SSoP Podcast Episode 77 — Australia: Just Smile and Give Me a Vegemite Sandwich

This is a transcription of Australia: Just Smile and Give Me a Vegemite Sandwich

David: Hello. Welcome to Strong Sense of Place.

Melissa: In each episode, we focus on one destination and discuss what makes it different than any other place on Earth.

David: Then we recommend five books we love that took us there on the page.

Melissa: I’m Melissa Joulwan.

David: I’m David Humphreys.

David: We’re going around the world one great read at a time. Thanks for joining us.

[cheerful music]

David: Welcome to Strong Sense of Place. Today we get curious about Australia.

David: On Two Truths and a Lie, I’ll tell you about a war Australia lost against an unarmed opponent, a true story older than writing itself, and an architect who never saw the world-famous building he designed. Then we’ll talk about five books we love.

Melissa: Today, in a plot twist no one saw coming, I’m recommending a nonfiction book. And it’s not about food! It’s all about Australian mammals. Prepare for fun facts about platypuses, wombats, bandicoots, and more.

David: I’ve got a book about how a love affair in 1913 led to the atomic bomb. But first, Mel’s going to bring us up to speed with the Australia 101.

Melissa: Let’s get oriented!

Melissa: Australia is the only country in the world that covers an entire continent. It sits in the Southern Hemisphere between the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It’s roughly the same size as the continental US… which presents a bit of a conundrum for the 101. There is so much to talk about, and only 1700 words to do it. So! I’m going to do my best to cover some basics, then share the stuff that grabbed my imagination. To our Australian friends out there: Your country is amazing; forgive me if I neglect your favorite thing.

Melissa: Australia is divided into six states, plus Tasmania — the heart-shaped island just south of the mainland. In Season 4, we devoted an episode to Tasmania, and we pretty much gushed about it; I’ll put a link to that in the show notes.

Melissa: I’m going to try to paint a word map of Australia so you can get a sense of its vastness and dramatic geography. More than-one third of the country is desert, and the outback covers 70-80% of the inland areas. A line of mountains — the Great Dividing Range — runs along the eastern coast. Most of the people live in the southeastern and southwestern corners of the country. The three largest cities — the capital of Canberra, Sydney, and Melbourne — are all in the right-hand corner on a map. And then Perth, is waaaaaaay over there in the west — sort of where San Diego sits on a map of the US. If you watched the movie Crocodile Dundee as a kid and remember the red rock formations, waterfalls, swimming holes, and yes, crocodiles, you saw Kakadu National Park. It’s in the Northern Territory, and it’s MASSIVE. Roughly the same size as the entire country of Wales.

Melissa: So Australia is more diverse geographically than you might think AND/BUT it’s also those snapshots in your mind: sparkly beaches and surfers and snorkeling, red sands and scrubby brush, the Sydney Opera House, jeeps in the Outback, and yes, many Australians do say ‘G’day mate.’

Melissa: Which brings us to language. English is the primary language — but we need to talk about Aussie slang. Starting with: Aussie. Research assured me that it’s OK to refer to Australians as Ozzies, so here we go. Aussie slang is a delight! There’s a tendency to shorten words, so definitely becomes defo and avocado is avo. Here are a few others I enjoyed: a cobber is a good friend, Bruce is an Aussie man and Sheila is a woman. A kid at the beach? That’s a shark biscuit. And if you want to hear the song ‘You Shook Me All Night Long,’ it’s by Accadacca. Then some words are just cute: beer is a frothy, gas for the car is petty [petrol], and even dastardly mosquitos sound adorable — mozzies.

Melissa: The best might be smoko. It started as a smoke break in the mid-morning or afternoon. But now less than 10% of Aussies smoke, so it’s become more of a coffee or tea break… in Scandinavia, you’ve got fikka. In Australia, it’s smoko. And there’s a hit song to go along with your cuppa and sausage roll. In 2017, the Aussie punk band The Chats released a 3-minute music video on YouTube. It cost them less $4 to make. Dave Grohl and Iggy Pock are both fans! It captures the boredom of minimum-wage work and has a shout-along chorus: ‘I’m on smoko, so leave me alone.’

Melissa: Now, a brief history of Australia.

Melissa: As always with colonization, there are two parallel tracks: the story of the indigenous people and the colonizing newbies. Australia’s first people were the Aboriginal Australians who’ve lived on the continent for over 65,000 years. According to National Geographic, researchers believe humans migrated to Northern Australia from Asia using primitive boats. For millennia, Aboriginal Australians lived in complex societies with spiritual traditions that honored the land. I’m going to talk about that a bit in one of my books later in the show. Today, about 3 percent of the population is made up of Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders. Then in the 18th century, the British showed up!

Melissa: Explorer James Cook charted the eastern coast in 1770, and claimed it for the Crown. Eighteen years later, the British First Fleet arrived. That was a convoy of 11 ships that arrived to establish the first permanent settlement and a European penal colony.

Melissa: When the British settlers ran into the Aboriginal population — estimated at 750,000 to 1 million — it went… poorly. Epidemics and violent clashes dramatically decreased the Aboriginal population. According to Nat Geo, there were at least 270 massacres of Aboriginal Australians during the country’s first 140 years. In 2008, the Prime Minister delivered a formal National Apology to the Stolen Generations; the efforts to right past wrongs are ongoing.

Melissa: Meanwhile… when the American gold rush happened in 1848, it inspired an Aussie Bruce named Edward Hargraves to hunt for gold in Australia. In 1851, he discovered gold fields in New South Wales, and the rush was on. There was massive influx of immigrants and fortune seekers — the population increased fourfold in 20 years. That helped transform the country from convict colonies to more cosmopolitan cities. In 1901, the six separate British colonies united to form the Commonwealth of Australia. Now it’s one of the most culturally diverse countries around — 30% of the population was born overseas.

Melissa: Let’s talk about amazing things to do in Australia! Again. Australia is huge and awesome. So I picked out a few things that made me think, ‘Ooooh, I want to do that!’. For something bookish…

Melissa: Australia is home to two of the libraries on the list of the world’s ten most beautiful. The State Library of Victoria is in Melbourne. It’s showstopper is the La Trobe Reading Room. It’s a six-story-tall octagon, airy and white, capped with a glass dome. It looks like a jewel box theatre, but instead of box seats, the balconies are lined with bookshelves. And underneath all that bookish razzle-dazzle, the ground floor has rows of dark wood reading carrels that radiate out from a center point like a starburst.

Melissa: In Adelaide, you can visit the State Library of South Australia. On the outside, it’s a modern cube of glass. Inside, it’s the Victorian library of your dreams with arched doorways, balconies outlined by ornate wrought-iron railings, illuminated wooden display cases, and warm filtered light. It’s definitely the kind of place where you might get caught up in a mystery surrounding an ancient book.

Melissa: If you love animals and tromping around outside, Australia’s has so many options. It’s home to 516 national parks and animals that aren’t found anywhere else on the planet, like the platypus, echidna, kangaroos, and koalas. At the Kuranda Koala Gardens, you can make friends with koalas, along with wombats, quokkas, wallabies, lizards, frogs, and more. They specifically call out photo opps with koalas and pythons. Or visit Kangaroo Island, a sanctuary for seals, dolphins, echidnas and, of course, kangaroos in their natural habitat. I’ll put gobs of links to animal encounters in show notes.

Melissa: To learn more about Aboriginal Australians and connect more deeply with the land, there’s Aboriginal Experiences. It’s a collective of tour operators that brings together 200 different experiences, all led by Aboriginal guides. There are outdoor options like storytelling hikes and tours of botanical gardens. You can take a class to learn traditional art techniques and make your own souvenir. Or go on a two-night outback safari to sleep in a bush camp. My favorite will not be a surprise: A culinary cave tour with storytelling, a didgeridoo performance, and a BBQ lunch around a campfire with native foods.

Melissa: If you love the water, Australia has more than 22,000 miles of coast — plus inland waters — where you can swim, surf, snorkel, sail, and kayak. If I could magically transport somewhere for a splash right now, I would pick the Bondi Icebergs pool. It’s part of a tidal pool complex right on the beach, so you can swim laps in the Olympic-size pool while ocean waves crash against its sides. The swimming club there has been THE place to to take a dip since 1929. After a swim, you can also sun on the deck, relax in the sauna, or grab some food at a café that has stunning views of the South Pacific.

Melissa: And the number one thing I would love to do in Australia: Ride The Ghan luxury train… between Darwin in the north and Adelaide in the south. It’s an 1800-mile journey (2,900 km) through the Outback. [Dave - how many days?] [4 days, 3 nights]. The off-train adventures include a boat cruise through the gorges of the Katherine River, hiking and biking in Alice Springs, a tour of an opal mine, and a visit to the mystical rock formations of Uluru National Park. Plus, there are views of kangaroos out the windows and a dinner under the stars at the Historical Telegraph Station. I should also mention that the interior of the train is dreamy and cozy-mystery appropriate: leather chairs, white linens, glasses of bubbly, big observation windows.

Melissa: Before we wrap up, I need to share some of the things I learned when I fell down the rabbit hole of Australian Rules Football, also known as footie. It you squint, it’s sort of like American football mashed up with soccer and rugby? But it’s got its own thoroughly entertaining rules. First, the field. It’s played on a field shaped like an egg that’s about twice the size of a soccer pitch — and 6-10 times larger than an American football field. The goal is to kick an oval-shaped ball between two very tall goalposts. They’re just… sticks… reaching up into the air, no crossbar. Players have to get break the plane of the goal line with the ball, either on the ground or in the air. But the ball can’t be thrown. There are no nice long bomber passes. They can kick the ball or run with it, but it has to bounce or touch the ground every 15 meters. And the game is full contact so tackling is allowed. But there are no pads or helmets. And, this is my favorite bit, to swipe the ball out of the air, you’re also allowed to use other players as a human step ladder. It’s a spectacular spectacle. I’ll put a video in show notes.

Melissa: That’s the Australia 101.

David: Are you ready for Two Truths and a Lie? Statement 1: In 1932, the Australian government started a war against some feral camels in the Western Australian desert. They lost.

David: Statement 2: For a long time, it was assumed the world’s oldest verifiable stories were Greek. They’re not. They’re Aboriginal Australian stories.

David: Statement 3: The architect of the Sydney Opera House died in 2008, never having seen the finished building in person.

David: So, let’s take them one at a time. In 1932, the Australian government started a war against some feral camels in the Western Australian desert. They lost. That’s not true! In 1932, the Australian government started a war against some feral camels in the Western Australian desert. They lost.

David: There are feral camels in Australia. A lot of them. They were imported in the 1800s by British colonists to help survey the outback. When the railways arrived and made them redundant, many were set free. Australia now has more feral camels than anywhere else on Earth — perhaps as many as a million. But no — the war-with-camels story is the one I made up.

David: I wanted an excuse to talk about a real war the Australian government fought on Australian soil, and lost. It wasn’t against camels. It was against emus.

David: In late 1932, the wheat farmers of Western Australia were having a bad year. The Great Depression had crushed wheat prices; a subsidy the government had promised hadn’t arrived; and about twenty thousand emus — the six-foot, hundred-pound flightless birds that are, functionally, a small curious dinosaur in a feather boa — had discovered that wheat farms were basically emu buffets. The farmers, many of them recently returned First World War veterans, wrote to the Minister of Defence and asked for the army.

David: The Minister said yes. He sent Major G.P.W. Meredith of the Royal Australian Artillery, two soldiers, two Lewis machine guns, and ten thousand rounds of ammunition. The plan was to line the emus up and mow them down. The emus did not agree.

David: The emus, sensing a machine gun the way a small bird senses a hawk, scattered into groups of ten or twenty and ran off in different directions. Emus can hit thirty miles an hour, and they can keep it up. The soldiers chased one group in a truck; the truck got tangled up in a fence; the emus kept going. Over about a month of trying, the guns fired thousands of rounds and killed maybe a thousand birds. The Australian press had a field day.

David: Meredith withdrew, filed his report, and did the thing you do when you have just spent a month losing to birds. He included a line about how much ammunition the birds seemed able to soak up without slowing down. ‘If we had a military division with the bullet-carrying capacity of these birds,’ he wrote, ‘it would face any army in the world.’

David: So, ‘For a long time, it was assumed the world’s oldest verifiable stories were Greek. They’re not. They’re Aboriginal Australian stories.’

Melissa: That’s true!

David: For a long time, it was assumed the world’s oldest verifiable stories were Greek. They’re not. They’re Aboriginal Australian stories.

David: In 2015, a linguist at the University of New England named Nick Reid and a geographer at the University of the Sunshine Coast named Patrick Nunn published a paper in the journal Australian Geographer that did something nobody had quite done before.

David: They collected twenty-one Aboriginal stories from coastal groups all around Australia — from the Kimberley in the northwest, from the Gulf of Carpentaria up north, from the Great Barrier Reef, from the south coast facing Antarctica, all the way around — and every one of the twenty-one stories described the same event. A time when the coastline stretched much further out. A time when what are now islands were the tips of peninsulas. A time when hunting grounds that are now underwater were dry land where you could stalk kangaroos. And then a time when the water came in, and changed all of that.

David: Reid and Nunn matched each story to the specific geography it described — the local strait, the local island, the specific patch of what is now seabed — and cross-referenced it against the detailed maps geologists have of Australian sea levels at the end of the last ice age. Every single story matched a real, dateable moment when that specific stretch of coastline flooded, somewhere between roughly seven thousand and thirteen thousand years ago. Which is to say – the ancient Aboriginal stories were true.

David: Here’s one, from a group of islands in the southern Gulf of Carpentaria called the Wellesley Islands. This is the story as Reid and Nunn paraphrase it in one of their essays:

In the beginning, as far back as we remember, our home islands were not islands at all as they are today. They were part of a peninsula that jutted out from the mainland, and we roamed freely throughout the land without having to get in a boat like we do today. Then Garnguur [GARN-goor], the seagull woman, took her raft and dragged it back and forth across the neck of the peninsula, letting the sea pour in and making our homes into islands.

David: The geologists confirm that Garnguur was busy. The Wellesley Islands were connected to the mainland by a low strait that flooded roughly ten thousand years ago as global sea levels rose at the end of the last ice age. What the story describes — the peninsula, the neck of land, the flooding — is exactly what the seafloor shows.

David: Reid does the math on how long the story has been kept alive. If a generation is about twenty-five years, ten thousand years is somewhere in the neighborhood of four hundred generations. Grandparent to grandchild, grandparent to grandchild, four hundred times in a row, with the story arriving at each stop with the peninsula still in the right place, and the seagull woman still dragging her raft. Reid, who is not a man given to hyperbole, told Scientific American the whole thing was ‘gobsmacking.’

David: As amazing as that is, though, those aren’t the oldest accurately preserved human stories on earth. There’s a story from the Klamath people of Oregon about the eruption that formed Crater Lake, which happened over seven thousand years ago. The Klamath have been telling thet story ever since.

David: And there is a story that the Gunditjmara people of Victoria have been telling about the eruption of a volcano called Budj Bim, which a 2020 study suggested might date back thirty-seven thousand years. But the sea-level stories are a body of evidence, twenty-one voices from twenty-one different parts of the coastline, all saying the same true thing across at least three hundred generations. So when someone from the Wellesley Islands tells you what their great-great-great-great-great-grandmother said about the coastline — and the seabed says she was right — you are not listening to legend. You are listening to news that has been on its way to you since before the invention of writing.

David: So that means this is also true: The architect of the Sydney Opera House died in 2008, never having seen the finished building in person.

David: Jørn Utzon lived for forty-two years after the Sydney Opera House opened. And he never once set foot inside it. The story of how that happened is a heartbreaker — and, as it turns out, one of the great late-life reconciliations too. It’s told in a 2018 book by Helen Pitt called The House: The Dramatic Story of the Sydney Opera House and the People Who Made It. Here’s the short version.

David: Utzon was a Danish architect, thirty-eight years old and largely unknown outside Scandinavia, when he decided to enter a competition being run by the New South Wales state government. They wanted to build an opera house on Bennelong Point in Sydney. It was 1956. There were 233 entries from 32 countries. The judging panel had four members. Three of them were doing the slog of culling in Sydney when the fourth arrived, late, from the United States. That fourth judge was the Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen — of Gateway Arch fame, of TWA terminal fame, the wonder boy of mid-century modernism. Saarinen looked at what his colleagues had already shortlisted. Then he asked to see the entries they had rejected before he arrived. He rummaged through the pile. He pulled out entry number 218. He looked at it. He looked at it some more. Then, according to Pitt, he said, in a heavy Finnish accent: “Gentlemen, here is your opera house.”

David: Entry 218 was Utzon’s. The other three judges, who had already thrown it out, came around. In January 1957, the winner was announced. Utzon was in his kitchen in Denmark when the phone rang.

David: Now — the design he had submitted was beautiful. It was also, according to the engineers who had to build it, geometrically impossible. Each of the great white shells that make up the roof was a different curve. Every panel would have had to be individually cast and individually stress-tested, at a cost beyond the state’s means. Utzon spent four years wrestling with the problem in his studio in Hellebæk. He eventually cracked it — the shells could all be cut from a single imaginary sphere, so every panel could be mass-produced.

David: By 1965, the shells were rising over the harbor. The budget had ballooned from an original seven million Australian pounds to more than fifty. The schedule had slipped by years. And then a state election changed the government. The new Public Works Minister named Davis Hughes. He had no patience for a Danish architect who was making him look bad in the papers — and decided to put that Utzon in his place. He stopped paying him. In February 1966, Utzon sent in a letter of resignation intended as a shot across the bow, expecting to be talked back. He wasn’t. Three months later, he and his family flew out of Sydney. The Australian government finished the building without him, under a local architect named Peter Hall.

David: The Opera House opened on the 20th of October, 1973. Queen Elizabeth II cut the ribbon. Utzon was invited. He wrote back from Hellebæk politely declining. He couldn’t, he explained, be the guest of a government while publicly criticising one of its ministers. He stayed home.

David: When Pitt was doing the research for her book, she had access to Utzon’s papers. Among his letters and drawings and receipts, she found something. She found that, in 1969, three years after he’d left Sydney, Utzon was still paying his dues to remain on the register of architects in New South Wales. He was hoping to be called back. The invitation never came. He paid the fee anyway.

David: But — the story does not end in the low place. In the late 1990s, the New South Wales government reached out. They asked if Utzon would consult on renovations to the interiors. They had never been finished to his original vision. He was in his eighties by then, no longer able to travel. So his son Jan took on the work, on his father’s behalf. Utzon reviewed drawings in Denmark; Jan carried them to Sydney. In 2003, Utzon won the Pritzker Prize — architecture’s Nobel — largely for the Opera House. In 2004, a room inside the building was renovated to his original design and named the Utzon Room. In 2007, UNESCO declared the Sydney Opera House a World Heritage Site, one of the youngest buildings ever to receive that status. Utzon, in a house he’d designed for himself on Mallorca, was reportedly delighted.

David: He died at home on the 29th of November, 2008. Ninety years old. He had seen the building in thousands of photographs, in his son’s phone videos, in the drawings Jan carried back and forth across the world. He had never stood on the granite steps in front of it. Never looked up from beneath the shells. Never watched the light on the harbour through the great glass walls.

David: But those shells are up there. On Bennelong Point, where Aboriginal people gathered for tens of thousands of years, where a Danish stranger sketched an idea in 1956, where a Finnish stranger fished it out of a bin — the sun hits those shells every morning. Something like ten million people visit them a year. The rest of us, if we’re lucky, will get there eventually.

Melissa: My first recommendation is ‘The White Earth’ by Andrew McGahan. This is a coming-of-age story and family saga wrapped in the trappings of a Gothic novel — it’s almost Gothic horror. There are elements that flirt with the supernatural, but the true horrors are the ones instigated and carried out by mortal men.

Melissa: This story is set in the ‘present’ of 1992 with flashbacks through history from the 1800s to the mid-20th century. The plot turns on real-life historial events including a devastating drought in the early 1990s, the legend of a lost cache of gold, and the court case of Mabo vs. Queensland. That was a landmark case in 1992 that gave Indigenous Australians rights to land and waters according to their traditional laws and customs.

Melissa: The geographical setting of the book is Dalby, a rural outpost in the Darling Downs. That’s in Queensland, on Australia’s east coast. Unlike the flat, dry outback, this area is notable for rolling hills and farmland. It’s called the ‘Salad Bowl of Australia.’ With deep, nutrient-rich black soil great for growing grains, cotton, and beef. Looming over the farmlands are the Bunya Mountains — and an ancient conifer rainforest with red cedar and the largest bunya pine forest in the world.

Melissa: The Bunya Mountains were a sacred place to the Indigenous Australians in the area. They gathered there every three to four years for a celebration that included ceremonies, sports, trade, marriages, and eating the bumper crop of bunya nuts produced by the bunya pines.

Melissa: All of this — the ancient trees, the fertility of the land, indigenous rites — are more than background here. They’re essential to the story. Fire is also a recurring theme in the book. It literally opens with flames. These are the first lines:

One spring date in late 1992, when William was halfway between his eighth birthday and his ninth, he looked out from the back verandah and saw, huge in the sky, the mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion.

Melissa: What he witnesses is not a nuclear bomb, but a mundane, life-changing fire in the wheat field. His father, who we learn fairly quickly is not a successful farmer, has died in the fire started by a damaged harvesting machine. There’s no bomb, but William’s life is incinerated just the same.

Melissa: His mother is incapable of mothering — she has a nervous condition or migraines or something we only vaguely understand because William only vaguely understands. With their sole bread-winner gone and their farm in ashes, their only choice is to move to Kuran Station, the home of William’s great-uncle John.

Melissa: John is a fascinating character. I won’t ruin the story by telling you too much about him, but I will say that he does not use the phrase Indigenous Australians, if you get my meaning. He is obsessed with his legacy and returning his manor house to its former glory.

Melissa: His house was once a glittering showpiece for the success of the surrounding farmland. But William’s first glimpse of it reveals its changed fortunes. The roof sags; windows are smashed or covered with plywood. The once-grand garden is overgrown with weeds, forgotten laundry hangs between the lampposts, the swimming pool is empty and cracked.

Melissa: Inside, it’s worse. Entire rooms on the ground floor are closed off. William and his mother huddle in drafty, moldy rooms, meeting up with the housekeeper in the shabby dining room for grim, silent meals. Upstairs, behind locked doors, is his uncle’s study. A mysterious place William has been forbidden to enter.

Melissa: Over and over again, the adults in William’s life let him down in unconscionable ways — even as they make plans in which he plays a pivotal role. Uncle John is hoping to groom an heir. His mother needs financial security. They don’t care about him, but they need him.

Melissa: Eventually, Uncle John’s behavior takes a slightly paternal turn, but it’s clear he’s grooming the boy in his image. He introduces William to what he calls his ‘important work’ and important friends, shows him around the estate, and takes him to a secret waterhole in a remote corner of their land — a place that seems possessed of sacred magic.

Melissa: The author Andrew McGahan hits every Gothic note exactly right. The sublime landscape and oppressive heat. The beleaguered orphan. The curse that haunts this family. A wrath-of-god storm and unquiet graves. There’s even a creepy housekeeper to rival Mrs. Danvers from the novel ‘Rebecca.’ This thing is a melodramatic epic.

Melissa: But the narrative is threaded with sneaky social commentary and history lessons. The early signs of the climate crisis. Stories about the logging industry. The land rights fight. All shocking in their hypocrisy and casual cruelty.

Melissa: But still, the book is beautifully written with thrilling adventure scenes and the sympathy that only an orphaned, unloved protagonist can engender. It’s a haunting story with a slew of metaphorical ghosts — and it’s a fascinating trip through two centuries in Australia. It’s ‘The White Earth’ by Andrew McGahan.

David: My first book is ‘The Dry’ by Jane Harper. When we asked our audience about books in Australia, half of them said the title of this book before we finished the word “Australia.” Enthusiasm is high for this title.

David: This is a crime novel. It’s set in a small town, Kiewarra, somewhere in rural Victoria. There’s a once-in-a-century drought happening. The book starts with a man named Aaron Falk driving back into Kiewarra. It’s the first time he’s been back in twenty years, and he is counting the hours until he can leave.

David: He’s a federal police officer in Melbourne now. Financial crimes. Thirty-six years old, pale and blonde. He’s wearing a wide-brimmed canvas hat with his black funeral suit – because the alternative is melanoma. He grew up in Kiewarra — and he left at sixteen, under a dark cloud. The cloud was another death. There was a girl named Ellie Deacon; she drowned in the river. There were rumors then. There are rumors now.Falk is back in town because of a friend of his: Luke.

David: Luke Hadler, a farmer, local born and bred, has apparently killed his wife and his six-year-old son with a shotgun, and then turned it on himself. Their baby daughter Charlotte is eighteen months old; she somehow survives. The town has spent about a week trying to get to a story everybody can live with. The drought broke him. The pressure broke him. It happens. The eighteen-month-old survived. Falk doesn’t believe it. He also does not want to be here.

David: He arrives for in town planning to stay eighteen hours. Show up, pay his respects, get out. Then Luke’s grieving father slips him a note. The notes says: ‘You lied. Luke lied. Be at the funeral.’ So now he’s staying.

David: What unfolds is a double mystery: the present-day Hadler killings and the twenty-year-old Ellie Deacon case, both coming to the surface at the same time. And the thing that makes The Dry work is that the place itself is doing as much of the work as the plot.

David: The drought is an antagonist. Kiewarra is a town that’s dying. The main street is mostly boarded-up shopfronts; Falk walks past where the bookshop used to be, where the bakery used to be. The people who are left are, in his old friend Gretchen’s words, “walking around like zombies. Not sure what to do, what to say. Watching each other. Trying to work out who’ll be next to snap.”

David: There’s a scene about a third of the way in where Falk walks out to the Kiewarra River — the river he and Luke and Ellie used to swim in as kids. And it’s just not there anymore. It’s a dry scar.

David: Harper is great with the heat. You can feel the late-afternoon sun. The car-door handle that sears your hand. The fly that lands on Gretchen’s lip in the middle of a serious conversation about murder, and she just brushes it away. The collective claustrophobia of mourners spilling out of a community center because the air conditioner is losing it. You understand why these people are at the end of their rope.

David: She’s also very funny about Falk. He is, by his own account, an “albino”-pale thirty-six-year-old with skin “the blue hue of skimmed milk” who has felt his whole life “that the Australian sun was trying to tell him something.” He is not your standard detective. He is somebody who, every time he checks his watch, is calculating exactly how long he has left before he can get out of town. He checks his watch a lot. He hates his hometown. A good part of his hometown hated him first.

David: Now — about Jane Harper.

David: Harper isn’t Australian. She was born in Manchester and moved to Australia with her family when she was eight. Before The Dry, she spent thirteen years as a print journalist on two continents — first in the UK, then in Melbourne, writing for the Herald Sun. She wrote The Dry in her spare time, mostly through a writing course, and the manuscript won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript before it was even bought. Then it got bought. Then it sold more than a million copies, was translated into more than forty languages, and became a feature film starring Eric Bana, in 2020. So that worked out.

David: Aaron Falk turns up in two more novels — Force of Nature in 2017, also now a film, and Exiles in 2022, which Harper has said is his final book. She’s also written three standalones: The Lost Man, set in the Queensland outback, which a lot of readers think is her best; The Survivors, set on the Tasmanian coast, recently adapted as a Netflix series; and a brand-new one called Last One Out, published earlier this year. She has been become the reigning queen of Australian rural crime. Sometimes people call it Aussie Noir. Or Outback Noir. Whatever that is, The Dry is where it starts.

David: If you want a crime novel where you can feel the heat coming off the page — and a very strong sense of rural Australia — this book is a good place to start. It’s The Dry by Jane Harper.

Melissa: My second recommendation is ‘Platypus Matters: The Extraordinary Story of Australian Mammals’ by Jack Ashby. This is an engaging blend of memoir and personal observations, zoological facts, and opinionated commentary on the state of science and museums.

Melissa: The author Jack Ashby is a zoologist and works at the Museum of Zoology at Cambridge University. But he also spends a lot of time in the field. Stories of his adventures seeking out shy Australian mammals are like confetti sprinkled throughout, and he spins a good yarn.

Melissa: For all of his training and expertise, he reacts to cute animals like I would. Take, for example, the western pygmy-possum. It’s tiny, only about 2 inches (6 cm) long with big round eyes, a little snout, enormous ears that it folds down over its face when it sleeps, and a long tail that spirals into a perfect coil. Ashby says it looks like it was ‘designed by a cartoonist whose brief was to come up with the most adorable creature that their imaginations could muster.’ He goes on to write that when you wake a pygmy-possum, ‘it sits curled up in the cup of your palm, slowly rousing from your body heat. The heart melts.’

Melissa: In his story about the first time he saw a platypus in person he admits he had tears in his eyes. He also explains that there’s no accepted term for a baby platypus. Although the name for baby echidnas — puggles — has, as he says, ‘obvious charm,’ he proposes that baby platypuses should be called platypups. [DAVE] He also, delightfully, uses the term platypusology. He’s basically heart-eye emojis about Australian mammals. It’s very endearing.

Melissa: The first few chapters of the book are devoted to unpacking amazing facts about the platypus. This is the perfect book for anyone who was obsessed with the encyclopedia, Farmer’s Almanac, or Guinness Book of World Records as a kid.

Melissa: Herewith, some of the many things I learned about the platypus.

Melissa: It has a bill that looks like a duck’s, but it’s leathery. A body like a mole, feet like an otter, cheek pouches like a hamster, and bony grinding pads in its mouth instead of teeth. It’s semi-aquatic — a platypus can dive up to 75 times an hour when its foraging for food underwater. They lay eggs, but also produce milk — although they don’t have nipples. Their fur fluoresces under UV light, but scientists don’t know why. And the males are venomous. Oh, also, their front feed are webbed. As Ashby puts it, ‘Platypus limbs are like Swiss Army knives, with gadgets for walking, swimming and digging.’

Melissa: I think on hearing this, most of us would say, ‘Whoa. Weird!’ and mean it as a compliment. But Ashby takes issue with describing Australian mammals as weird. His argument is that if we other these animals, we make them seem lesser, and that puts them in danger. Australia has the worst mammal extinction rate of any place on Earth. Ashby believes that minimizing the wonder of its animals goes hand-in-hand with discounting Aboriginal contributions to understanding them — and all of that can be traced back to Australia’s colonial history. There are a few times when he shouts from his podium, but it’s hard to fault someone so earnest.

Melissa: After you get to know the platypus, subsequent chapters turn to other Australian mammals: wombats, wallabies, dingos, quokkas, and a bunch of tiny marsupials that are fun to say: quolls, dibblers, dunnarts, bandicoots… and then there’s the echidna. It’s a mammal about the size of a basketball with spines like a porcupine and a pouch like a marsupial. Its front feet are shaped like spades for digging, and their hind feet point backwards. If you scare one a little, it rolls into a protective ball. If you scare it a lot, it flattens itself out, tummy down, then shimmies its whole body until it’s partially buried in the dirt, clinging to the earth with its sharp claws. It’s very ‘you don’t see me.’

Melissa: The final chapters are about taxidermy, the role museums play in conservation, and how to decolonize natural history. The book is peppered with quotes and illustrations from the journals of the 19th-century naturalists. Much of it is quaint and enlightening. But some of those guys were straight-up racists, and they killed a lot of animals to learn about them. Those bits are unpleasant to read.

Melissa: I must warn you, there is a lot of discussion of poo. It begins with wombats pooping out little cubes, which is sorta cute, and then gets into some descriptions that… if you were a 9-year-old boy, you would find them hilarious. Overall, I enjoyed that this book gave me more insight into animals that make me squee. It’s ‘Platypus Matters: The Extraordinary Story of Australian Mammals’ by Jack Ashby.

David: My second book is Question 7 by Richard Flanagan. This book. This isn’t the kind of book that I’d usually reach for — it’s a memoir, with fictional literary bits. It’s also philosophical. Among other things, it explores the idea that the thoughts of strangers ripple through our lives in profound and unexpected ways.

David: I have a friend who likes to say, ‘It’s a thinker!’ She’s usually making fun of something when she says it. But, yeah, this is a thinker. But I started flipping through it, got hooked, and, two days later, I’d finished this extraordinary book. Let me see if I can tell you a little bit about it.

David: The title, and this is not going to make it sound any less like homework, is from Anton Chekhov. Very early in his career, he was broke and writing for money. He wrote a spoof of a hated Russian school math textbook, and question 7 in his parody goes like this:

Wednesday, June 17, 1881, a train had to leave station A at 3 a.m. in order to reach station B at 11 p.m.; just as the train was about to depart, however, an order came that the train had to reach station B by 7 p.m. Who loves longer, a man or a woman?

David: And that non-sequitur — a question about love dropped into a math problem — is where this whole book sits. When we’re talking about anything, love is right there. Messy human relations are always the non-sequitur in everything we do. Sure, dark matter may exist, but is you is or is you ain’t my baby? Question 7.

David: What Flanagan does with this is a straight-up piece of magic. He builds a chain of cause and effect that runs the length of the twentieth century — bouncing from feelings to science and back again.

David: Around 1914, the novelist H. G. Wells — terrified, in part, by an affair he was having with a much younger writer named Rebecca West — writes a novel called The World Set Free. In that book, he imagines atomic chain reactions destroying cities. Twenty years later, a Hungarian physicist called Leo Szilard reads it, has the actual idea for nuclear fission, and spends the next decade persuading the President of the United States that an atom bomb is possible. On August 6, 1945, at 8:15 in the morning, a bombardier named Thomas Ferebee drops the first atomic bomb over Hiroshima. About seventy thousand people die that morning. And eighty miles west, in a coal-mine tunnel running under the Inland Sea, Flanagan’s father — an Australian prisoner of war about to die of cold and starvation — is suddenly going to live. The war will end. He will be free.

David: Which is to say: Rebecca West has an affair with H. G. Wells, and half a century later the author, Richard Flanagan, gets to be born. They met, West and Wells, because she had written a biting review of his latest book, and he wanted to talk to her about it. There’s an argument to be made that the twentieth century turns on whether Rebecca West liked that book.

David: When I was reading ‘Question 7,’ there were two paragraphs in particular that just killed me. I want to read them to you. It’ll give a sense of what you’re in for. Before I read this, you should know that West was 21 when she met Wells. He was 47 and married with children. Here’s the passage:

Rebecca West and H. G. Wells were completely wrong for each other, they were completely right; she saw he wouldn’t leave his wife, he saw she needed a wife; they jarred each other and annoyed each other from the beginning and from the beginning they were inextricably physically attracted to each other. He thought love was just common sense, she thought it was a way of losing it, he was for sex without love, she was for the whole damn business. He believed he was reinventing literature as a form of proselytising journalism, while she wrote many years after their affair ended, as if still arguing with him, that art was ‘not a plaything, but a necessity, and its essence, form, is not a decorative adjustment, but a cup into which life can be poured and lifted to the lips and be tasted’, and the book she wrote those words in, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, reinvented journalism as literature, prefiguring much of what literature would become.

They should never have met, they were destined for each other, he would make her life and destroy her life and she would make her life in spite of his life, he would be an inexhaustible source of love and friendship for her for the next thirty-five years, he would madden her, he would win her and lose her and win her, she would be the one person he cared to see to the end, and to her immense surprise only after his death would she discover within herself the one thing she had never expected: a crack in the cup of life that opened into a desolation that was utter and inconsolable.

David: There are two things I want to point out about that passage. First, I think the writing is just lovely there. Second, it’s true, but he’s also making some leaps. Flanagan’s book is officially shelved as memoir, but it moves in and out of what he can possibly have known. When he tells us what Rebecca West was thinking in 1913, he’s writing fiction. He knows it. He wants us to know he knows it.

David: Flanagan won the Booker Prize in 2014, for ‘The Narrow Road to the Deep North.’ In November 2024, ‘Question 7’ won Britain’s Baillie Gifford Prize for non-fiction. With that win, Flanagan became the first author in history to win both the Booker Prize for fiction and the Baillie Gifford Prize for non-fiction. An unprecedented double,’ the prize’s director called it.

David: Asked by The Guardian how he felt about a book being called both a novel and a memoir, Flanagan said: ‘Delighted. Labels are for jam jars.’ And then he announced he wouldn’t actually be accepting the £50,000 prize money. Not yet. Not until Baillie Gifford committed publicly to a plan to reduce its investment in fossil fuels. He said he’d be glad to take the money on the day that plan was announced.

David: ‘Question 7’ is short — about a hundred and eighty pages. It’s the kind of book where you finish a chapter and have to sit still for a minute before you start the next one. It’s one of the most beautifully built things I’ve read in a long time. If you love a writer who can move you from a Japanese coal mine to a London flirtation to a rapid on the Franklin River in Australia, and make it all feel like the same continuous question — then this book might be exactly what you’re looking for. It’s ‘Question 7’ by Richard Flanagan.

Melissa: My final recommendation is ‘Picnic at Hanging Rock’ by Joan Lindsay.

Melissa: Imagine a steamy, sunny day in southern Australia. It’s Valentine’s Day so it’s the end of summer. The year is 1900, and you’re a 17-year-old girl — one of the privileged students at Mrs. Appleyard’s College for Young Ladies. The private boarding school was founded on the notion of bringing a proper British education to this new outpost of society. You and your friends are buzzing with anticipation: Today, the school is taking a holiday to Hanging Rock, a massive chunk of volcanic stone in the wilderness beyond the school gates. In honor of the festivities — and the oppressive heat — you’ve been given permission to remove your white gloves once the carriage has carried you away from the school grounds. Your flowing white dress, corset, and straw hat, however, WILL remain in place. You’re not savages. And you have been strongly admonished that the Rock is extremely dangerous. All tomboy foolishness or exploration is forbidden — but you will be expected to write an essay about the excursion on the Monday to follow.

Melissa: This is the setup to a gripping story told in 224 moody, precisely drawn pages. I suspect a lot of people listening are familiar with the outlines of the story. It’s pretty simple: Twenty schoolgirls and two governesses set out for the picnic at the mystical Hanging Rock. At the end of the day, three girls and a chaperone had vanished into the wilderness.

Melissa: This simple premise is magicked into something complex and layered as the rest of the book reckons with their disappearance, and the ripple effects it has on the school and community for decades afterward. As the narrator tells us, ‘Unseen, unrecorded, the pattern of the picnic continued to darken and spread.’

Melissa: The narrator, by the way, unfurls the story with the perfect amount of voiciness. It is a PRESENCE: OF the story, but not IN the story. An observant cocktail of wry and rueful. Which contributes to the overall vibe. And this book is MAJOR vibes.

Melissa: It’s a dark fairytale drenched in sunshine. But instead of making things clearer, the light just makes the shadows seem more impenetrable. The sensation of reading this book is like peering at a vista through gauze: You can’t quite see anything clearly through the soft haze. Even when generally nice things are being described — flowers blooming, birdsong in the air, affection among the girls — there’s a low thrum of dread. The wilderness is menacing. Dreams are fraught with foreboding. Conversations have lurking subtext.

Melissa: There’s a languidness about it — both in the telling of the story and the plot itself. During their outing, the sun leaches away the schoolgirls’ energy. The picnic leaves them in a stupor, their spirit of happy anticipation depleted. Later, after the disappearance, they have trouble recalling details — the whole endeavor seeming like a dream.

Melissa: The plot plays out like a true crime story told with a pastiche of Victorian voice and a sort of psychedelic ’60s dreaminess. It’s unsettling and weird and beautiful, while also being quite suspenseful. But it’s not just a mystery. It’s woven with subtle jabs at colonialism, classism, Victorian mores, the plight of women, and the ephemeral bonds of friendship. All smart, all well handled. No soapbox, just needle-sharp observations.

Melissa: So the reading experience, based on the book alone, is fantastic. Highly recommended. The story gets even more intriguing when you learn how Joan Lindsay came to write it.

Melissa: Lindsay was 71 years old when she published this book. She’d been a working writer for decades before writing this, her most famous work. So don’t let anyone tell you you’re too old to do anything.

Melissa: From the age of 13, Lindsay attended a boarding school called Clyde Girls Grammar School which later moved to a location near Hanging Rock. She was coy in interviews about how much the story drew on real life, and the book opens with these words:

Whether ‘Picnic at Hanging Rock’ is fact or fiction, my readers must decide for themselves. As the fateful picnic took place in the year 1900, and all the characters who appear in this book are long since dead, it hardly seems important.

Melissa: She was a known believer in the supernatural and was interested in the idea of time slips. She sometimes claimed her novel came to her in a dream. She said it seemed so real when she awoke, she could feel the hot breeze blowing through the gum trees and hear the peals of the girls’ laughter. Years later, when she visited the set of the 1975 film adaptation, she greeted the actress playing one of the characters with a hug and exclaimed, ‘Oh, Miranda, it’s been so long.’

Melissa: You could easily build a reading project around this novel. It’s inspired literary debates and hot takes for decades — a fire that was only fueled when a final, missing chapter, excised by the original editor, was published in 1987, three years after Joan Lindsay’s death. It’s also taken on a second life on film: the 1975 movie is considered a classic, and there’s a buzzy 2018 series with a stacked young female cast. Don’t miss the creepy painting that inspired the title, and, if you really want to go for it, you can go hiking in Hanging Rock yourself. Finally, this would make an excellent read-along with ‘The Governesses’ by Anne Serre. I’ll put the relevant links in show notes.

Melissa: This weird little book is ‘Picnic at Hanging Rock’ by Joan Lindsay.

David: Those are five books we love, set in Australia. Got something we missed? Come tell us on Patreon. Every week, we hang out with listeners after the episode — swapping stories, trading ideas, and keeping the conversation going. It’s just $3 a month, and you’ll help us keep making this show. Join us. We’ll save you a seat.

David: Be sure to drop by our show notes at strongsenseofplace.com. We’ve got some really lovely footage of the Sydney Opera House. We’ve got video of a wombat eating corn like he’s mad at it. We’ll introduce you to the Ballarat Wildlife Park, which is just about everything you’d want from an Australian zoo: wombats, wallabees, tree kangaroos, komodo dragons, koalas, quokka.

David: Mel, where are we going for our next episode?

Melissa: We’re heading off to boarding school.

David: Thanks for listening, and we’ll talk to you soon.

[cheerful music]

Top image courtesy of Alex King/Unsplash.