I thought long and hard before setting up my Gay/Lit LGBTQIA books category, because I like it when authors simply include LGBTQIA characters as part of the furniture, so to speak. If you’re writing about the modern world, then chances are that your characters ought to include some who are LGBTQIA because LGBTQIA people are everywhere. In rainbow families with or without kids; in schools, religious communities and the workplace; and lately, openly in our parliament. Which is all good, and as it should be, and so I shouldn’t really need a separate category. But it would be naïve to think that discrimination has gone away, or to imagine that some don’t suffer a crisis of identity, so there is also a place for books which explore issues of gender identity rather than treat diversity as a given. These books serve purposes both for those of us who seek to understand and those who relate to characters facing that kind of existential crisis.
Half Wild shows us the cruel consequences of a time when discrimination was so routine it was not even recognised as such. Sydney-based author Pip Smith has recreated what was a 20th century salacious scandal to bring to life the humanity of its central character. Eugenie Falleni was a real person who struggled with transgender identity, and Half Wild fictionalises the story of multiple lives: a childhood defined as a daughter; of an adolescent running away to live and work as a man; of two marriages where the wives did not know about the disguised sexuality of the person they had married; and ultimately of a stepfather —revealed before the courts to be a woman—charged with the murder of the first wife.
The novel is bookended with the memories of an elderly woman in hospital. Jean Ford was hit by a car in Oxford Street and is drifting in and out of coma. Her thoughts are incoherent, and then in a new chapter titled ‘Who She’d Like to Be, Wellington New Zealand, 1885-1896’, the story proper begins with the first person narrative of Tally Ho, baptised Eugenia and known to her bemused Italian parents as Nina. When she sees her mother having morning sickness once again, she declares that she doesn’t want to have babies…

Her face went still like the refrigerated pigs I once saw in the bond store at Queen’s Wharf.
Well, what are you going to do? Mamma said. Be a nun?
No, I said. I’m going to be a sailor, or a driver down the West Coast called Tally Ho, or a butcher boy like Harry Crawford.
She ruffled my hair. She said I was a funny little joker. Then she said I’d better get my tally ho to school or she’d butcher me herself. (p.12)

School, as you can imagine, is torture, and not just because Nina struggles to learn to read. There is a Father Kelly who knows the difference between an insolent child and a child who was not meant for the schoolroom but as soon as Nina escapes from his efforts to help she bolts away, feeling good to have that stale school air squeezed out of [her] lungs so nothing but life could flood back in.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2018/12/02/half-wild-by-pip-smith/ ( )