Diana Plater has presented readers with an intriguing tale and one very easily possible in our multicultural country. At first so many characters coming together in one way or another at a cafe in Tamarama is puzzling and almost improbable until you work out that the novel is much more than a complex plot. It an exploration of life, of coincidences, and of differences.
Our lives are like a puzzle, a jigsaw puzzle of stories of ordinary people who too often have things happen to them while the rest of us remain oblivious. Then, something draws our attention, too often too late and too often too tragic. Slowly the pieces begin to fit and Sydney comes to life with clever descriptions and some now fascinating people who make connections without really understanding the whole until after the events occur.
As we read on each story begins to blend with the story of others including some dramatic flashbacks, sad and brutal. There are so many stories to be heard and not just from immigrants, and in sharing stories understanding grows along with the belief that hope does exist. It is in listening to each other that we begin to better understand ourselves.
I highly recommend this to all readers who love intrigue, politics, romance, and a very good story. Great reading!
Whale Rock
Whale Rock
Diana Plater's latest book is available on:
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1922261416
Amazon Australia: https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B07NYHWNTR
Amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07NYHWNTR
MoshShop: https://themoshshop.com.au/collections/new-releases/products/whale-rock-by-diana-plater
SmashWords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/924932
At her Tamarama café Shannon struggles with the loss of her marriage. A close friendship develops between her and Colin, an Indigenous elder, and Rafael, a Nicaraguan immigrant. When a worker plunges to his death on the building site opposite, journalist Vesna covers the story. But as their secrets are exposed all hell breaks loose and they discover they’re more connected than they ever imagined.
Whale Rock is provocative, stormy and sensual. Diana Plater gives us both human brutality and sensitivity in 21st century Sydney.
Alejandro Pérez, author, Modelo Económico
Feedback/reviews from readers:
4 June 2019
Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase
Thoroughly thoroughly enjoyed this book by Australian writer Diana Plater. It covers important issues in contemporary Australia, such as the treatment of refugees and indigenous Australians – the Stolen Generations – while involving the reader in the complex lives and relationships of a colourful cast. Great work.Reviewed by
BarbarinaS
An excellent read
12 April 2019 - Published on Amazon.com
Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase
jnana
A thought provoking and rewarding read!
1 May 2019 - Published on Amazon.com
Lucy de Bruce, PhD, University of Technology, Sydney:
Storyline:
Shannon is from a farm down the NSW South coast. The farm provides refuge when all is not well in her Sydney world. Her marriage to Tom, a philandering, firey, immigration lawyer of Serbian heritage, is on the rocks and there are inevitable tensions over money and access to their son, Maxie.
At the root of their problem is Shannon's stillbirth, which Tom blames her for, and for which she carries loss and guilt. To ensure there is cash flow in the floundering marriage, the frugal Tom sets Shannon up in a coffee shop on the Eastern beachside suburb of Tamarama. Her customers are construction workers, office workers, and glossy, pony-tailed yummy-mummies pushing giant baby buggies and hogging the tables at the cafe.
Shannon shuns the snobby, trendy, East Sydney scene preferring to cultivate an earthy, country-girl image. Her favourite refuge is a place she calls Whale Rock located on the flat rocks high above the crashing surf. It is a place that soothes her soul and where an engraving of a mother whale with a baby calf inside her, etched into the rocks, is a bewitching reminder of a sub-narrative flowing throughout Shannon's story.
At the cafe, two of Shannon's regular customers become close friends - Aboriginal Colin and Nicaraguan Rafael. Rafael enters her life at just the right time when she is feeling rejected and hopelessly inadequate as a wife, mother and daughter-in-law. The olive-skinned, pony-tailed and well-built Rafael gives her the Latin passion she craves in their sensual, erotic bedroom scenes above her cafe and in his bachelor pad. Rafael keeps an obsessive low profile; he was once a rebel leader for the Nicaraguan Sandinistas who fought the US-backed Contras. He too is scarred by a secret past in more ways than the torture burns on his body. He yearns to return to his homeland to resolve a botched love affair with an American journalist. His relationship with Shannon brings back painful memories.
Aboriginal Colin also fancies Shannon but ends up as a friend. As a five year old, Colin was a child of the infamous Kinchela Aboriginal Boys Home who was removed from his mother, Lily. He nurses a lifelong grief for his dead soldier father and older brother and tries to find out whatever happened to his mother. Lily, herself a child of the Cootamundra Aboriginal Girls Home, worked as a maid in white households down the south coast. Shannon becomes strangely obsessed by Colin's story and wants to help him find his mother. Disturbingly, Colin and Shannon share an explosive family secret.
Colin and Rafael work at a nearby building site where Colin is Rafael's boss. One day a worker is killed and there are whispers that his death may have been caused by workplace safety neglect.
Shannon, a hopeless do-gooder, insists on getting involved and through a woman acquaintance, Muslim Amany, is put in touch with Vesna, a journalist with a news wire service. Vesna is of Serbian descent and living at home (again) with her parents. When she and Shannon meet, they soon discover they share a tantalizing connection. Vesna snoops around, then publishes the workplace neglect story against the strong protests of Colin and Rafael. This leads to tragedy for Rafael.
Evaluation:
This is a fiction based on re-hashed and imagined characters from the author's past life as a journalist working in Australia, USA and Latin America. The five main characters are strangely intertwined through their parallel lives and dark secrets. The central character, Shannon, comes across as sunny and outgoing with a mischievous sense of humour. Yet a closer look reveals she is also fragile/broody/guilt-ridden/needy/selfish and erotic - with dark secrets. Tom (hapless husband) thinks she is entitled and spoiled. Her "complex" personality comes into play with the characters and situations she encounters.
The story is pacey and told in a light-hearted, cynical way, which counters some of the darker elements. Colourful vignettes of Sydney's affluent and struggling areas are deftly brushstroked as are scenes of life on her south coast farm. Like her beloved Whale Rock, the family farm ("in the valley") is a spiritual and healing place where she can escape from the big bad city. It is where treasured childhood memories, her own lost little one, and disturbing tales of Aboriginal/European relations are deeply etched into that rainforested landscape.
Conclusion:
Whale Rock is a seductive story with a cast of delicious, unexpected bedfellows! It is richly textured, exploring themes of love, grief, betrayal, child-loss, illegal immigration and brutality - all provocatively told by Sydney journalist, Diana Plater. The double narratives switching back and forth between Australia and Nicaragua are a small distraction but still work well. Overall, the book is well crafted, humorous and a page turner! Importantly, it tells the lives of invisible people in a powerful and engaging way. Above all, it shows that no matter how unremarkable a person's life may appear to be, the sheer wonder of the human experience, if well told, is as compelling and extraordinary as any noteworthy person.
Glenda:
Café owner and mother of one Shannon buries herself in work, after losing her second baby and marriage to Tom. The café she runs in Bondi is the intersection point for the five characters featured in this moving, bitingly honest debut novel by Diana Plater. Shannon doesn’t have much time for indulgent café society. She’s drawn instead to customers like Colin and Rafael who don’t fit the mould. Colin’s a foreman at a building site, struggling with scars laid down by his, and his mother’s Stolen Children upbringing in orphanages and foster homes. As with Colin, the fault line in Rafael’s life runs deep into history. Rafael’s a Nicaraguan construction worker, hiding out in Australia for a crime he committed back home during the Sandanista revolution of the ‘70s. A shared love of salsa, sparks a passionate connection between Shannon and Rafael, but their hopes founder on a journalist’s incorrigible ambition. Vesna’s struggling to retain her place at a newspaper that’s dying, but she has no intention of going down with it. Shoring up her options she starts an affair with Tom, Shannon’s ex – a Serbian Australian like herself - as well as an investigation that threatens to unravel Shannon and Rafael’s new happiness.
Tension builds and emotions run high as the characters are drawn into a race against time to beat their inner demons and defeat bloody minded officialdom. In a page turning finish, lives are nearly lost and redemption is found in unexpected ways.
Whale Rock is as diverse and complex as Australia, and every bit as interesting.
Messages:
I finished your book last week and thought it was fabulous. Absolutely gripping, found it hard to put down. Loved so many of the characters. Can't wait for your next novel!! Well done.
I just finished your book. A great book. I loved it. ...You should be proud of what you have written.
February 10, 2011
Guilty consciences
Tourism and travelling has become a serious business, of late.
You can’t go anywhere without being expected to volunteer for a charity, visit an orphanage, look after sick elephants, donate your services to a soup kitchen, vaccinate rabid dogs or give money to war victims.
You just can’t go anywhere without a guilty conscience.
Five star hotels in third world countries beg you to leave money for their local charity or do something to help.
Airlines ask for even more money on top of the taxes, fees and charges so they can offset their carbon by planting a tree in the middle of nowhere. Would you trust that person asking for that extra money? Even with that smile on their face? Would they be planting the right sort of tree for the environment anyway?
Call me cynical, but I don’t trust any of them. And yet we all want to give back to the places we’re taken a lot from. A few cents for victims of land mines in Cambodia is not too much to ask. Visiting an orphanage and collecting some money for the kids there isn’t going to kill you.
But today many have been bitten by the volunteer bug and often they have more volunteers than they can adequately deal with you. And you have to put your name on a waiting list, especially in the more exotic places.
Cambodia is especially popular. The South-East Asian country has one of the saddest histories of any country on earth. Because of the Khmer Rouge's fundamentalist Marxist polices pursuing increased rice productivity almost everybody was displaced and between one and two million people died in the period 1975 to 1979 and hundreds of thousands more died during a severe famine in the late 1970s after Vietnam invaded in 1978.
But since UN-sponsored elections in 1993 and the surrender of elements of the Khmer Rouge in the mid-1990s and the remaining forces in 1998 there has been some semblance of normality.
Today there seems to be almost as many NGOs in Cambodia as there are tourists, helping to get the country back on its feet. And it's impossible as a visitor - and as anybody involved in tourism including hotels - not to be aware of the fundamental dilemmas of heritage and cultural protection and the financial benefits that tourism brings.
And how can you not have your breath taken away by the enchanting children?
At what could loosely be described as an orphanage in Siem Reap right next to the amazing Angkor Wat I meet children, some of whom have been brought here by their parents because of poverty.
No, I'm not doing an Angelina Jolie or even a Madonna (more my type), but I can't help but cuddle them.
One little boy, freshly showered and hair combed, grabs my hand. "I have no mother, father. You be mother, him father," he points to the general manager of the hotel where I'm staying, who has been donating materials to the orphanage.
Well, I wasn’t going to go that far. I explain I have children back home.
Meanwhile, one child after another comes out with a drawing to give me to take back to Australia.
As I climb to the 10th century Bakheng temple to see Angkor Wat bathed in late afternoon sunlight, I pass a group of musicians maimed by landmines performing traditional music.On the way back, one of the musicians hands me a pamphlet explaining that they are members of the Angkor Association for the Disabled. It says they are pursuing funding for an ecological farm in the Siem Reap area, where they can live and grow organic products.
Their main aim is to transition members from a life of begging on the streets into safe, adequate housing.
They say - despite campaigns to clear them - landmines continue to maim and kill thousands of Cambodians every year.
As well as money, people are urged to donate their time and skills, from everything from small business and funding proposals to promotional activities, to teaching and training.
Even at the airport, the proceeds of cards sold at the giftshop are said to go to NGOs.
Conscience tourism is alive and well here. But this is one place where my hard-core cynicism melts.
Cambodia is one place where children need a lot of protection. The incidence of children as young as 3 being sold into sex tourism is one in 4. See sex-trade survivor Somaly Mam's website for more gruesome stats.
ReplyDeleteIt would appear that Cambodians don't see their children as enchanting as foreigners do. The incidence of domestic violence is also very high.
Sadly, Cambodia is destined to be NGO dependent for a long time to come.
Change of attitudes towards women and children, however, can only come from within.