Past the Shallows by Favel Parrett: book review

Past the Shallows by Favel Parrett (2011) is set in Cloudy Bay on the remote south coast of Tasmania, an island off the mainland of Australia. Out past the shallows is deep water.

The story is about an abalone fishing community and the lives of three brothers: Joe, Miles, and Harry. Their ‘deep water’ is their unpredicatable, moody, bitter, secretive father, just called Dad. Joe, the oldest, left home, but Miles and Harry are too young to leave. Their relief from their father is the beach and its treasures – seaweed, seabirds, surf, shells, fish, dunes, and driftwood.

Sometimes they visit their mother’s sister, Aunty Jean, but she is old with arthritis, and she cuts their hair too short. She comes to their place too, to collect their dirty laundry on washing day.

They live and breathe the coast and its waves. Miles says, ‘There were things that no one could teach you – things about the water. You just knew them or you didn’t and no one could tell you how to read it. How to feel it.’ Miles knew not to trust it.

Harry, the youngest, is the most popular. Everyone loves Harry, except his father. Miles tries to protect him from Dad’s anger, but he can’t be with Harry all day, especially when he’s cleaning the fishing boat.

Harry is afraid of the water, but sometimes he goes on the boat with Dad, Miles, and the other fishermen. And then there was the accident.

This is a poignant story of brothery bonds, fatherly anger, loss, and loneliness. Told simply, the narration is evocative but sparse. Some things just can’t be said – to each other – to their father. The brevity of conversation is striking.

MARTINA NICOLLS

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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).

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