Nerida Newton

I’ve been listening to Death of a Whaler by Nerida Newton as an audio book on my way to work each day, and I’m wondering why this book was ignored for the major awards of its year of publication (2006).

The central character, Flinch, is the ultimate anti-hero. He is short and scrawny; was born with a deformed leg; is jobless and uneducated, has no money and lives in a dingy pastel pink house. He has one pair of jeans that fit him – all the others trail the leg of the pant where one leg is shorter than the other. When he did have a job it was as a whaler – as near as one can be to a pariah in hippie Byron Bay of 1962, (and probably throughout Australia and the civilised world in 2009). He has an ancient ute nicknamed Millie ( what kind of name is that for a bloke to call his car?) but so far is he from the stereotypical Aussie male of heroic ingenuity, that when the ute breaks down, he can’t fix it. His spiteful mother Audrey gave him a miserable childhood, blaming him for her self-imposed loserdom, and it seems as if all of Byron Bay was glad to see the back of her when she died. Oh, and Flinch accidentally killed his best mate, Nate, too…

Flinch could so easily, then, have been a pathetic character and the story maudlin, but the author of The Lambing Flat (1) is too good a writer for that… For Flinch, while a recluse (and who wouldn’t want to be?) and burdened with awful emotional baggage, is no embittered loser. He is his own man. When he meets up with Karma, (who reminds me of Lizzy Dellora (the daffy blonde) in East of Everything ) he eventually overcomes his wariness and enjoys her open friendliness – but he doesn’t for one moment believe in the hippie spirituality stuff and isn’t about to go vegetarian any time soon. Newton portrays his occasional forays into the commune in a mixture of droll humour and awakening hope as he begins to emerge from his self-imposed isolation.

Byron Bay 1962 is as I have never seen it, a tatty, dingy place like so many of those daggy Queensland towns you drive through on your way to somewhere else. Newton has resisted the temptation to wax lyrical about the bay, and has instead chosen to remind us about its past as a whaling station. The innocence of the commune is in stark contrast to Nimbin today: yes, you can still catch a whiff of pot as you stroll through town, but you’re more likely to smell good coffee or to hear cash registers rather than meditational chanting. These scenes are great writing, untainted by that tiresome nostalgia you sometimes hear from people who whinge ‘Oh, you should have been here when it was unspoiled’.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2009/07/30/death-of-a-whaler-by-nerida-newton-read-by-c...… (mehr)