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.
April 05, 2011
When light-skinned means coloured
Nine Aboriginal people are part of a Federal Court class action started by Aboriginal woman Pat Eatock against (Melbourne) Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt over articles and blogs on Aboriginal identity. After writing about so-called light-skinned people of mixed heritage who identify as Aboriginal, he has been accused of racial discrimination. Bolt has given evidence that he was being tried for exercising his right to free speech, and for raising topics that were "little discussed" because of intimidation.Years ago I met Pat Eatock and interviewed her with student Samantha Weir for an oral history project. She spoke about her life including her early days and her involvement in the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra. I'm telling you now, she goes way back!
Whatever you think of the matter, the discussion in court reminded me about how being light-skinned doesn't make it any easier for Aboriginal people.Here's a story, told to me a few years back by Vincent Wenberg, a member of the Stolen Generations. One day he showed me a photo, one of those you often find in albums of the 1940s - a snapshot of a man and woman, sometimes with children, walking down the main street.
This one depicts a soldier, complete with slouch hat and a cigarette in his mouth, holding the hand of a little boy, wearing shorts, long sleeved white shirt and a tie and panama hat.
Next to him is a slim, pretty Aboriginal woman clutching a purse and wearing a cotton dress and flowered hat.
The man is Private John Wenberg, who was then with the Second AIF based in Tamworth.
On the back, in black fountain pen, Lily has written, "father and mother and son John Wenberg 1940".
Johnnie never had the opportunity to display this photo in an album.
The three boys were taken from their parents and spent the war years in the Kinchela Boys Home near Kempsey on the NSW mid north coast.
While there, Johnnie's complaints of stomach aches were ignored until it was too late. He was taken to hospital where he died of appendicitis. He was seven years old.
"The people in the home didn't let Gus and me go to see him in hospital," Vince remembers.
"If he'd seen us or had his mother there to comfort him he would have been happier."
After the funeral service the brothers and the other boys from the home were made to march through the main street of Kempsey.
From on top of the hill, remarks such as "Blacks go home!" were yelled at them. In the meantime, the Welfare Board wrote to Mr Wenberg asking for the details of the Mutual Life and Citizens Association insurance policy he had taken out for Johnnie, in the hope that it would cover the funeral costs.
The Wenberg girls - Rita, Adelaide, Amy, Pat, Valerie and Dorothy - were also removed from their parents and taken to Cootamundra and to Bomaderry Children's Home.
According to the Bringing Them Home report, the Aborigines Protection (later known as
Welfare) Board's main aim was to rescue Aboriginal children from what were considered neglectful family lives, and to assimilate them into the wider community as menial workers.
Yet of the estimated 400 boys who went through Kinchela between 1924 and 1970, many became alcoholics and homeless, unable to identify as either white or black.
In contrast, Vincent gained a job with the Railways in Sydney after his four years at the home and worked there until his retirement.
But he is still bitter about the policies that took him there.
He asks how the Welfare Board could claim to have been protecting Aboriginal children from neglectful parents, when his sister Dorothy, then around 18 months, died in the Bomaderry Childrens Home when her head became caught between the bars of her cot.
When her younger sister, Valerie, went to visit her she was upset to find her wearing a straight jacket. Not long afterwards Pat died. She was 18.
Valerie, herself, has distressing memories of the Cootamundra home and life as a domestic on farms, including a series of sexual assaults. She was the first member of the Stolen Generations to win monetary compensation for her treatment, winning $35,000 from the NSW Victims Compensation Tribunal in 2002.
While the Wenberg boys kept in contact with their sisters by visiting them at Cootamundra after they left Kinchela, what became of Lily and John, the parents?
Vincent opens the concertina files holding the official documents of his life that he has collected, urged on by his children. He discovered that he was born out of wedlock when Lily was 16 and that his real father was Wally Randall. He has also discovered many new half brothers and sisters.
He shows me the letters that for many years John and Lily continued to write to the Board, begging that their children be returned.
One letter from Lily, written in 1948, suggests "I think it time he (Vincent) came home now. Will you let me know. I think it time he was home now."
A letter written to Lily by the Acting Secretary of the Welfare Board in 1947 insists that Vincent must stay under its care until he is 14 and points out that "you and your husband badly neglected your children". Vincent denies this.
In 1948, the year Vincent was released from the home as a 14-year-old to find work on farms and in the bush, Lily died of pulmonary tuberculosis. She was buried in the Methodist Cemetery at Bellingen. She was 34 years old.
*The Wenbergs are mentioned in the book I wrote with Ollie Smith, Raging Partners: Two Worlds, One Friendship (Magabala Books, 2000). I met Vince while working for the Sorry Day Committee several years ago, when the issue of an apology to the Stolen Generations first arose, but I was well acquainted with his sisters and nephew before that.
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