Kate
Gaffney-Kozinsky is the book’s central character. Née Gaffney, she was
originally of Irish stock and gained the Polish double barrel by virtue of
marriage. Virtue may be a stretch of both truth and reality when describing
this particular marriage, however.
Kate
Gaffney has an uncle who is a priest. Given the Irish connection this is not
altogether surprising. But Kate’s uncle is not the usual sort of cleric. He has
particular interests and proclivities that result in his rubbing shoulders with
the rich, the powerful and the infamous. Thomas Keneally’s novel pre-dates
scandal relating to personal abuse by clerics, and there is no mention of this
in relation to the story of Kate’s uncle, but the rest will eventually conspire
to condemn him and indeed defrock him. But a tension that is present and one
that Thomas Keneally brings out to great effect is the way that this Irishness,
this anti-British nationalism, can in Australia be lumped together with the
traditional English rump to form a contrast with the later arrivals to the
country from Greece, Poland, Lebanon, Vietnam, Italy and elsewhere.
It
is pertinent to Kate’s story because she meets and marries a Kozinsky, a Pole,
one of the more recent, non Anglo-Saxon antipodeans. The family has made a huge
fortune in developing investment property. They are rich, famous and
successful. Kate’s life is duly transformed.
Two
children are born and they begin to grow up in a family whose cracks are
beginning to appear. Kate internalises anything that might appear to fall short
of overt success. But then mothers often do regard as failure anything less
than perfection in themselves, especially in those things that impinge upon
their children’s lives. Kate turns to new relationships, seeking there perhaps
to fill some of the cracks that have appeared in the very structure of her own
family life. And then things really fall apart.
Kate
seeks out a new life. She takes a train into her country’s interior, that vast,
even now largely unknown hinterland where it is usually failure, not
opportunity, that awaits. She becomes a barmaid in a back-of-beyond town that
suffers chronic and regular flooding, and, sure enough, climatic disaster
strikes again. A man called Jelly reckons that a hole blown through a railway
embankment would relieve the town of its unwanted surfeit of water. Predicting
the blast proves more difficult that setting it.
The
plot wanders across country after explosive events. A large kangaroo and an emu
travel in the party, on their way to a film set where they are cast in parts of
a living national coat of arms. Kate thus travels again, but always pursued by
her husband’s family lawyer, who wants her to sign away her rights,
responsibilities and any presumed guilt.
When,
later, abortive attempts at settlement have been attempted and come to nothing,
Kate tries to take things into her own hands and seeks a settlement of her own.
Her priest-uncle’s fate has taken its turns, as, she discovers, have the
fortunes of the Kozinskys. While she has been bound up in the detail of her own
life and its imaginings, fears and guilt, things outside of her direct
experience have moved on. The world she rediscovers has changed. The landscape,
though still unchanging ancient Australia, is now utterly different, offering
new possibilities to new lives and even the opportunity to rewrite her personal
history. Kate Gaffney thus explores the great inner sea of her country at the
same time as navigating the tides of her own innermost fears. The journey, as
ever, lands on new shores in old places.
My latest book, One On One, is a romantic espionage thriller set on an island in the South China Sea
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