Gay Bilson

What a big book it is! And so many photographs: only a few without Jenny Kee. The dust jacket is drop-dead gorgeous: just Jenny’s face, with the Revlon red of her trademark glasses and lips lifted to the title. But heavens, this isn’t a dust jacket but a jacket. Take it off. The lining is Jenny’s Monet Opal print, and there are French folds and more photos. Open the book, and here is Jenny’s big life in twelve chapters.

So here we are. A house in Dosson, a village ‘almost joined to’ Treviso, which in turn is not far at all from Venice. A casa aperta, an open house, one to which friends and colleagues of the owner, a well-regarded musician, are drawn, not only by their confidence that a simple permesso will ensure welcome but because the owner ‘believes implicitly in the civilising effects of hospitality’. The maestro wants his friend to write a book. It will be about ‘music and art and culture and my friends and food and where I live’. He loves to cook and obliges the appointed scribe with a list of kitchen accoutrements, which will cover all occasions. It is admirably short and begins with ‘3 pots (one big one for 10 people, one medium one for 6, one little one for 2)’. Thoreau’s central explanation of his furniture comes to mind as a rejoinder to a casa affollata: ‘I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.’ The book will include recipes, the writer decides, and it does. She tells the reader, ‘Maybe the book will get sorted out, maybe not.’

Alice Garner asks us to ‘dip our toes’ into the history of the shifting shore of the Bassin d’Arcachon, but she is being coy. Her study of sea change and social conflict in the nineteenth century (for the most part) in this particular part of south-west France demands that we need to wade with her into the deep waters of exhaustive primary sources. As a research fellow in the History Department at the University of Melbourne, she is indefatigable and meticulous. This presumably well satisfies the requirements of academe, and shows her to be a fine historian, but it tends to dampen some of the liveliness that might have more easily seduced the general reader to the stories of ambition, progress, counter-attack and conflict that resulted in a resounding win for development and tourism in an age when industrialisation and railways, architectural conceits and money turned a coastal fishing and oyster-fishing area into a ‘bathing resort’.

Gay Bilson, in her Plenty: Digressions on Food, is good on garnish. She describes the occasion of the queen mother’s tour of this country in 1958, during which the royal visitor ‘was offered white-bread sandwiches in the shape of Australia, with a sprig of parsley at the south-eastern tip, thoughtfully representing Tasmania’. Bilson understands, wisely, that the anecdote speaks for itself, and requires not further garnishing from her. Instead she reflects on the strange resilience of the parsley sprig, and the way it keep turning up on plates, decade after decade, as a signal to the diner that the dish had been composed by someone with an interest on how it looked on the plate; that somebody in the kitchen was taking the trouble, even if only to the extent of adding the sprig of parsley that had been sitting patiently in chilled water, waiting for its big moment.

Janina Milek – born in Poland in 1921, shunted out of it with her parents and siblings by the Russians to become human draught horses in Siberia in 1940, released via Uzbekistan to a refugee camp in Iran in 1942, transferred to another refugee camp in Lusaka in Africa in 1943, and shipped to Australia in 1950 – told Tim Chappell that her family was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. When she finally had some kind of say as to where she might live (an Australian commission offered places to healthy persons from the African camp), the one thing she knew was that she would not go back to Poland and live ‘on the back of an old woman’s tongue’ (Janina’s marvellous phrase for gossip mongering). Her mother, to whom Janina had been completely devoted, suddenly announced that she wanted only to return home. Janina was deserted by the one person she now lived to care for.