Batavia

Another Australian novel for the Aussie Author Challenge; I recently finished Batavia by Peter Fitzsimons. I am a fan of Peter's writing - he makes history very accessible and turns the historical figures into three-dimensional (living and breathing) characters. This novel about the ship wrecked Batavia was no different.

This story is truly horrific, and hard to believe that it could actually happen. But they do say that real life is often stranger than fiction. I know that Peter will have taken some liberties in developing character traits, but they can't have been too much of a stretch, since true evil must have existed for these events to have occurred.
   So in the 1600s, a huge ship, travelling for the Dutch East India Company from the Netherlands to Indonesia on a spice run (and carrying a huge fortune of bullion) hit a reef off Geraldton in WEstern Australia and sunk. It was the ship's maiden voyage. The survivors got themselves into low islands along the belt of reefs. The captain of the ship took one of the long boats and got themselves up to Indonesia to return with another ship to rescue those stranded.
   In the meantime, the survivors became divided by the scheming of the 2IC on the Batavia. Gratuitous murder began, along with rape, the division and isolation of groups, bribery and captivity. Of the original 341 people on board the Batavia, only 68 survived!
   Peter's writing brings the history to life in an extremely readable, page-turning form. It is well researched, but presented in such a way that is not just listing facts.

The Ballad of Les Darcy

As part of the Aussie Author Challenge, this week I read The Ballad of Les Darcy by Peter Fitzsimons. I have now read about four of Peter Fitzsimons' novels, and he has a unique writing style - it is like he is sitting beside you telling you the story. He writes non-fiction, but he makes it like a proper story, rather than just reciting research. I was also lucky enough to hear him speak in Wagga Wagga two years ago, and had him sign a couple of his books.

I had heard nothing of Les Darcy, I am ashamed to say. I was a bit disappointed, because I thought it was going to be the story of a boxer-tured-war hero. In fact, he died when he was twenty-one, just after he had enlisted - he didn't even get to war.
   Even though he died so young, Les Darcy was already the middleweight champion of the world, and the light heavyweight and heavyweight champion of Australia! He is one of Australia's greatest athletes, ever, but he is virtually unknown (to my generation, at least). I am so glad that Peter Fitzsimons wrote this little gem of a novel (only about 50,000 words for the Books Alive initiative for the Australian Government).
   The novel has caught the flavour of the time, in the early 1910's and through the first years of World War I. I cannot believe the amount of pressure that the Australian press and public put Darcy under to join the Army. His mother refused to sign the paperwork, so whilst he was under twenty-one years of age, it wasn't his choice whether he joined up or not. But everyone seemed to ignore that fact.
   His spirit was also very inspiring. He was such a straight-living young man, who came from a family that must have struggled when he was young. There is very little about his early years, which I imagine to be very difficult. There is also very little about his relationship with his drunken father (who, somehow, manages to outlive his younger mother by about 8 years!). I might explore some other books written on Les Darcy, since I am intrigued by the struggling and working classes around the time of Australian federation.

Nancy Wake: A Biography of our Greatest War Heroine

In keeping with my promise to myself to read widely, and hopefully this will help improve my writing, I just finished reading Nancy Wake's biography by Peter Fitzsimons.

Nancy is an incredible woman, and there's no taking anything away from her life or her story.

I knew nothing about Nancy Wake until I went to see Peter Fitzsimons speak in Wagga Wagga upon the release of his autobiography: 'A Simpler Time'. He's a great speaker, and I knew he'd written quite a few books on various wars. He talked about he book about Nancy Wake. So I bought it after he'd finished speaking, and had him autograph it for me.

Peter Fitzsimons used a lot of cliches in his autobiography. I had hoped his voice wouldn't be so strong in his book on Nancy Wake. Unfortunately, it was. He's got a very distinct writing style, and he makes serious situations seem humorous. Nancy came across as a very frivolous party-girl before the war, and perhaps a lot of the sayings that Peter Fitzsimons used were her own. But I sometimes felt that the language used made the events that Nancy went through trivial, which they definitely were not.

I admire Nancy. I admire her strength and determination. I admire her survival. I feel pity for her, that Australians didn't give her the recognition she felt she deserved, or that nothing in life lived up to war time after WWII. She didn't seem able to settle into normality again, although she was used to living a wealthy fast-paced life before the war. I hope she has found some peace since Peter Fitzsimons wrote this book.

I highly recommend this book, because I think every Australian should be aware of what Nancy Wake did. Just be prepared for Peter's seemingly light-heartedness in his writing style.