We All Lived in Bondi Then is a posthumously published short story collection from the late Georgia Blain (1964-2016). The stories were written between 2012 and 2015, intended for publication some time after Between a Wolf and a Dog (2016), which turned out to be her last novel though she did not know that until she was editing it for publication. (It was not her last book, that was the posthumously published The Museum of Words: A Memoir of Language, Writing, and Mortality (2017).
These stories traverse preoccupations that are familiar to readers of Blain’s fiction. Difficult siblings with incomprehensible personalities; ambiguous mother-daughter relationships; grief and loss; resentment and loyalty; disappointment with the self and others; and the contemporary scourges of disconnection, drug addiction, intemperate drinking and Alzheimer’s Disease.
The collection of nine stories comprises:
- Australia Square
- Dear Professor Brewster
- Far from home
- Last days
- Last one standing
- Ship to shore
- Still breathing
- Sunday
- We all lived in Bondi then
‘Australia Square’ is a heart-rending story. Parents on the verge of splitting up hire a French au pair who brings the children, a girl and a baby boy in a pram, to the father’s work. She has a dental appointment so the children are to have lunch with the father. But on the forty-seventh floor, a brief, innocent distraction sends the lift away — with the pram still in it. The reverberations from this event spiral down through the years. Relationships sever in the aftermath as the mystery of the child’s disappearance haunts them.
More and more of us are experiencing the loss of a loved one to dementia or Alzheimer’s Disease, and in ‘Dear Professor Brewster’ the narrator’s halting progress towards having her mother diagnosed is all too familiar. Something seems wrong long before the dots are joined, and then there are the decisions about care options, made with or without the cooperation of the afflicted one. And the thing is, life is going on in other ways at the same time. It’s incredibly stressful, and then there’s the anxiety about the possible genetic inheritance. Blain captures this perfectly in ‘Dear Professor Brewster’ but it’s difficult to read…
‘Last Days’ is the melancholy last night of a relationship that seems to have run its course, fizzling out because of discontent and resentment. The couple are lesbian, but it’s a common enough scenario… moving to uncongenial places and being the stay-at-home parent because of a higher-earning partner’s work. Annie’s yearning for freedom got the better of her once and she left Lou alone when she shouldn’t have. Kath is so busy with her own fulfilment that she doesn’t notice that her control is chafing at Annie:
‘Annie?’
She calls her again: ‘Annie?’
It’s Lou who gives her away, who points to where she stands in the middle of this small patch of lawn, not so difficult to see really, if Kath came out and looked for her, rather than waiting for Annie to go in to Kath.
She raises her hand, somewhat pathetically, and calls out hello, she’s just smelling the scent of summer in the air, she’ll be in in a minute. She will. But Kath isn’t really listening. She simply likes to know where Annie is. (p.78)
I have never responded to anybody calling me from inside the house. Dogs and children (sometimes) come when they’re called. Equal partners don’t. You want to know where I am, then look for me. The house is not that big…
‘Last One Standing’ reminded me of Lucy Treloar’s superb 2019 novel Wolfe Island (see my review). A woman alone in a place that’s been deserted for a long time. Blain’s story is set perhaps at some time in the near future when rain is too spasmodic to make life sustainable. Her only companion is a very old dog, whose impending death she fears. And then there are signs of a disconcerting, possibly threatening presence: smoke on the air, a gate left open. This was my favourite story because there is a glimmer of hope in its resolution.
Though there is also a glimmer of hope in ‘Ship to Shore’. ‘Oh no,’ I breathed at the bottom of page 115, aghast at the fate of the dog perched precariously on a cliff ledge, unwittingly the catalyst for a woman lost in grief to begin to care again.
These are sombre stories. But I had a rare snort of laughter, when reading this, narrated by a woman with glandular fever:
I often didn’t rise until the afternoon light turned the hallway a deep gold, and I would shuffle out to the lounge room, where Rachel would be lying on the art deco couch, oblivious to how ill I felt. We were young, and didn’t realise that sharing a house could also entail caring for each other — which was not as harsh as it sounds. Neither of us had expectations of the other, and so there was little sense of being let down. But in that month of fever, I sometimes wished I had a home to go to. (p.118)
The oblivious Rachel is a medical student, with two years to go. Clearly, caring for others is not a course prerequisite…
Brona has also reviewed this collection, and so has Theresa.
PS I recently had the pleasure of hearing cover designer Sandy Cull talk about her practice at the Glen Eira Storytelling Festival. It was not what I was expecting because the session was called ‘How to Judge a Book by its Cover’ which made me think it would clarify for me the design style elements of different book genres, and the panel chair (hmm) didn’t go anywhere near that topic, but still it was interesting to hear how much time and effort and creativity Sandy Cull puts into each design. She reads, properly, every book for which she does a design. No wonder they are as good as they are.
Author: Georgia Blain
Title: We All Lived in Bondi Then
Foreword by Charlotte Wood
Publisher: Scribe, 2024
Cover design by Sandy Cull
ISBN: 9781761380730, hbk., 155 pages
Review copy courtesy of Scribe.
ANZ LitLovers LitBlog 
These sound like spot on short stories Lisa … so sad that Blain died when she did. Didn’t her mother have dementia? That story you describe was presumably based on close experience.
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By: whisperinggums on March 8, 2024
at 10:24 am
Yes, she did. Anne Deveson died with Alzheimer’s Disease just a few days after Blain died. Knowing that made it a poignant experience to read it.
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By: Lisa Hill on March 8, 2024
at 10:44 am
That’s what I remembered … so tragic. I wondered whether Deveson was aware her daughter had died. In a way it would be nice if she didn’t.
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By: whisperinggums on March 8, 2024
at 5:07 pm
It would be a dilemma whether to tell her or not. On the one hand, a mother has the right to know, it would be a way of respecting her dignity despite her condition. But, depending on what stage of the disease she was at, the likelihood is that she would of course be terribly distressed… and then forget. So relatives, already grieving their loss, would have the awful situation where to tell her again would be to revisit that distress, but not to tell her again would mean pretending that it hadn’t happened.
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By: Lisa Hill on March 8, 2024
at 5:23 pm
Dementia is a terrible thing and IMO those who have never experienced living with someone w D. really has no idea how very difficult it is. It’s isolating for caregivers.
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By: Guy Savage on March 9, 2024
at 3:43 am
I agree.
I went to a course on ‘communicating with people who have dementia’ and so I met many who had a much more demanding and stressful situation than me, but even so, it was isolating in the sense that because I went to visit my father in aged care every day (not for five minutes, usually 3-4 hours) I did not keep up with my friends and when I did see them, I had nothing very interesting to talk to them about. Some of those friendships have never really recovered from that. Two that I am thinking of had parents who died young, so they never had the experience of it.
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By: Lisa Hill on March 9, 2024
at 11:26 am
Good to hear your shout out to the book designer here too, Lisa. There’s a whole different realm of intelligence that goes into designing a good cover from what goes into writing what’s on the pages inside. And I’m not a book designer, I should add!
Peter Dann
>
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By: peterjdann6c4eb6b31b on March 8, 2024
at 10:43 am
Hello Peter, thanks for your comment.
I haven’t always done it, but for some time now, I’ve added the cover designer to the book details at the bottom of every post, and I’ve tagged the designer too. So if you know the name of the designer, you can type his/her name into the search box, and all the books that I’ve tagged for that designer will come up. (I thought about tagging with ‘cover design’ but then of course every book would come up in a search!)
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By: Lisa Hill on March 8, 2024
at 10:47 am
I also had a good chuckle at the quote from p118 that you shared – it brought back memories of my shared accommodation experience at uni :-D
I enjoyed the extra details you provided about the cover design/er.
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By: This Reading Life on March 8, 2024
at 5:35 pm
I lived in a share house for a short while, though I was a let down to the other girls: they wanted me to be more companionable than I was. One of them spent her nights assembling some components for something or other, earning money towards the house deposit, and she wanted company in the evenings.
Though of course I was polite and friendly whenever I encountered them, it would never have occurred to me to care about any of them. TBH I wouldn’t have known if any of them were sick, and I feel mildly guilty about that now.
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By: Lisa Hill on March 8, 2024
at 6:03 pm
I wouldn’t worry about that now Lisa, even mildly. I remember being quite ill with a flu in my second year and then a vomiting bug in my 4th. No-one even knew I was sick. Before mobile phones there was no way to let anyone know, so you just suffered in silence or just got on with it. In return, I didn’t think to check in on others either (except in my 4th yr when I was a residential tutor and it was my job to care for everyone in my block). It’s the age and the age we also grew up in.
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By: This Reading Life on March 9, 2024
at 8:12 am
They probably don’t remember me either!
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By: Lisa Hill on March 9, 2024
at 11:16 am
These stories sound sad but knowing of the author I’d expect them to be brilliant. I lived in an apartment with 5 of us in uni plus many boyfriends who stayed over which made me uncomfortable. It was 1973 and Roe vrs Wade had just come in and one girl flew to New York to get an abortion. Such drama but also curiosity. So long ago.
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By: TravellinPenguin on March 9, 2024
at 11:16 am
Remembering these times, though, reminds us how independent we were. One way or another we funded living away from home, and never went back.
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By: Lisa Hill on March 9, 2024
at 11:21 am
So true. 🌻
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By: TravellinPenguin on March 9, 2024
at 12:21 pm
Beautiful review Lisa.
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By: Theresa Smith Writes on March 9, 2024
at 12:03 pm
Thanks!
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By: Lisa Hill on March 9, 2024
at 8:49 pm
That must have been interesting to hear from Sandy Cull – I don’t think I’ve ever heard a cover designer talk about their work. It’s reassuring that she reads all of the books she designs for.
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By: madamebibilophile on March 9, 2024
at 7:37 pm
Well, I reckon I can tell when they haven’t…
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By: Lisa Hill on March 9, 2024
at 8:49 pm
I hadn’t heard of Georgia Blain but must seek her out. Dementia is so devastating, both my grandmothers and my dad died with it (my mum was driven to distraction by caring), and my husband’s mum has Alzheimers. My children’s gene pool isn’t looking great. It’s so difficult to be with the people close to us when they develop dementia and yet so anxiety-inducing not to be. Thanks for flagging up this writer.
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By: imogenglad on March 10, 2024
at 3:57 am
Hello Imogen, thanks for sharing this.
I suppose I am ‘lucky’ that all my grandparents died young so I don’t know what my gene pool might be.
There are some novels emerging about this, but after my experience with my father and my MIL, I have avoided them. Though when I search my previous posts there are many references to dementia, they are all novels about something else, with a character who has dementia as part of the cast. Which is a realistic thing, when you consider how many of us have had the experience.
I remember vividly the first time I met someone with dementia who was ‘out and about’ rather than at the end stages in an aged care home. We were at the annual dinner for the State Library Foundation, and I met this wonderful old lady who chatted away with most interesting anecdotes, and I really liked her. It was not until a little later on when the group shuffled and reformed, that she repeated exactly the same anecdotes as if she had never met me before. Her daughter quietly apologised that she had dementia, but she still liked to frock up and go out.
That taught me a powerful lesson. That old lady was still ‘herself’ and she was still good company in a group because the repetitions could go round the group while her carers got a break and had the company of other people. Her daughter in law knew that this stage would not last, but she was taking every opportunity to enjoy it while she could.
She will have had good memories of her mother when the time came.
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By: Lisa Hill on March 10, 2024
at 9:47 am