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Let's. Take a look. To take a look inside the book. Take a look...
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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, talking about books in the Vision Australia collection. So this show comes on the very cusp of November turning into December. Hotter weather is upon us, and also, people may be thinking of a quieter time when things start to shut down over Christmas. Remember to ring the library if you want to have increased Braille books over this time. If you're a... Braille reader, or also just if you're in general thinking, Oh, I really want to... read particular books over this time, so give the library a call and I hope you find some ideas in today's show.
I'll start off with today with the book that I mentioned last week, A Balcony Over Jerusalem by John Lyons. I didn't have enough time for a sample of it last week, so I'll just play a sample this week. This is a gripping memoir of life in Jerusalem from one of Australia's most experienced Middle East correspondents. Leading Australian journalist John Lyons will take readers on a fascinating personal journey through the wonders and dangers of the Middle East, from the sheer excitement of arriving in Jerusalem with his wife and eight year old son, to the fall of dictators, and his gripping account of what it feels like to be taken by Egyptian soldiers blindfolded and interrogated.
This is a memoir of the Middle East like no other. Drawing on a 20 year interest in the Middle East, Lyons has had extraordinary access. He's interviewed everyone from Israel's former prime minister, Shimon Peres, to key figures from Hezbollah and Hamas. He's witnessed the brutal Iranian Revolutionary Guard up close, and was one of the last foreign journalists in Iran during the violent crackdown against the Green Revolution. He's confronted Hamas officials about why they fire rockets into Israel, and Israeli soldiers, about why they fired tear gas at Palestinian schoolchildren. Lyons also looks at 50 years of Israeli occupation of the West Bank - the mechanics of how this works and the effect it now has on both Israelis and Palestinians.
Lyons explains the Middle East through everyday life and experiences his son's school, his wife's friends and his own dealings with a range of people over six years. So I'll play the sample now of Balcony Over Jerusalem, a Middle East memoir by John Lyons and Sylvie Le Clézio. It's narrated by Daniel Wilks.
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Once in Israel, though, I quickly realized how narrow a range of opinions we were receiving. The organisers set us up for an hour or so with some Palestinians to hear the point of view of the Palestinian Authority, but apart from that, we were getting only one side of the story and a hard line side at that. It became clear to me that the whole point of the trip was to defend Israel's settlements in the Palestinian territories. To give myself a broader perspective, I asked to go to Hebron in the occupied West Bank. I'd read enough to know that in Hebron you can see the raw conflict.
Hebron is instructive because it's the only Palestinian city where there is an Israeli settlement in the middle of the Palestinian population. Normally the settlements are separated in Hebron. Several hundred settlers live in the middle of 200,000 Palestinians. It's therefore easier for visitors to see the reality of life for the Palestinians in Hebron. The same Israeli army that occupies the West Bank operates in Hebron, the same rules of engagement for the army apply. I told my hosts that I wanted to go and set out with my paper's correspondent, Ross Dunne. Guthrie also took a trip to Hebron after telling the Israeli hosts that he wanted to hear more of the Palestinian side.
The cruelty of Hebron is there for all to see. I saw how the conflict between the settlers and Palestinians played out at the most basic level. In Hebron, the streets are empty. Palestinians are not able to drive on some roads or walk on others. As my own editor, Paul Whittaker, would remark when I took him there years later, it's like Dresden after the bombing. Whitaker had broken away from the group he was with as his correspondent. I had picked him up after the day's meetings and driven him to Hebron. We arrived late at night. The heavy Israeli army presence, the lights and the empty streets gave the city a certain eeriness.
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And that was Balcony Over Jerusalem, a middle East memoir by John Lyons and Sylvie Le Clezio. John is spelt [spells author's name]. And that book goes for 11 hours and 25 minutes.
So this month, November the 24th, we lost one of the most popular writers, Barbara Taylor Bradford, sadly died. She was born in 1933 and was a British-American bestselling novelist. Her debut novel, A Woman of Substance, was published in 1979 and sold over 30 million copies worldwide. She wrote 40 novels in all, all bestsellers, and I'm just reading from Wikipedia here. She was born in Leeds, and her older brother Vivian died of meningitis before she was born, and she later described her mother as having put all her frustrated love into me and her parents' marriage - it's fictionalised in her 1986 novel An Act of Will.
In her youth, she read Charles Dickens, The Bronte sisters... Thomas Hardy and Colette, and she decided to be a writer at ten years of age after sending a story to a magazine. Her biographer, Piers Dudgeon, later uncovered evidence that her mother, Frieda Walker, was the illegitimate daughter of Oliver Robinson, second Marquess of Ripon, a local Yorkshire landowner who employed the author's grandmother, Edith Walker, as a servant. Dudgeon informed Taylor Bradford that her grandmother and Ripon had three children together. There was some hesitation and, but Taylor Bradford eventually allowed Dudgeon to publish this information in his biography.
And we do have Piers Dungeon's.... Dudgeon's - I keep on going to call him Piers Dungeon - Pierce Dudgeon's biography of Barbara Taylor Bradford in the library, if you'd like to borrow that. And she did feel before the biography was published that it was a bit of a stigma about her grandmother, and her grandmother later spent time in workhouses, so sounds like a fairly tragic life for her grandma. Her early life after the... after leaving school at the age of 15, she worked in quite a few newspapers and women's magazines. But she says here in an interview, I was in my late 30s. I thought, what if I get to 55 and I've never written a novel? I'm going to hate myself. I'm going to be one of those bitter, unfulfilled writers.
So her debut novel, A Woman of Substance, became an enduring bestseller. Her favourite contemporary authors were P.D. James, Bernard Cornwell and Ruth Rendell. Her last novel, which we don't have yet in the library, was The Wonder of It All, published in 2023, and in its 1979 interview with The New York Times, Bradford reflected on her career and anticipated legacy... I'm not going to go down in history as a great literary figure. I'm a commercial writer, a storyteller. I suppose I will always write about strong women. I don't mean hard women, though. I mean women of substance.
So let's hear a sample of Woman of... Substance by Barbara Taylor Bradford. In 1905, Emma Hart is 16, single and pregnant by 1968. She is one of the richest women in the world, ruler of a business empire stretching from Yorkshire to America and Australia. Emma is a woman of substance, but what price has she paid? Let's hear a sample, narrated by Maggie Jones.
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The American corporate offices of Hart Enterprises took up six floors in a modern office block on Park Avenue in the 50s. If the English department store chain Emma Hart had founded years ago was the visible symbol of her success, then Hart Enterprises was the living heart and sinew, an enormous octopus of an organization with tentacles that stretched half around the world. It controlled clothing factories, woollen mills, real Estate, a retail merchandise company and newspapers in England, plus large blocks of shares in other major English companies.
As the original founder of this privately held corporation, Emma still owned 100% of the shares of Heart Enterprises and it operated slowly under her aegis, as did the chain of department stores that bore her name, with branches in the north of England, London, Paris and New York. Heart stores was a public company trading on the London Stock Exchange. Although Emma was the majority shareholder and chairman of the board, the diversified holdings of Heart Enterprises in America included real estate, a Seventh Avenue dress manufacturing company, and other stock investments in American industries.
Whilst heart stores and heart enterprises were worth millions of pounds, they represented only a portion of her fortune. Apart from owning 40% of the stock in the Scitex Oil Corporation of America, she had vast holdings in Australia, including real estate, mining, coalfields and one of the largest fully operating sheep stations in New South Wales. In London, a small but rich company called E H incorporated controlled her personal investments and real estate.
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And that was a Woman of Substance by Barbara Taylor Bradford. Barbara is [spells name]. And that book is a doozy. It goes for 36 hours and 37 minutes, and it's part one of the Emma Hart saga. So if you want to engage in some Barbara Taylor Bradford and you never have before. You might want to give that a listen. It had a huge impact on women writing about women characters.
And now to another story of a woman, a real life person. This is The Lives of Lee Miller, and it's by Anthony Penrose. Beautiful, bewitching, and an exceptionally good photographer, Lee Miller was one of life's adventurers. She became a Vogue cover girl in the 1920s New York before embracing Paris photography and surrealism, and then dramatically changed her life yet again, reinventing herself as a war correspondent, notably covering the liberation of Dachau. These are but three of the many lives of Lee Miller, intimately recorded here by her son Anthony Penrose. Featuring a selection of Miller's finest work, including portraits of her friends Picasso, tanning and Ernst Penrose's tribute to his mother, brings to life a uniquely talented woman and the turbulent times in which she lived.
Let's hear a sample of The Lives of Lee Miller by Anthony Penrose. It's narrated by Esther Wayne.
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Lee Miller, fashion model. Lee Miller, photographer. Lee Miller, war correspondent. Lee Miller writer. Lee Miller, aficionado of classical music. Lee Miller, haute cuisine cook. Lee Miller traveller. In all her different worlds, she moved with freedom. In all her roles, she was her own bold self a paradox of irascibility and effusive warmth of powerful talent and hopeless incapability. Lee rode her own temperament through life as if she were clinging to the back of a runaway dragon. Sometimes the dragon triumphed, and Lee was plunged into bleak, weeping despair. But mostly she took control and won a close run victory against herself first and adversity second.
Her successes always left an enduring impression. She loved to learn, create or take part and then move on to something else. Some of her Jags, as she called her current obsessions, would last only days. Others stretched for years. Photography was her supreme jag, and she deserted it only when, after 30 years, she had exhausted all its abilities to provide excitement. Lee's spread of interests amounted to much more than the desultory pecking of a dilettante. Whatever she became involved in, her commitment was total, and the consequence to herself and others was of only minor consideration.
Though Lee had an immense capacity to learn from other people. Few can be seen to have had much influence on her. She herself changed little as she moved among the giant sized characters that peopled her different worlds.
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That was The Lives of Lee Miller by Anthony Penrose, and that goes for seven hours and 15 minutes. Anthony is spelt [spells name]. The Lives of Lee Miller is the inspiration for the motion picture that is currently at cinemas, starring Kate Winslet as Lee Miller. There's an article here from The Guardian in 2005, so the book was published in 1985. The Lives of Lee Miller. Penrose, he had a rocky relationship with his mother due to her depression and alcoholism, and in the 1970s, his late wife was going through the attic and found old photos of Anthony and also a manuscript pages of a manuscript, and it was Lee's eyewitness account of US infantry assaulting the heavily fortified German positions in Saint-Malo.
And he says here in the article... I sat on the stairs and read it through several times. I was totally bewildered. I could not relate to the person who had written this vivid and lucidly observed prose to the drunk, often hysterical and incompetent woman I had known. There was a whole life here that I had completely missed. From that moment, I had to find out everything I could about her, and there were more boxes in that attic that yielded letters, manuscripts, army passes, things like camera repair bills, notebooks mixed with beautiful photographs she took in her early days in Paris.
Anthony, while he wrote this book, he writes... I farmed by day and wrote this book, The Lives of Lee Miller far into the night. Elation came on, finding a document of exceptional value, and I would dance around the room clutching my dog. It was deeply cathartic, my tears pattered down on the keyboard. In the moments when I realised how we had all misunderstood Lee. And he did go through this also with his father, who helped him along the way. And he says... my father and I reevaluated Lee as a result of my findings. He died in about chapter six.
Now, to an Australian novelist, this is a book whose title is The Cane and it's by Mary Rose Cuskelly. Koala, a north Queensland sugar town in the 1970s, Barbara McClymont walks the cane fields searching for Janet, whose 16 year old daughter, who has been missing for weeks. The police have no leads. The people of koala are divided by dread and distrust, but the sugar crush is underway and the cane must be burned. Meanwhile, children dream of a malevolent presence. A school teacher yearns to escape, and history keeps returning to remind koala that the past is always present. As the smoke rises and tensions come to a head, the dark heart of koala will be revealed, affecting the lives of all those who dwell beyond the cane. Let's hear a sample of The Cane by Mary Rose Cuskelly. It's narrated by Duncan Wass and Taylor Owens.
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They're lighting the cane, and Janet McClymont has not been found. A week after she disappeared, her mother Barbara, walked into Jensen's shop and bought every box of matches and all the big cigarette lighters on the shelves. She then stood outside, striking the head of each and every match against the phosphorus strip, watching it flare before shaking out the flame and dropping the spent stick on the road. Then she drove down to the inlet and threw the lighters into the water. No one knew what the hell she was playing at.
Then it dawned on me, with the crush about to start and all of us believing that her daughter's body must be lying in the cane, some harebrained notion had got hold of her. She thought she could stave off the lighting of the cane fires until Janet's body was found. You see, in Barbara's mind, on top of everything else that probably happened to her daughter. Burning a body would be yet another desecration. But nothing is going to stop the sugar crush. It's already been delayed. We're almost at the end of June. What with all the searching and the upset. I mean, I understand Barbara's need to hope that after all this time, someone will find Janet's body lying unblemished in the canefields near where she found her daughter's bag. Or maybe even that the girl herself is alive.
You have to remember, apart from the fact that she's been missing for so long, there's no evidence that Janet's dead. But hundreds of people came through those drills, from koala to Calliope and back again for weeks looking for her and found nothing. That hasn't stopped Barbara, though. She still goes out every morning by herself, walking through the cane fields belonging to the 3DS and the tractors, looking for a daughter's remains. She comes back hours later, covered in dust and dirt. Ah! I've got all the sympathy under the sun for her and Ted and what they're going through. But if their girl is in the cane, she's dead.
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And there was a sample of The Cane by Mary Rose Cuskelly. Mary Rose is one word. So it's [spells author's name]. And that book goes for nine hours and 40 minutes. And I am on Mary Rose Cuskelly dot com dot AUau ... maryrosecuskelly.com.au - and Mark Brandi, another Australian novelist, author of Wimmera and the Rip, calls it... A stunning piece of Australian rural noir. Scott Whitmont, in books and publishing says... One can feel the humidity and searing heat of far north Queensland, its isolation and uniqueness. Fiona Hardy from Readings Bookstores calls it, or says... Castelli's gripping rural historical tale will leave you listening in the night for the sound of the cane rustling and what it might be hiding.
So lots of good reviews and her essays and articles have been published in a range of magazines, journals and newspapers, including Crikey, The Age, The Australian and The Melbourne Magazine. Her next novel, The Campers, will be published by Allen and Unwin in early 2025.
And now to Australian writer Chloe Hooper and her book The Arsonist, a Mind on Fire. And this may not be the most pleasant book to read if you have been affected by bushfires on the scorching February day in 2009... that became known as Black Saturday, a man lit two fires in Victoria's Latrobe Valley, then sat on the roof of his house to watch the inferno in the valley where the rates of crime were the highest in the state. More than 30 people were known to police as Firebugs, but the detectives soon found themselves on the trail of a man they didn't know.
The Arsonist takes listeners on the hunt for this man and inside the strange puzzle of his mind. It is also the story of fire in this country, and of a community that owed its existence to that very element. The command to fire has defined and sustained us as a species. Understanding its abuse will define our future. Let's hear a sample of The Arsonist, a Mind on Fire by Chloe Hooper. It's narrated by Sibylla Budd.
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Picture a fairy tales engraving straight black trees stretching in perfect symmetry to their vanishing point, the ground covered in thick white snow. Woods are dangerous places in such stories. Things are not as they seem here too. In this timber plantation menace lingers. The blackened trees smolder. Smoke creeps around their charcoal trunks and charred leaves. The snow stained pale grey is ash. Place your foot unwisely and it might slip through and burn. These woods are cordoned off with crime scene tape and guarded by uniformed police officers.
At the intersection of two nondescript roads, Detective Sergeant Adam Henry sits in his car, taking in a puzzle. On one side of Glendonald Road, the timber plantation is untouched, pristine Pinus radiata, all sawn at the same time, growing in immaculate green lines. On the other side, near where the road forms a T with a track named Jelleff's outlet, stand rows of eucalyptus globulus, the common blue gum cultivated the world over to make printer paper. All torched as far as the eye can see. On Saturday, the 7th of February 2009, around 1:30 p.m., a fire started somewhere near here. And now, late on Sunday afternoon, it is still burning several kilometres away.
Detective Henry has a new baby, his first a week out of hospital. The night before, he had been called back from paternity leave for a 6 a.m. meeting. Everyone in the Victoria Police arson and Explosives squad was called back. The past several days had been implausibly hot, with Saturday the endgame mid-forties, Celsius.
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And that is the non-fiction book The Arsonist, a Mind on Fire by Chloe Hooper. Chloe is spelt [spells name]. And that book goes for six hours and 40 minutes. This book was published in 2018, and I'm reading here from the Australian Book Review from 2018, and a review by Fiona Gruber. She says... The book is divided into three sections: the Detectives, the Lawyers and the Courtroom - in an attempt to give a rounded view of the arsonist from those who wanted to clear his name, as well as those those who wanted to lock him up.
And Fiona writes, bearing witness.... The arsonist reminds us of the victims and the terror, the senselessness of a flame tossed onto a forest floor, and the awful silence of a landscape razed by fire. There are quite a few other books by Chloe Hooper in the collection. There is... Bedtime Story, which is a story of her partner who was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive illness, and she had to find a way to tell their two young sons, and by instinct, she turned to her bookshelf. Can the news be broken as a bedtime tale? Is there a perfect book to prepare children for loss? So that's bedtime story.
There is also another really well known book called The Tall Man. Another non-fiction, The Tall Man, A Death and Life on Palm Island, and this again is incredibly well researched. In 2004, on Palm Island and Aboriginal settlement in Far North Queensland, a 36 year old man named Cameron Doomadgee was arrested for swearing at a white police officer and 40 minutes later he was dead in the jailhouse. The police claimed he'd tripped on a step, but his liver was ruptured. The main suspect was Sergeant Christopher Hurley, a charismatic cop with long experience in Aboriginal communities and decorations.
For this work, Chloe Hooper was asked to write about the case by the pro-bono lawyer who represented Cameron Doomadgee's family. He told her it would take a couple of weeks. She spent three years following Hurley's trial to some of the wildest and most remote parts of Australia, exploring Aboriginal myths and history and the roots of brutal chaos in the Palm Island community. That non-fiction book is also available in Braille, and too are Child's Book of True Crime, which I think I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that we when I worked in the library, we'd get notes back with this book that, you know, people were so horrified at the title that they would often not read it. I was talking with Maureen O'Reilly about how, um, deceptive titles can be.
So this is A Child's Book of True Crime. It's a novel by Chloe Hooper. Kate Byrne is having an affair with the father of her most gifted fourth grader, Lucien. Her lover's wife has just published Murder at Black Swan Point, a true crime story about the brutal slaying of a young Adultress in a nearby town. When Lucien begins to display violent imagery in his crayon drawings, Kate wonders how well her pupil understands his mother's grisly work and why he's been exposed to it. Kate imagines another version of the story for children and narrated by Australian animals. But will her fixation with this crime and Lucien's family align her fate with that of the murdered girl? So that's A Child's Book of True Crime by Chloe Hooper.
Thank you for joining us on Hear This today. Remember, your recommendations for our library members are always welcome. If you don't want to have your name read out, that's fine, I won't read your name out. But the recommendations are always fabulous. And again, if you would like to get some books over the Christmas break, the library does... shut and I will have those dates for next week. The library shut down. It's usually one and a half to two weeks, so I'll have those dates for sure next week. If you'd like to call the library to find out yourself, you can call them 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 ...
And if you haven't already, you can register for the last event for this year that Vision Australia library is holding. It's the last Treat Your Shelf Christmas party online and in person. So this is on the 11th of December and it's from 11 a.m. to 12 p.m. it is online, but you can also join in and have a cup of coffee and tea and some cakes here at Vision Australia if you want to pop into the Kooyong office. So it's just a chance for Vision Australia Library members and librarians to come together for a fun and informal chat about the books and a great get together. And of course, reader recommended - what people recommend for holiday reads, so you can register. Just call Vision Australia Library on 1300 654 656. You can register to attend online or register to attend in person. Have a lovely week and we'll be back next week with more Hear This.
