Month: October 2017

Seeing Through Snow, by Matthew Higgins

/ asenseofplace2017

Published by Ginninderra Press, 2017.

Kiandra

Snow at Kiandra © Matthew Higgins

opening lines:

“Somewhere in the howl of the morning blizzard there was another sound.”

…

Canberra historian, author and expert on the high country Matthew Higgins has published his first novel based on the ghost town of Kiandra. Kiandra is located in the New South Wales high country between Yarrangobilly and Adaminaby, and is now part of Kosciuszko National Park. The novel is told in the style of an oral history with Les Leong as our narrator, and this style makes the book very easy to read and accessible. We learn that Les was born an orphan in a terrific blizzard in 1891, and we follow his life story (mostly) in and around Kiandra.

I was surprised at some of the information Higgins reveals about Kiandra in his 158 pages. Via Les, we learn how Kiandra became the birthplace of skiing in Australia in the 1860s thanks to the Scandinavian migrants at Pollocks Flat; the vagaries of the physical conditions with huge blizzards (such as in 1891) and significant fires (such as in 1939); the Australian-Chinese tensions at various goldfields; the town’s treatment of the local Ngarigo, Wiradjuri and Wolgal people; the real-life characters drawn to Kiandra region such as photographer Charles Kerry, poet Banjo Patterson, author Elyne Mitchell, artist William Dobell and musician Mick Jagger; the impact that the Boer War, World War I and World War II can have on a small town; and the employment options for a town started on gold, but later relying on saw mill work and the Snowy Mountains scheme.

This is a delightful gem of a novel, with the author’s intimacy with and respect for the alpine region evident throughout the book. The cover image of children on their skis from around 1906 serves not only as a great front cover but is also possibly linked to one of the characters Les talks about, photographer Charles Kerry. Higgins’ writing reads well and so perfectly suits the oral history style of the book that I kept forgetting that I was reading a novel! Higgins gently reminds us how easy it is to forget just how much can happen in one lifetime – let alone one spent in a town which was abandoned in the 1970s, and how tough this community had to be to survive. A small but charming touch is the addition of pen and pencil sketches at the start of each chapter, and make sure to read the author’s note at the end of the novel.

‘Seeing Through Snow’ has an excellent sense of place, and I would highly recommend it to anyone wishing to gain an introduction to Kiandra or the Australian high country in general.

Men of Salt: crossing the Sahara on the caravan of white gold, by Michael Benanav

/ asenseofplace2017

Published by The Lyons Press, 2006.

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Caravan returning from the salt mines of Taoudenni © Alistair Bestow

opening lines:

“The boat coasted slowly into the port at Kourioume, on the Niger River, manoeuvering its way into an open space among the other wooden crafts already moored there. It was ten o’clock on a late-October night. Only a few scattered lights glowing in the houses on shore broke the total darkness. The air was hot and still except for the faint wakes stirred up by circling swarms of mosquitoes.”

…

The words ‘Timbuktu’ and ‘the Sahara’ often conjure mythical notions of far-away locations in the Western psyche. For many of us these places will remain unexplored – both literally given recent troubles in this part of Mali, but also figuratively. This is why Michael Benanav’s book is so valuable; we learn about a part of the world and way of life not many of us are aware of. The author, a journalist and photographer with a deep passion for nomadic desert peoples but well aware of his outsider status as a Jewish American, takes us with him as he travels from Timbuktu to the salt mines of Taoudenni with the salt caravans, and back again. Along the way he muses on the fascinating history of these landscapes and their people, and describes the personal highs and lows of his travels.

Timbuktu was a former trading hub near the banks of the Niger River, made rich by salt, ivory, gold, and slaves in an era when the trans-Saharan trading network was at its peak. At the same time, it experienced a golden age as a centre for Islamic learning. However Moroccan invasion in the 17th century signalled the start of Timbuktu’s decline, and today it is an impoverished town threatened with desertification. Part of the title of this book, ‘the caravan of white gold’ refers to the salt the camels carry, which used to be very valuable indeed; Benanav suggests that salt was once worth its weight in gold, and was used as currency until French colonisation in the 1890s introduced paper money.

One of the delights of this book is how Benanav delves into the ways of these desert people; I particularly enjoyed learning about their language. Another delight is the camels, and I have a complete newfound appreciation, respect and admiration for these animals. Those drawn to deserts will identify with many passages in this book. For me, it was the quality of light in day and night, and the sand. Sand has a special way of permeating everything in the desert – food, drink, hair, pores, sleeping gear – nothing is sacred. And the wonderful remoteness deserts offer, away from modern comforts and certainty and the tamed landscapes of farms and cities; all that expanse of time and space without distraction…and of course the challenge remoteness presents for storing food on long desert journeys – in this case, rancid goat butter and goat meat!

This book wins points for including maps (a necessity given I suspect many readers wouldn’t know where Mali is, let alone where Timbuktu or Arouane are) and a reference list. Despite all this I did have a few quibbles with the book. I wanted to know more of the author and his background, what it was that motivated the author to seek out desert peoples around the world and document his experiences. I also could not agree with him on some of the topics he was confronted by, such as child marriage, and while I can see he was trying to avoid cultural imperialism in his rationale for justifying such practices, I was not convinced. And finally, while a superb narrative of his experience, for some reason I found his writing didn’t connect with me the way other travel literature often does.