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.

January 25, 2017

TO BUNNINGS VIA TAMWORTH

Dobe Newton of The Bushwackers

You couldn't feel more Strayan than when singing along to I am Australian at a Bushwackers gig at the Tamworth Country Music Festival.

The song was written in 1987 by Bruce Woodley of The Seekers and Dobe Newton - the very colourful lagerphone player/front man of The Bushwackers - and it has been suggested many times that it would make a much better national anthem than the one we're stuck with.

"We are one, but we are many" seems to sum it all up very tidily.

I can't remember when I first went to hear the Bushwackers play their Australian music but last Saturday night was up there with those early concerts. It was a wonderful performance including Celtic instruments, rousing singing and much enthusiasm even if I'm not a big fan of people over 60 wearing beach gear at a night event.(The theme was Back to the Beach.)


The Bushwackers 
We had a brilliant few days at the festival, running from one show to the next, starting with the free concert in the park, including the trio, Bennett, Bowtell and Urquhart, Kimberley Gold at the Post Office Hotel, a beautiful vaudeville performance on Saturday afternoon at a pub by legendary Mic Conway, fantastic, raunchy and moving Beccy Cole, the fun duo, The Sweet Jelly Rolls, some brilliant buskers in Peel Street....and much much more. 

Mic Conway
                                          
For a live-music-starved fan it was Heaven. Only gripe: come on audiences move a bit with the music and show some enthusiasm and appreciation of the incredible musicians. You don't lose your rhythm as you get older, it just gets a bit sloppier.

Peel Street buskers 
So for those who want to show their patriotism on Australia Day (January 26, stupid date) there is no need to wrap yourself in an Australian flag. You could just use your imagination and brains and write a bloody good song.

Meanwhile, The Bushwackers have a new and very appropriate song also for this day - Another Trip to Bunnings. Might just take myself over there to buy a curtain bracket, some plugs and screws and grab a sausage sandwich while I'm at it.

'ave a bloody good day, mate.


For my foreign friends who don't know the song here are the lyrics:
(it's more like 70,000 years but still.....)


I came from the dream-time,
From the dusty red-soil plains.
I am the ancient heart,
The keeper of the flame.
I stood upon the rocky shores,
I watched the tall ships come,
For forty thousand years I've been
The first Australian.
I came upon the prison ship,
Bowed down by iron chains,
I fought the land, endured the lash,
And waited for the rains.
I'm a settler, I'm a farmer's wife
On a dry and barren run,
A convict, then a free man,
I became Australian.
I'm the daughter of a digger
Who sought the mother lode.
The girl became a woman
On the long and dusty road.
I'm a child of the Depression,
I saw the good times come,
I'm a bushie, I'm a battler,
I am Australian.
We are one, but we are many,
And from all the lands on earth we come.
We'll share a dream and sing with one voice,
"I am, you are, we are Australian"
I'm a teller of stories,
I'm a singer of songs,
I am Albert Namatjira
And I paint the ghostly gums.
I'm Clancy on his horse,
I'm Ned Kelly on the run,
I'm the one who waltzed Matilda,
I am Australian.
I'm the hot wind from the desert,
I'm the black soil of the plains,
I'm the mountains and the valleys,
I'm the drought and flooding rains.
I am the rock, I am the sky,
The rivers when they run,
The spirit of this great land,
I am Australian.
We are one, but we are many,
And from all the lands on earth we come.
We'll share a dream and sing with one voice,
"I am, you are, we are Australian."
"I am, you are, we are Australian."
Written by Bruce Woodley, Dobe Newton • Copyright © Spirit Music Group, BMG Rights Management US, LLC

January 18, 2017

Cool cars on hot days


The best place to be on a 44-degree day is an air-conditioned car. We left Foxground on the NSW south coast at 9.18am and arrived at Bathurst at 4.01pm.

At Crookwell we stopped to peruse a shop called Bush Rangers and was told by the lovely shopkeeper this had nothing to do with bushrangers. But we later learnt that the Ribbon Gang hid out at Abercrombie Caves and finally were caught. In true Australian fashion they were hung, and a lane was named after them in Bathurst.

We had coffee at a converted picture theatre where we were told the rich sat upstairs and threw jaffas at the poor down below.

We ended the day with a gin and basil smash at Webb and Co bar. The best way to cool down on a very long hot day.