Trevor ShearstonBesprekingen

A quietly beautiful, delicate and reflective novel. Quite rare to read a novel set in the area in which I grew up, the western end of Australia's Blue Mountains. I look forward to reading another Shearston.

The Beach Caves is a deceptively innocent title: this is a novel that reeks of jealousy, betrayal, and guilt. Part I begins in the summer of 1970-71 with a team of archaeologists working a dig on the New South Wales South Coast. They are poised to make remarkable discoveries about Aboriginal lifestyles in the late Holocene era. Aled Wray and Marilyn Herr, a husband-and-wife collaboration, lead the team which includes their PhD students Annette Cooley and Sue Klima. The outsider is Brian Harpur, who’s an engineering student fulfilling his parents’ ambitions, not his own.

It is Brian who by chance discovers the new site offering exciting possibilities, but the find fractures the cohesion of the team along fault-lines determined by Aled and Marilyn’s professional competitiveness. Shearston depicts with forensic precision Aled’s assumption that he should dominate: this is the 1970s when men in western societies were having their precedence challenged by feminism, and those of us who were challenging the same assumptions on the domestic front as well as at work, will remember that not all concessions were made gracefully, and some men could not cope with being challenged at all.

Annette and Sue have to make their choices knowing that their PhD supervision is at stake. And when one of the team goes missing and the team breaks up in distress, some of the group have their choices constrained by the Vietnam conscription ballot: they could defer their national service only for as long as they are students. Dropping out of university means being forced to serve in a war that by this time is generally recognised as morally wrong. (Conscription and Australia’s participation in the war ended in 1972 when the ALP came to power after 25 years of Liberal Party rule).

However, it is Annette’s decision to intervene in the police investigation that drives the novel. By chance she sees something that might or might not be relevant, but her behaviour is driven not by any moral imperative but by jealousy. She had thought that Brian was interested in her. She wants to punish him.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2021/01/28/the-beach-caves-by-trevor-shearston

Hare's Fur by Trevor Shearston is a very highly recommended, beautifully presented novel and character study.

Russell Bass is a potter and recent widower living on the edge of the Blue Mountains of New South Wales in Australia. He lives a mostly solitary life with a few close friends. When he is hiking to a specific vein of basalt that he uses in one of his glazes to get the hare's fur effect, he sees a new candy wrapper in the forest. Then he hears the voices of children. He ends up discovering and later bringing food to a teen age girl and her two younger siblings. They are living in a nearby cave, hiding from the police and child services. Russell offers them the food and his phone number, should they need more help. Circumstances send the three to his house, living with him, while still hiding from authorities.

Hare's Fur is a wonderful, quiet, tender, and thoughtful novel, both for the writing and the character development. The descriptions are incredible. If you have ever done any pottery you will immediately be taken back to your experiences and understand intimately the descriptions lovingly provided in the narrative. The setting is handled with the same amount of care and attention. Equally compelling are the descriptions of the people and the connections that are slowly built between them. This is a finely crafted novel with prose that serenades the reader while depicting the time, setting, and characters in a quiet, contemplative manner.

With compassion and introspection, Hare's Fur becomes a novel about working through grief and loneliness. It is about having your life's work also be your passion. It is about aging and acceptance. It is about setting mistakes aside, whether in life or pottery. And it is about trusting other people and the fragility of forging a family and pottery. Quite simply, Hare's Fur is a lovely novel. It was the perfect quiet, contemplative novel to read during a very stressful time.

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of Scribe Publications.
http://www.shetreadssoftly.com/2020/07/hares-fur.html
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3427353717

Hare’s Fur is such a lovely book! The Australian literary scene is awash with grim books at the moment, but as the blurb says Hare’s Fur offers an exquisite story of grief, kindness, art, and the transformation that can grow from the seeds of trust.
The novel doesn’t shy away from the realities of life. Russell Bass is a Blue Mountains potter, alone after the recent death of his wife, and of his child, long ago. He has kindly neighbours who offer companionship and he has his highly-regarded creative work as a potter to keep him busy, but nothing can fill the chasm of loss after his beloved wife died unexpectedly almost a year ago.
That is, until Russell stumbles upon some children hiding out in the remote bush where he goes to harvest clay for his pots. These kids are from an entirely different world. They are sleeping rough in a freezing cave because their feckless parent has been taken off to gaol for dealing in drugs. The oldest of these kids, Jade, has at 15 seen it all before, and she believes that DoCS (the Department of Community Services) will separate the trio when they go into care. Because, the last time her mother was gaoled, that’s what happened to her and her older sister Kayla.
Russell, knowing nothing of this when he first sees the two younger ones playing a game in the creek, sees straight away that all is not well. He judges the smaller one to be about five and the other eight or nine...
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2019/03/04/hares-fur-by-trevor-shearston/

Excellent book that really captures the flavor of colonial Australia. An emotive account of the last year of life of bushranger Ben Hall, torn between the realities of life as a hunted man and the need to connect with his son. Language, thought patterns and customs are all authentic to the times and the book's terse style perfectly matches the brutality of life in the bush in the gold mining era, where life is cheap and often short. The inevitable conclusion to the story hangs heavily over the reader as it moves to its climax, and the sheer horror of the brief epilogue, where Ben's son is exposed to the inevitable consequences of his father's brief life, is savagely thrust upon the reader in a few short, punchy sentences that really hit home. An excellent piece of Australian literature.½