Imagen del autor

Jock Serong

Autor de The Rules of Backyard Cricket

8 Obras 271 Miembros 29 Reseñas

Sobre El Autor

Jock Serong is the author of Quota, which won the Ned Kelly 2015 award in the category of Best First Novel. (Bowker Author Biography)

Obras de Jock Serong

On the Java Ridge (2017) 50 copias
Preservation (2018) 47 copias
The Burning Island (2020) 32 copias
Quota (1669) 24 copias
The Settlement (2022) 18 copias

Etiquetado

Conocimiento común

Género
male
Nacionalidad
Australia

Miembros

Reseñas

Aboriginal readers are advised that this review
contains the names of deceased persons.

Third in the Furneaux Islands Trilogy, (see my reviews here) The Settlement is Jock Serong's fictionalisation of a dark chapter in Tasmania's history. It was longlisted for the 2023 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and the 2023 ALS Gold Medal, and at the time of writing is also longlisted for the 2023 Margaret and Colin Roderick Literary Award. (Which is what prompted me to take it from the TBR and read it now).

Jock Serong is an author who came to my attention when he won a British award for writing On the Java Ridge (2017), a literary thriller that doesn't feature violence against women. His first two novels were crime novels i.e. Quota (2014) and The Rules of Backyard Cricket (2016) and The Settlement concludes his historical fiction series about the European settlement of Bass Strait. (In an interview with Corrie Perkins, he reveals that his next book is set in the C20th century enabling him to avoid the arrival of the internet.)

If you've been reading my reviews for a while, you might remember my review of Lyndall Ryan's Tasmanian Aborigines, A History since 1803 (2012) which I read in the year it was published. It is a landmark history of 400+ pages, not listed among other reference books used by Serong for his novel. Of these I have Truganini by Cassandra Pybus and Tongerlongeter by Nicholas Clements and Henry Reynolds. I haven't read them yet, and that's the point. Many of the stories that we need to know about our country will be more widely known if written as popular fiction than in weighty non-fiction texts, and that's fine IMO as long as the fiction is written with respect for the history, especially where it's contested.

Robinson's legacy is contested. Lyndall Ryan describes him as an ethnographer and humanist. As I wrote in my review:
Ryan is insistent on the point that whatever the tragic consequences of his attempts, this man was the first to try to learn about the Tasmanian Aborigines, and without him they would certainly have been exterminated, probably by 1835. His journals reveal just how hard the settlers tried to do just that.

The blurb's 'pastoral settlers' who were taking over Tasmanian lands were former soldiers. Ryan explains that they were veterans of the Napoleonic War. They were experienced at killing other people. Again, from my review of Tasmanian Aborigines...
When the wars ended, discontented returned officers and gentlemen who felt they were owed recompense for their war service were (like soldier-settlers after WW1 in Australia) fobbed off with grants of land in remote places. In both cases, that land granted to them was falsely held to be terra nullius, land belonging to no one. The Napoleonic veterans fared better than their WW1 counterparts, however, because their grants of land were accompanied by a convict labour-force. It was this massive invasion of pastoral settlers that effected the transformation of Tasmania from a creole small-scale agricultural society – with some accommodation between roughly equal numbers of indigenous people and the settlers – to a pastoral society. The colonial population surged from about 2000 to 23,500 by 1830. There was bound to be resistance, and there was.

I read The Settlement with these perspectives in the back of my mind.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2023/07/23/the-settlement-furneaux-islands-trilogy-3-20...
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Denunciada
anzlitlovers | Jul 22, 2023 |
After two meritorious novels in Quota and The Rules of Backyard Cricket Jock Serong steps it up a gear with On the Java Ridge, a tense and emotive thriller about Australia's policies towards asylum seekers.

This is a much weightier topic for Serong, but he tackles it with aplomb. Isi Natoli is the temporary skipper of a tour boat taking some Australian surfers out in Indonesian waters. While they are sitting out a storm in a quiet lagoon, a boatload of asylum seekers is wrecked on the reef, and suddenly Isi finds herself having to manage a disaster.

Meanwhile, back in Canberra, Cabinet Minister Cassius Calvert is pushing a hard line against boat arrivals, ratcheting Australia's already cruel policies up a notch as he privatises all dealings with asylum seekers and announces that Australia will do no rescues of damaged refugee boats.

This book is a cracking read that perfectly captures both the horror that asylum seekers face and the endless cynicism of politicians willing to trash human lives for electoral advantage. Serong's device of having Australian holiday-makers present when the refugee boat founders allows us to envisage things that the Australian government determinedly keeps secret in the sure knowledge that, if the human impact was brought to light, these policies could only result in their utter condemnation. Since we cannot visit the places they are imprisoned in, and telling us what goes on there has been criminalised, then the work of a novelist like Serong is perhaps our best way of getting to the truth.
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Denunciada
gjky | 6 reseñas más. | Apr 9, 2023 |
Jock Serong's first novel won the Ned Kelly Award, Australia's top crime fiction award, so he is clearly one for crime fans to watch.

Dissolute lawyer Charlie Jardim is thrown a lifeline by a prosecutor and sent down to a small fishing town to interview a witness to a murder; the witness's story does not appear credible. While trying to get to the facts, Charlie encounters a hostile and uncooperative local community whose leading lights are the parents of the accused.

This is quite a good novel. It is engagingly told, and Charlie is a protagonist the reader can identify with. There's a few good plot twists, especially once we get to the trial, but I thought maybe not quite enough - another twist or two would have been welcome. A few of the characters were underdeveloped, and some were unimaginative Aussie stereotype characters. Still, this is a good start for Serong, who is definitely worth another try.… (más)
 
Denunciada
gjky | 4 reseñas más. | Apr 9, 2023 |
The Rules of Backyard Cricket is the story of two cricketing prodigies from the wrong side of the tracks. Darren, the narrator, is a gifted tearaway with scant regard for the rules, whereas his older brother Wally is a gimlet-eyed disciplinarian dedicated to his career.

The novel starts with Darren bound and gagged in the boot of a car, heading up the Geelong Road to Melbourne. In each chapter, he reveals a little more of his and Wally's backstory, and how things led up to his current predicament.

This book is best thought of as a "ripping yarn" style of novel rather than a whodunit, as there are few surprises. On that level it's very good, with a pacy plot told in a very engaging style.

Fans of cricket are going to have fun spotting character traits and incidents that Serong borrows; people acquainted with Melbourne's true crime stories are also going to recognise a few allusions. I think this is overdone though, to the point where I really wouldn't recommend this book to people not au fait with, or interested in, cricket.

Whoever designed the cover of this book should be fired; it pretty much gives away the ending
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Denunciada
gjky | 8 reseñas más. | Apr 9, 2023 |

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Estadísticas

Obras
8
Miembros
271
Popularidad
#85,376
Valoración
4.0
Reseñas
29
ISBNs
53
Idiomas
1

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