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

5.0 out of 5 starsAn excellent read

12 April 2019 - Published on Amazon.com

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase


jnana

5.0 out of 5 starsA thought provoking and rewarding read!

1 May 2019 - Published on Amazon.com

In an eastern suburbs beach side café (Tamarama, Sydney) where yummy mummies and aspiring screenwriters complain about too much or not enough froth on their babycinos and soy lattés, a deeper drama begins to unfold. Café owner Shannon, whose marriage is crumbling after the death of her second child, meets Rafael, a Nicaraguan immigrant who is working with her Koori friend Colin at a building site across the road. Rafael, who bears the scars of the Sandinista/Contra war, keeps his past well hidden. Colin too keeps mum about the cruel torture of growing up in the Kinchela Boys Home.

A mutual love of salsa music draws Shannon and Rafael close but just as love begins to blossom an incident occurs that brings government officials and the media swarming. Vesna, a seasoned journalist who covered the Kosovo atrocities in the 90s, is after a scoop on illegal immigrants and will go to any lengths to get it. All hell breaks loose as each character is forced to confront the consequences of their actions and come to terms with the traumas of their past.

In this gripping drama filled with astute insights and canny observances of urban life and modern relationships, Diana Plater digs deep to open the lid on how personal, political and collective trauma affects each and everyone of us.

There are no goodies or baddies in a story like this, just human beings coming unstuck, learning the hard way it is their humanity that will save them in the end.

A thought provoking and rewarding read!

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.

November 29, 2015

TRAVEL FACES: VALE TANNY POLSTER





I met Tanny (Nathaniel) Polster in 1986 in Washington DC. I was on the way to Nicaragua to spend a year or so covering Central America for The Age and other publications.

My friend and colleague, Mike Steketee, had given me his number, saying he was a remarkable older journalist, really worth looking up. We kept in touch through my time in Central America and later New York and then when I returned home to Australia, becoming great friends, pen pals in many ways, writing letters in the early days and emails later. He encouraged me with my writing, sending me books and other interesting and unusual presents. Whenever I could when I was in the US I visited him.

Tanny was born on December 30, 1921 and died at the age of 93 this year.

According to the very brief death notice I found he was a World War Two veteran, anti-poverty program worker, lobbyist for the National Cancer Institute, and publisher of specialised medical newsletters of heart, lung and blood and adolescent medicine.

From what he’s told me over the years he grew up in Columbus, Ohio. His father had come to the US as a teenager from then Austria-Hungary, while his mother’s family was from Russia.

Tanny was a political animal. Being a Jewish man and a humanitarian , he was horrified by what he saw in Europe during his time in a US Air Force squadron but even more horrified by the later treatment of refugees by the US.

“The military never told home folks we bombed Switzerland during WW II,” he wrote in an email. “Minor mistake by navigator of bombing crew.”

He told how he met a mixed race couple at a party in Chicago, who had been living in Switzerland, and how the “white wife said her mother was in the town bombed by U.S. planes. Her mother had her in her arms as she ran away from the explosions”.


“I detested telling her that my bomber group dropped those bombs.  My automatic cameras in the planes verified the town bombed.


"That day, a Brooklyn G.I. warned me to insist on flight pay in the few flights I took.  His plane exploded on take-off a few minutes later. No survivors. Futile memories. We got rid of Hitler while committing genocide of German civilians.”
Back home, he worked as a journalist at the Washington Post and in the Deep South including Savannah and Charleston, Georgia. He was deeply involved in supporting the Civil Rights movement.


It was during this time that he met John Tiller, a Black former college basketballer from Philadelphia, who later became an adviser to Alexander Haig and George Bush Senior, particularly in the areas of health care reform.

“He and I became friends when that was extremely rare, white and black,” Tanny said, almost surprised that they were able to overlook their different political views for all those years.

He considered John the best man he ever knew.

Tanny and I were having lunch in a Washington restaurant one day I think in 1987 when I glanced out the window to see a tall, striking man glide past. And then he came inside, pulling a chair out and sitting at our table.

“I’ve invited John because I know he can show you all the best dance clubs and bars in DC,” Tanny announced.

John and I stayed friends until his death from lung cancer in May, 2012. And some of the best times of my life were spent with those two.

In the 2000s, Tanny met his second wife, Janet Schirn, a well-known interior designer - past President of the American Society of Interior Designers as well as a Fellow of the Society -and moved to Chicago. She was a wonderful, artistic, inspiring woman, who told me once Arnold Schwarzenegger was among her clients.

I visited them when she was very ill in 2008 and she told me Tanny was the love of her life.
But after she died he had to move out of the apartment, finding one closer to the lake, where we went swimming together the last time I visited him in 2011.

Tanny was still working, lobbying to make changes to a society he felt was not just economically bankrupt but in many ways morally as well.
While ostensibly a Democrat, he was no fan of the Clintons and more an admirer of Michelle Obama than Barack. He believed change had to come from way above the president.


This is from one of his later emails to me: “My great nephew (age 40 or 50) moans that we are a 3rd world nation. China owns us via U.S. government bond purchases. France, Spain, Japan, and other dinky nations have faster trains.  Our bridges are falling down. Our roads are pitted. Obama, the social worker, told the Wall Street crooks to stay out of jail and put taxpayers into eternal debt with not a community person, not a layman, not a non-crook in on the talks. Now he doesn't know how to pretty-up the $6 to $11 million a year that the crooks are paying themselves. Rubin is God's gift to anti-Semitism. He re-appoints the government officials who presided over the chaos.  Manufacturing is down.  Automobile makers and airlines are bankrupt. The daily newspaper industry is dying.”

He felt so strongly about the newspaper devastation that he spent a year working on a plan for the Chicago Tribune that he thought would “1) expand circulation and 2) wake up America's sleeping electorate.  I tried selling it twice, but fumbled the ball.  I have taken months to improve the selling of it. Just finished tonight”.

He wept at the inefficiency of American public transport, noting he could only get a midnight train to visit his sister in Pittsburgh.

“Inter-city travel in the U.S is now a crushing bore: Full body X-rays to learn if you have a tooth capped or a bomb in your bowel.  Rules, I.D. cards, delays, long lines, mistakes,” he said in an email to me in 2011.

He was also very funny, with a wicked sense of humour that many did not understand or appreciate.

Once her ordered me a martini in Chicago and told the waitress to “cut the vegetables” – ie the garnish!

“Down the street there is an institution where girls in mid-thigh skirts and spike heels attend,” he emailed once.  “It is named Detention (no joke).  I've never been inside, but I had my pocket picked nearby. On weekends 2 or 3 police cruisers monitor the folks.  It's not in South Dakota, but you could write about it.”

Until his later years Tanny was pretty fit. He’d take an inflatable boat in his car boot to one of the Chicago rivers, blow it up and row for miles. He took me once on a freezing, winter day.

He was a ladies’ man, always admiring good looks and intelligence – he liked to have a woman companion.

There is a lot I don’t know about Tanny – about his first marriage and daughter although he did tell me a little. And forgive me if there is information I have left out.

“My first wife, Iris, was sitting at a lunch counter in Savannah, demonstrating against segregation.  A white man came in and stuck a foot-long dagger into the back and lungs of a man (demonstrator?) two seats from Iris,” he said once explaining what it was like in the South during the Civil Rights period.

In later years he become involved in a movement called the Villages for older people -  voluntary non-government groups  where members seek help from one another.
“These new units area all called Village something or other and are therapeutic for usually abrasive city living in U.S.A   A club of journalists inside the Village are engaged in writing memoirs and trading them.”

Tanny was a trailblazing journalist, activist and lobbyist who never received the recognition he deserved (not that he would have cared one hoot) and an incredible friend.

He wrote to me after a phone conversation with John not long before our darling friend died.
He makes me realize what a boon it is, knowing you and him during my lifetime.”
No, Tanny, the pleasure was all mine.


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