I have a lot of catching up to do here.  Thanks for being so patient.  Last time I stopped by here I was preparing for the Wooden Boat Festival in Hobart.  I was supposed to work four days but only managed three days. It was full on and hot and my old body needed a day of rest. We walked more than 10 km per day with our cameras. When my body talks….I listen.  I will put up some photos on a Wordless Wednesday post or a Thursday Travels.

The weekend after the Wooden Boats we had the Kempton Festival for the day.  It was stinking hot that day and little shade. The country town of Kempton opens their doors for garage sales and a big festival full of locals and animals.  It was fun. I think that might be another Wednesday or Thursday post of photos. I won’t dwell on the six dogs I made the owner pull out of their car in the terrible heat. When will people learn you don’t put kids and pets in cars to wait for you in the stinking heat while going of to enjoy yourself.

Then we had visitors from Michigan. My husband’s cousin and his partner.  You won’t believe how much we did in a week. They arrived Sunday evening so a meal in the Cascade Brewery pub was called for. Monday- the top of Mt. Wellington and the MONA (Museum of Old and New Art Museum). Monday night was a home BBQ.  Tuesday was the Tasmanian Museum and the Bonorong Wildlife Sanctuary. Tuesday night was a lovely Japanese meal out. Wednesday we managed the Botanical Gardens.  I had an author event so Mr. Penguin cooked them a pasta dinner.   Then Thursday we drove the 90 minute drive down to Port Arthur (the ruins of an 1800’s penal colony) with a breakfast stop on the way.  Mr. Penguin and Visitor Cousin had a

cousin/sister on the cruise ship with friends that day who took the ship’s tour to Port Arthur where we all met up. Then home we came and met them later on at a fish restaurant down on the wharf. They then sailed for New Zealand on the cruise ship and we came home

Friday was a quiet day just resting, drinking beer and watching Netflix a bit. On Saturday it was 39 degrees (that’s about 100 F) and Mr. Penguin took them back down the Tasman Peninsula for a Pennicott boat cruise that goes along the cliff faces on the Tasman Sea and sees lots of marine wildlife. I get very seasick as it’s quite a rough ride so

I chose not to go. I stayed home and rested. Sunday saw us walking down around the
sandstone buildings of Salamanca and a stop for a cold beer.  They flew out to Melbourne Monday morning and we collapsed.  I took photos in most of these places so I think I’ll have a lot of Wordless Wednesdays and Travelling Thursdays coming up.

 

Now….did I read?  Yes I did manage some books.  There is no time to write a great deal about the books but I will give you a bit of a synopsis.

Book One- The Arsonist by well recognised author, Chloe Hooper, b. 1973 from Melbourne Australia. This book is Australian non fiction about the Black Saturday fires in the state of Victoria in 2009. There were 173 fatalities and many properties lost. The story is a journalistic investigation of the fire and what caused it? Who caused it?  I won’t give much more information as I don’t want spoilers.

It was a very interesting account and much was learned from that fire and new practises put into place.  Our Fuller’s Book Store Book group is reading it for this week’s meeting but as I am so exhausted from all the past month’s activity I chose to sleep at home through the meeting. There is a
group meeting tonight but I’m booked into a play tonight so will miss it. More on that later. (maybe)

I found this book incredibly interesting and the writing was not sensationalised.  It offered a lot of food for thought which is always good. The ramifications carry on for a long time.

The second book I managed to get through, as it’s a very short book was The Newspaper of Claremont Street by Australian author Elizabeth Jolley.  She had an incredibly interesting life and wrote quite a few books. (here for The Wikipedia entry about Ms Jolley)

The Australian author Tim Winton mentioned her as he studied under her at Curtain University in Western Australia in his book The Boy Behind the Curtain (short stories)

 I loved this book. It is a story of an elderly cleaning woman who services all of the affluent homes in her neighbourhood each day. She gets all of the gossip from every house and shares it with every other house. If something is happening she knows about it.

When her immigrant neighbour dies she is left caring for an extremely difficult wife of the man who died. There is some good black humour in this book. The character is verywell developed. We get to know her well and we feel the need for her to accomplish her goal of raising money for a certain ideal in her mind. I won’t say more than that. She lives in a room in a boarding house and we get used to her habits at home.  The last half of the story is about the relationship between her immigrant neighbour and how that develops.  I will certainly read more of her work and I believe I have one or two of her books on my shelf. She’s definitely an author I will look for in second hand shops.

 

The third book I just finished for the April Book Club read is The Everlasting Sunday by Robert Lukins. This is his first novel and is being nominated for all kinds of awards. The Good Reads blurb states:

During the freezing English winter of 1962, seventeen-year-old Radford is sent to Goodwin Manor, a home for boys who have been ‘found by trouble’. Drawn immediately to the charismatic West, Radford soon discovers that each one of them has something to hide.

Life at the Manor offers only a volatile refuge, and unexpected arrivals threaten the world the boys have built. Will their friendship be enough when trouble finds them again?

At once both beautiful and brutal, The Everlasting Sunday is a haunting debut novel about growing up, growing wild and what it takes to survive.

I found this a difficult book to get into. I had the audible edition and had trouble following it as there was too much going on in my life as I got to it in bits and pieces. I finally downloaded the eBook from the library on Overdrive, sat down properly in a chair with both versions, backed up a few chapters and began again. I then got a lot more out of it.

In the beginning I thought the author’s descriptions were over the top and I got irritated.

Too many adjectives. I laughed out loud when he described someone’s lips “collapsing into themselves”. My mind is just too visual. I don’t need descriptions like this every few sentences. Then he calms down a bit and the characters take over more. I enjoyed the protagonist Radford, though you’re never sure why he’s in the boys home. It was a book that had an ominous overtone and I felt something awful was going to happen. I felt the book got a lot stronger as I continued. I would have liked more even character development. Some characters that turned out to be more important later on weren’t fleshed out enough that I cared about them.  There were a couple of characters;  Radford, his friend West and the boys adviser and mentor, Teddy who were quite well developed. I think it is a remarkable first novel but I can’t say I loved it as I went through it. I did want to see though how it was going to end. It made me curious. I wanted to know why Radford was in this place. He seemed such a nice young man. Well…. I will be interested to know what my book group thinks about it in April and it is certainly one meeting I won’t be missing.

My quick online research states that Robert Lukins lives in Melbourne and has worked as an art researcher and journalist. His writing has been published widely, including in The Big Issue, Rolling Stone, Crikey, Broadsheet and Overland . The Everlasting Sunday is his first novel

Whew!!!  A bit long winded but I wanted a good catch up to get me motivated again.  When one steps away from their blog for too long everything piles up and just can’t be covered.  I think this post is more than enough for all of us.

I want to wish everyone well. The northern hemisphere people are yearning for spring and summer especially in those cold places in the USA and UK.  The Southern Hemisphere people want the fires out (six of which continue in Tasmania with continued smoke here and there) and cooler temperatures. We always seem to want what we don’t have. So enjoy spring if you’re above the equator and enjoy autumn if you’re below it. More soon. I promise.