Manfred Jurgensen

To varying degrees, both of these second novels by Brisbane authors conjure southern Queensland as completely different from any other place in Australia. It is disconcerting but also beguiling. Disorientation and displacement are strong themes in both novels. In very different ways, they explore the lives of characters who have been lost, abandoned or orphaned at some time. Now each of these adults is discovering that their pasts are washing up as fast and surely as the flooding Brisbane River, which is omnipresent in Manfred Jurgensen’s The Eyes of the Tiger.

Novel, autobiography, memoir? I imagine poet and editor Manfred Jurgensen dealing impatiently with the question – does categorisation matter? Aren’t books to be judged by intrinsic worth rather than labels? Up to a point, but in Book One especially (of two) there is enough equivocation to be annoying.