A new publishing model

I have recently come across Unbound. It’s an exciting shake-up of publishing where books are crowdfunded, then produced with that committed support. It recognises that the answers, or at least some of them, are in technology. As an advocate of digital, I have watched the publishing industry hamstrung by nostalgia which is obscuring an important debate about how to improve returns to creators. 

Many in the book world still see support for digital as a betrayal of the experience of reading, or of the author. The book culture’s defence of the artefact rather than the artist is the change that needs to happen. If we want more returns to authors, to creators, we need a serious conversation about digital options, including different streaming models, preferably author-led.

In thinking about more equitable returns on writers’ labours, I looked at the music industry. The digital transition – by artists, listeners and music producers – happened in waves over a decade or more, long before books. And yes, it’s been hard. Returns for musicians have plummeted with album sales all but disappearing but there’s no going back. There’s been a niche return to vinyl and CD sales are still a chunk of the market but the retail ship has truly sailed. 

And Bandcamp, established in 2007, grew out of frustration with the paucity of returns to artists. Its mission is to support the culture of music through a service that returns more than eighty percent of profit to artists, and where fans find new music directly in an online community. 

Independent singer/songwriter Imogen Heap took technology to a new plane with myceliaformusic.org, an online commercial marketplace and network which uses encrypted blockchain technology to pay artists and the supporting creatives (cover art, licensing, instrument brands) directly. An individual ‘Creative Passport’ for music-makers tracks and pay for services rendered. She told Ellen Peirson-Hagger in New Statesmen in September 2020 that “Right now we are individual musicians with no union. If we can prove that by having your information organised and being able to connect to all the different services that you use in your own micro eco-system…we can shift it around.”

Heap told the Guardian that she wanted to close the ‘gap between fan and artist and the journey of their music’, saying in, ‘in the data-driven era, the movement of music, money and feedback should be frictionless. A total rethink is in order.’ That call hasn’t hit books hard yet. Authors are certainly not revolting against either their publishers or the third parties, still in lock step with traditional models. 

Imogen Heap says that while she doesn’t have a perfect view of how the future of the music industry is going to look, she feels that the answer is in the technology. Authors have to grasp the technology and make it work for them. Similarly with books and writing. We need better, cleverer models which work with authors to distribute their work and allow for communities to share it.

Unbound is an step in that direction.

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Detransition, Baby, Torrey Peters

First published in Newtown Review of Books

Torrey Peters has written a complex and deeply moving novel about the ties that bind us – ties that govern our choices about who we love, how we love, and the costs. Detransition, Babyfollows a trio: Reece, a trans woman; her ex, detransitioned Ames (formerly Amy); and Ames’s new partner, a cis heterosexual woman, Katrina, as they each struggle with the idea of parenthood.

The narrative moves between two time periods, chapters named for the years before or weeks after conception. 

Reece and Amy meet eight years before conception. Reece is trailing a history of (sometimes abusive) relationships with cis men and Amy, a ‘baby trans’, is overwhelmed by her new knowledge that she is ‘a girl in love with a girl’. The conception in question is Katrina’s – Ames has found that his ‘atrophied testicles’ are, after all, capable of impregnation.

The novel is among the first by an openly trans woman to be published by a big-five publishing company. Torrey Peters received some vicious criticism when it was longlisted for the UK’s 2021 Women’s Prize for Fiction, but the judges publicly affirmed her right to enter the prize.

The novel interrogates traditional notions of masculinity and femininity. Our world devalues femininity and its identifying behaviours, which are seen as submissive and weak, and are ridiculed when adopted by men. In her influential book, Whipping Girl: A transsexual woman on sexism and the scapegoating of femininity, first published in 2007, biologist and trans activist Julia Serano asserts that defining masculinity and femininity as a ‘non-overlapping set of attributes, aptitudes, abilities, and desires’ harms us all. The reclaiming of femininity makes trans activism a feminist movement. Detransition, Baby is a profoundly feminist book

This familiar story, the introduction of a baby into a relationship, is wrought here in a context that strips away contrivances. The politics of birthing and raising children, a cradle of feminist struggle, is finely rendered by Peters’s three characters. Reece wants a baby, Ames struggles with the idea of ‘fatherhood’, knowing that Amy is still a vital part of his identity, and Katrina is torn. Peters observes motherhood’s myriad contradictions: expanding in love while simultaneously exhausting and impoverishing women; its very private anguish and joy while also being a public service­­ – a duty on which all have an opinion; and its privilege, which is granted and withdrawn by public policy governing access to contraception, abortion, adoption, and reproductive technologies.

Katrina challenges Reece on some of her assumptions about who is considered a ‘deserving’ mother.

‘Think about black women, poor women, immigrant women. Think about forced sterilization, about the term “welfare queens” or “anchor babies”. All of that happened to enforce the idea that not all motherhoods are legitimate … I’m not criticizing your feelings, Reece … I’m telling you that I feel the same. Because everyone gets criticized about how they should or shouldn’t be mothering.‘

Motherhood may be presumptive for cis women, but when these women do not adhere to the procreative norms, they are ‘treated like silly whores, obsessed with themselves, lacking some basic capacity to love’. Julia Gillard is a case in point, labelled by her political enemies as unfit for leadership because she was ‘deliberately barren’.

Peters brings us up close to the reality of living outside gender norms. It is to live with exhaustion: constantly alert, ready to defend, or retreat. It is to live with shame. You are not worthy of love, from a partner, or a child; you are not worthy of a job; trans women are tricksters, untrustworthy. Reece applies ‘in stealth’ for a job in childcare. When she and Amy go to an adoption information evening, Reece says, ‘I feel naughty. Like we’re passing ourselves off as just a normal lez couple.’

It is also to live with sorrow, to be hardened by another death, another suicide, another funeral. In Australia, the LGBTIQ Health Alliance 2020 reports that 35 per cent of transgender people aged 18 and over have attempted suicide in their lifetime.

But cis and trans women share much, including a fear of cis men. A violent assault is a trigger for Amy’s detransition and she begins this path with sorrow.

[Amy] had, of course, long come to understand that masculinity dulled her, that it dissociated her from herself. But honestly, that’s all she wanted at that point.

Patriarchy has no time for sentiment, ambivalence or uncertainty. The humouring of the male ego is so internalised in cis women that Reece is floored by a man’s off-colour joke about his penis, and the muted reaction from the audience of cis women who ‘laugh politely’.

Something else shared is class privilege, a theme woven throughout the novel. Wealth is a protection racket buying safety in housing, medical care, influence. Reece is enraged when she sees ‘Tranny’ plastered all over a wall as part of a book promotion.

Those rich trans bitches. These fucking assholes who transition with hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars to protect them from ever hearing someone say ‘tranny’ to them on the street, so that one day they can write tranny on the streets themselves, and congratulate themselves on being so punk. As if, in a climate of political dread, no one has ever written Jew, or faggot, or hung a noose, or painted a swastika where some poor target tried to pass a small life.

Detransition, Baby is all this, and also so funny, poking fun at our rituals, our clothes, our allegiances; it is a glorious journey about friendship and facing our truths. Torrey Peters has written a story about how to live.

Torrey Peters Detransition, Baby Profile Books 2021 HB 320pp $33.75

The Airways, Jennifer Mills

First published in Newtown Review of Books

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Someone recently tweeted that if we gave male violence the same attention as Covid, men would have been under curfew for ever. Published in 2021, this prescient novel deals with both themes, taking the sickness inhabiting the world as an extended metaphor. Though the book’s few time-markers place it in separate periods in the millenium’s teens, the before times, both the virus and the impact of male predation are woven throughout as real and malevolent presences.

Adam has moved from Sydney to Beijing where he is working in some ill-defined marketing role helping ‘deliver bespoke global brand solutions’. The office is in a modern building designed with exposed bricks and pipes to lend it that start-up feel. He is brought down by a mystery illness and leaves work to go home, where he sickens rapidly. Mills draws out every sense. He hallucinates, his body sweats, itches, he is weak with nausea, diarrhoea. The symptoms shriek with recognition: he loses his sense of taste, he can’t breathe. He closed his eyes. The virus, infection, whatever is was, was moving around inside him, waiting for him to fall asleep. The passages where he continues to interact with his colleagues, people in the street, in shops, are overlaid with pandemic tension. Stop!

Alternating chapters mark an earlier timeline where Adam is sharing a house in Sydney with some other students, including Yun (who is studying virology). Adam is drawn to Yun but his interest is not reciprocated. These chapters are heavy with tension. A woman, a fellow student, has been murdered in a nearby street, and a vigil is held for her. 

The Airways opens not with this murder, but with a different violent death, a death which releases the anima who narrates half the book: the ‘they’ whom we follow, who journeys through cities, through new bodies, looking for the one it wants to inhabit. It is a slow stalking.

These chapters are named for sensation – Heat, Hunger – and also for emission, or transmission: Smoke, Steam, River. The airways are breath, life, and ‘they’ are seeking a new body, expelled from their own. As they move into new bodies, trying them out for size, making a home for a while, they learn, become more awake.

The transitions are becoming easier, even if control remains beyond them. They flip through bodies like pages, looking for lines they recognise, that leap of meaning.

Again, in Covid-times, it is impossible not to see a parallel with a virus adapting. Mutating. Cells have an intelligence in The Airways, behaving like sentient beings as they watch a division, ask what changes it brings, even argue with each other.

Adam’s girlfriend, Natasha, has left. He tells people she’s visiting her family for the weekend, but we gradually learn of an invasive video he has posted of her. This is not his only transgression. Adam has his own trauma, unexamined, but it is his ordinariness that jars. In a recurring pattern, he comes face to face with different people who try to move around him, but they collide, bump. He is a man who cannot, or will not, read the signs. He is awkward, carrying a clear sense of inadequacy, and entitlement: ‘He should have gone with them’ quickly becomes ‘They should have asked him to come.’

Male entitlement manifests in other scenes. An unnamed man leans over a counter:

… looks plainly at the tops of her breasts. Want in his groin … Sinking lower, trying to escape his skin and enter hers. When she reacts, frowning, sitting back, he gets a shot of pleasure.

This is a hugely original exploration of the banality of violence, its unremarkable perpetrators—and its hold on those violated, both living and dead. ‘So many people are like this,’ says Mills’ narrator, ‘carrying around their private violence, their body’s understanding with the world.’

Reading, rereading, and untangling The Airways’ strange pursuit is a deeply rewarding journey.

Jennifer Mills The Airways Picador 2021 PB 384pp $32.99

Learning Guem Gang in lockdown

I’m a martial artist, a black belt in taekwondo. I can perform the core techniques, from foundation white belt kicks through to complex kicks which require balance, accuracy and power. I can spar up to three opponents simultaneously. I can also repel attacks to any part of my body with different self-defence techniques. My strength and agility is demonstrated through breaking boards with spinning and jumping kicks. I incorporate weapons into different routines, an element of show which calls on our dexterity.

It also means I can perform patterns—the complex dance-like, or choreographed, routines which the sport’s founders incorporated into the art to allow for a mock fight without injuring each other.  They comprise multiple steps of kicks, stances and hand techniques, moving  from left to right, forwards and backwards, turning and twisting. They must be performed perfectly to pass gradings. 

They are also incredibly hard for me to learn. I don’t think visually, or spatially. I have trouble recalling sequences—from street directions to recipes. I still make left and right-hand mistakes under pressure.

I learnt the first two black belt patterns in classes at my school, the Australian Martial Arts Academy, joining up with other students to go over them again. And again. And again. Even when they are embedded, they still require complete concentration—focusing on each turn or technique one by one through the sequence. 

Learning the third dan black belt pattern, Guem Gang, required something different. I, like most of NSW now, am in lockdown. We are supported by videos taking us step by step through the pattern but I didn’t know how hard I would find it translating those remote visuals. I would watch them, pause the video, step again, but it was incredibly frustrating not being able to retain more than a few steps in my head at once. Each move is, in itself, a complex combination of arms, legs, feet, head. I was trying to see the video over my shoulder, or from too far away. It was hard to resume after pausing mid-sequence, the pattern interrupted. I got the first 10 to 15 moves, but then couldn’t progress. 

But I am a writer of, among other things, technical, operational, instructional material. I had to write it out. I watched the videos again, pausing every few seconds to write down each move and its component parts: a stance, a turn, a direction. Then I recorded myself reading out those steps. I put in my AirPods and listened to the exact instructions, moving through the pattern. This helped me learn the intricacies of each step, but I forgot the sequence, the flow, as soon as I tried without the instructions. I needed to commit the moves to memory in a way that made sense to me.

I re-recorded it, this time counting before each move: one through to ten, again one to ten, and finally one to seven: all 27 moves. I practised again and finally, a breakthrough. I found I could remember the move that accompanied the number, for instance, crane stance was 8, 5, 8, and 5 again. We count the moves in class but I could only see how they fitted together when I wrote them down.

There were times I thought I’d never get it, and my ‘aha’ moment was only this afternoon, but I know the pieces have fallen into place. It’s another demonstration of the many different ways there are to learning the same thing and why technical writing is as much about understanding the user, as it is the system we are describing.

Bookshops in the digital age

As an advocate of digital, I have watched the changes in bookselling clear-eyed, albeit with some nostalgia. Is the independent bookshop viable? Recently, I listened to Jemma Birrell’s interview with Sylvie Whitman, owner of Shakespeare & Company, that famous bookshop on the banks of the Seine in Paris, and it prompted some thoughts. 

As technology replaces bits and pieces of the product and traditional publishing processes are inexorably changed, social media pleas to support your local indie bookshop, to buy print, to keep them in business, are rife. While I understand the sentiment, it strikes me as an odd way for the market to operate. I learnt that independent bookshops in France are supported through a tax subsidy—a recognition of their cultural value, like opera.

When a retailer depends on heartstrings pulled, or touting their valued community, or offering titbits on the side, or seeking subsidies to sell products that can be bought cheaper elsewhere, it may be a heads-up that that industry needs to adapt. Lures like this are used in sales everywhere, of everything, but the difference with books is that technological competition could literally make print books, and the shelves on which they sit, redundant.

But publishing has never been agile. Between the 1960s and 1980s, corporate management theories propelled waves of mergers and acquisitions as publishing and global media swallowed competitors. The conglomeration of the industry led to a cowed conservatism where the marketing department ruled and editors became product managers working towards revenue targets. Yet while they continue to look for rational strategies in selecting books for publication, they were no closer to predicting success. Finding out what sells, and how to sell it, is elusive. 

The rise of publishing conglomerates was accompanied by bookselling moving from a high street mix of independent and chain stores, to the megastores with massively increased shelf space. Multinational publishers mirrored the approach in other sectors: squeezing out competitors and reverting to populist market dominance instead of looking for creative solutions. Window blocking where large publishers paid chain stores to showcase a book in window displays was one such tactic. The megastores killed off many an indie bookshop but failed to produce the returns that strategists expected. Even with the lure of ‘lifestyle’ products – candles, cards, soaps, cafes, wine bars – a diversion from their core product –the megastores were, themselves, replaced within a decade. Hello Jeff Bezos. 

Now we don’t need to step outside to buy any book our heart desires, and more cheaply. While he had no love for literature, Bezos understood that books could be warehoused and shipped more easily than other products. And it opened up readers to many new authors—another industry gatekeeper is the distributor. If a publishing house is small, or an author independent, getting books into bookshops is near impossible. This is especially so in a country like Australia with a tiny market but vast geography to cover. Amazon gave indie authors and small presses new readers.

While Amazon’s business model and impact on the industry has been extreme and tax loopholes that advantage it over other retailers should be closed, it’s clear that there’s no going back. And we haven’t even got to ebooks yet. 

Indie bookshops joining forces to sell online through shared services in direct competition with Amazon is a start. Much more print on demand, cutting ties with distributors and networking directly with publishers may be other solutions. Could bookshops provide a browsing experience, then take a cut of ebook sales for those who prefer to buy digitally? Spineless Wonders, a small multi-platform company specialising in Australian short fiction encourages readers to order its books through their local bookshop but also sells through its website. Similarly, Tablo an online independent publishing platform provides uses local printers to supply a network of 40,000 retailers, and 30,000 libraries, with print-on-demand books on the platform.

I think the answer is in the technology and we have to be prepared to live with fewer bookshops, which coexist symbiotically with a reading and writing community which is also online. Like record stores today, they will be sought out niche places, staffed by people with knowledge and passion about their products. And, like Shakespeare & Company, they need to support authors directly, if not with a bed or a meal, as it famously provided, then by grasping the need for change and pushing a reluctant industry along. Policy mechanisms to provide a standard for universal service provision, to oblige publishers to keep information in the public domain, and to support libraries, are all key issues. I look forward to more debate.

Rising to a special 2020 challenge

We’re now into the final month of this year, 2020, year of the plague; the year when the days ran into each other without bearings or markers, and ruled by fear. Check in. Wash your hands. Sanitise. Remember your mask. Wipe it down. Use an anti-bacterial, use a detergent. Don’t get too close. Don’t breathe. Sleep. Wake up. Repeat. 

You couldn’t help but be moved by the anguish of loved ones stranded between countries, of people dying alone in hospitals, or being locked in aged care without visitors. The cruelty of the pandemic. The boredom. 

My family was lucky. Our work continued, we had our own rooms and studies, a garden and a makeshift gym. But even with all that, it wasn’t easy. The 2020 black belts-to-be at the Australian Martial Arts Academy were facing the same challenge as when I got mine in 2015, and so much more. Ann, Renee, and Shane told me how they and their families pushed through this year.

Discipline can be liberating

Taekwondo teaches us discipline—we learn to get back up and do it again. There can be relief in setting a routine and sticking to it. When Zoom classes started, I got out on my mats for a class every second day, week in week out. It gave me something to hold onto at a time when nothing seemed real.

Renee was so excited she went to every single class – 19 a week! For months without her work, she said that the Zoom taekwondo classes were the only appointment in her diary. Every day, she put on her uniform, set out her mats in the living room, and put her phone on a tripod. ‘I just kept showing up and working hard. The enthusiasm and positive attitude of the instructors did wonders for my own attitude during a challenging time.’ 

Ann said that was difficult to keep up the intensity of training but she and Patrick managed three to four classes a week, either outside, or after moving furniture around inside. ‘Our dog wasn’t sure what the heck was happening but we stayed mostly focused.’

Having a goal—something to focus on

There is nothing like working on a difficult technique to clear the mind. Concentrating during lockdown was hard but Renee said that training took over and her anxiety about Covid would disappear for a short while. It’s that moment of flow, when your focus on one thing eclipses all else.

Lockdown training meant Renee could finally nail a perfect reverse hook kick and she now feels that her snap kick has become one of her strongest. Darren’s work on his jumping back kick has made it one of his most powerful and Shane loves the tornado—‘when it comes off, you feel you’re floating.’

Training together…and just checking in

All agreed that making time for friends and being able to train with family members was crucial. Shane said that ‘without a doubt’, he got through because Ed, his son, was also working to the same goal. He also eased lockdown craziness through scheduling regular sessions for games with friends—now over Zoom instead of their regular Sunday night meet-ups. 

Renee and Ann both said how much they missed the camaraderie on the mats and the chats before and after class but found friendships were strengthened. They continued to check in on each other outside of the Zoom classes.

Finding that strength

In adversity, we can learn things about ourselves. For Renee, it was that obstacles really can be overcome. She said, ‘They always tell us to “never give up” and they actually showed us that these are words to live by.’ Ann said that she learnt that she and Patrick realised they were a lot more resilient than they had thought. Extraordinary circumstances need changing plans and flexibility.  ‘We can achieve anything if we pull together as a family.’ 

What AMA means to us

Renee and Shane told me that the hardest part about training in lockdown was the lack of in-person interaction with the instructors and students. I had to agree. I’m an early morning person and I anticipated that getting a class in before breakfast would be a practice I would continue. Ahem….!  I haven’t done one since AMA reopened. We all realised the enormous boost we get from training with others and the supportive atmosphere of the Academy—asking a teacher for a quick refresher on a technique, working together, taking stock, comparing our progress.

For Shane, getting back to the AMA for classes in-person was such a lift: ‘You don’t realise how much you miss something until you’re able to do it again.’ 

None of us will remember 2020 too fondly, but this cohort achieved something remarkable. I’m proud of my black belt because it’s hard! Knowing you’ve earned it is immensely satisfying and a Covid silver lining may be that this group finds it even sweeter. 

Their stories made me wonder whether having the black belt goal might have helped them after all in this strangest of years.

Congratulations all.

In Westerly 65.1: What makes for a good author–editor relationship?

“The author–editor relationship is little understood outside the publishing industry and often mischaracterised by those within it. Commentators agree that this relationship is difficult to define and complicated, with the distribution of power ebbing and flowing in response to a variety of pressures…. Adding to the mystique, the editor’s role in book production is opaque. Editors have been seen as either minor players—an optional extra—at one end of the spectrum, or as gatekeepers to publication at the other.”

I talked with authors and editors and delved into my own experience, setting out my findings in my essay in Westerly 65.1, ‘Exploring Attributes of a Successful Author–Editor Relationship in Creative Writing’.

Kim Kelly, Walking

My review of Kim Kelly’s new book, Walking, is out in Newtown Review of Books today.  In these times of isolation, it’s a story of how love will prevail over fear.

KIM KELLY Walking. Reviewed by Jessica Stewart

 

 

 

Why we need to read digital

Someone with a pretty sizeable following tweeted recently that reading digitally wasn’t really reading. Go read a book, you animals, she said. I wonder. What is a book?

The words. It’s the words, folks. Who is more deeply moved by the quality of the paper, than the words printed on it?

Yes, I understand that one can appreciate the tactile, but the paper and ink and glue is not why we read. To hold onto that is a sentimental romanticising — or a fetish.

What makes a book?

A book becomes ‘publishable’ when, after writing, it has been edited, designed, illustrated and typeset. Marketing and promotion start in the lead-up and continue after release. So, then what? What else makes a book?

First, we build and run machines to print words onto sheets of paper. That brings considerable environmental baggage starting with the trees, of course, but also from toxicity of inks and dyes and bleach. Then we cut those paper sheets into small rectangles and glue these printed sheets between thicker sheets. Sometimes we bind them into a solid casing needing more glue or stitching. More machines.

The supply chain

These printed and bound wads of paper need to be shipped. From printers, which may be anywhere in the world, to distributors’ warehouses to booksellers’ warehouses and then to retail booksellers. And bookselling is the great unknown. Finding out what sells, and how to sell it, is elusive.

If the bookseller is a shop, the books then go onto shelves. If it’s an online store, more warehousing. When they aren’t sold, they are returned: ‘remaindered’. More logistics, and warehousing is expensive.  A publisher never wants to print too many. These are pulped. Great for the environment, that step. Sometimes they’re pulped because the publisher doesn’t have room, and even though this book might have a readership, it becomes ‘out of print’. Time to move on. Shiny new authors are always around the corner. Sometimes books are pulped because they have an error. It might be a typographical error that is just too embarrassing (book production is a human process) or it might be a legal issue. More pulping. After corrections, then more printing. More packing, distribution and warehousing.

Profits are in volume

Sometimes the publishing house is very tiny, or the author is independent. The distribution of books between factory to warehouse and into bookshop is difficult, especially in a country like Australia with a tiny market but vast geography to cover. It’s expensive and exclusive. If you can’t get a distributor, you can’t get your book into bookshops. There’s a reason that publishing houses have become huge conglomerates (80 percent of books sales are controlled by only a few firms): this system benefits from economics of scale. Operators with volume.

Every one of these steps costs money. And none, none of the above, has anything to do with writing.

Digital is better for authors and for readers

When the financial returns to authors are so small, most make less than AUD$12,000 each year, what steps can be cut out?

Digital is better for readers who can download immediately and read more. We need more, better and cheaper ereaders and we need to be able to buy ebooks from multiple sources. I don’t want Amazon to have any more power than it already has. And we need more options to ‘gift’ ebooks than we have in Australia now.

It’s happened with music

This isn’t even new—we’ve crossed this threshold with music. Most music is streamed now and we’re all still standing, albeit with some nostalgia. I heard Zan Rowe interview Norman Cook (aka Fat Boy Slim) on Triple J recently. Cook seemed aware of an inherent contradiction between his desire for music to be played, and a certain wistfulness about today’s world. We can find and listen to anything anywhere anytime. But has something been lost, he mused? Has the passion gone? Growing up, he recalled the joy of finding copies of records which might only exist in one or two places and he loved them all the more because of the struggle to get them.

We will always need some print books: for libraries, for people with special needs, and for collectors. And books of photography, art, and design, of course. For this, there is print on demand. But for the bulk of trade, or consumer, books, we need to be buying digitally.

Is exclusivity part of the deal? Nope. It’s not. And I think most struggling authors would agree with me.

My review of The Place on Dalhousie, MELINA MARCHETTA

First published in the Newtown Review of Books.

Melina Marchetta has written a story about home in The Place on Dalhousie. Home is both a place — where you live, the geography, the cityscape, the country — and a state of mind, the comfort and familiarity of having people around you ¬who know you and care for you. Home is support in its different guises.

Rosie Gennaro has lost the most important people in her life — her mother when she was 14, and now her father — and she feels she has lost her home, the house her father built for her and her mother. She has moved in with a boyfriend, then out again, and she has taken off travelling, working odd jobs, moving on when it suits. The book opens with Rosie in a regional town where she has found work as a carer. She seems drawn to other people’s homes.

The town floods and she stays on to help, working alongside Jim, an SES volunteer:

It’s rained for forty days and forty nights, so when a guy who looks like Jesus in orange SES overalls comes to stand next to her, Rosie thinks it’s all a bit biblical.

Marchetta’s few words bring us the familiar orange uniform we associate with tension, disaster and recovery, a bearded young man and Rosie’s weary fatefulness. The story’s timeline moves back and forth among an ensemble of characters and piecing it together is part of the enjoyment. This is a book to reread.

Rosie and Jim have a brief relationship, seeking comfort in one another, but then lose contact, travelling in different directions. It is only the beginning of their story, though. When they meet up again in Sydney several years later, the landscape has shifted. Rosie has returned to what was her home, her father’s house in Haberfield in Sydney’s inner-west, the place on Dalhousie, with her new baby. Also living there is Martha, her father Seb’s second wife, and both women lay claim to the house.

Martha and Seb had met in the cancer ward where they were caring for dying loved ones. Marchetta handles weighty themes with a light touch. Death, and the search for solace by those left behind, rears up often. Seb has also died prematurely and we see the repercussions of loss. Marchetta’s strong women show us that death is a part of life. Though it is one end, it is not the end.

Marchetta’s characters find support in different forms. Jim is searching for his parents, but his close-knit group of friends from school, and their parents, brothers and sisters are his family:

He’s home, and he knows he’s home because they’re here and that’s the way it is, just the certainty that one of them will always be around, and it feels like everything’s going to be okay …

Martha’s school friendships, reforming around an adult netball team, are another source of support with a shared history. The pokes at netball prima donnas are laugh-out-loud funny for any woman who remembers school teams. In another forum, the bitchy competitiveness of a mothers’ group is shown to be a veneer: underneath is solid, practical support.

Responsibility is a constant theme — responsibility to one’s children and one’s parents, financially and emotionally. Rosie’s Italian grandmother comes back to the house on Dalhousie, worried for her granddaughter. Of Jimmy’s job as a fly-in fly-out worker in the mines, Martha says, ‘You need to make this work, Jimmy.’ Frankie, Jimmy’s best friend, who knows his patterns and his history, says to him, ‘That little boy needs you, no matter what.’

And the migrant experience is here. When family is on the other side of the world, the neighbourhood becomes de facto family:

Martha had never sensed Loredana in this house before, but she’s imagined her languorous walk down Dalhousie chatting to every second person outside their home … That husky strong accent attracting the foreigners, the rapid musical dialect comforting the old-timers.

Martha’s responsibility, too, becomes clear in the end, and the place on Dalhousie becomes home again.

Melina Marchetta The Place on Dalhousie Viking 2019 PB 288pp $32.99