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Fiction

After Darkness by Christine Piper

by •
September 2014, no. 364

After Darkness by Christine Piper

Allen & Unwin, $27.99 pb, 297 pp

Fiction

After Darkness by Christine Piper

by •
September 2014, no. 364

Australia’s history is chequered at best. For every story of military heroism, there is one of discomfiting prejudice. So it is with Christine Piper’s After Darkness, which explores Australian history from the point of view of a Japanese doctor, Tomakazu Ibaraki, arrested as a national threat while in Broome, and sent to the Loveday internment camps in regional South Australia.

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Laurie Steed

Laurie Steed is an award-winning author from Perth, Western Australia. His fiction has been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and published in Best Australian Stories, Award Winning Australian Writing, The Age, Meanjin, Westerly, Island, and elsewhere. His début novel, You Belong Here, was published in 2018 and shortlisted for the 2018 Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards. His memoir, Love, Dad: Confessions of an anxious father was released in August 2023 and his third book, Greater City Shadows, won the 2021 Henry Handel Richardson Flagship Fellowship for Short Story Writing, was shortlisted for the 2022 Dorothy Hewett Award for an Unpublished Manuscript, and will be published by UWA Publishing in 2024.

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Comment (1)

  • Having recently been steeped in WWII stories - Richard Flanagan's novel, Weary Dunlop's biography - and movies such as Paradise Road and The Railway Man, all describing Japanese atrocities, Piper's novel, while describing the ultimate atrocities, also shows the human frailty that allows such things to happen. I felt conflicted by feeling sorry for her flawed but ultimately heroic character, Dr Ibaraki, but was won over by her insightful writing. The novel adds an extra human dimension to Piper's Calibre-winning essay on the same subject. I'll be recommending it widely.
    Posted by Karen Brown
    14 September 2014

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