00:09 Program ID
Take a look. Take a look inside the book. Take a look...
00:24 Frances
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 have a great sample of a new talking book into the catalogue. It is Unsettled - A Journey Through Time and Place by Kate Grenville. And we're very pleased to have that in the collection now. It's narrated by Kate Grenville as well, and we also have some samples of some interesting other books, so I do hope you enjoy the show today.
If you're a member of the library, you may have been to Kooyong Library, at Vision Australia here at Kooyong to see Kate Grenville in person and to hear her talk about her book Unsettled, a deeply personal memoir of reckoning with what it means to be on land that was taken from other people. And as she was in conversation with Daniel James. And in this discussion, she intertwines her family's history with the broader story of First Nations peoples dispossession and displacement.
Daniel James was born in Melbourne and raised on Taungurung country in north east Victoria. He is a Yorta Yorta Melbourne-based writer and broadcaster, and the winner of the 2018 Horne Prize for his essay Ten More Days. He is the host of the 7 a.m. podcast for Schwartz Media, and is a contributor to the Saturday Paper, indigenous X, SBS, Crikey, The Age and Sydney Morning Herald, The Guardian and he also hosts The Mission on 3RRR FM. Daniel's work explores the notions of empathy, intergenerational trauma, hidden history, and the political landscape that continues to shape the lives of Aboriginal people across the country. And also he has a debut novel in the works - this will be available for library members this whole... hour-long chat. It will be uploaded and... you'll be able to listen to that on your devices.
So Kate Grenville is no stranger to the past. Her success and fame as a writer exploded when she published The Secret River in 2005, a bestseller based on the story of her convict ancestor, an early settler on the Hawkesbury River. More than two decades on, and following the defeat of the Voice referendum, Grenville is still grappling with what it means to descend from people who were, quote from Kate Grenville... On the sharp edge of the moving blade that was colonisation. So she decides to go on a kind of pilgrimage back through the places her family stories happened and put the stories and the first people back into the same frame on the same country to try to think about those questions.
Let's hear a sample of unsettled A Journey Through Time and Place by Kate Grenville. It's narrated by Kate Grenville.
03:19 S3
Once I've left the common behind, the country becomes drier and steeper and more uncompromising. There are no lagoons up here, and none of those triangles of fertile land. Just the narrow V of the valley and the stony hills rising steeply on both sides. Every slope is studded with great shelves and shards of the rock underneath the pale bones of the planet bursting through. We colonists call land like this inhospitable. There's something a bit accusatory about it. It's as if we think the place is spitefully holding out on us. That's why it's national Park now. No one lives here in all those hundreds of thousands of acres. Because.
But the people who retreated from Wiseman's place, the people who were pushed up the first branch bend after bend, the people who were finally forced away from the greedy strip of the common. They could have lived here for a while anyway. This whole country was an intensely used landscape, even up on the stony Heights, though these days it's hard to see the evidence you have to be shown, as I've been shown a few of the marks left by those generations of life. Engravings there once fresh gold, now the same gray as the rest of the rock, so they're hard to find among the trees and leaf litter, grinding grooves in the rocks.
A cave with stencils made by spitting out a mouthful of clay tinted water. There are outlines of boomerangs and stone axes with their big rounded heads and short, thick handles. I've seen the shape of a hand with the thumb bent like a hitchhiker's, another hand beside it with a kink in the middle finger, another that belonged to a child. I've put my own hand up to them, a greeting, palm to palm across, who knows how long.
05:14 S2
And that was Unsettled - a Journey through Time and Place by Kate Grenville. Kate is [spells name]. And that book goes for 7.5 hours. I played a sample of The Secret River recently on the show, which I adore as an audiobook, and also reading it in print, but we have a lot of earlier works of Kate Grenville as well. And we have Bearded Ladies, a collection of contemporary Australian stories based around the author's childhood experiences in Sydney and her later travels in Europe. They're often darkly humorous, sometimes savagely so. The Idea of Perfection - that's also available in Braille. Joan Makes History, another novel in which Kate rewrites Australian history from the standpoint of a woman who is never rated a mention in the schoolbooks. The Lieutenant, also available in Braille.
Lilian's Story, another one of my favourite stories - and many Sydneysiders may remember Bea Miles, a famous Sydney eccentric, and this story is loosely based on the life of Bea Miles. It's a beautifully written book. We also have one life My Mother's Story. This is also available in Braille... and Restless Dolly Maunder... the list goes on. But... if you would like to find out more about what books are available by Kate Grenville in the library, just give them a call or go online and have a have a search. I think we've got most of her books now. I think we're pretty up to date.
And now for something completely different. I just noticed recently it's Michael Palin, he of Monty Python fame and travel author and television presenter, just turned 81. And we have many books by him, including the diaries of his Monty Python years and a few of his travel books. But I thought I'd take a little sideways view and have a sample of Eric Idle's autobiography, Always Look on the Bright Side of Life - a Sorta Biography, by Eric Idle. We know him for his unforgettable roles on Monty Python, from The Flying Circus to The Meaning of Life.
Now, Eric Idle reflects on the meaning of his own life in this entertaining memoir that takes us on a remarkable journey from his childhood in an austere boarding school... through his successful career in comedy, television, theatre and film. Coming of age as a writer and comedian during the '60s and '70s, Eric stumbled into the crossroads of the Cultural Revolution and found himself rubbing shoulders with the likes of George Harrison, David Bowie and Robin Williams - all of whom became lifelong friends. With anecdotes sprinkled throughout involving Mike Nichols, Mick Jagger, Steve Martin, Paul Simon and many more, as well as the pythons themselves, Eric captures a time of tremendous creative output with equal parts of hilarity and heart. Let's hear a sample of Always Look on the Bright Side of Life, a Sortabiography by Eric Idle. It's narrated by Eric Idle.
08:32 S4
Graham Chapman once said, life is rather like a yacht in the Caribbean - it's all right if you've got one. Well, I've been travelling at the speed of life for 75 years now, and I still don't have one. But then again, I wrote Life's a Piece of Shit when you look at it. While reminding everyone to look on the bright side. A line that I discovered recently is as old as Coleridge. This book is partly the story of that song, and partly the story of a boy who became me. if you like the memoirs of a failed pessimist. I still remain foolishly optimistic, even with the threat of global warming, which worries me slightly less than personal cooling.
And so I've written my recollections before I forget everything and develop amnesia, which is what you get from being an old actor. Of course I have faults, but you won't read about them here. I've glossed over all my shortcomings. That is, after all, the point of autobiography. It is the case for the defence. But I will own up to not being perfect. I have British teeth. They are like British politics. They go in all directions at once. Writing about yourself is an odd mix of therapy and lap dancing. Exciting and yet a little shameful. So here is my own pathetic addition to the celebrity memoir.
On the advice of my lawyer, I'm leaving out the shameful bits. And on the advice of my wife. The filthy bits. But as usual in my career, I will leave you wanting less. If this isn't exactly what went down, it's certainly how it should have happened.
10:12 S2
And that was Eric Idle introducing his memoir, Always Look on the Bright Side of Life - a Sorta Biography. And it is 50 years since their first film came out, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which came out in 1975. And I'm looking at Wikipedia here, and it says here that Idle wrote... his Python material mostly by himself. He was a little bit of an outsider, it seems. The other Pythons usually worked in teams. Idle's work in Python is often characterised by an obsession with language and communication, and many of his characters have verbal peculiarities, such as the man who speaks in anagrams, the man who says words in the wrong order, and the butcher who alternates between rudeness and politeness every time he speaks.
He was the second youngest member of the pythons and closest in spirit to the teenagers who made up much of Python's fan base. He dealt with contemporary obsessions like pop music, sexual permissiveness, and recreational drugs. Um, often characterized by double entendre, he is most famously demonstrated in the nudge nudge, wink wink character. In 2004, idle created Spamalot, a musical comedy based on Monty Python and the Holy Grail. And to finish off a little bit of trivia. He is David Bowie's godfather to his son, who was known as Zowie Bowie or Zowie Bowie, but is now known as... Duncan Jones and is a film director.
Let's head off to New Zealand now with a couple of books. The first one is a mystery crime thriller and it is by Michael Bennett. The title is Better the Blood. Hannah Westerman is a tenacious Maori detective, juggling single motherhood and the pressures of her career in Auckland's Central Investigation Branch when she's led to a crime scene by a mysterious video, she discovers a man hanging in a secret room. As Hannah and her team work to track down the culprit, other deaths lead her to think they are searching for New Zealand's first serial killer. With little to go on, Hannah must use all her experience as a police officer to try and find a motive to these apparently unrelated murders.
What she eventually discovers is a link to an historic crime that leads back to the brutal, bloody colonisation of New Zealand. Then the pursuit becomes frighteningly personal, and Hannah realises that while her heritage is a key, whilst her heritage is key to finding the killer, their agenda of revenge may include her and her family. Let's hear a sample of Better the Blood by, um, Michael Bennett. It's narrated by Miriama McDowell.
12:54 S5
Central Police Station is 12 storeys high and unattractive and unspectacular grey concrete building in the middle of downtown Auckland. The interview rooms are buried in the floors well below street level. The rooms are claustrophobic and uncomfortable, which pretty accurately describes how Addison is feeling right now. What? We're just gonna sit here, she says on the opposite side of the table. Hannah has a printed copy of Addison's offence report in her hands. Next to Addison is Jay Hamilton. Early 40s, warm blue eyes, no airs and graces. Despite being one of the most senior cops in the Tamaki Makaurau policing region, a detective inspector.
But that's not the reason he's in this interview room. Jay is Hannah's boss. He's also her ex, and he's Addison's dad. Beside Jay is Marissa, his partner of several years. Clear eyed and earnest, Marissa is itching to step in and offer succour to Edison. She's a born caregiver and comforter of birds with broken wings. Literally, she's a veterinarian, but she manages to stay quiet. Edison, after all, is Hannah and Jay's daughter, not hers. The heavy silence in the room makes Edison want to turn the table upside down. You can't put me in the naughty chair and ignore me, she complains in a tone of voice, not unlike a child put in a naughty chair and ignored.
14:31 S2
And that is Better the Blood by Michael Bennett. Michael is [spells name]. And that book goes for nine hours and 11 minutes. This is book one of the Hannah Westerman series. It was winner of the Best First Novel award at the 2023 Ngaio Marsh Awards in New Zealand, Island and shortlisted for the audiobook of the year at the Capitol Crime Fingerprint Awards. There are two more books in the series the Hannah Westerman series, Return to Blood and Carved in Blood. We don't have those in the library collection as yet.
Many of the reviews I'm looking at call it a riveting thriller... powerful story featuring an impressive heroine and antagonist. In the Kirkus Review, they call it a striking debut and a significant addition to indigenous literature. Making his fiction debut, Maori screenwriter and director Michael Bennett establishes himself as as an excellent storyteller as well. Executed as Murder Story is, the book's immersion in tribal culture and history makes the greatest impact, lending complexity and sweep to the narrative. Bennett's use of indigenous terms and names adds to the novel's resonance. One can only hope this is the beginning of a series, which it is. That's really good. So that's Kirkus review of Better the Blood by Michael Bennett, which was released in January 2023.
Now to another New Zealand author. This is Catherine Chidgey - her novel The Transformation. In the hands of master winemaker Lucien Goulet the third, a hairpiece is a transformation. Living alone in the Tampa Bay Hotel in 1898, he hires 15 year old Cuban Rafael Mendez to recover hair clippings. An unlikely trio forms between Raphael Goulet and Marian Unger, a young widow with white blonde hair whom Rafael loves and for whom Goulet wants to design the grandest transformation of all. Let's hear a sample of The Transformation by Catherine Chidgey. It's narrated by Bernard Boland.
16:48 S6
February 1898. With its tangle of Moorish minarets, cupolas and arches, its Byzantine domes and its 13 crescent moons, the Tampa Bay hotel was a fairy tale castle anchored at the water's edge. It was open only a few months a year, and during the immense summers it stood empty. Its glittering roofs blinding even the crows from December through April. However, it was full of the best sorts of people bankers and industrialists, stockbrokers and shipping merchants, attorneys and architects, and a number of celebrities.
They came from the big northern cities and from Europe, these guests. Each man accompanied by a sleek wife, any children they brought with them, were like the hotel maids, silent until asked to speak. Wealthy invalids came to women of delicate constitution and sensitive nerves. Feeble second sons, consumptives rheumatics all ordered south by physicians weary of the illnesses of the rich, whether phantom or genuine. Florida was a place where wonders could happen, where there was no winter worth mentioning, and where the soil was so fertile that dry sticks took root and flowered like Aaron's staff.
Heart cases did well there. Once inside the gates of the Tampa Bay hotel, there was no need to leave. No reason to venture into the dirty, dangerous parts of town where the Negroes and Latins lived. It was a city unto itself, with a drugstore, a schoolhouse, a barber shop, a newsstand, a beauty salon, and a telegraph office. There were spa facilities, an exposition hall, a casino, a bowling alley, tennis and croquet courts, kennels and stables. Every room had a telephone, hot and cold running water, and electric lighting designed by Edison himself.
18:57 S2
And that was The Transformation by Catherine Chidgey. Catherine is spelled [spells name]. And that book goes for 12 hours and 15 minutes. Catherine Chidgey was born in 1970, in New Zealand. She has published eight novels. She grew up in Auckland and now lives in Hamilton. We have her debut novel, In a Fishbone Church, which was published in 1998 and was praised widely in New Zealand and overseas. As I said, we have that in the collection. And writer Nick Hornby said... Catherine Chidgey is a wonderful new talent and in a Fishbone Church marks the beginning of what promises to be a glorious literary career. And Louis de Bernieres called the novel... Warm, subtle and evocative. You will be thinking about it long after you've finished reading it.
And this first novel won the Commonwealth Writers Prize and was long listed for the Orange Prize for fiction in the UK. The transformation was published in 2004 2005, in The Guardian newspaper of April 2005. Justine Jordan reviews the novel... Chidgey is a gifted writer, and in this her third novel, her confident, commanding prose and vivid atmospherics hold the attention, and she draws comparisons between the character in this book the wig maker Julie, and the main character in Patrick Suskind's novel perfume, which featured a genius of scent and the morbid and monstrous compulsions that that leads to. So this is very similar, but it's about hair.
It's also worth mentioning that it's set in a really interesting part of history. Julie has sought refuge from the murky background of France at the end of the 1800s for the New World. Tampa, Florida - a land of sunshine and oranges menaced by swamps and extreme weather, where, inwardly sneering and seething, he flatters the scalps of his wealthy clientele. He can, he declares, in tones of obsequious menace, work miracles with a hank of hair, glue and a net. I can take years off your life. So just a little bit about the transformation by Catherine Chidgey.
The next book is by the recently deceased author Peter Lovesey. So a bit of sad news if you're a fan of his, but we're going to play a sample of a 1991 book, and the title is The Last Detective. Detective Superintendent Peter Diamond is the last detective, a genuine gumshoe committed to door stopping and deduction rather than fancy computer gadgetry. So when the naked body of a woman is found floating in the weeds in a lake near bath, with no one willing to identify her, no marks and no murder weapon, his sleuthing abilities are tested to the limit. Struggling with a jigsaw puzzle of truant choirboys, teddy bears, a black Mercedes and Jane Austen memorabilia. Diamond persists even after the powers that be have decided there's enough evidence to make a conviction.
Let's hear a sample of The Last Detective by Peter Lovesey. This is part one in the Peter Diamond series. It's narrated by Simon Prebble.
22:21 S7
The Murder Squad worked from a mobile incident room from Sunday morning onwards. It was a large caravan parked on a stretch of turf, as close as possible to the reeds where the body had been found. Each time Peter Diamond crossed the floor, it sounded like beer kegs being unloaded. The sound was heard until well into the evening as he directed the first crucial stages of the inquiry. Five telephones were steadily in use, and a team of filing clerks transferred every message and every piece of information, first onto action sheets and then onto cards. The standard four tier carousel for up to 20,000 cards, stood ominously in the center of the room.
Diamond felt comfortable with index cards, even if some of his younger staff muttered things about the superiority of computers. If there was no quick resolution to the inquiry, he'd be forced to install the despised Vdus and God help the Moaners when the things broke down. The search for the dead woman's clothes was first concentrated on the sections of shoreline, with easiest access from the three roads that enclosed the lake. A bizarre collection of mislaid garments began to be assembled. Tokens of the variety of human activities around the lake. The items were painstakingly labelled sealed in plastic bags noted on the map and entered on the action sheets.
Without much confidence that any were linked with the case, divers were brought in to search the stretch of water where the body had been found floating. It was not impossible that the clothes or other evidence had been dumped there. This was an exercise that had to be gone through. Although most people, including diamond, reckoned that the body had drifted there from further along the shore or even across the lake. At the same time, house to house inquiries were made in the villages and at each dwelling, with a view of the lake, seeking witnesses to any unusual activity beside the water after dark in the previous month.
24:21 S2
And that was The Last Detective by Peter Lovesey. Peter is [spells name]. That book goes for 11.5 hours. There are a few different series that Peter Lovesey wrote with main detective characters. There is Sergeant Cribb, the Cribb series, a Victorian era police detective based in London. Peter Diamond, a modern day police detective in Bath. And also, curiously, Bertie and the Tin Man, which is the first in his Detective Memoirs of King Edward the Seventh, set in 1886. So you know, that's where King Edward - or Bertie, as he's called - solves some secrets. I think there's a few in that series.
And he was also one of the world's leading track and field statisticians. He won numerous gold and silver daggers from the British Crime Writers Association, and his novels and stories for mainly into the category of entertaining puzzlers, as in the Golden Age tradition of mystery writing the Peter Diamond novels. They started in 1991 with The Last Detective and finished in 2024 with Against the Grain.
And there was a lovely obituary in The Guardian written by his friend and fellow crime writer, and that was from the 8th of May, 2025. Martin Edwards credits him with being one of the forerunners of the modern historical detective mystery with the invention of Sergeant Cribb, and says in this obituary that he feels that Ellis Peters, creator of Brother Cadfael, followed that lead and started to write his own detective historical detective series, and books from every historical period imaginable began to crowd the bookshelves, he says.
Thank you for joining us on Hear This today. I'm Francis Keyland - and just a reminder, there's some really significant and important events happening in May. On May the 15th there is Global Accessibility Awareness Day. This happens every year. The purpose of this Accessibility Awareness Day is to discuss and highlight digital access and inclusion and its impact on the more than one billion people with disabilities around the world. So if you want to do a bit of research and see what events are happening through Vision Australia, you can go to Global Accessibility Awareness Day 2025 on online and see what's around. It can be quite inspiring seeing what things are being developed and what people in the community are talking about, the current issues, the things that are being said.
And then on May the 17th, there is the International Day Against LGBTQ+ discrimination. So just a really great day for inclusion and to be aware and to maybe join some events that are happening on the day. There's also National Volunteer Week, which is happening this month, May the 19th to the 25th, highlighting the important role of volunteers and our community. And it might be a good idea to see if you haven't volunteered and you think you've got the time and you would like to, you can often find something that really suits your interest out in the volunteering world, in organisations or not for profits.
And then moving on into late May, we have National Reconciliation Week. That's May the 20th 7th to June the 3rd. Learning about our shared histories, cultures and achievements, and exploring how each of us can contribute to achieving reconciliation in Australia and moving into June, a very important month for us here at Vision Australia Radio. It's the Vision Australia appeal. It's the annual end of financial year fundraising campaign. All donations of $2 or more will receive a tax receipt. So it's a lovely way of making sure that community voices are still heard on Vision Australia Radio.
If you'd like to join the library, the number is 1300 654 656. That's 1300 654 656. Or you can email library@visionaustralia.org - that's Library at Vision Australia dot org. Have a lovely week and we'll be back next week with more Hear This.
