Book of the week
The Lucky Galah by Tracy Sorensen (Macmillan) $35
In July 1969, a remote satellite station in coastal Western Australian was an essential part of the global communications and tracking system for the Apollo space missions. Put this together with a caged pet galah, small town social distinctions, a marriage disintegrating in the heat, and the itch of sexual desire, and you have the basis of Tracy Sorenson’s debut novel, The Lucky Galah.
Whether you want to call Sorensen’s book Antipodean ‘‘magical realism’’ or see it as a dreamy riff on what it means to be an Australian, it doesn’t really matter. It is a clear and engaging novel of a remote township and its people, impacted by a global event.
Evan Johnson is a radar technician and he and his wife, Linda, and toddler daughter, Jo, have made the long journey from Melbourne to the remote station. What might be a career move for Evan is more of a mystery for Linda. How does she fit in with the other technicians’ wives? What of her own unexplored needs?
There are also the other inhabitants of Port Badminton.
Sorensen has pitch-perfect control as she segues from a galah's-eye view of the world to the beauty of landscapes.
The Kelly family of red-haired daughters lives at the bottom of the social heap with the ‘roo and dingo shooters. Elderly Lizzie with her pet galah riding on her shoulder ‘‘like an Afghan cameleer on his ship of the desert’’ lurches down the main street to the small town’s book exchange.
Invisible tensions knot them all into a tight tragedy.
Sorensen has pitch-perfect control as she segues from a galah’s-eye view of the world and children’s mystification at adult actions to the beauty of landscapes of dune and samphire flats. Her voice is distinctively Australian, filled with the vernacular – ‘‘Right you are!’’, ‘‘Tell me straight out’’, and ‘‘Shoosh, cocky.’’
It is the small human mysteries that make Sorensen’s novel so immediately appealing. Her vision of 1969 Australia with its walkshorts and wooden salad servers is leavened with desires and needs that are barely formed, let alone clearly articulated. The Lucky Galah deftly demonstrates that these unspoken things can make or break a world.
Stylistically, Sorensen can be audacious. Telling part of the story through the eyes and thoughts of a pet galah seems a recipe for disaster, but it becomes an essential and moving component of the novel, giving it a shimmer of wonderment.
Like the televised images of Armstrong on the moon, The Lucky Galah is a book that contains worlds. It is filled with the pinks and blues of the Australian coastline. Human passion is careless and sometimes heart-breaking. We are all caged, Sorensen seems to say, and our view of open spaces is both a dream and a trap. – David Herkt