ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

The TAG Hungerford award has a good record for recognising talented Australian authors.  Set up by the City of Fremantle in WA to discover authors as yet unpublished, it consists of a cash prize and a publishing contract with Fremantle Press.  Although I haven’t read the prize-winning books, I’ve read other books by these recipients of the award, including:

• 1990: Brenda Walker, Crush, see my review of Reading by Moonlight
• 1991: Gail Jones, The House of Breathing, not an author reviewed on the blog except for Combined Reviews of A Guide to Berlin but I’ve read Sixty Lights and Dreams of Speaking
• 1993: Simone Lazaroo, The World Waiting to be Made, see my reviews of Sustenance, The Travel Writer and Lost River, Four Albums
• 2002: Nathan Hobby, The Fur (on my TBR). Nathan is currently writing a biography of Katharine Susannah Prichard.
• 2006: Alice Nelson, In Arcadia, see my review of After This and The Children’s House
• 2008: Natasha Lester, What is Left Over, After, see my review of  If I Should Lose You and A Kiss from Mr Fitzgerald

I’ve reviewed three winners of the award on the blog

• 2010 Red Dirt Talking, by Jacqueline Wright
• 2012 The Weaver Fish, by Robert Edeson
• 2016 Vodka & Apple Juice, by Jay Martin

and I’ve also read three of the novels shortlisted for the 2014 award picked up and published by other publishers — 2014 must have been a difficult year to choose the winner because these three are very fine novels: Seeing the Elephant, by Portland Jones;  Bloodlines, by Nicole Sinclair and The Sisters’ Song, by Louise Allan

The winner of that hotly contested 2014 award was Troppo, by Madelaine Dickie, published in 2016 by Fremantle Press.

Troppo is going to be on the 2020 reading list for the Indonesian book group I belong to, and it’s a good choice for discussion because it’s the story of a young Australian woman who goes to work in Sumatra, offering the perspective of an Australian who is fluent in Indonesian and knows the country quite well.  Like Simone Lazaroo (who won the award in 1993), Dickie writes as an outsider with some inside experience of Indonesia.  Most of the people in our group have a great deal of inside experience of Indonesia, so I’m looking forward to hearing what they think of the novel.

Penny, the central character and narrator of the story, is her own worst enemy.  The book begins with an alarming incident where she hears first-hand from a young woman who had worked for her future boss, Shane, but she decides to ignore those warning signs.  Penny is a keen surfer, telling herself that she’s in Sumatra to manage a coastal resort for a few months so that she can surf in her time off, but really, she’s running away.  She’s evading the problems she is having in her Australian relationship with a man called Josh.  Some years older than her, he is everything she is not: prudent, sensible, and comfortable with routines.  He’s career-minded, and settled-down contentedly in Perth.  But Penny, perhaps because of her disrupted youth which included time out with her father on Bali for a year, likes to party, to drift, and to have an adventurous lifestyle.  Reckless and naïve, Penny is warned off working for Shane by both expats and the locals with whom she is staying, but she ignores the weight of all this hostility and takes up her job at the resort.  (His offer of a huge bonus if she lasts for six months helps her to make up her mind!)

Troppo shows this young woman experiencing a conflict of values.  The novel is set in November 2004, just after the Bali and Denpasar bombings, and just before the Boxing Day tsunami.  In contrast to her free-and-easy year on Bali, she finds the oppressive influence of strict Islamism has spread to the remote village of Batu Batur, and it makes her feel uneasy.  She wants to respect Indonesian customs and culture, and she disapproves of young women flouting the cultural mores with scanty clothing, but she’s used to Western freedoms, and feels resentful of restrictions placed on women because of their gender.

Penny is not a blithe tourist with a romanticised perspective: she observes the back-breaking labour in the rice paddies and feels uncomfortable about her own privileged position.  At the same time, while she knows that she and Westerners like her are regarded as rich by virtue of their capacity to travel, to holiday, and to spend freely in the Indonesian economy, she has finite resources when it comes to returning to Australia.  At home she is certainly not rich, and her erratic work history in the unqualified hospitality sector makes her financial future rather precarious.  But her feelings of guilt lead to impulsive generosity — which of course reinforces local opinion that she has money to burn…

Considering herself well-acquainted with the domestic politics of commercial development in Indonesia, Penny thinks that the hostility to Shane is because of his impact on village life.  But she is inevitably compromised.  Her job involves working in a resort that supplants the local culture with its lavish facilities.  Still, she can see that not only have the local fisherman had their livelihood disrupted by restrictions imposed by Shane, but also that resort development doesn’t benefit the locals if they’re not employed there.  She is aware that most of the thriving businesses on Bali are owned by Australians, not by the Balinese.  And Shane is a typical example of someone who’d rather employ Westerners, called bules (i.e. bullies) in the novel.  Shane would much rather have a barmaid who drinks herself, to serve booze to his customers.

(This reminds me of an ‘guest speaker’ who addressed my class when I was learning Indonesian at Gadjah Mada University.  He was a (Caucasian) representative of one of the major global hotels in Yogyakarta, and he was there to offer employment to any of us who wanted to work in his hotel.  He explained that he needed bilingual staff who understood diner expectations in a fine dining restaurant, and it was easy to deduce the inference.  I thought this was interesting because we were all there on scholarships paid for by the Victorian government to learn Indonesian so that we could teach it in government schools, and yet he was invited there to poach us! This might have been my one-and-only experience of korupsi…)

Corruption, however, is a given in this novel.  Shane is bribing the local police to ignore the way he flouts the law, and the local Indonesians in their desperation decide to deliver some very rough justice using ‘black magic’.  The escalation from hostility to vengeance is what drives the narrative tension and gives the novel its shocking conclusion.

I liked the sophisticated way that Dickie depicted her bilingual character in this novel.  Sometimes she uses an Indonesian word or phrase, and translates it as part of the same sentence, and at other times the meaning is obvious from context.  But the novel also shows Penny being excluded from conversations because the local Indonesians speak Bahasa Lampung, spoken in Southern Sumatra alongside the official language of Bahasa Indonesia.  This technique is a way of showing that Penny remains an outsider in this community, and is not trusted, even by people who like her.

Sue from Whispering Gums reviewed Troppo too.

PS Dickie has just released a new novel: it’s called red Can Origami and I’ll be reading it soon. For more details, see here.

Author: Madelaine Dickie
Title: Troppo
Publisher: Fremantle Press, 2016, 264pp
ISBN: 9781925163803
Review copy courtesy of Fremantle Press

Available from Fishpond: Troppo and direct from Fremantle Press