Richard Flanagan

This month we read works of Richard Flanagan who was born and lives in Tasmania. He is descended from Irish convicts transported during the Great famine to Van Diemen’s land. In a BBC documentary he said that his father’s mother had indigenous ancestry. He is known not just for his writing but also for his environmental activism and support for Indigenous Rights.

Links to his biographic, works and numerous awards, including the 2014 Man Booker prize, are:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Flanagan
https://literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/richard-flanagan

The books we collectively read were:

Death of a River Guide (1994)
The Sound of One Hand Clapping (1997)
Gould’s Book of Fish (2001)
The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2003)
Wanting (2008)
And What do you Do Mr Gable (2011)

Other interesting links are:
Life after Death (2015) BBC documentary on Flanagan
https://vimeo.com/135694839

Richard Flanagan articles with The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/profile/richardflanagan

Interview with Phillip Adams, Late Night Live ABC National Radio
https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/latenightlive/richard-flangan/3162530

Our discussion illustrated how most but not all had enjoyed reading Flanagan’s books. At first reading, we thought they were very masculine and very Australian as you might expect. He writes of Tasmania history: the slaughter of the Indigenous people, the convicts and their cruel treatment, the racist treatment of the Eastern Europe WW2 refugees who worked on building the hydropower dam network and the environmental damage due to large scale forestry. But he also writes of love, spirituality and dreaming, alongside trauma, domestic violence, cruelty.