Author: TravellinPenguin

Our book group met last night to discuss Australian author Helen Garner’s memoir The Season. It came out earlier this year. Helen Garner lives in Melbourne and is a very popular author of diaries and crime. She is getting older (past 80) and her youngest grandson is 18 and plays Australian Rules football. She wants to know him better before she passes away and he leaves home for the big world. She decides to participate from the sidelines of his footy training and games.

This is the story of that footy season. I read it, enjoyed it though I’m not a massive football fan, never have been though I admit Aussie Rules is much easier to follow than American football or Grid Iron as the Aussies call it. I can never tell who has the ball in America and all the padding the players wear makes them hard to distinguish from either and they have SO MANY time outs! AUSSIE rules is so much faster. But American football players weigh a lot more. Hence the padding.

Anyway I thought what on earth could be so divisive in this book to get a good discussion going in our book group. OMG- was I wrong‼️

Half the group saw the relationship as the main theme in the book between grandson and grandmother. Football was just a prop. He could have been an equestrian or a swimmer and the story wouldn’t change a lot. I was in that camp.

The other half were so anti football I thought a couple of them would explode. The players were described as a bunch of young homophobic, misogynist thugs who practised racism from dusk to dawn.. And the injuries are bad as they are so dumb they wear no protective gear and suffer brain injuries and broken limbs.

Actually I think being an equestrian and white water rafting is more dangerous. I had my one and only ambo ride years ago coming off a runaway horse who threw me half way across a paddock while on a sharp gallop with a dead stop and right angle turn at the end.

Then another voice popped up from a small country town in Victoria. She said the whole community bonded over Friday or Saturday night football. Everyone came out, got pissed, held BBQ’s and had a great time. Friendships made were long lasting. And on and on this went for the hour we were there. I was highly entertained.

I do think more protective clothing should be worn and I know there are medical issues that are life long from brain injuries from people playing rugby and football. I also know racism, homophobia and misogyny rear their ugly heads but that pops up in many places.

I rode a motorbike for years and fell off horses jumping over 4 foot fences when the horse stopped. My sister was active in various sports as was my brother. My father flew helicopters and once the engine quit and as it plummeted to the earth he had skills to not panic and start the engine up again. However all his hair fell out two weeks later and grew in again with big white patches. Contained trauma and stress. Do we live with our passions even if dangerous? Or do we get wrapped in cotton wool. The discussion could go on for months.

But..I enjoyed the book. I don’t think the book was about football. I moved on once I finished it. Thought it was nice Helen enjoyed the footy season with her grandson and his mates. Discussion over. 🏈

I do believe sport is important especially for young kids who don’t have structure in their life or discipline or much support. They learn a lot and have a community to which they belong. They get penalised for racist slurs or homophobic comments. They get to know people from other cultures or areas of the country.

But I digress. Helen Garner did get to know her grandson better and observe him. She does talk about his body though as though he is a Greek god. One member of our group said if an 83 yr old grandfather talked about his grand daughter the way she described her grandson he would be in trouble. A good point??

Anyway it was fun and I sipped from my water bottle and watched the fur fly.

So now we begin the next book for our October discussion. It is Heart Lamp by Indian writer Deepa Bhasthi and translated by Banu Mushtag. It is a series of 12 short stories of Indian Muslim women. The book won the International Booker prize of 2025.

It should be much different to footy.

Any thoughts ?

Another week is gone and I can’t quite get over how fast this year is going. Here we are in September!

Bookish News-

I was scrolling around on Tik Tok one rainy afternoon this week. I mainly follow Book review sites and a few travel tales of people walking or bicycling around the world. I have learned how to wean out the junk on this site and find some gems. One of the pages I follow is Ann Patchett’s book store in Nashville Tennessee. She posts a book introduction every Friday. I really enjoy her and her little dog. She introduced a very interesting memoir of a book called Little Heathens:  Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression. 

Debut author Mildred Armstrong Kalish, a retired English professor, records her childhood recollections in clear, concise prose. Voted one of the 10 Best Books of 2007 by the New York Times Book Review, Kalish’s Little Heathens is a compelling memoir of her hardscrabble life on an Iowa farm during the Great Depression. As foreclosure fragments her family, five-year-old Mildred and her three siblings find refuge with her grandparents – God-fearing farmers, enjoying a modest retirement. When the “little heathens” flush the seniors and their child-rearing skills out of retirement, the grandparents deploy tough but loving bedtime schedules, Bible and prayer routines, and plenty of character-building chores. Having no electricity or indoor plumbing and with little heat or money on the farm, Mildred learns to find joy in the priceless blessings of life.

I really enjoyed this book very much. It has the same tone about it as Grapes of Wrath or any other Steinbeck type voice. The children had such a disruptive life yet they worked and played and the closeness and antics of family members during such a harsh time really lifted the story. If you enjoy American depression history I would recommend this book. One of the best things about this book is there is not a lot of emotion. Each chapter focuses on a different way of life. One chapter is about the farm animals, one about their garden and harvesting food. One about life in the kitchen and one about their school or their clothes. It is very matter of fact but has good character development.

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The rest of the week went by in a bit of a blur. Not much happened on Monday. Tuesday I had to take Ollie to the vet for cyst removal from the top of his head. He’s had it awhile and as it kept changing size I decided to get it removed. He needed his ears checked as well as being springtime his allergies are flaring up.

Then I went for a haircut and colour which always lifts the mood. In the evening I had my seniors group meeting. They are such a funny group. No one can hear and half can’t see and we all talk at once while enjoying a lovely meal on the yacht club premises on the outskirts of Hobart, with views of the big bridge and the river.

Ollie came home before I went to the dinner and he had a big bandage on his head. 

During the week I had a delivery of a rock tumbler and I also won at auction a small box of petrified wood. I’m going to tumble it. I have always been interested in rocks and geology and I remember my “rocks and stones” class at university I took. Geology. We also took an ornithology class in our basics at university in Michigan. Our final exam was a room set up with tape recordings of quite a lot of bird calls and we had to identify the calls. I did really well on them then ended up living in Tasmania where all the birds are different!

I didn’t have any Fullers book launch events this past week but will have one coming up.

On Thursday I had to go to the hospital to the cardiac centre and get fitted up with an ambulatory blood pressure set up. You wear it for 24 hours and it takes your blood pressure every 30 minutes during the day and hourly during the night. It was quite funny doing a pilates class when the cuff would tighten on the old arm in the middle of training and the long cord wrapped around my neck. On Friday I went back to the centre to get it removed. I struggle with blood pressure. It really does have a mind of its own so hopefully we get it sorted and see what’s going on. But not to linger on the old boring health stuff. We aren’t meant to have body parts in our conversation as we age or people will become bored with us. (quote by Germaine Greer).

Pickles has the run of the house now and is trying hard to take everything over. We are so happy she has finally settled in with our exisiting cats and dogs. But when life gets too chaotic she retreats to her cubby house. She is such a friendly lovely cat. We just love her.

On that note I am looking forward to the coming week where we have book group to discuss The Season by Helen Garner. I also have a photo club meeting where we critique photos we have recently taken and it is a very social group.

On Wednesday three of my women photographer friends are meeting up with me in the city and we’re all doing street photography. That should be a lot of fun. Four female photographers on the streets of Hobart. Rain showers are predicted which always give off good light so looking forward to seeing what we capture. Stay tuned for a few photos.

I had time to edit a few of the Bruny Island photos I took with professional photographer LukeI O’Brien in June. I’ll share a few here. It is a beautiful island about 45 minutes south east of Hobart. I was there for three days.

Enjoy the photos.

Good morning shot.

Just after sunset.

Bruny Island lighthouse. It first lit up in 1836.

Bruny has many albino wallabies. We also saw an albino possum. It was pure white but too fast to photograph.

This was taken from the Pennicott boat tour in the Tasman sea. Australian fur seals and a Pacific gull.

What are you looking forward to this coming week?

FROM MY SHELF…

I finished listening to East of Eden by John Steinbeck yesterday. I really enjoyed the book a lot once I got into it and had the characters straight in my head. Rather than wait to read a lot and finally learn who everyone is, I went to Chat GPT and asked it to list the characters in East of Eden.  Within a minute I had a complete list of the characters and who they are within the book, by family.  Wow! Would this be helpful if I were to dive into any big Russian novel. It was incredibly helpful.

I have to say I am enjoying reading older American authors as that is the America I remember and loved and nothing like it is there today. So nostalgic. People were just so different. Responsible, courteous, seemingly doing the right thing by others. Steinbeck is so very good writing about characters and dialogue. I will reread more of his books as I’ve  not read him in 50 years.

Now- the book from my shelf is one my neighbour’s (who just passed away,) sister gave me. It is a very old 1933, hardcover cook book called the New Standard Cookery Illustrated edited by Elizabeth Craig. Oldham Press Limited W,C. London. 

I laughed at the following paragraph from the book:

“I am glad to be able to present to housewives not only a large number of modern recipes but a large number of old favourites,which I have often been asked for and which I have found very few books carry.

There is one thing husbands won’t be able to say anymore if their wives use this cookery book, and that is that they can’t get the dishes mother used to make.”

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Many of the recipes are wild game, lots of butter and lard, all the old foods we don’t fix anymore.

The other thing I noticed is how much trouble these women would have had to go through to fix something relatively easy. I am typing up a recipe for Southern Corn Bread as an example.

This is a recipe one sees quite a bit in southern cookbooks from the American south. I used to make it when we lived in Florida for 15 yrs before we moved to Australia.

I could easily find corn meal there. I have made corn bread here but have used polenta as I haven’t found corn meal. So here we go.

Utensils needed:

Sieve, saucepan, 3 basins, egg beater, deep loaf tin, measuring spoons and a wooden spoon. 

Ingredients:

2 cups corn meal

2 eggs

2 cups milk

2 TBSP butter

1/2 tsp salt. 

3 tsp baking powder.

Instructions:   Sift the corn meal, salt and baking powder into a basin.  Scald the milk & add the butter. When the butter is melted add the milk & butter with the beaten egg yolks, to the corn meal. Fold in the stiffly frothed whites of eggs and bake in a deep, buttered loaf tin for about 1/2 hour.

(Temperature not given so guess the women of the world knew which to use.)

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Now there are corn bread mixes, especially in the USA and there are several steps I believe can be omitted.

I hope you enjoy some of the photos here.

Is this the oldest cook book I own now? No I actually have my grandmother’s cookbook from 1926 with a few comments strewn throughout. I find it interesting to look through these old books and see how people ate years ago. Would I want to live back then and have to cook everyday the way the women before us did? No, I don’t think so. Mr P does most of the cooking in our house. That would not have happened in the past except out of necessity. I think food would have been more wholesome in many ways but preparation is so much easier now. Wouldn’t it be fun to go back in time with a microwave under one arm and an air fryer under the other.

What is the oldest cook book you own now? Or What cook book is your favourite?