AusReading Month: The Rainbow and the Rose by Nevil Shute

Pilot Ronnie Clarke learns that Johnnie Pascoe, the man who had taught him to fly many years before, has crashed his plane while attempting to rescue a sick child from her isolated home on the rugged west coast of Tasmania. Pascoe is lying badly injured with only the child's mother to nurse him. The child's condition begins to improves but unless Pacoe receives medical attention for his fractured skull he will die.

Clarke is the narrator of the story and as he reminisces over the past and his association with the injured pilot, he makes the decision to go to the small town in Tasmania where Pascoe is based and endeavour to fly a doctor in to the area.

Clarke persuades the reluctant young local doctor to go with him and later finds out that he has never flown before. The first attempt to assist the injured man allows the doctor to drop a suitcase of medical equipment out of the plane onto the tiny airstrip next to the homestead but the doctor himself is unable to get out of the plane. Clarke returns to town as the weather conditions begin to deteriorate.

He spends the night at Pascoe's home waiting for a chance to try again the next day and learns about the older man's past, his secret history and painful memories.

As with all the books I've read by this author, I found the story simple but compelling. Nevil Shute has an easy style but he develops his characters so well. He has the ability to take a very ordinary sort of person, unwrap them and reveal their value and worth in the midst of their weaknesses and foibles. In doing this he helps the reader to empathise with his characters and I always come away from his books with a sense that he must have been a man who understood human nature but his response to that knowledge was not cynicism but kindness.

Throughout this book, Shute uses an interesting flashback technique which confused me at first and I wondered a few times what was going on. After a while I began to enjoy the way he used the technique even though it felt clunky at times. It was an interesting way to divulge information that the narrator would not have known.

This isn't one of his more well known books. Certainly, A Town Like Alice would be his best known book here in Australia and there was a TV mini-series of the story plus an earlier movie version. This is one version I've seen:

Other Nevil Shute books I've read and would recommend are:

Pied Piper  - set in WW2 in England and France.

On the Beach  - (near bottom of post) a novel dealing with a post nuclear catastrophe; set in Southern  Australian.

Nevil Shute Norway was born in England in 1899. He studied Engineering Science and worked as an aeronautical engineer. During World War 2 he worked on the development of secret weapons and after the war he settled in Australia where he lived until his death in 1960.

 Linking to Brona's Books:

Australian Natural History: Warrigal the Warrior by C.K. Thompson

Unfortunately C.K. Thompson's books are all out of print but we've been fortunate enough to pick up a few at secondhand book shops and Lifeline book sales. Our copy of Warrigal the Warrior was published in 1948 and is a wonderful story based on the Australian dingo.

Charlie Harrison was employed as a dingo-killer or 'dogger' and in his travels he came upon a young part-dingo pup who had been separated from his parents. Harrison's first reaction was to immediately shoot the animal, but when the young dingo showed no fear of the man and gazed up at him curiously, the usually tough dingo-killer couldn't bring himself to do the deed. When the dingo then approached Harrison, licked his hand and allowed himself to be picked up, he won his way into the dingo-killer's heart.

Harrison returned to his camp with the dog and not long afterwards two weary prospectors came along and were invited to share a meal.

When the visitors realised that Harrison had a dingo pup and intended to keep it they were surprised and tried to talk him into killing the dog but he refused:

"Don't do it, mate," said McPherson earnestly. "You'll have nothing but trouble if  you start that. I've known other fellows to try to rear dingoes as pets and every one of them regretted it. So will you. Apart from anything else, you'll never hold him. He might stay with you for years, but in the end he will go back to the wilds."

"I don't agree with that at all," said Harrison. "He is only a pup now. If I can keep him away from the dingo pack from now on, he will become domesticated - just the same as if he were a sheep dog or a cattle dog. Why should he want to return to the dingo pack?"

"Because the wild and primitive life is born in him, " said McPherson. "Sheep and cattle dogs have been bred under domestic conditions  for thousands of years. They are part and parcel of human life, yet sometimes they go wild. So what chance have you got with a dingo?"

Harrison eventually took Warrigal into town when he went to visit his sister and her husband. When he had to travel to the city, he asked them to care for the dog, and gave instructions that Warrigal should be kept tied up at all times. His brother-in-law, unaware that the dog was a dingo, took pity on the animal and started to let him off his chain at night.  The township became perplexed when they started to find chickens, sheep and other animals that had been killed during the night with no trace of a perpetrator. The riddle was solved when a boy who had teased Warrigal during the day when he was tied up to his kennel, was given detention after school for fighting in the playground and was required to write an essay on Australian wildlife:

Moodily he turned the pages and came across another animal. The dingo. Yes, a few bits about dingoes would go well in the essay.

But as the boy began to write from the book, his interest became aroused. He threw down his pen and gave himself up wholly to reading.

"Dingo or warrigal...the Australian wild dog," he mumbled aloud. "It has a sharp muzzle, ears short and erect...bushy tail...color varies between light reddish brown and black...unable to bark, but yelps...at night howls dismally...a silent hunter..."

This book was a fascinating insight into an animal that has been little understood. When C.K. Thompson wrote this book more than sixty years ago he said in the introduction that,

There is a new generation that knows little about the bush and the creatures that inhabit it.

The tragic Azaria Chamberlain case in the Northern Territory in 1980 highlighted this:

  "at the time, Australia wasn't able to believe that a wild dog could do such a thing."

And more recently an episode on Fraser Island, off the southern coast of Queensland that resulted in the death of a 9 year old boy.

I have not sought to glorify Warrigal, neither have I condemned him. 

I have just tried to present him as he really is, without fear or favour, affection or ill-will.

He is as nature fashioned him.

C.K. Thompson

Warrigal the Warrior is 130 pages in length and is illustrated with black and white pictures. It makes a great read aloud and would be enjoyed by a wide range of ages.

Linking up this month with Brona's Books:

AusReading Month 2014 - For the Term of His Natural Life by Marcus Clarke

Originally written as a monthly installment in 1870-1872 under the title His Natural Life, Marcus Clarke's classic was later published as a book in 1874 with the title, For the Term of His Natural Life. Some of the characters and events in Clarke's book are based upon real people and actual events which help to portray a realistic picture of convict life in Van Dieman's Land.

The story centres around the injustices, blunders and futility of the English system of transportation, which was used as a method of punishment at the time, by telling the tale of one man as he serves his sentence.

Richard Devine, a young Englishman, allows himself to be convicted of a crime he did not commit in order to protect his mother's reputation.

Adopting the name Rufus Dawes, he gives up his true identity, and withholding information that would have gained his release, is sent to the Australian penal colony in Van Dieman's Land 'for the term of his natural life.'

Just under 500 pages long, the book is divided into four parts:

Book One: The Sea: 1827

The account of the sea journey from England where Rufus Dawes encounters the brutal lieutenant, Maurice Frere, his nemesis all through the story, and the lovely Sylvia, daughter of the Captain.

During the voyage a mutiny is planned by some of the the convicts and by chance the plot is overheard by Dawes who reports it to the Captain and the mutiny is squashed. However, the mutineers revenge themselves on Dawes by saying that he was the instigator of the plot.

Book Two: Macquarie Harbour: 1833

The mutineers' sentence is commuted to six years at the penal settlement of Macquarie Harbour on the desolate west coast of what is now Tasmania. Dawes is fettered and confined to a solitary area and attempts to kill himself by flinging himself into the sea. The shock of the ice cold water brings back his sense of self-preservation and a huge drifting log loosened from a nearby raft becomes his means of preservation. He gains land only to find the settlement has been abandoned and he is on his own.

But meanwhile there had been another mutiny and Dawes comes upon Lieutenant Frere, the Captain's wife and her daughter, Sylvia who had been abandoned by the prisoners. Dawes uses his knowledge and skills to keep them all alive and wins the affection of Sylvia who calls him, 'Good Mr. Dawes.' He eventually builds a vessel which enables them to escape but Sylvia falls into a delirium and is unable to recall what has happened and when they are picked up by an English vessel, Frere takes the credit for everything Dawes has done and Dawes is sent to Port Arthur to finish his sentence.

Book Three: Port Arthur: 1838

Sylvia, still unable to recall the part Dawes played in her deliverance and not knowing Frere's true character, agrees to marry him after a few years. Frere meanwhile lives under the constant threat of the truth being revealed and over time his brutal and crude nature come to the fore.

A group of convicts involved in the initial mutiny plan and execute another escape. One of them is John Rex who had once been employed by a man in England to discover the whereabouts of his stepson, who happened to be non other than Richard Devine. Rex had unravelled some of the mystery surrounding Dawes and  when he realises that he has found the missing stepson he plots to secure the fortune that was left to Devine upon the death of his stepfather.

Book Four: Norfolk Island: 1846

Rex escapes and finds his way to England. He impersonates Richard Devine, whom he greatly resembles, and lives in high style but his coarse ways and profligate life disgust Devines' mother who begins to doubt his legitimacy. Lady Devine confronts Rex and the mystery behind why her son allowed himself to be convicted in the first place is revealed. In a curious twist of fate Rex finds his own life so inextricably linked with the man he is trying to supplant.

Although For the Term of His Natural Life contains elements of Victorian melodrama and has some unbelievable twists and coincidences, Marcus Clarke drew upon official reports (documented in an appendix at the end of the book) to furnish his tale and spent time as a journalist in Tasmania studying the convict system.

The author's descriptions of the landscape are palpable. I've been to both Macquarie Harbour and Port Arthur a few times and I thought he captured the atmosphere of both places well.

For the Term of His Natural Life is an Australian Classic and I kept thinking that I should read it at some stage. I put it off because I thought it would be too depressing. It is bleak but it has an ebb and flow to it that kept me reading, waiting to see if 'Good Mr. Dawes' was going to get justice. The story reminded me in some ways of Uncle Tom's Cabin - but it was a long time ago that I read that book and it was very a different setting - perhaps it was the suffering the main characters endured.

Age suitability:

I'd definitely pre-read and even then it would be a book I'd only recommend for mature readers in late high school and I'd want to discuss some of the content with them. Besides the brutality and allusions to cannibalism, the two Ministers of Religion in the book are presented as 1) a Pharisaical type, shallow, self-serving and ineffectual  2) a man with a conscience and compassion but who struggles with a hidden addiction to alcohol and his love for a married woman. 

 The picture below is from an out of print hardback copy of the book which I own but the image of the book I put at the top of this post is of an edition of the book that is in print.
The book is available as a free Kindle version here.

I'm linking this post to Brona's Books: