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Felicity Bloch

One Bright Spot by Victoria K. Haskins

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April 2006, no. 280

In 1993, when Victoria Haskins undertook research into the relationship between Aboriginal and white women, she was ‘plunged into the argument that white academics were only perpetuating colonialism by writing Aboriginal people’s history … that white Australians should not, could not, try to speak for Aboriginal people, nor try to represent the Aboriginal experience’. Left floundering by ‘the difficult politics of writing Aboriginal history as a white Australian scholar’, Haskins was unreceptive to her grandmother’s pleas to embark on the despised ‘trivial bourgeois pursuit’ of family history, dismissed as ‘middle-class … the province of mildly ridiculous ageing relatives, searching for the dates of their ancestors’ arrival in the colonies’. But curiosity about an old photograph of her grandmother as a fair-haired toddler with an Aboriginal nanny prompted her to root out her great-grandmother’s boxed papers, then languishing in an aunt’s garage.

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‘One day I will have to tell (my daughter) … that her grandmother is a bag lady.’ Josiane Behmoiras’s exquisitely crafted memoir of her mother, Dora, delivers its punchline in the opening chapter. Behmoiras’s childhood and youth were shadowed by her mother’s untreated mental illness and by their descent into chronic penury, loneliness and fear. Nonetheless, the overall effect of this work is of warmth and colour, and of a keen sense of the absurd. The pleasure taken in recapturing each vignette seems to reflect its subject’s irrepressible fighting spirit. Dora fostered her daughter’s artistic gifts, as well as her capacity for love, joy and compassion.

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Gang of Four by Liz Byrski & Poppy's Return by Pat Rosier

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August 2004, no. 263

Zeitgeist or coincidence? Spinifex and Macmillan have both just published novels with middle-aged women centre stage. In marketing terms, they have launched a niche product, targeting the middle-aged female consumer. Poppy’s Return, by New Zealand author Pat Rosier, and West Australian Liz Byrski’s Gang of Four boldly foreground women’s midlife issues. Their protagonists bravely confront the multiple challenges of their own ageing, in addition to the care of elderly relatives.

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