Skip to main content

Alice Springs by Eleanor Hogan: book review




Alice Springs is a city in central Australia – in the outback, the heart of the nation. Alice Springs is more affectionately called Alice – once called Stuart in 1988, but renamed in 1933. Its First Nations name is Mpartntwe. Alice Springs (2012), the non-fiction travel/memoir, spans the years 2005 to 2009, when the author worked as a policy officer for the Aboriginal Health Service.

Hogan tells of a place with higher than average family violence, alcoholism, anti-social behaviour, and intergenerational trauma amongst the local population. She discusses the stolen generation in which the church and missions removed children from their parents to raise them in response to fears of miscegenation – interracial marriages. Later figures showed that women removed as children were three times more likely to be victims of violence than those who were not removed from their parents. The rates of fatal car accidents were also disproportionately high. And the unemployment rate – in 2009, First Nations peoples were employed in only 600 of the 11,000 jobs in the city.

She writes of court cases, interracial homicides, women-on-women violence, and that in 2007 Alice was known as the “stabbing capital of the world.” She writes too of the black-white divide. As one person tells the author, “Alice taught me grey.” “Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal children play together, then drift into two separate groups around the age of fifteen.”  But most people stay in Alice, on average, for only five years.

It’s not all negative – Hogan writes too of the value of shade (in the heat), sport, societies and organizations, art and art galleries.

Alice is a place of 26,000 residents with 50 women to every man. What attracts so many women “straight, gay, or otherwise, to live in the middle of the desert”? Hogan is referring to educated white women. And the reason may be a number of factors – the arts movement of the 1970s (such as filmmaking and drama), the social justice industry, the service industries, environmental advocacy, the space base (Pine Gap) peace protests (aka Karen Silkwood), or to be free of the constraints of “good-girl” manners of city living. In any case, women gravitate toward the heart. Some would even say that it’s due to the “many circular and rounded shapes” of the landscape – very feminine attributes of the countryside.

Hogan paints a real-life view of living long(ish) term in Alice Springs where everything from the heat to the future of the city is explored.  However, the essence of the book is “everything’s extreme in central Australia.”





 

MARTINA NICOLLS

MartinaNicollsWebsite

 

Martinasblogs

Publications

Facebook

Paris Website

Animal Website

Flower Website

SUBSCRIBE TO MARTINA NICOLLS FOR NEWS AND UPDATES 

 

MARTINA NICOLLS  is an international human rights-based consultant in education, healing and wellbeing, peace and stabilization, foreign aid audits and evaluations, and the author  of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce  (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).



Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Pir-E-Kamil - The Perfect Mentor by Umera Ahmed: book review

The Perfect Mentor pbuh  (2011) is set in Lahore and Islamabad in Pakistan. The novel commences with Imama Mubeen in medical university. She wants to be an eye specialist. Her parents have arranged for her to marry her first cousin Asjad. Salar Sikander, her neighbour, is 18 years old with an IQ of 150+ and a photographic memory. He has long hair tied in a ponytail. He imbibes alcohol, treats women disrespectfully and is generally a “weird chap” and a rude, belligerent teenager. In the past three years he has tried to commit suicide three times. He tries again. Imama and her brother, Waseem, answer the servant’s call to help Salar. They stop the bleeding from his wrist and save his life. Imama and Asjad have been engaged for three years, because she wants to finish her studies first. Imama is really delaying her marriage to Asjad because she loves Jalal Ansar. She proposes to him and he says yes. But he knows his parents won’t agree, nor will Imama’s parents. That
1 comment
Read more

Flaws in the Glass, a self-portrait by Patrick White: book review

The manuscript, Flaws in the Glass (1981), is Patrick Victor Martindale White’s autobiography. White, born in 1912 in England, migrated to Sydney, Australia, when he was six months old. For three years, at the age of 20, he studied French and German literature at King’s College at the University of Cambridge in England. Throughout his life, he published 12 novels. In 1957 he won the inaugural Miles Franklin Literary Award for Voss, published in 1956. In 1961, Riders in the Chariot became a best-seller, winning the Miles Franklin Literary Award. In 1973, he was the first Australian author to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for The Eye of the Storm, despite many critics describing his works as ‘un-Australian’ and himself as ‘Australia’s most unreadable novelist.’ In 1979, The Twyborn Affair was short-listed for the Booker Prize, but he withdrew it from the competition to give younger writers the opportunity to win the award. His autobiography, Flaws in the Glass
Post a Comment
Read more

Sister cities discussed: Canberra and Islamabad

Two months ago, in March 2015, Australia and Pakistan agreed to explore ways to deepen ties. The relationship between Australia and Pakistan has been strong for decades, and the two countries continue to keep dialogues open. The annual bilateral discussions were held in Australia in March to continue engagements on a wide range of matters of mutual interest. The Pakistan delegation discussed points of interest will include sports, agriculture, economic growth, trade, border protection, business, and education. The possible twinning of the cities of Canberra, the capital of Australia, and Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan, were also on the agenda (i.e. called twin towns or sister cities). Sister City relationships are twinning arrangements that build friendships as well as government, business, culture, and community linkages. Canberra currently has international Sister City relationships with Beijing in China and Nara in Japan. One example of existing
1 comment
Read more