children's books
Jenny Pausacker
Garry Disher
The Divine Wind
Hodder Headline $14.95pb, 151pp
0 7336 0526 5
TEN YEARS AGO historical novels were an unwanted rarity in Australian children's publishing. Instead, there was a vogue for time-slip novels where a contemporary kid went travelling back into the past, as though history would be too hard for younger readers to handle without some sort of tour guide.
At the time I can remember worrying that his represented a kind of 'dumbing down'. But I needn't have worried. History moves in cycles and the historical novel is currently among the most vigorous and varied genres in Australian children's fiction -- sometimes set in Asutralia, sometimes focusing on children in concentration camps or streetkids in fourteenth century Jerusalem.
One of the most notable turning points in this particular cycle was Garry Disher's The Bamboo Flute. Disher's first person, present-tense narrative had an immediacy that whisked the reader across time and space faster than Doctor Who 's Tardis, subtly pointing out the parallels between the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Recession of the 1990s.
Now Disher has turned his attention to the period leading up to World War II, once again developing some provocative parallels between past and present. The Divine Wind begins with a time of innocence. Four kids roam happily around Broome -- the narrator Hart Penrose and his sister, Alice; Mitsi Sennosuke, born in Australia to Japanese parents; and Jamie Kilian, son of a government official.
Through Hart, Disher creates an aching nostalgia for a moment when race and class seemed irrelevant, a very different kind of nostalgia from the One Nation brand that pictures Australia as uncomplicatedly Anglo until ten minutes ago. Indeed, the only discordance in this idyllic time comes from Hart's mother, yearning for lost England and disapproving of her children's friendships with the 'Malays, Manilamen and Koepangers' who work on their father's pearling luggers.
But there are more troubles to come. Even before the war sets up barriers between the Penroses and the Sennusukes, Mitsi has turned away from Hart, just as Alice turns away from her station-owner lover Carl, after both men fail to defend the rights of Aboriginal people. At the midpoint of the novel Disher offers a telling insight into the domino effect of racism through Major Morrissey, who announces, 'Your Abo is unreliable. He'll collaborate. He'll guide the Japs through the bush.' ('Rubbish,' Alice says in reply.)