Winner in 1984 of Australia's prestigious Miles Franklin Award,
this is a largely conventional novel about modern-day whaling and
the barbarities thereof, interspliced with the story of commercial
finaglings in a small town, and with the saga of a tormented
family. Brutal, and serving an outmoded market, the whaling
industry nevertheless relentlessly continues as economic mainstay
of the seen-better-days town of Angelus on Australia's western
coast - although it's an industry that continues, after the arrival
of a motley but determined group of anti-whaling activists, with
something of a shaken conscience. A local young woman who joins the
activists is Queenie Coupar, last offspring of a family that traces
its beginnings back to Nathaniel Coupar, who worked here for a
whaling company in the 1830's, before Angelus even existed (or when
it was only a British penal colony and whaling outpost). Queenie's
conscience compels her to join the protesters, though her new
husband, the seemingly weak-spirited ex-journalist Cleve Cookson,
hardly shares her compulsion: in a quarrel over the matter,
accusing her of being "all into emotion," he fells her with a blow
of his fist. During their subsequent and miserable separation,
Queenie continues in the sea-going (and dangerous) protests, and
Cleve immerses himself further in the ancient journals of whaler
Nathaniel Coupar, which provide agonized glimpses of madness,
rapine, and cruelty, harbingers of the deaths and suicides, the
reader learns, that will plague the Coupar family down to the time
of, but excepting, Queenie herself. Before Queenie and Cleve are
reunited at book's end, there will be on-going portraits of
Queenie's irascibly stubborn and slowly dying grandfather, Daniel
Coupar; of the good Reverend William Pell; of bigot and pub-owner
Hassa Stoats; and of the loathsome commercial manipulator Des
Pustling, who wears a girdle, grows new sets of teeth as he loses
the old, and bit by bit buys up town and environs. An ambitious
symmetry of structure and symbol is blemished here by tiredly
familiar elements of town-expose, moments of callow preachiness
("and our future lies in communication between the species,
co-existence with the environment. Not in the follies of the
past"), and simple lapses of tone and judgement ("Oh God, no, she
thought. Please," or "Geez, he thought, geez"). But much else is
strong, not least the riveting journals of Nathaniel Coupar, and
the many evocations of weather and land. Earnest, hardly fresh in
manner, but often compelling. (Kirkus Reviews)
150 years after the establishment of land-based whaling in Australia, its last outpost is Angelus, a small town already struggling for survival. The arrival of the conservationists threatens the town's livelihood and disturbs the fragile peace. The author also wrote "Cloudstreet".
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