This Water: Five Tales by Melbourne author Beverley Farmer (b. 1941), is a collection of three novellas and two short stories, linked by exquisite images of water and harrowing musings on loss, reminiscent of Farmer’s preoccupations in a previous collection called A Body of Water (see my review).  But age mellows this collection, and the elemental forms of water and stone, ice and fire, light and darkness give the writing a mythic quality.  Yes, in the wake of my reading of Contemporary Fiction, A Very Short Introduction, I am mindful that this collection of tales shows that fiction can indeed take any form it likes.

The stories which bookend the work were the most vivid to me.  The last story, ‘The Ice Bride’ is chilling not because the bride lives in a palace of ice, but because she is imprisoned there, sheltered from the real world and learning only to see the world…

It took longer than it should have to read House of Stone by Zimbabwean author Novuyo Rosa Tshuma.  Weird, confusing, but fascinating too, it seems to be grounded in an oral storytelling tradition with a narrator who’s pulling the strings in an anarchic sort of way.  Zamani is definitely in charge of the narrative, breaking in every now and again to confide in the reader that he is orchestrating events in the present while extracting from unwilling witnesses their stories of the past.  But he is also manipulating the reader in order to gain sympathy for himself…

The story begins with the disappearance of 19 year-old Bhokasi.  His parents, Abed and Agnes are distraught (as any parents would be in the chaos of Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe) so they are vulnerable to Zamani’s upbeat assurances that all will be well, even though he knows full well that Bhokasi was hauled into a…

  Cultural warning: Indigenous readers please be aware that this post contains content about, and weblinks to video images of, a deceased person.

The Most Underrated Book Award (MUBA) is designed to unearth literary treasures that might otherwise have been overlooked – and the 2018 winner is certainly an example of that.  The MUBA award judges,  Sarah L’Estrange, Megan O’Brien and Toni Jordan said that Living in Hope, by Stolen Generations survivor Frank Byrne is an important story of survival and hope and that the award, coming just after the death of the author aged 80, offered some measure of comfort to his family. But Living in Hope is a very small book, published by a very small non-profit community publisher based in Mparntwe Alice Springs, and it’s a title that had not crossed my radar at all until the MUBA shone a light on it.  And yet it’s a book, like 

Elusive raptors,

rarely let you near.

When they do,

you are enraptured.

Melanistic red tail hawks have more melanin or pigment in their feathers than other hawks making them distinctive. It used to be thought these morphological distinctions were an isolated variant, but now scientists are noticing behavioral differences associated with the changes in feather color.

Melanistic hawks typically let me get much closer than other hawks and I wonder if this might be due to behavioral differences associated with their color variance. After all, it is often true, those who are different, are also braver!

Cheers to you from the brave and different hawks~

Wild Turkey tom (Meleagris gallopavo)

Yesterday afternoon I noticed a wild hen turkey near our feeder and as I drew near the window right below me was a tom strutting his stuff! Like the iconic Thanksgiving bird, he displays heightened mating season color and stance – blue skin on his head and bright red wattles, fanned tail, lowered striped wings and ruffed up iridescent back feathers. I love the way the hens virtually ignore their amorous advances, almost bored and seemingly unimpressed.

Relaxing his feathers and stopping only a few times to peck at some tidbit on the ground, he resumed his full mating stance, vibrating his tail as he stalked her across the yard and into the woods. Fascinating to watch!

Then today, our dog alerted me to another surprise visitor in the driveway – a bobcat! By the time I retrieved my camera he or she was beating a hasty retreat…

Bobcat (Lynx rufus) photo: J.Masson

My neighbor called today to let me know that our resident bear has returned from hibernation, larger than ever, visiting their compost pile and bird feeders last night. As they usually get the first visit, it’s nice of them to give me a heads-up to protect my own feeders. Their yard is very popular with wildlife and they get many more visitors than we do, perhaps because we have a dog or that their smorgasbord of feeders is enough for one-stop dining.

In conversing, I learned that the handsome bobcat I posted about the other day has been hunting squirrels off their feeders all winter. They kindly shared the above photo of this beautiful visitor calmly sitting on their deck! Check out that face and those huge paws!

According to this website, which was filled with a lot of information about the species, bobcat diet consists of…

White-tailed Deer track

Living in the country as we do, we share our land with many wild creatures. Though rarely seen as most are nocturnal, we occasionally see sign of them in a muddy footprint by the river or a soft spot of earth on the path. Once the snow falls, the whole world of animals outside our door comes to light through their tracks and it is breathtaking to see how vibrantly alive with wildlife are these fields and woods.

Mink tracks

Me and Ms. Fox

Seeing numerous tracks, large to very small, is like a tour of discovery every time I walk out. Identifying the owners is an intellectual guessing game.

In the past week, I’ve seen coyote, fox, bobcat, bear, deer, opossum, raccoon, otter, mink, rabbit, porcupine, squirrel, numerous birds and countless small species of rodents. Most on our small parcel of seven acres, a few on our…

The Book Thieves was an impulse loan from the library.  I’d heard a lot about the Nazi theft of artworks and their burning of books, but I knew nothing about the systematic theft of books…

But it takes only a moment’s thought to realise that of course there would have been precious collections of books all over Europe, and of course they would have been looted by the Germans, just as the precious artworks and other collectibles were.  Invaders have always looted the possessions of the vanquished, and all the major museums of the world have treasures that originally belonged elsewhere.  In some cases, perversely, that’s turned out to be a good thing: many of Afghanistan’s ancient treasures were smuggled out of the destructive hands of the Taliban and even if they’re in the hands of private collectors now, at least they still exist.  OTOH in the case of…