Tasmania Books

This story made me cry more than any other. Flanagan breaks many "rules" of creating writing, which is to his credit. He tells a story without a plot. The characters were not attracting. He gives away the ending. But, he uses a delivery method of fantasy to tell a truth of the human condition. Brilliant! This is a book about loss, injustice, and suffering, with smatterings of love and tenderness. Beautiful. A most powerful scene takes place in a bar where Flanagan captures the heart and soul of what makes music so dramatic and driving for both musician and listener. This is not a happy book, just great literature. I read this after reading his "The Unknown Terroist," another good one with the same themes.

Aljaz Cosini, a Tasmanian river guide, is trapped under water, his body wedged between rocks in the Franklin River, into which he has dived in an effort to save a reckless rafter. "I have entered the realm of the fabulous, of hallucinations, for there is no way anybody stuck drowning could experience such things," he thinks, as many generations of his family history pass through his mind. As this remarkable narrative unfolds, it alternates between Aljaz's dying, first person memories of his family's past and his objective, third person observations about life in contemporary Tasmania. Through Aljaz's memories, the reader learns the sad history of the island, a former penal colony for the most hardened criminals, the site of total genocide for the aboriginal natives, a remote colony with little hope and no tolerance for differences. A bright boy, Aljaz himself has intentionally failed everything in school, because "by failing, Aljaz begins to fit in with people...there is a camaraderie amongst the ranks of the fallen....They expect to be failed, to be unemployed, to be pushed around, to know only despair."

This is a story of abject hopelessness, the misery of Aljaz's family continuing through the four or five generations we meet during Aljaz's final moments and culminating in Aljaz's own predicament. The author does not even hold out the hope that Aljaz himself will be rescued, choosing to confirm the death in the book's title, before the reader even opens the book. What unites the generations (and keeps the reader going) is the clear and abiding respect for nature we see throughout the book--for the power of the river, for the unique animals of the island, for the stories and myths of the old people--and the belief that there is a unity of man and nature. And Aljaz experiences the ultimate unity with nature in his death in the river, as he becomes one with the sea eagle who "carries the spirits of the ancestors."

The characters one meets in this book are memorable, as they survive the best way they can. The tales of nature and the mystical moments that Aljaz experiences are vivid and uplifting, a fitting contrast to the reality of life. The action on the river is realistic and exciting, and there is a thematic unity which connects the generations of the past with the action in the present. It may be self-defeating, however, to create a novel in which the reader is asked to become personally involved with a main character whose death is foretold from the outset. Though that confirms and reinforces the point the author is making about the hopelessness of Aljaz's life, it certainly makes this novel a depressing ride for the reader. Mary Whipple

perhaps i found this book enjoyable because i have been a river guide and also because i enjoy magical realism. the sense of time and space throughout this book captures not only a family history but the essence of a river itself, and being caught up in it. as i began reading, i found myself hating the main character for his apathy towards his own life. i resented that i would have to wait until the end of the book for him to finally end his miserable existence and drown. but then as i read on i wasn't so sure what i wanted for the main character. a very satisfying read.

Richard Flanagan has an almost unexcelled capacity to weave historical threads into his fiction. In line with many writers of the Australian scene, he deftly conveys his awareness of the Aborigine condition in this story. Despite his name, Aljaz Cosini, born far away in Trieste, yet manages to return to his ancestral homeland. Ancestral roots bear little, if any, sway on our monotheistic world. In other cultures, however, forebears are the foundation for existence, a tradition widespread and of extended duration. Flanagan's awareness of that cultural milieu is forcefully portrayed in this story of a man's final living moments.

Flanagan's method is subtle. We mourn for the drowning guide as the story opens. His fate is clearly inescapable. Strangely, he condemns neither his situation nor the river that is taking his life. The attitude is far from fatalism, however. His circumstance is opening a new realm of Aljaz' awareness. As he confronts the inevitable, Aljaz comes to perceive his ancestral roots. Visions arrive of events he could not have witnessed, yet bear no skein of fabrication nor the supernatural either in Aljaz' mind or in Flanagan's depiction of them. There are no deities or spirits here. Aljaz resents that at first - "visions ought be given you by divine beings, not ... marsupials and their mates". Yet these visions are events from the reality his ancestors experienced. They are also of those real people - his father, grandmother, and most importantly, his former girl friend and the child they lost. Flanagan accepts the Aborigine view of children - love them intently, but if they are lost, long-term grief is too debilitating a luxury. The white world didn't understand this view when they first encountered it, and it remains enigmatic even now. Aljaz meets death calmly after a tormented life, but it's not release from suffering he gains, but a fuller understanding of who he really is. He is joining with a lost heritage.

Describing Flanagan's style as "powerful" is frail praise. "Formidable" might be something of a start. This is not a book to rush through, or if done, one to turn back to again. Flanagan wants to confront you with the realities of history and become aware of the long-term effects of lack of cultural awareness. These aren't lessons acquired at one sitting. He knows there are deeply set roots underlying behaviour and this book is attempt to reveal some of these to us. He has accomplished this effort with vivid imagery and exemplary characterisation. We must applaud his effort with enthusiasm. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

I was interested to read this first novel by Richard Flanagan after reading his acclaimed novel "The Sound of One Hand Clapping". In going back to this earlier work I wanted to see if he was pursuing similar themes and if the writing was as compelling. It was. Here again was a master storyteller at work who refuses to release the reader until the last page has been read and the reader held in the grip of an idea that the broken in spirit will be redeemed.

This story of a man drowning beneath a waterfall provides the canvas to explore the emotional history of his family and by extension the emotional history of his island state, Tasmania.

Behind the Mountain is a unique creation, more than a close, personal look at a most unusual place, Tasmania, "an appendix, an after thought" to the mainland of Australia. It is also the memoir of a brilliant, scholarly self-exile's return after twenty years and his coming-to-terms with the people and places that made him who he is.

Conrad had "escaped" from Tasmania at age twenty to attend university at Oxford and to start a new life. He had burned in the back yard all his diaries, exercise books, and "anything that might incriminate [him] by attaching an identity to [him]." He had left his home and family behind, intending never to return, believing that "Home was where you started from, not where you stayed." Twenty years older when he writes of revisiting Tasmania, he has discovered that despite his attempt to escape, "Tasmania had set the terms of [his] life. The home you cannot return to you carry off with you: it lies down the at the bottom of the world, and of the sleeping, imagining mind."

This search for identity and roots informs his travels within Tasmania and gives the book an immediacy and liveliness lacking in so many other studies of place. Tasmania, he explains, is "an offshore island off the shore of an offshore continent," its residents therefore the "victims of a twofold alienation," with nothing between them and Anarctica, the end of the world. Conrad turns his eagle eye, his thoughtful sensibility, his absolutely limitless vocabulary, and his extraordinary skills at description to the recreation of Tasmania from the air, from the water, from the farm, from the mountain, and even under the ground, all in vivid word pictures. You will travel with him, and experience the great good fortune of seeing the island through the eyes of a gifted and introspective native whose twenty-year absence has given him a perspective on life in Tasmania that enable him to communicate it with "outsiders."

Best of all, Conrad permits the reader to share his discovery that he had "placed [his] trust, mistakenly, in the myth of self-invention. You created yourself, and did so out of nothing." Instead, he finds, "we are all still pioneers, required to colonise the piece of ground which chance assigns us, to make it our own by shaping it into a small, autonomous intelligible world....[Tasmania] was the landscape inside me: the space where I spent my dreaming time....Tasmania had set the terms of my life."

Conrad's account of his return to Tasmania is a delightful journey in time, place and language. Tasmania's special place in history and geography is depicted in the special style that can only be invoked by the self-exile. His prose is rich with metaphor in dealing with his own life, Tasmania's physical features and the society English society imposed on it. Raised in a suburb north of the State Capital, Hobart [the world's most southern such], Conrad's childhood environment was overshadowed by the looming, capriciously moody Mount Wellington. Everything else about Tasmania was "Behind the Mountain."

Conrad is expressive about what it was like to be raised in a place that even the rest of Australia seemed to have forgotten - it was left off school maps of the Last Continent. As the site of imprisonment for the most incorrigible of Britain's transported felons, its white inhabitants later tried to erase their own history. Isolated, then, in place both globally and socially, its people clung to the only culture they could derive - the "home" that was England. Even when the rest of Australia sought ties with the Americans, Tasmania remained locked into their version of the "old country."

Conrad breaks the mould of that image. He's frank about the white's treatment of Tasmania's Aborigine population and culture. He contrasts the outlook that named and respected every mountain, stream or other physical feature of the island. The Parlemar people were rounded up in a series of paramilitary exercises, the most notorious that of the Black Line. The surviving Aborigines [some suicided from seaside cliffs] were exiled to Flinders Island and other off-shore sites to rot and die. Even their corpses were desecrated by amateur "anthropologists" keen to depict them as sub-humans, well deserving extinction. The eradication was absolute - Tasmania remains the only Australian State with no surviving indigenous population.

Conrad journeys over the island by bus and aircraft [he is unable to drive]. The jaunts confront us with bizarre naming practices the island was subjected to by white settlers. No Aborigine names were applied until the State's Hydro Commission attempted some restitution while building dams in the mountains. The attempt is simply a final instance of the paucity of knowledge of Aborigine culture. His tours take us to Port Davey, a week's walk from the nearest road end, and the distant, disreputable Macquarie Harbour. His map shows the anomaly of this extensive estuary with its entrance but 60 metres wide. It was truly the end of the world for many convicts who laboured their lives away under assault by winds originating off the South African coast.

His candor in descriptions of his life and his family is refreshing. He aspired to the exile he entered with unwarranted enthusiasm. The book opens with the conflagration of his childhood artifacts. He is later as disturbed by this sacrifice as we are while reading it. His evocative metaphors evoke the remorse to follow him as he recovers or recreates those childhood losses. The memories he solicits show a level of confusion about his own identity - at one point unable to discern whether the image in a photograph is himself or his father. Life on the Apple Isle could lead to such vague self-persona given the paucity of information about his roots. An alcoholic grandfather had simply been made to disappear by the rest of his family.

It's trite to state that any examination of one's roots can lead to disillusionment. But Conrad's return to this remote land provided an improved sense of self-identity. He returned to learn more of his natal surroundings than would have been possible had he not left. He demonstrates that all he learned during his journeys didn't require a comparison to his adopted land to be valuable. Every place he visited or researched provided new elements of his self-awareness in their own right. The book is an object lesson for anyone who has left home for other venues. Read it to learn of this faraway land, the brilliance of its re-discoverer, and perhaps some insight into your own outlook about where you are. It's a rewarding journey.

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Jeannie Baker's latest book contains dazzlingly realistic images.

The illustrations in "Hidden Forest" are photographs of her gallery works that are 3-dimensional constructions, made up of a translucent collage of materials illuminated from behind in a light box. They are truly remarkable with their vividness and accuracy of representation. There is a strong environmental theme running through Jeannie's works. In this story it is the fragility of the marine environment that is the focus of the story.

Young Ben has to go diving in the Kelp Forest to learn about the beauty and special qualities of this underwater world.

This is a truly magnificent book. Look out for an exhibition of Jeannie's artworks if it tours near you.

This is another beautiful book from a great artist. Jeannie Baker uses a range of techniques to bring to life the underwater world. Each of the pictures has been created so lovingly that Baker's respect for the Australian landscape is obvious. As a teacher of young children I love this book for its detail. It never fails to quieten a class as they gaze at the pictures and listen to the wonderful story. I have also given copies to my nephew who is ocean-crazy and he loves it. Down here in Australia we spend a lot of time in the ocean, looking at the ocean and talking about the ocean and this is one of those books that is becoming a kids classic.

Sven Klinge is author of the most comprehensive cycling guide-books in Australia. By combining cycling with walking treks, he has explored over 300 of Australia's National Parks and State Forests. Born in Sydney and educated at Sydney University, Sven now divides his time between accounting and other writing projects. CYCLING THE BUSH: 100 RIDES IN TASMANIA contains detailed tracknotes for one hundred of the best bicycle rides in the state. The range of rides include short one 'dayers' of historical interest around the cities, as well as coastal rides, and extended overnight mountain biking/walking expeditions in the rugged wilderness that Tasmania is internationally famous for. From mountain lookouts to fishing lakes, from pristine rivers to limestone caves, from tall old growth forests to the coast, all National Parks are covered as well as a selection of the most scenic State Forests, Recreation Areas, Forest Reserves, and Bass Strait islands. Each ride incorporates data on distances, transport, access, track & ride grades, facilities, map references, and special equipment needed. Extensive information is provided on geological, biological, and historical aspects of natural, aboriginal, and colonial features along the rides. There are chapters devoted to the development, mechanics, and maintenance of the mountain bike, in addition to sections covering accessories, riding techniques, first aid, food, equipment, photography, and camping. In COMPACT, LIGHTWEIGHT FORMAT, this guide should be POCKET EQUIPMENT for every cyclist and bushwalker wishing to discover this new exciting way of venturing into perhaps the most spectacular parks system in Australia.

A classic work on the Early Architecture of Tasmania Illustrated with stunning black and white photographs. The abridged edition includes all the buildings included in the First Edition and three dwellings and two churches which did not. This edition omits the chapters which contained the 'general historical and architectural surveys relating to northern Tasmania' and abridges 'quotations from documents and other historical matter'. Nevertheless, it retains all the information about all the buildings.

A thoroughly engaging and entertaining book, If Only We Would Listen, contains all of the hopes and dreams, the challenges and successes, the triumphs and tragedies, and the incredible courage of Julie and Doreen when they merged their smaller herds of dairy goats and dedicated their lives to dairy farming on a commercial scale in a very beautiful and seemingly ideal location. However, this is not the focus of the book, although their story does unfold in the background of this captivating work that supports the age-old saying that "truth is stranger [and funnier, and more enlightening, with more surprising twists and turns] than fiction"

The author introduces each of the characters and brings them and their stories to life so masterfully that I feel as if I could have visited the herd and identified each of them quite easily. I laughed until I thought my sides would split, shed tears at the tragedies that were much fewer in number than they would have been without the enormous heart and determination of the author and her partner to stop "The Plague" from taking another life, and felt enormous admiration for both the goats and their caregivers.

If Only We Would Listen touched my heart and soul and expanded my awareness of the feelings, wisdom, and communication of animals, and the connectedness among them and between them and humans who are open to it. There is much we can learn from the animals that share this earth with us, and the author shares some of the knowledge and insight that she has gained and undoubtedly continues to gain from her charges, while entertaining the reader chapter after chapter in a manner reminiscent of the books of James Herriott.

There seems to be something for everyone in this wonderful book, and it has definitely left me wanting more.

Having just got back from Tasmania with this book in tow I can highly recommend it to everyone, from locals, all Australians and the overseas visitor. This book has not only the history of this State but everything thant you could want to know about the flora and fauna, where to stay including the very basic accomodation through to the most luxurious, there are in depth maps, where to do the best shopping for your souveniers, where to eat whether it be fish and chips, vegetarian or a steak. This book was my bible and did not let me down once. We even found some short cuts with some lovely hidden treasures of nature displayed for us just by following the maps. The good thing was that the book does not only give information for the big towns but also many of the smaller ones hidden away,by visiting some of the smaller places It made my holiday that bit more personal and memorable. Read the book and you'll want to come and visit this wonderful isle.

Used this guide book for a one-month biking trip in Tasmania. Other than differences in price listed (expected), the information provided is very accurate and I appreciate the author's personal touch in this book, particularly those blocked text introducing ordinary locals doing extraordinary things. In fact, I had one of the most memorable excursions following the author's footstep. Looking forward to using other Bradt guide for my future travel.

"To the Outskirts of Habitable Creation" by Stuart Scott is a very readable, and scrupulously researched account of the actual armed invasion of Canada by Americans. The story covers events leading up to the Rebellion of 1837, as it is known, through to the capture and punishment of both the Canadian "patriots" and American combatants. Following their capture, trial and numerous executions, ninty-two US citizens and Canadians were transported to Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania) for a life of penal servitude. The story ends with a recounting of the efforts undertaken by many to secure the release and repatriation of the US citizens, which was accomplished after 4 long years.

Events during this period actually began along the Canadian/American border from Michigan in the West to New England in the East. Specific military action took place along the Great Lakes in Western New York. Having lived there myself for quite a few years, it was fascinating to read the story, considering many of the places, and buildings are extant. This account contains a wealth of information about the participants, including family relationships, names, and their final resting places. As such, I believe this book is a valuable resource for anyone from the Great Lakes region interested in geneaology. "To the Outskirts..." contains copious footnotes, references and explanations that allows the reader to find out more information and sources on particular situations that may be of personal interest.

I enthusiastically recommend anyone interested in this eventful period of Canadian/American history to read Stuart Scott's fine work.

I recommend that anyone wanting to learn about the Tasmanian wilderness get hold of a used copy of this book.