The Tiger Man of

Reviewed by Pamela Wilson

When you’ve got a story full of intrigue, deception, torture and murder, you’ve got the makings of a good thriller. When that story is true, you have the makings of a great one. Because of this, I snapped up the chance to read and review The Tiger Man of Vietnam, by Frank Walker. Given the choice, I will always pluck from the shelf a biographical account that promises a good story as well as enlightenment of a foreign place, era, or event; and, on all accounts, I wasn’t disappointed with Walker’s book.

The Tiger Man of Vietnam recounts the two years that Australian war hero Barry Petersen spent heading a covert CIA mission to train up a paramilitary force deep in the Vietnam jungle. In this short space of time, Petersen honed his skills in guerrilla warfare, mastered the cultural requirement of skolling home-made rice wine – even when grit and wriggly weevils were present – and was instrumental in quelling a rebellion that would have resulted in bloodshed. He made friends and enemies everywhere he went. But few in the Australian government even knew he was there; before long, few in the CIA wanted him to remain.

Sympathetic to the Montagnard – the tribespeople being squeezed by both the Viet Cong and the South Vietnamese forces – that he was training, Petersen got too close to them and their cause. Revered and honoured, he became a demi-God. So, when the CIA asked him to turn his troops, The Tiger Men, into assassination squads, he refused. Shortly after, he found himself to a target on the CIA’s own assassination list.

When I target the bookstores, I always aim to get the best bang for my buck, to get value for money. I expect something worthy from the words I read, whether it is entertainment, insight or knowledge. I got all three with The Tiger Man of Vietnam. I learned that the Vietnam War, as it was run by the Americans and allies, was even more abhorrent and unforgivable than I previously realised. I was horrified to learn the true extent of the CIA’s dirty tactics and, worse still, that they continue today. I was surprised to discover that for many years a ‘torture school’ existed at the School of Military Intelligence at Middle Head in Sydney. Even better, I got all this from well-formulated prose and description, and not in the format of extended teachers’ notes that some historical books bog us down with.

However, as gripping and fascinating as Barry Petersen’s story is, I tired of this man who seemed too good to be true: a champion of the wretched, a soldier with a conscience, a man enough brave to stand up to authority. To Walker’s credit, he launches into a series of interviews with men that Petersen worked with, about two-thirds of the way into the book. Here, we begin to see Petersen in a new light, as a man who gets ‘carried away with himself’ and ‘a megalomaniac who fancied himself as another Lawrence of Arabia’, but it came a little too late for me. I would have liked to have seen this side of Petersen’s character sooner so I could get to know him properly – warts and all – from the start.

Despite this, Walker has done a thorough job in fleshing out this important story. As you would expect from a journalist with 32 years experience in newspapers, this book is meticulously researched and the interviews are informative and insightful. Walker’s knowledge of military and defence is evident from the years he spent covering these topics, along with security and politics, for the Sun-Herald newspaper.

I would highly recommend this book. In fact, I already have, to a number of colleagues, friends and family. This is a story for anyone who enjoys the feeling that they are not only being entertained, but that they are learning something when they sit down for a quiet night in with a good book.

Pamela Wilson is the freelance writer, journalist and editor who talks a little too much and laughs a little too loud. She also facilitates author ‘in conversation’ events, teaches a freelance feature writing course at the Sydney Writers Centre and writes a blog for aspiring writers. (www.writesmart.com.au)

I recently reviewed the thriller Ravens, by George Dawes Green, for The Book Show on ABC Radio National. Have a listen, here.

Part One of this interview can be found here.

Pictured: Emily Maguire and I before the Sleepers Salon in October.

I ask Maguire about the setting. Is it pertinent for this story to be set in Sydney? She says it probably could have been a few cities, but ‘western Sydney is – the cliché is ‘melting pot’, but it’s not very melty actually, it’s more like lots of different kinds of people clashing with each other.

‘Part of it is, Adam is an outsider, his expectations of Sydney are Bondi and beaches, sea water, all that side of it, and it’s not that, y’no?. But there are two universities near there so there are students, there are a lot of international students, there are a lot of immigrants, but it’s also partly, newly gentrified so you have wealth cropping up and – it’s a clash.

‘There were a few other places in the world, there are probably parts of Melbourne, there are certain American cities that have that too. But as an Australian writing, and as someone from Sydney, I think that particular area is the kind of place where you do get these odd mixes of people who have smashed into each other and are a bit stuck where they are and so you get these weird kind of friendships.

‘There are a lot of street characters there too, they’re known as that although I’m sure they don’t think of themselves as characters – they’re living their lives – but, people who’ve lived there a long time can tell you the stories about these street people. “The man with a stick” is kinda based on a real guy.’

I was really struck by how calm the character Katie is after she acts out, such as after she harms herself. Her calmness is what’s really confronting to Adam and the other characters. There’s a scene where she’s bald, barefoot and scarred, and she’s wearing a red dress ‘of a style Graeme recognised from his youth’, and a navy and white polka-dot apron. She is making Graeme dinner. It’s a very beautiful, sad and tense scene. I asked Maguire if she thought some readers might be confronted by the book, the way the other characters are sometimes confronted by Katie.

‘Yeah. It’s really interesting to me how different people relate to the characters when they read it – I feel like I learn a lot about them. Some people have said “she’s so irritating, she’s so self-indulgent”, which I think is partly true, but others have said “I love her, she’s great” – and I feel somewhere in between the two. I hope both things are true – that even though she is irritating and kind of self-indulgent, that’s the flip-side of what I think is lovely about her, which is the deep empathy and the way she doesn’t “mature things away”. She takes everything seriously, whether it’s a celebrity’s crisis, or cooking dinner – she really throws herself into everything – which can be trying, if you’re actually with someone like that’.

There’s a part in the book, in one of Katie’s chapters, about distraction being ‘the stuff of life’ and being what allowed Katie to ‘get on with the stuff of life’. I did sort of see it as the symbolic part – of contemporary existence in general. But Maguire said that’s only one part of it: ‘I don’t mean to highlight it in just a cynical, critical way because I think distraction is a big part of actual survival. The characters don’t really have a religion or an afterlife to look forward to and you do kinda get to that point of “what’s the point?” And part of that is just connecting with other people and finding beauty in the world and things to care about. So that’s the other side of that. So it can become a really negative thing if you never stop to reflect – if you’re always concentrating on the next thing so you never have to stop and you never have to think about your life, but to an extent it’s quite a healthy coping mechanism, too.’

Because I always love to know what authors read, particularly if I admire them and their writing, I ask Maguire about some of her favourite books. She goes back often to Graham Greene. ‘He’s a Catholic writer, in that his Catholicism comes into his work, but he’s very cold and hard. His writing is old-fashioned in a way but it’s sort of the way I write too, and what I love, that old-fashioned psychological realism. Characters that really start delving into their soul, and books that examine how they make choices in their life. One of his books in particular, The Heart of the Matter, was hugely influential for Smoke in the Room.’

Jane Eyre is Maguire’s ‘touchstone book’, but more for her as a person, than a writer. ‘It’s just a really important book to me … I just love it’. She also cites Nadine Gordimer – the South African novelist, ‘who is my idol in the way she can write about politics or political situations, but her novels are still really character-driven. You never feel like you’re reading a political novel, but it’s there. It’s South Africa and it’s the context of the lives of her characters. She’s wonderful’.

After our talk, I watch Maguire in Q&A with Steven Amsterdam at the Sleepers Salon, and learn that at an early stage of writing this book, she suffered a stroke. What happened, was that she came back to the draft and found it somewhat ‘cold’. The book you read now has come about through a life-changing experience. And the characters have their own revelations – through circumstance, through inevitability, and through conscious decision. It’s sometimes up to the reader to think about just which of these things has affected an outcome (choice or inevitability?). And I’m sure Maguire would be able to see deep inside you, depending what you chose.

You can find more details about Emily Maguire and her books on her website.

Smoke in the Room is published by Picador.

I caught up with Emily Maguire one afternoon in Melbourne to ask her about the book. We sat in the corner of a pub and listened to the kitchen staff belting out 60s rock & roll. I’ve always thought Maguire looks a bit like Christina Ricci – her eyes are large and warm, very deep, and she has the same sort of edge. She is someone whose writing and talks (I have seen her at a few writers’ festivals) indicate that she is one of those people possessed by an honest knowledge about both the sadness and the beauty of the world, and I expect this has been the case since she was very young. She is also often touted, quite truthfully, as a ‘voice of her generation’, writing in both fiction and nonfiction about young people, particularly women, in contemporary Australia.

Smoke in the Room began with the character of Graeme, Maguire says. She had coincidentally been reading a lot of biographies with a similar theme. ‘One of them was of the Aboriginal activist Rob Riley, who committed suicide in ’96. And then I read a long article about Iris Chang, an American writer who wrote a historical account of the rape of Nanking. She was only 36, I think, and she committed suicide, after that book. The book is devastating.

‘So, I was thinking about the toll, that being really engaged in social justice or foreign correspondence, can take. And then I also happened to read a biography of Graham Greene, who’s my favourite twentieth-century writer, and he liked to tell this story – and I wonder if it’s a little bit of an exaggeration – about how when he was a teenager he’d feel depression coming on and he would play Russian Roulette. He suffered from depression his whole life, but he said that he found the best cure – rather than psychotherapy or anything – was to travel to really dangerous places. And so you can track the worst places in the world in the twentieth-century by looking at where Graham Greene went. He went to the most terrible places. And he said that’s when he felt best.’

The character of Graeme in Smoke in the Room is named, then, after Greene, and he too, has travelled to dangerous places all throughout his life. It’s only the young character Katie who has insight into this behaviour, in the book. Maguire wondered whether ‘someone like him is drawn to that kind of work as a way to stave off depression or apathy’. And if not, ‘is this something that will have this cumulative kind of effect when you stop?’

The other part of Graeme came about through people-watching. ‘I would see just around the area these men in their 50s or 60s who look very neat and put-together, not homeless or anything, but just look so lonely and isolated’.

Katie’s philosophical outlook on life – living honestly, emotionally, for-the-moment, no matter how hard-hitting the truth of the moment is – contrasts her new friend and lover Adam’s outlook. Adam prefers to distance himself or step back, or divest his energy in something else – pick up the pieces, despite the weight of his grief. Katie is more inclined to let it in and go with it. Maguire says: ‘Part of it is this kind of context of who you are in relation to society, because Adam is someone who has always been really privileged, and lucky, and his worst complaint is that his mum never felt sorry for him. So when this terrible thing happens to him – to lose someone – he’s almost offended by it happening, and he doesn’t really have any kind of inner resources to cope with something like that happening to him. Whereas Katie’s someone who’s – whether it’s in her nature or related to her experiences in life – a lot more accepting of the fact that shit happens. And that’s all part of life, and she doesn’t take it personally in the same way, so she’s able to kind of roll with it’.

Katie really reminds me of that line in the movie Adaptation: ‘You are what you love, not what loves you.’ She’ll go on loving, believing, feeling, expressing – whether or not it is reciprocated.

Part Two of this interview can be found here.

You can find more details about Emily Maguire and her books on her website.

When I was first offered this book to review I thought: Well, Ms Meyer, it seems that not only are you literary-minded but you’re also literally minded, because what you have given me here is a book about a Brisbane girl returning home to her family. Which, Angela—as you very well know—is the very same situation I was in when you flung this book at me. However, when I started reading I realised that maybe not everything in this world is about me after all, and once I got over the shock of that I was able to appreciate that Linda Neil’s story is very much her own, and a beautifully rendered one at that.

Learning How to Breathe is a memoir, the debut of musician-radio producer, Neil. It traces her relationship with her ailing mother, whom she is suddenly called home to take care of after years of being away. Using interviews with family members, stories from other relatives and friends, and of course, her own memories, Neil recounts what happens over the next decade as she witnesses her mother’s deteriorating health and records their experiences in various caring facilities. A shared love of music is the bond that helps mother and daughter reconnect during this difficult time, and Neil’s examination of their changing relationship is thoughtful and tender.

The childhood home is described with detailed affection. Neil’s mother, Joan, was a singing teacher and taught students out of her house in St Lucia, Brisbane, so the five children grew up surrounded by music. One of the nice touches about the book is Joan’s singing advice (which was published in various industry newsletters over the years) scattered throughout the story, helping us hear her voice in harmony with the voice of her daughter.

Neil plumbs her family history to understand where she has come from. Her self-characterisation as a bohemian-wild-child, who spent her youth playing electric violin on the streets of Sydney and living in the hills of Byron Bay before coming home as the prodigal daughter, seemed to me a little heavy-handed to begin with. But as the story and her relationship with her mum grows stronger, Neil seems to become clearer about her own development, and the writing grows too. By the end, I was overawed by the magnificent moments that fill the final half of the book—moments illustrating a family’s love.

What came across most beautifully for me in Neil’s writing is the way that she and her four siblings seemed to share and balance the role of caring for their mother over the many years of her illness. She skillfully depicts the ways each child is able to contribute their very different strengths. I adored these moments. The final few chapters are completely breathtaking, and as a reader you feel much rewarded at that point.

This book is about love, and the multifarious ways it can be expressed. It’s a book for anyone who has had to decide between caring for a loved one or institutionalising them. It’s a book for those who enjoy truthful stories, stories about discovering the light within the darkness, stories about music, and stories about Brisbane girls returning home to their family.

Lorelei Vashti is a writer and book editor with no fixed address, but that doesn’t mean she’s homeless. She swans around here in her dressing gown and here in her more professional attire. God knows what she wears here but it can’t be pretty.

9780980374667
September 2009 (Australia)
Affirm Press

If you didn’t already know that Mic Looby was once a Lonely Planet writer and editor, it’s not difficult to guess, reading his debut novel, Paradise Updated. In it, the satirically named ‘SmallWorld’ publishers dominate the guidebook industry and the bloke who made them what they are today, legendary Robert Rind, expert on the island nation of Maganda, has reached his use-by-date.

Enter the adoringly awkward Mithra, SmallWorld editor, with weaknesses for Mr Wrong and the muffin trolley. She’s been given the opportunity of a lifetime – to replace Rind and write the updated version of the Maganda guidebook, known affectionately (or scathingly) as The Bible. But the big guidebook authors come with matching egos, and Rind’s is the biggest. He is hilariously disillusioned with his status as the man who put Maganda on the tourist map (while being utterly clueless about all things Magandan). In every way a mess of a human being, Rind is impossible to hate.

Mithra, on the other hand, is one of those curious characters that manages to be endearing without ever doing much. Her character works, mainly, because everything that could possibly go wrong happens to her. And it’s damn funny. Anyone who’s been overseas is familiar with the frustration and despair that can sometimes accompany a holiday. And Mic Looby never lets up.

He never gives his characters a break, which, while entertaining to read, is also incredibly exhausting. From Mithra’s sweaty ride to the town of Bahala on the Changra Paste Express, to the horrendous combination of inner thigh chaffing and mosquito bites, we come to understand our heroine’s resentment at being thrust into the less than glamourous world of travel writing.

Then we get these beautifully crafted sentences (about baggy shorts of all things):

‘There was so much air rushing in and out it felt as if there was nothing at all between his soft, pink shame and the outside world.’ (p85)

Paradise Updated is an intelligent read, and more than a little funny. But it’s not a book to take your time with. It’s super fast, and may cause repressed memories of travel horrors to resurface. But apart from all this, a fantastically written memoir – err, I mean, fiction – about the glossy, greedy, globalised industry of travel book publishing.

Elena Gomez is an aspiring writer, blogger and journalism graduate turned publishing noob. She discovered she could write when she won the QLD Courier Mail Young Reviewer of the Year Award 2000, age 12, with a review of Luke’s Way of Looking by Nadia Wheatley. She now writes for www.withextrapulp.com.au

Penguin New Zealand 2008
9780143008934

The Year of the Shanghai Sharkcharts a series of encounters, tales and incidents in one year of a boy’s life in Dalian, China. His immediate existence is determined by his Uncle, who possesses many big books and conducts dubious business, his best friends Po Fan and Xiao Wang, plus basketball, fast food and his many individual encounters. On the periphery of this story are the Iraq war, the SARS epidemic, and general themes of Americanisation, technologisation, history and a shifting culture.

This book is a light yet thoughtful, modern, coming-of-age story told in a warm, immediate voice. Some of the characters our protagonist Hai Long encounters during the ‘year of the Shanghai shark’ include Worker Chen, who steers Hai Long on the path to ‘a good mind’; Gambler Deng; the peasant/beggar Fish; a kid nicknamed Basketball (because he’s so good at the sport) whose Dad wants him instead to be a doctor; the Old Stone, who Hai Long reads to; Writer Liu, a thin man who likes to write about ‘the inner struggle’; Karl, the Canadian English teacher; troubled Sister Ling; arguing Uncle Zhang and Uncle Jiang; the ambitious Li Tong who wants to study economics in America; and Old Gao the poet. There are other faces along with the peripheral stories – such as Yao Ming – a Chinese basketballer who has made it big in America.

This is Mo Zhi Hong’s debut novel, unpretentiously showcasing modern China and all its mixed-interests, through the eyes of one boy. Zhi Hong is located in New Zealand but was born in Singapore, lived in Taiwan, Canada, China and the US – where he worked as a software developer. The author’s globalised experience is reflected in the novel as a generational nonchalance toward American influence, but Zhi Hong also embeds his older Chinese characters with rich personalities and histories – and writes some as characters vehemently opposed to American cultural influence – so our young character, and the reader, receive a wholesome mix of messages, easily and entertainingly absorbed.

With Readings and Writings: Forty Years in Books, there doesn’t appear to have been an overriding theme or subject limitation placed on the contributors. Instead, the writers involved, who have all had supportive associations with Readings Books & Music (Melbourne) over the years, are given free reign. The result is a genuinely impressive collection.

The slightly irascible tone in ‘The Age of Terror’ by Chris Womersley is a lovely touch and very funny, recalling the best and most acerbic writings of Amy Hempel. It has wonderful descriptions which caught me out for their unexpectedness and humour (an ambulance officer feeling for a pulse is likened to a ‘trout fisherman, feeling for tremble on his line’) . There was a delighted shock of recognition, which many readers of this anthology will share, of the ‘inner-city parties populated with the absurdly tasteful’. Devastating and brilliant, for my money this is the best story in the mix, and hard to forget.

That said, Kate Holden’s ‘The Sightseers’ rivalled ‘The Age of Terror’ for my vote. A father takes his wife and daughter around Rome in the role of pushy guide, until he unwisely steps off the tourist path. The writing evokes Katherine Mansfield (although much darker) for the way it tracks minutely the shifting sympathies of the characters, and builds small but telling detail toward a shocking conclusion which is nonetheless inevitable when you search back through for clues. An object lesson in clever, subtle and brilliant writing.

Another highlight was ‘The Woodcutter’ by David Cohen. The story works as mad allegory, with satire thrown in, on the subject of marketing. It was great to read a tale so far out of the realist mould, which the majority of this collection falls into. An absurdist romp and an utter delight.   

‘The Nun’s story’ by Peter Goldsworthy replaces the usual predator, the priest, with a nun in a simple but elegant style, building in carefully controlled tension. The nun’s ‘enigmatic smile’ is at first just that – enigmatic – until it becomes a motif of unforced and effective creepiness.

I must mention Catherine Harris’ ‘A Grand Leap of Stupid Faith’, so interesting I suspect the narrator could easily be recycled to sustain a whole novel. Her tone is slightly bored, with nothing glamorised or touched up; the tale is seemingly tossed-off but delivered with tight control.

A game of ten-pin bowling between two brothers, in Paddy O’Reilly’s ‘After the Goths’ effortlessly and unostentatiously told, is a real treat. And what can one say of Christos Tsiolkas’ impeccable storytelling that has not already been said. ‘The Pornographic Scientist’, where a mother tries to understand her estranged, deceased son through the only means left to her – a porno he acted in – is suitably raw and confronting.

No less mentionable, Alex Miller’s musings on what defines home; Elliot Perlman’s slice of everyday tragedy; Amy Tsilemanis’ cool exposure of the covetous generation; and Cate Kennedy’s study of a man and woman’s alternative forms of resilience.

Likewise with Myfanwy Jones’ tale of a dog-walker who is surprised by a moment of tenderness; Barry Divola’s nostalgic warnings on parroting; Robbie Egan’s blistering summer; Miles Allinson’s dreamlike fun-park; and Michael McGirr’s lesson on how philosophy can’t give us concrete answers. There is not a single dud among this collection.

If a theme or feeling can be gleaned from the overriding mood of these stories, then it appears that we may be no wiser or happier. But as examples of contemporary creativity, we are in prolific and fascinating times.

Tom Conyers is the author of the novel Morse Code for Cats. He makes short films, some of which have been shortlisted for prizes overseas; written a dozen plays (Magpies opened Chapel off Chapel’s Emerging Playwrights Forum 2008); and is currently working on a feature-film project and his second novel.

[Angela: all proceeds from the sale of this book go to the Readings Foundation. More info here.]

In The Lost Symbol, Harvard Professor Robert Langdon is called to give a last-minute talk at the Capitol Building in Washington DC. But soon the severed, tattooed hand of his mentor is found, pointing at a painted ceiling; and a short bossy CIA agent becomes involved. Then come vaults and passageways and codes and clues and of course, danger.

Quite a few cornball descriptions snagged me (‘Then, like an oncoming truck, it hit her’) and I couldn’t help but be annoyed by the bland, asexual symbologist Professor Langdon, but this book is a rich puzzle of connections. Langdon’s purpose is to play out the reader’s fears and their scepticisms. From planted clues early on in the novel emerges a mix of Masonic myth and history, humanist thought, new age mind ’science’, technology, art, and a really fun, despicable phoenix-tattooed eunuch villain.

Brown’s books contain oft-far-fetched but worthy conceptual considerations. In The Da Vinci Code it was the notion of the sacred feminine which kept me reading, despite the clunky writing. His writing here is smoother, though the (albeit interesting) bits and bobs about historical figures and information are still a little intrusive. Better than having them be expositional though. Though even with limited exposition, the dialogue is pretty cringeworthy. So many of the characters call men and boys ‘son’. People just don’t talk like that.

What isn’t amateurish is the phenomenally rich plot. And there is much that is original about this book, and about Brown’s work. I still think he’s nothing on Clive Cussler, if you’re going for far-fetched adventure (with a much more charismatic lead, in Dirk Pitt). But there are a few sequences in this book, which I really did not see coming. Brown’s other skill is connection – not just between plot points, but between concepts. ie. modern science and ancient mysticism, the similarities between different religions and belief systems (and the similar misunderstandings), the connection between this odd ‘science’ of Noetics (literally mind over matter) and computer metasystems, art and mathematics – plus concepts of language, knowledge, enlightenment, truth and power.

This book really is great fun and much more stimulating than a lot of the big-publisher-faff out there. I know it’s lame that some authors clog the shelves with their massive print runs and you get sick of seeing their covers in the hands of commuters everywhere, but I’ve never understood the weird logic of choosing not to read something just because it’s popular. I’d be interested to hear your thoughts.

Truckers
Mary Richardson
Mark Batty Publisher
June 2009 (USA)
9780979966682

Reviewed by Rhys Tate.

A few months ago, as an ex-truckie and sometime poet, I was invited to submit some lines to Sydney outfit Red Room and their collection of trucker poetry, a pairing even I find incongruous. My poem was titled ‘There’s nothing romantic about driving a truck’ and Truckers by Mary Richardson might well be the photojournalistic twin to that anti-sentiment.

The trouble is that people who don’t drive trucks do sentimentalise an occupation that invariably combines consistent pressure with soul-destroying repetition. Heading from Melbourne to Sydney return three times a week (many do that and more besides) with a  manifest that has your trip plotted to the nearest fifteen minutes might sound okay, until you’re six hours north of Melbourne at two in the morning and can’t see fifty feet because of the fog. There’s no pulling over for a few hours or travelling at a sane speed for the conditions; even at 110 all the way, you might have fifteen minutes spare to make a delivery window in Sydney. Miss too many windows and it’s Centrelink time, baby.

Richardson and her photographers paint a bleaker picture of US truckers, who lack even Centrelink’s dubious safety net. She makes no bones that the focus of the book is the erosion of conditions for drivers and especially owner-operators. Gayle, a truck-stop bartender whose drove with her ex-husband before they were squeezed out by operating debts, puts it simply, ‘Back then it was a good living. Now it’s not.’

Over 128 pages, a cast of drivers and their support crew flit past like strangers on a busy street. Most get a photo and a couple of paragraphs, and then it’s on to the next and the next after that. There are divorces and cigarettes and far too many artful ‘unposed’ portraits of truckers in front of their rigs. Richardson is shooting for a mood of washed-out impermanence and, even though some of the writing is a touch self-conscious, she delivers on this front.

This transience does make Truckers more difficult to recommend. Our interaction with the truckers feels guarded, as if we were fresh hitchhikers they hadn’t quite made their minds up about yet. I wanted more depth to the vignetting, more relaxation and variety to the photography. Richardson has stripped the sentiment from the occupation, but in doing so she’s bleached out much of the colour and humour which counterpoint the terrible conditions. Most truckers, in similar to people who spend far too much time keeping their own company, are merrily half-mad. I wanted to spend three or four days crossing one of the world’s great continents with each one; as it is, Truckers made me feel more like an interloper with a clipboard, knocking on the windows of parked semis at a stop.

Rhys Tate studies writing at Deakin and has recently been published in Verandah 24, The Logbook Anthology and Victorian Writer. He once drove a truck with thirteen gears and a non-synchro gearbox (sample gear change: clutch in, shift into neutral, clutch out, get revs between 1,500 – 2,000 rpm, clutch in, shift into new gear, clutch out, rinse and repeat-peat-peat-peat). He’s bogged a truck in Spotswood, ‘widened’ a front gate in Altona and backed into a tree in Malvern. His writing also tends towards minor calamity.