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Let's. Take a look. You take a look inside the book. Take a look. You...
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Hello, and welcome to Hear This. I'm Frances Keyland, and you're listening to the Vision Australia Library radio show, where we talk about books in the Vision Australia library collection. And today we've got a few books to talk about, and I hope you enjoy the show.
It's 60 years since Mary Poppins hit our screens and delighted audiences around the world, and introduced us to the wonderful Julie Andrews. I thought it would be a good opportunity to play one of her two autobiographies or memoirs that we have in the collection. So this is Home, about her early life over the years, Julie Andrews has been much interviewed in the press and on television, but she has never before revealed the true story of her childhood and upbringing. In home, she vividly recreates the years before the movies. An idyllic early childhood in Surrey was cut short when her parents divorced and her mother remarried. The family moved to London and there are vivid scenes of life during the Blitz.
Her mother went into musical theatre with her stepfather, who encouraged Julie to have singing lessons, which led to the discovery that her voice had phenomenal range and strength. Before long, she was appearing on stage with her parents. She soon realised how much she enjoyed looking out into the black auditorium with the spotlights on her. By the time she was a teenager, she was supporting her whole family with her singing. A London Palladium pantomime led to a leading role in The Boyfriend on Broadway at 19... parts in My Fair Lady, opposite Rex Harrison and Camelot with Richard Burton, soon followed, and there are wonderful anecdotes about the actors and actresses of her day. But this is far more than a collection of show stories. It's not until the final part of the audiobook that Julie gets the call from Disney for Mary Poppins.
Home is an honest, touching and revealing memoir of the early life of a true icon. Let's hear a sample of Home by Julie Andrews, and it's narrated by the wonderful Julie Andrews.
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I am told that the first comprehensible word I uttered as a child was "home". My father was driving his second hand. Austin seven. My mother was in the passenger seat beside him, holding me on her lap as we approached our modest house. Dad braked the car to turn on to the pocket handkerchiefs, square of concrete by the gate, and apparently I quietly, tentatively said the word home. My mother told me there was a slight upward inflection in my voice. Not a question so much as a trying of the word on the tongue, with perhaps the delicious discovery of connection, the word to the place. My parents wanted to be sure they had heard me correctly. So dad drove around the lanes once again, and as we returned, it seems I repeated the word. My mother must have said it more than once upon arrival at our house, perhaps with satisfaction or relief, or maybe to instill in her young daughter a sense of comfort and safety.
The word has carried enormous resonance for me ever since. Home, the River Thames begins as a trickle just above Oxford, in an area referred to in old literature as ISIS. The trickle has become a fair river and fordable by the time it reaches the great university city, and from there it winds its way through the English countryside changing levels from time to time, spewing through the gates of some exquisitely pretty locks, passing old villages with lovely names like Sonning, Henley, Marlow, Maidenhead and Bray. It flows on through Windsor and Eton. Wicked King John signed the Magna Carta at a picturesque stretch of the Thames called Runnymede.
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And that was Home by Julie Andrews. And that book goes for 12.5 hours. Julie is [spells author's name]. And that's followed by the book Home Work a memoir of My Hollywood Years, also narrated by Julie Andrews.
I was looking at an article in the Guardian newspaper where authors and reviewers give their favourite books for 2023. Their Recommendations for reading and one of them was caught my eye. It's called Unfinished Woman and it's by Robyn Davidson. In 1977, 27 year old Robyn Davidson set off with a dog and four camels to cross the 1700 miles of Australian desert to the sea. A life of almost constant travelling followed from the deserts of Australia to Sydney's underworld, from 60s street life to the London literary scene, from migrating with nomads in Tibet to marrying an Indian prince. Davidson's quest was motivated by an unquenchable curiosity about other ways of seeing and understanding the world. Davidson threw bombs over her shoulder and seeds into her future, on the assumption that something would be growing when she got there.
The only terrain she had no interest in exploring was the past. In Unfinished Woman, Davidson turns at last to explore that long avoided country through this brave and revealing memoir, she delves into her childhood and youth to uncover the forces that set her on her path and confront the cataclysm of her early loss. Unfinished Woman is an unforgettable investigation of time and memory, and a powerful interrogation of how we can live with and find beauty in the uncertainty and strangeness of being. Let's hear a sample of Unfinished Woman by Robyn Davidson. It's narrated by Kerry Fox.
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I was 27 when I walked across Australia with a dog for company and camels to carry my gear. It was a deeply private act, which I assumed would hold no interest for others. I had no intention of writing about it afterwards, nor of recording the journey as it was happening. It was the doing of something just for itself, yet so personal. A gesture, a wish to disappear beneath any radar would beget its opposite. Before the journey was even over, I was front page news, and later the story was repeated on the covers of hundreds of magazines around the world. Rick Smolin's gorgeous photographs lent a glamour to what I had done, to which I'd been oblivious while doing it. Of course, that doing changed me. It gave me what I'd known inchoately I needed a kind of integration proof to myself that useless, ugly, stupid was not all there was.
But it did much more than that. It rerouted my fate and recast my prospects, an upheaval all the more disorienting for being unexpected. And it would affect others intimates as well as strangers in ways that were baffling to me at the time. Here were different kinds of danger requiring a different kind of prudence. Fame that grand deluder puts you at risk of ceasing to be yourself. It distorts not just how you appear to others, which doesn't matter much, but how you might appear to yourself, which does. I knew this instinctively, and my response was to retreat from it. I feared the loss of anonymity and privacy, and with it a particular kind of freedom to observe rather than be observed when retreat was not possible. I made a facsimile, Robin, a public identity to protect the private one.
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That's Unfinished Woman by Robin Davidson. Her book goes for nine hours and seven minutes. Robin is spelt [spells author's name], and that was recommended by Janine Israel in The Guardian, 18th of December 2023. So a roundup of the best novel and best books that people had been reading. And she adds in a memoir that's as evocative and restless as its author. Flitting from Doris Lessing's abode in London to the Indian home of her Rajasthani prince. Davidson interrogates what family, freedom and home means when you never truly belong anywhere. We also have tracks by Robyn Davidson, her first book that talked about her travels.
And also there's a novel called Ancestors by the author Lucy McTavish, who's returned to the isolated and decaying house in the Australian rainforest, where she was ferociously raised by the eccentric and loving aunt. And that's our 15 hours, 15.5 hours, rather, and narrated by Cynthia Conlon. So there's a fiction book by Robyn Davidson, ancestors, and that was published back in 1989. So it's not a new novel.
Another novel, this time it's a fiction, is Homecoming by Kate Morton... and Sarah Ayoub from The Guardian article about best books for 2023 says Morton is a master storyteller who effortlessly, effortlessly crisscrosses time periods, geographies and protagonists in this sweeping saga of family secrets, illicit love affairs and finding home. A rich, vivid, gripping epic by one of Australia's biggest exports, homecoming is an indulgent read at over 600 pages, atmospheric and evocative in its descriptions and sometimes protracted, winding storyline, but worth it for escapism alone.
To the synopsis of Homecoming... Adelaide Hills Christmas Eve 1959. At the end of a scorching hot day beside a creek in the grounds of a grand and mysterious house, a local delivery man makes a terrible discovery. A police investigation is called, and the small town of Tambellup becomes embroiled in one of the most shocking and perplexing murder cases in the history of South Australia. Many years later, and thousands of miles away, Jess is a journalist in search of a story. Having lived and worked in London for nearly two decades, she now finds herself laid off from her full time job and struggling to make ends meet until a phone call out of nowhere summons her back to Sydney, where her beloved grandmother, Nora has suffered a fall and been raced to hospital.
At Nora's house, just discovers a true crime book that chronicles the police investigation into a long buried event the Turner Family tragedy of Christmas Eve 1959. It is only when Jess skims through the pages that she finds a shocking connection between her own family and this once infamous scandal. A murder mystery that has never been resolved satisfactorily. Let's hear a sample of Homecoming by Kate Morton. It's narrated by Claire Foy.
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And of course, there was to be a lunch party to mark the new Year. A small affair, just family. But Thomas would require all the trimmings. Unthinkable that they would do otherwise. The Turners were big on tradition, and with Nora and Richard visiting from Sydney, neither Frippery nor fanfare was to be skipped. Isabel had decided to set up in a different part of the garden this year. Usually they sat beneath the walnut tree on the eastern lawn, but today she'd been drawn to the stretch of grass in the shade of Mr. Wentworth's cedar. She'd walked across it when she was cutting flowers for the table earlier, and been struck by the pretty westward view towards the mountains. Yes, she'd said to herself, this will do very well. The arrival of the thought.
Her own decisiveness had been intoxicating. She told herself it was all part of her New Year's resolution to approach 1959 with a fresh pair of eyes and expectations. But there was a small internal voice that wondered whether she wasn't rather tormenting her husband just a little, with the sudden breach of protocol. Ever since they'd discovered the sepia photograph of Mr. Wentworth and his similarly bearded Victorian friends, arranged in elegant wooden recliners on the eastern lawn. Thomas had been immovable in his conviction that it represented the superior entertaining spot. It was unclear to Isabel exactly when she'd first started taking guilty pleasure in causing that small vertical frown line to appear between her husband's brows.
A gust of wind threatened to rip the string of bunting from her hands, and she held tight to the highest rung of the wooden ladder. She'd carried the ladder down from the gardening shed herself that morning, quite enjoying the struggle of it. When she first climbed to the top, a childhood memory had come to her a day trip to Hampstead Heath with her mother and father, where she'd scrambled up one of the giant sequoia trees and looked south towards the City of London.
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That was Homecoming by Kate Morton. That book goes for 17 hours and 40 minutes. Kate is [spells name]. And yes, the narrator, Claire Foy, is the British actor that starred as Queen Elizabeth in her... years of being a young queen in The Crown. There are many other Kate Morton books in the collection, and they usually involve a secret that comes to light a generation or two after the events dramatic events. There is The Shifting Fog that shifts between 1924 and 1999. The Forgotten Garden starts on the eve of the First World War and then moves decades later. The Distant House, which reveals a mother's secret that she has never told her daughter. And I'll read out the ones that are available in Braille as well. So The Shifting Fog is available in audio and in Braille. The Secret Keeper is available in audio and in Braille. The Lake House, audio and Braille. So that's just a few of the Kate Morton books that are in the collection.
Now, let's have a couple of mysteries. These weren't in the Guardian recommended, but they're Australian mysteries. The first one is Still by Matt Nable. Darwin, summer 1963. The humidity sat heavy and thick over the town, as Senior Constable Ned Potter looked down at a body that had been dragged from the shallow marshland. He didn't need a coroner to tell him that this was a bad death. He didn't know then that this was only the first, or that he was about to risk everything. Looking for answers. Late one night, Charlotte Clark drove the long way home, thinking about how stuck she felt a 23 year old housewife, married to a cowboy who wasn't who she thought he was. The days ahead felt suffocating, living in a town where she was supposed to keep herself nice and wait for her husband to get home from the pub.
Charlotte stopped the car, stepped out to breathe in the night air, and looked out over the water to the tangled mangroves. She never heard a sound before the hand was around her mouth. Both Charlotte and Ned are about to learn that the world they live in is full of secrets, and that it takes courage to fight for what is right. But there are people who will do anything to protect themselves, and sometimes courage is not enough to keep you safe. Let's hear a sample of Still by Matt Nable. It's narrated by Johnny Carr.
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Charlotte Clark stood in her kitchen, looking out the window above the sink at the row of weedy lots of land that were vacant and signposted for sale. She could hear the whir of her husband's voice, and though she wasn't listening, she knew by the sounds that clipped his words that he was telling a story with fervour. She closed her eyes and remembered a time when his words and voice commanded her attention, and she'd wait for the climax of his tale, or for the declaration of his love. She had reveled in those three words I love you. She wasn't sure when she'd stopped listening.
It was the summer of 1963, and the humidity in Darwin sat still and thick over everything in Nightcliff, where Charlotte lived. The humid air had rolled itself around the heat and made her every drawn breath laboured. It was the wet season and the afternoon storms were a reprieve. Charlotte very much looked forward to. She loved the smells that signalled the weather on approach. The floral bouquets from her backyard garden, the last jasmine sprouts that had endured past spring, and the tomato vines broadening their leaves to accept the rain. Even the town's garbage that was picked up by the wind at the front of the storm and thrown around in smelly gusts.
Looking out the window, she thought of her life and where she'd made it to. At 23, with no children, she felt stuck. She'd left school five years previous, had abandoned a place at Nurses college to get married and start a family. But that hadn't happened. She'd fallen pregnant twice, both times miscarrying after 12 weeks. It had been hard. Somewhere in between, she lost herself and also the connection to her husband. During the months after the last miscarriage, Charlotte wondered with some surrender if her body might not be made to carry a baby baths, that she may never become a mother.
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And that was Still by Matt Nable - a bit of Australian noir, outback, mystery and crime. And that book goes for nine hours and 50 minutes. Matt is spelt [spells author's name]. Nable is an Australian film and television actor and a former professional rugby league player, and he has quite a CV here in films and television. Bay of Fires. Last King of the cross. The 12 Wakefield. The Dry. He's been in a lot of Australian Australian productions.
Now to another crime writer, Arthur Clifford, who's Australian, and her crime novel It Takes a Town. So many people had reason to hate her. But did anyone have a reason to kill her? Everyone dies. Famous in a country town but glamorous Vanessa Walton was a shining star, a celebrity since a television commercial when she was a child. Vanessa is back on the front page for all the wrong reasons. After a terrible storm, she's been found dead at the bottom of her stairs. At first, her death seems to be a simple accident, but anonymous letters are discovered that suggest otherwise. And when 16 year old Jasmine Langdridge claims it is a murder, she suddenly disappears as the police begin to investigate. Secrets are exposed and friendships unravel. Let's hear a sample of It Takes a Town by F.R. Clifford. It's narrated by Joan Van ESS.
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It was raining on the tarmac when they took off Ion Iron clouds were still sulking over the mountains, and the helicopter lurched and bucked, buffeted by the wind, while the pilot pressed buttons and talked. It was equal parts smart attitude and chewing gum. Sergeant Carol Duffy closed her eyes. She had no confidence in his assurances that the remnants of yesterday's weather event would settle down soon. Storm warnings were still being issued by text, and there had been social media posts, mostly about thunderstorm asthma and rising flood levels. All right. There, Duff came the voice of the pilot through her headset. Not feeling sick, are we? Carol thought about telling him to focus on flying. This million dollar tin can. But instead gave him a thumbs up, which was exactly how she didn't feel. It had been a scramble this morning.
Once she had word from higher up that she needed to leave for welcome immediately to help out with the emergency response to possible flooding. Packing an overnight bag and finding someone to look after the cat short term. It was a transfer at level rather than a promotion, and Carol had planned a few days off to take a leisurely drive to her new position, but instead found herself on a police helicopter with a politician, his adviser and a pilot from the aviation unit, acting like a cut price Maverick from Top Gun. Day one in her new job was already a natural disaster. The politician, sitting directly in front of her glanced over his shoulder, as if worried that the contents of her stomach were about to become acquainted with his fancy suit and shiny tan riding boots, which would have been a possibility if she hadn't dosed herself up on travel sickness tablets. Major mouth feel chalky and dry, but better than the alternative.
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And that was It Takes a Town by F.R. Clifford. And that book goes for 9.5 hours. [spells author's name]. Another Australian writer that's closely associated with Sisters in Crime. And there are three other mystery books by F. R. Clifford in the collection. There is All These Perfect Strangers, Second Sight, and When We Fall.
And now to author Anna Mazzola and her book The Story Keeper. Audrey Hart is on the Isle of Skye to collect the folk tales of the communities around her. It is 1857 and the crofters are hostile, claiming they no longer know their stories. Then Audrey discovers the body of a young girl washed up on the beach, and the crofters tell her that it is only a matter of weeks since another girl has disappeared. They believe the girls are the victims of the spirits of the Unforgiven dead. Initially, Audrey is sure the girls are being abducted, but then she is reminded of her own mother, a sky woman who disappeared in mysterious circumstances. It seems that Audrey may uncover just what her family have been hiding from her. Let's hear a sample of The Story Keeper. This is by Anna Mazzola. It's narrated by Sarah Barron.
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September 1857. Shrieking split the leaden sky, and Audrey looked up to see a host of birds, their wings ink black against the grey storm coming. Do you see? They know the wind's changing. The man gestured upwards, but his eyes were on Audrey. They feel it long before we can tell. Audrey nodded, but did not reply, for she was too tired now for conversation. It had already taken them an hour from Kyleakin, and she was wet through with a fine rain and the spray from the sea, her carpet bag and its contents soaked. All around she heard the monotone of the men singing a Gaelic lament as they rode a low, insistent sound, like the washing of the waves against the little boat. Behind her, an old woman in a sodden bonnet was grumbling over her damaged possessions. A bag of meal and a basket of paper roses.
Apart from the man, the only other passenger was a girl in blue who sat hunched forward at the stern of the boat, her face bone pale, her eyes squeezed shut, her narrow shoulders tensed as though in pain. Audrey watched her wanting to help, but suspecting she wished to be left alone. As that far you've travelled. The man persisted, chewing the tobacco in his cheek. From London, she glanced briefly at him, and then away. Three days it had taken her first the overnight train to Glasgow, then a steamer to Oban, and a boat to Kyleakin. She, who had never travelled alone in her life. The man continued to watch her out of the corner of his eye. After a minute or so he said, it's fear cut off sky. Not much good in those that can leave. He pushed back his hat. Strange place for a young lady from London to be visiting this time of year.
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And that's The Story Keeper by Anna Mazzola. That book goes for eight hours and 50 minutes. Anna is spelt [spells author's name]. I'm here on annamazzola.com. So Anna mazzola.com are reading about Anna. Anna is the award winning author of five historical, crime or gothic novels. She is now also writing legal fiction under the name Anna Sharp. Her books explore the impact of crime and injustice, and her influences include Daphne du Maurier, Shirley Jackson and Sarah Waters. We have other books by Anna Mazzola in the collection - we have The Clockwork Girl and The Unseen.
Thank you once again for joining us on Hear This today, I'm Frances Keeland. An interesting batch of books, but I would like to hear what you've been reading and enjoying. So always send through your recommendations and or ring them through on 1300 654 656. That's 1300 654 656. Or you can email the library at Vision Australia dot org that's library@visionaustralia.org ... Have a lovely week and we'll be back next week with more Hear This.
