Borderland
A Trilogy: Re–entry — Jihad — Cameleer
Rosanne Hawke
Lothian Books
The thread stitching these three stories together is the character of Jaime Richards, an Australian girl brought up in Pakistan. In Re-entry, she experiences an unexpected homesickness for her adopted country and a deep sense of dislocation as her family relocate back to Australia. Everything is strange and she feels both confusion and loss as the awkwardness of adolescence vies with the awkwardness that comes from cultural ignorance.
To express her feelings, Jaime begins to write a journal but it soon becomes a flight of romantic fancy. Her teacher astutely identifies the mysterious stranger in it as an idealised personification of Pakistan itself.
As she slowly begins to unravel the mysterious language cues of her own culture, real friendships start to develop. Danny and Blake both come from a background of colliding cultures and are able to help her come to terms with her mixture of feelings.
Borderland is not just for those who are trying to re-assimilate into a culture to which they nominally belong. It’s for everyone who feels like a fish out of water, everyone who feels alien in their own land, everyone who feels lost in trying to integrate into a new school, everyone who yearns to be accepted just for themselves and not because they’re part of the right group or wear the right clothes.
The second story in the trilogy, Jihad has all the elements of an adventure thriller. Jaime returns to Pakistan where her parents were aid workers. While catching up with old friends still at the International School, she meets Sonya, a mysterious self-assured girl who offers a lift in an embassy car. Sonya neglects to tell her it’s Russian. It’s indicative of things to come. Sonya’s habit of not telling people all she could results in Jaime’s abduction. Her friends, Jasper and Liana, are captured while trying to rescue her.
Embroiled in a tense and complex political situation, they are taken through the breath-taking Kyber Pass to a tribal stronghold in Afghanistan. Jasper is in turmoil, quietly raging at God and everyone around him, friend and enemy. He realises that this is the very area where his father—an American doctor—was killed by a land mine on the road. His unexpressed grief becomes scorching pain as he determines that, whatever the cost, he will ensure the safety of his friends.
Little do they know but there’s only one piece of advice anyone in authority who is aware of their situation would offer them: stay put. Do not try to escape under any circumstances.
Even Sonya, the half-Russian half-tribal girl who should know better, goes along with Jasper’s plan to leave under cover of darkness. It’s not long before disaster overtakes them.
In Cameleer, the scene changes again and the style of story with it. Jaime has returned to Australia after her dramatic rescue in Afghanistan. She has promised herself she will write down a story Liana told to comfort her during their captivity. She has also promised drop-dead gorgeous sensitive new age guy Blake Townsend she’ll come as a cook to his father’s cattle property in the far north.
But Blake at home is not the Blake Jaime knew at school. She is appalled by his cruelty to his little sister Liesa and stung by her inability to draw the reason for his behaviour out of him.
She befriends Liesa through story-telling. The little girl blossoms as she begins to identify with Liana and to take on the role of the legendary ‘Cameleer’. But a past tragedy casts a long shadow in her life and that of her brother.
Cameleer blends myth and adventure, heartbreak and homecoming, romantic tension and family conflict to bring Borderland to a satisfying conclusion. Like Hawke’s Wolfchild, it mingles elements of legend with family adventure to create a background hint of fantasy which only occasionally steps into the limelight. And like her Soraya the Storyteller, the motif of storytelling is woven through the book. Just as the secret designs knotted into the carpets made by the tribal community in Jihad are clear if you look closely, so too is the message threaded all throughout Borderland: stories bring understanding, healing and restorative change.
AH
Mustara
Rosanne Hawke
Lothian Books
Light and delicate, the echo of the bells kerlink kerlink followed me through the day long after I’d finished Mustara. Robert Ingpen’s soft sandy-toned watercolours perfectly evoke both the starkness and the haze of a desert landscape as well as the sepia-tinted era of eighteenth century exploration.
Mustara is a young camel. Ernest Giles sets out on an expedition to Central Australia. This beautifully-illustrated book highlights the largely unknown contribution of Afghan cameleers to our understanding of Australia’s interior.
AH
Yardil
Rosanne Hawke
Windy Hollow Books
Illustrated by Elizabeth Stanley
On the stair-steppe far away in Pakistan lives a girl of the Kalasha people who yearns for a snow leopard. Shazia’s dream comes true when she finds a lost cub in the forest. She names it Yardil, friend of my heart. But the villagers are troubled. Will their goats be safe when Yardil grows up?
Shazia’s father defends her. The leopard, he says, has been sent for a special purpose. It’s not long before the villagers discover what that purpose is.
Elizabeth Stanley’s charcoal illustrations with their occasional splashes of bright colour deftly evoke the harshness of mountain life on the northern frontier of Pakistan. The slate grey colouring brings out the silence of the steppe and the wild isolation of the mountain beyond the walnut grove.
However it also tinges the story with a brooding, almost sombre cast at times, overshadowing the lightness of spirit which comes to Shazia when she finally realises Yardil will always be a friend of her heart.
AH
The Wishgiver
Rosanne Hawke & Lenore Penner
Windy Hollow Books
Illustrated by Michelle Mackintosh
Moody blue pastels and delicate stardusted backgrounds hint at sleeping enchantment, but this delightful picture book is full of surprises. It’s not about magic. Instead it’s about grace and friendship and the rewards of putting others first.
The Wishgiver is a pixie-like boy with curly-toed shoes, a twig neck, a geeky striped nightcap and a big, big smile. He falls off his star and knocks on Layla’s window. She’s been crying and hugging Morgan her teddy because she has no friends at school. Not one. She would like to make a friend very, very much. And the Wishgiver has the power to grant her wish. But he can’t go home to his star unless someone uses their wish to send him back.
What will Layla do? Help the Wishgiver or help herself?
A captivating picture book for small children.
AH
Soraya the Storyteller
Rosanne Hawke
Lothian Books
Soraya’s mother has ‘lost her eyes’. That is an expression used in Afghanistan if someone becomes too sad and feels life is no longer worth living.
Soraya keeps her own sorrow at arm’s length using her love of telling stories. In her imagination, she flies on a magic carpet, in her dreams she is carried by an enchanted ebony horse to a land where she will always be safe.
Reality is far more frightening and Soraya is torn between wanting to forget the horrors of her past and wanting to remember so that those she loved do not fade from mind. Her sister Nasreen had died falling out of a window while trying to escape a brutal gang of Taliban soldiers. Her brother Qadir had been killed while trying to protect his gentle twin, Qamar, from been forcibly conscripted into the army. Her father was tortured and died in prison. And the promises of a wonderful new life in Australia have turned from happiness and hope to dark hollow fear.
The long shadow of a Temporary Protection Visa hangs over Soraya and her remaining family as once the threat of death hung over the legendary Sheherezade, perhaps the greatest of all storytellers. It is the tales of the princess and the magical jewelled ebony horse from Sheherezade’s 1001 Tales of the Arabian Nights that both frightens and comforts Soraya. She too has been taken to a far land where each day is a gift, each day is strange and bewildering—sometimes full of friendship and sometimes full of hatred and intimidation.
Each day carries with it the threat that safety might be withdrawn. No one in the family expected that they would be imprisoned in a detention centre for trying to enter Australia. Soraya’s mother thought at first it was a mistake. Even when they are released, there is no certainty that they will be allowed to stay.
It is Soraya’s gift of storytelling that changes everything for her family as they try to come to terms with life in Australia and move on from the past. She enters a writing competition with great hope but her story is misplaced. Her teacher consoles her by showing the story to a visiting author, Chris Brown, who is collecting stories for a book on refugees.
Chris Brown realises that although the story is framed as a fairytale, it is in fact the story of Soraya’s family. Through Chris’ contact with the Red Cross, a miracle occurs and Soraya’s mother ‘regains her eyes’.
Soraya the Storyteller is a story that seems simple and limpid on the surface but is a complex weaving as beautiful and intricate as a Persian rug.
Poems and prayers, recipes for qabuli palau and jellabi, stories ancient and new, tall tales and ‘true’, are all knotted together in a smooth and silken design.
Stories are healing! This theme runs through many of Hawke’s books.
The Shah was healed by Sheherezade’s stories. Soraya’s family is restored through her stories. Through her re-telling of the family’s trials and journey, they are able to remember the past and honour it, not bury it in forgetfulness. Through her re-telling, she is able to draw those of her acquaintance, both sympathetic and hostile, into a circle of understanding that transcends race and culture.
Deservedly short-listed for the Children’s Book Council of Australia Book of the Year Awards, this fusion of fairytale and history sensitively deals with a dark chapter in Australia’s refugee policy.
AH
Wolfchild
Rosanne Hawke
Lothian Books
Raw is the lone survivor of a shipwreck. Morwenna is a girl on the threshold of womanhood. She sings to wolves and tires to befriend the stranger living in the fogou* near the Seven Stones where King Arthur is said to be buried. She’s not afraid of anything—except perhaps Branek, the cruel village boy she suspects her family wants her to marry.
Stranger Law is in force in Lethowsow. Until Raw proves himself in some way helpful to the village, he is a ‘stranger’, to be killed on sight. Morwenna contrives to bring about a meeting between Raw and Lew of Trevalyn, the local lord. But Raw backs away from such an encounter and reveals to Morwenna that he is an escaped serf. Until he’s been free for a year and a day, any of the lords of the land will feel duty bound to return him to his master.
It doesn’t make sense to Morwenna. She knows Lew is not like that. He’s a lord of Cornwall, not one of the Norman overlords from across the sea. And she’s puzzled by Raw. How can a serf own a silver ball?
Set in the year 1098, on a part of the coast of Cornwall now lost to the sea, Wolfchild brings to life the intimacy of life in a medieval home, the freedom and wildness of the forest and the high places, and the hardship experienced by everyone in an only dimly-remembered time of climate change.
An evocative blend of well-researched history and one of the most famous of all tsunami stories—the legendary destruction of Lyonnesse—Wolfchild is sprinkled with words of the Kernewek language and with variations of old Arthurian tales as well as references to distinctive features of the Cornish landscape.
Short-listed for an Aurealis Award, Wolfchild has a faint far-off glimpse of fantasy to it when, towards the end, it draws heavily on the legend of the sunken lands.
AH