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FOREIGN CORRESPONDENCE
Timely stories Amelia Lester
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D R E A M D E S T I N AT I O N
Kosciuszko National Park SNOWY MOUNTAINS, NSW
“It’s the simple things in life that are the most extraordinary,” Paulo Coelho once wrote. He might have come to this realisation in the Snowy Mountains, a breathtakingly beautiful natural wonder on our doorstep. There are 34 camping grounds scattered around Kosciuszko National Park, and wherever you decide to pitch your tent, a star-flooded sky and the sound of silence will be your companions for the night. Daylight adventures are centred around Mount Kosciuszko, with plenty of hiking, biking, horse riding, fishing and more. Simply awesome. Tatyana Leonov
E AT / D R I N K
A GREENERY-FILLED dining room and a thoughtful menu showcasing Australian ingredients such as saltbush and quandong make Paperbark a charming place to dine. Chef Joey Astorga slow-braises organic mushrooms in rich mushroom stock, smokes them over paperbark and eucalypt and serves them with smoked macadamia cream ($9). And if we forgot to mention that both menu and wine list are all-vegan, it’s because we didn’t actually think about it. Jill Dupleix
8 GoodWeekend
PAPERBARK 8/18 DANKS STREET, WATERLOO PAPERBARKRESTAURANT.COM
Y FAVOURITE book last year was by a woman. But then, every book I read last year was written by a woman. This wasn’t by design. Looking back through my Kindle, I speculated that it was a subconscious response to the times, dominated by the excesses of powerful men. I don’t believe reading makes you a better person, but it can provide a respite from bad news. That is not to say that everything I consumed was divorced from current events. Crudo, by Olivia Laing, is a novel set in the summer of 2017, which means Brexit, Trump and global warming frequently come up in conversation. The question Laing asks – how does love prosper in a time of calamity? – feels urgent, and her scattered style is a mirror of our attenuated concentration spans. Tayari Jones’ An American Marriage was one of the year’s most popular novels in the US, and although an undisputed page turner, it also has a lot to say about that country’s prison system and in particular its racial bias. In My Year of Rest and Relaxation, by Ottessa Moshfegh, we are whisked back to New York City at the turn of the millennium, and all its hope and prosperity, only to watch the troubled, acerbic main character decide to put herself to sleep for the summer. She is trying to escape history, but it catches up with her in the end: the novel’s final chapters take place after she has woken from hibernation in September 2001. Tara Westover’s Educated is a memoir about growing up in the sticks; think of it as a 2018 counterpart to J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, which is also about rural life in the US and was popular in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election as a way of explaining white working-class Trump voters. Westover, who after intermittent
home-schooling by her indigent father went on to earn a degree from Cambridge, is a spectacular stylist; both gruesome farming accidents and scenes of pastoral beauty are rendered vividly. But it’s her determination to build a bigger life for herself than her family’s religion allows that makes you stick with the story. Looking for something lighter? Little Fires Everywhere, by Celeste Ng, and Home Fire, by Kamila Shamsie, are examples of the “sneak off to read in a quiet corner” genre. One is set in American suburbia, the other among British Muslims who are variously in London, Istanbul, Syria and Pakistan, but both are highly attentive to pace and plot.
Every book I read last year was written by a woman. A superb Australian novel, The Life to Come by Michelle de Kretser, skewers the bourgeois lives of inner-city dwellers. In the Garden of the Fugitives, by Sydney-based Ceridwen Dovey, roams across continents before building to haunting climaxes. And Liane Moriarty’s new novel, Nine Perfect Strangers, is typically cinematic and enthralling. The book which made me cry and laugh the most in 2018 was A Life of My Own by Claire Tomalin, who is British. This is also a memoir, but if the namedropping of London literary society occasionally rankles, the insights into what constitutes a good life make persisting worthwhile. It’s a subject about which Tomalin should know, having written a number of bestselling biographies; to see her shine a light on the highs and lows of her own existence is startling, moving and a reminder that even the darkest of storm clouds eventually pass. n
HELLENE ALGIE; ILLUSTRATION BY SIMON LETCH
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