don’t men get the same flexibility that women do? In our fixation on the barriers that face women on the way into the workplace, do we forget about the barriers that – for men – still block the exits? 

The Wife Drought is about women, men, family and work. Written in Annabel Crabb’s inimitable style, it’s full of candid and funny stories from the author’s work in and around politics and the media, historical nuggets about the role of ‘The Wife’ in Australia, and intriguing research about the attitudes that pulse beneath the surface of egalitarian Australia.

Crabb’s call is for a ceasefire in the gender wars. Rather than a shout of rage, The Wife Drought is the thoughtful, engaging catalyst for a conversation that’s long overdue. 

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Miles Franklin Literary Award Longlist 2019

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The most prestigious literary award, Miles Franklin, has announced it longlist. The longlisted 10 titles areas following and you can reserve a copy on City of Parramatta Libraries.

This year’s longlist, again, showcases the diversity of writers, of its fiction genres, and the capacity in reflecting what is very unique to Australia, but at the same time it is also very universal in contents.

  • The Lebs (Michael Mohammed Ahmad, Hachette) – A book about a Lebanese boy grows in Western Sydney
  • Flames (Robbie Arnott, Text) – – A new trilogy set in the Hidden Legacy world, where magic means power, and family bloodlines are the new currency of society…
  • Boy Swallows Universe (Trent Dalton, Fourth Estate) – already a winner of some awards, it is a book sets in Brisbane, 1985: A lost father, a mute brother, a junkie mum, a heroin dealer for a stepfather and a notorious crim for a babysitter.
  • A Sand Archive (Gregory Day, Picador) – stories of Australia’s Great Ocean Road, a young writer stumbles across a manual from a minor player in the road’s history, FB Herschell.
  • Inappropriation (Lexi Freiman, A&U) – a prestigious private Australian girls’ school, fifteen-year-old Ziggy Klein is confronted with an alienating social hierarchy that hurls her into the arms of her grade’s most radical feminists.
  • A Stolen Season (Rodney Hall, Picador) – Adam’s life has been ruined by war… A veteran of the Iraq conflict who has suffered such extensive bodily trauma that he can only really survive by means of a mechanical skeleton.
  • The Death of Noah Glass (Gail Jones, Text) – The art historian Noah Glass, having just returned from a trip to Sicily, is discovered floating face down in the swimming pool at his Sydney apartment block.
  • Too Much Lip (Melissa Lucashenko, UQP) – A dark and funny new novel from the multi-award-winning author of Mullumbimby.
  • Dyschronia (Jennifer Mills, Picador) – A small town. And the end of the world as we know it…One morning, the residents of a small coastal town somewhere in Australia wake to discover the sea has disappeared.
  • The Lucky Galah (Tracy Sorensen, Picador) – It’s 1969 and a remote coastal town in Western Australia is poised to play a pivotal part in the moon landing.

Book Review: Salt Creek

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Salt Creek by Lucy Treloar

Book Summary

Some things collapse slow, and cannot always be rebuilt, and even if a thing can be remade it will never be as it was. 

Salt Creek, 1855, lies at the far reaches of the remote, beautiful and inhospitable coastal region, the Coorong, in the new province of South Australia. The area, just opened to graziers willing to chance their luck, becomes home to Stanton Finch and his large family, including fifteen-year-old Hester Finch. 

Once wealthy political activists, the Finch family has fallen on hard times. Cut adrift from the polite society they were raised to be part of, Hester and her siblings make connections where they can: with the few travellers that pass along the nearby stock route – among them a young artist, Charles – and the Ngarrindjeri people they have dispossessed. Over the years that pass, and Aboriginal boy, Tully, at first a friend, becomes part of the family. 

Stanton’s attempts to tame the harsh landscape bring ruin to the Ngarrindjeri people’s homes and livelihoods, and unleash a chain of events that will tear the family asunder. As Hester witnesses the destruction of the Ngarrindjeri’s subtle culture and the ideals that her family once held so close, she begins to wonder what civilization is. Was it for this life and this world that she was educated? 

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