Book of the week
West Island: Five twentieth-century New Zealanders in Australia
by Stephanie Johnson (Otago University Press, $40)
The relationship between Australia and New Zealand is a very complex thing. It affects us all – in politics, sport, and in our personal lives – and not always in a good way.
With its smart, tart title, Stephanie Johnson’s non-fiction book, West Island, investigates the experiences of five very different New Zealanders who lived in Australia during the 20th century.
Their expatriate histories are framed by glimpses of Johnson’s own life as a trans-Tasman writer, actress, wife, and mother.
It is a skilled, well-researched performance. Johnson’s tone is anecdotal and intimate. She can go from the partying inhabitants of 1940s King’s Cross to contemporary real estate prices without a blink, sure that her reader will enjoy both her information and her confiding colloquial tone.
The cast list of West Island is one of its chief glories.
The delightfully named Dulcie Deamer might have been raised in Featherston, free to romp naked at will, but she would grow up to
become the ‘‘Queen of Sydney’s Bohemia’’ with an ever-present cigarette in her mouth. Dodgy Eric Baume was a journalist, serial liar, and a sexual cad, born in Auckland, but who ended up somehow very appropriately as the host of Aussie TV series Beauty and the Beast.
Roland Wakelin’s almost obsessive paintings of Sydney Harbour Bridge during its construction are iconic but sadly under-valued. Jean Devanny was both tragic and passionate, a fervent and misunderstood communist and author.
Taranaki-born Douglas Stewart edited Australia’s best literary magazine, The Bulletin, but loved
trout fishing nearly as much as he loved poetry and plays. Johnson scrutinises his view of race to reveal unexamined prejudices.
Along with Johnson herself, they all become characters in a national drama played out on foreign shores. West Island goes right to the heart of a nascent sibling national rivalry and dissects the cultures and psychology that nurtured it.
Johnson has always written in a variety of genres. Otago University Press has designed this wellillustrated non-fiction volume handsomely. Deamer, Baume, Wakelin, Devanny, and Stewart are now unfamiliar names but West Island restores them to triumphant life. Johnson interweaves their biographies with her own reflections and speculations. No reader is likely to forget Johnson and her husband, Tim, dealing with a mortally injured emu on a sun-blasted highway outside Broken Hill or the subsequent three-hour trip through the desert with a tow-truck driver. It is a visceral finale to a thoughtprovoking book.
In an era when Australia is happy to incarcerate and deport New Zealand citizens, Johnson’s experience and the histories she relates are of vital consequence.
Johnson’s tone is anecdotal and intimate. She can go from the partying inhabitants of 1940s King’s Cross to contemporary real estate prices without a blink.