Hear This 21stNovember 2025

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Episode Transcript

S1 (00:18):
Take a look. Take a look inside the book. Take
a look.

S2 (00:33):
Hello and welcome to hear this. I'm Frances Kelland and
you're listening to the Vision Australia Library radio show, where
we talk about books in the Vision Australia library collection.
We've got a couple of lovely reader recommended titles, and
I do hope you enjoy today's show. I'd like to

(00:54):
start off with one of Faye's books that she recommended.
Thank you Faye. This is around Australia the hard way.
This is by Jack Al Bowers, a true adventure story
about two young men from Sydney who in 1929 decided
to take a holiday and ride right around Australia on
a motorcycle. This had never been done before, and travelling

(01:17):
in the outback in those days was often hard and hazardous.
The journey took seven weeks and covered 15,000km. The journey
was fraught with hardship and danger, but they survived through
determination and resourcefulness. Let's hear a sample of Around Australia
The Hard Way by Jack Al Bowers. It's narrated by

(01:38):
Paul Caro.

S3 (01:39):
My father came from Ireland, from the outskirts of Waterford,
where the Bowers family had lived since the year 1300,
and something here they'd been given a large tract of
land at a place called Fiddown, a small country town
with one hotel about ten miles out of Waterford. And
there they are to this day. My forebears crossed from

(02:00):
England to Ireland when the English first sought to quell
the Irish. Over the centuries, it was forbidden for any
Englishman to intermarry with the Catholic Irish. And this is
why and where all the trouble started last century. My
grandfather defied this convention and married my grandmother, Bridget O'Mara. Now,

(02:22):
nothing could be more Irish or Catholic than a name
like that. So my great grandfather, proud of his heritage, said,
you ungrateful dog. Leave my roof. Or words to that effect.
And my grandmother, being Irish and most probably obstinate, saw
to it that her Anglo-Irish husband kept well away from

(02:43):
Gregor Vine. The old family home. Gregor Vine is still there,
standing on its own estate of several hundred acres, and
one of my distant relatives, Edward Bowers, lives there still.
One of his sisters lives not more than a mile
away in Fiddown House, a large home of three stories

(03:03):
and about 40 rooms, set in spacious grounds not far
from the family church, which is now in a derelict condition.
There are several other homes at Fiddown. All on the
original estate banned from Gregor Vine. My grandfather never returned
to the family home, nor did any of his progeny.
My father, forbidden to fraternize with his cousins, came to

(03:26):
Australia and New Zealand when he was 19 and liked
what he saw. He returned to Ireland and, being by
then somewhat of an adventurer, was invited to the ancestral
home to tell his relatives of his adventures in such
an outlandish place as Down Under.

S2 (03:42):
And that was around Australia. The Hard Way by Jack
L Bowers. Jack is J a middle initial L and
then Bowers is b o w e r s b
o w e r s. And that book goes for
four hours or nearly five hours. Actually two minutes off.
Five hours. And what a great narration by Paul Caro.

(04:06):
And just a reminder to that, um, Australian history and Australian, uh,
travel books are incredibly popular and there is a wide
range available in the library. And if you're interested in
what bike that these two gentlemen wrote on, it was
a Harley Davidson motorcycle with a sidecar in 1929. They

(04:27):
were young men. The effects of the depression were starting
to be felt. So these two guys just took off
and had an adventure. And the print publication of the
book was, um, 1995. And this audio recording was produced
by Louis Braille Audio back in 2007. And, uh, wonderful
to have that book looking online. It has some wonderful reviews.

(04:49):
It's a well-loved, uh, almost like an Australian classic. And, uh,
if you wanted to buy a print copy now, you'd
be looking at, uh, paying, uh, $60 and maybe a
bit less or maybe a bit more for a copy
of that book. And I think first editions are even
more expensive from bookshops online, and here you can listen

(05:09):
to it for free if you're a member of the
Vision Australia library. Thanks once again Fi for your recommendation.
The next book is recommended by Bob. Thank you Bob
and never worry about recommending too many books. Anybody out
there because we love hearing about these amazing books. Bob.
Recommended Book of Colours by Robyn Cadwallader, a local author

(05:33):
from the Canberra region who writes historic fiction, all set
in the medieval era and with a feminist perspective. I
found the depiction of the craft of illumination to be fascinating.
So this book, the synopsis is London, 1321. In a
small shop in Paternoster Row, three people are drawn together

(05:54):
around the creation of a magnificent book, an illuminated manuscript
of prayers, a book of hours. Even though the commission
seems to answer the aspirations of each one of them,
their own desires and ambitions, threaten its completion. As each
struggles to see the book come into being, it will
change everything they have understood about their place in the world.

(06:14):
In many ways, this is a story about power. It
is also a novel about the place of women in
the roiling and turbulent world of the early 14th century,
what power they have, how they wield it, and just
how temporary and conditional it is. Let's hear a sample
of Book of Colors by Robyn Cadwallader. It's narrated by

(06:36):
Katie Soby.

S4 (06:37):
If you touch the page, it's smooth and fine. Up
close you can see the pores where hairs once grew.
It's no easy task to turn animal skin to this
goat or sheep, maybe calf the slaughter, then the flaying
hide stripped from body. The parchment chooses his skin carefully

(06:58):
and his work begins. The soaking, scraping, stretching and shaving.
Hard labor. It is nothing. Fine is made without it
be broken down first. You can't have delicate illuminations on
a rough page. The lady will forget. This was once
a beast to cause for her. But only because the

(07:18):
parchment does his job and does it well enough to
be forgotten. But don't you forget. Flesh made ready for
the word. Our Lord, who came as a man of flesh,
is called the Word of God. His body stretched on
the cross as tight as skin on a frame. The
art of illumination. Unaware of the cold. He followed the

(07:43):
icy road, turning again and again to look behind him.
Felt the crawl of eyes on his back. Heard whispers
in the rustle of trees. Saw shadows creep and dart.
Each time a shock ran through his limbs, had him
ready to run. And each time when he realized he
was mistaken, the relief emptied him out, left him ragged. Still,

(08:07):
he was sure they were behind him somewhere, following demanding justice.
At night, a black river ran through his dreams, coiling
and twisting beneath a moonless sky. He slept and woke,
slept and woke, exhausted by the effort and walked on.
He wanted to cry. His chest ached with the need,

(08:30):
but that was allowed only to the innocent. Grief was
forbidden him.

S2 (08:35):
And that was the sample of Book of Colours by
Robyn Cadwallader. And Robyn is spelt r o b y
n r o b y n r. Cadwallader is c
a d w a r d e r c a
d w a r e. And that book goes for

(08:59):
12.5 hours. And there are some other historical fictions by
the author. There is The anchoress. The anchoress is set
in England in 1255. Sarah is only 17 when she
chooses to become an anchoress. A holy woman shut away
in a small cell measuring seven paces by nine at
the side of the village church, fleeing the grief of

(09:21):
losing a much loved sister and childbirth and the pressure
to marry. Then there's also another one by Robyn Cadwallader,
The Fire and the Rose. This is England, 1276. Forced
to leave her home village, Eleanor moves to Lincoln to
work as a housemaid. She's prickly, independent and stubborn, her
prospects blighted by a port wine birthmark across her face.

(09:44):
Unusually for a woman, she has fine skills with ink
and quill. The fire and the Rose was published in 2023.
The Book of Colours, 2018. 18 The Anchoress. 2015, which
was her first novel and published to great acclaim. Robyn
was shortlisted for the 2015 Adelaide Festival Awards for literature.

(10:07):
Robyn has a PhD in Medieval Literature from Flinders University.
Lovely to hear of another author and a local author
from the act. Thank you Bob for that. It puts
me in mind of a great book that was published
a while ago. Now it is people of the book
and it's by Geraldine Brooks, another Australian writer. In 1996,

(10:29):
Hannah Heath, an Australian rare book expert, is offered the
job of a lifetime analysis and conservation of the famed
Sarajevo Haggadah, which has been rescued from Serb shelling during
the Bosnian War. Priceless and beautiful, the book is one
of the earliest Jewish volumes ever to be illuminated with images.
When Hannah, a caustic loner with a passion for her work,

(10:51):
discovers a series of tiny artefacts in its ancient binding,
an insect wing fragment, wine stains, salt crystals, a white hair.
She begins to unlock the book's mysteries. Let's hear a
sample of people of the book by Geraldine Brooks. It's
narrated by Edwina Wren.

S5 (11:10):
It's hard to grasp right off the bat why someone
might need a meter of calf's appendix, but if you're
going to work with 500 year old materials, you have
to know how they were made 500 years ago. That's
what my teacher, Werner Heinrich, believed. He said you could
read about grinding pigments and mixing gesso all you like,

(11:30):
but the only way to understand is to actually do it.
If I wanted to know what words like Cooch and
Shoda really described, I had to make gold leaf myself,
beat it and fold it and beat it again on
something it won't stick to, like the soft ground of
scoured calf intestine. Eventually you'll have a little packet of leaves,

(11:53):
each less than a thousandth of a millimeter thick. And
you'll also have horrible looking hands. I made a fist
trying to smooth out the old lady wattle skin. Also,
to see if I could stop the trembling. I'd been
nervous ever since I changed planes in Vienna the day before.
I travel a lot. You basically have to, if you

(12:14):
live in Australia and want a piece of the most
interesting projects in my field, which is the conservation of
medieval manuscripts. But I don't generally go to places that
are datelines in war correspondents dispatches. I know there are
people who go in for that sort of thing and
write great books about it, and I suppose they have
some kind of it can't happen to me optimism that

(12:35):
makes it possible for them. Me? I'm a complete pessimist.
If there's a sniper somewhere in the country I'm visiting,
I fully expect to be the one in his crosshairs
even before the plane landed. You could see the war
as we broke through the gray swag of cloud that
seems to be the permanent condition of the European sky.

(12:56):
The little russet tiled houses hugging the Adriatic looked familiar
at first, just like the view I'm used to. Down
over the red rooftops of Sydney, to the deep blue
arc of Bondi Beach. But in this view, half the
houses weren't there anymore. They were just jagged bits of
masonry sticking up in ragged rows like rotting teeth.

S2 (13:16):
And that was a sample of people of the book
by Geraldine Brooks. Geraldine is g e a l d
I n g a l d I n e Brooks
BOKSBR00 k-s. And that book goes for a nearly 14 hours.

(13:37):
People of the book was first published in 2008. The
Guardian gave it a great review. Back in 2008, Jane Um,
Horsham said are people of the book tackles big emotional
themes with ambition and diligence, and the depth of Brooks
research makes for a narrative of almost forensic intensity that
is effectively tempered by compassion and decency. And there are

(14:00):
many other books by Geraldine Brooks in the library. In 2005,
Novel March won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and I
think that's one of my favorite of her books. March
imagines the Civil War experiences of Mr. March, the absent
father in Louisa may Alcott's Little Women. An idealistic abolitionist

(14:21):
march becomes a union chaplain and later finds himself assigned
to be a teacher on a cotton plantation that employs
freed slaves or contraband. But the war tests his faith
not only in the Union, which is also capable of
barbarism and racism, but in himself. Interspersed are memories of
March's earlier life his whirlwind courtship of quick tempered Marmee,

(14:44):
his friendship with Emerson and Thoreau, and the surprising cause
of his family's genteel poverty. When a Confederate attack on
the contraband farm lands march in a Washington hospital, sick
with fever and guilt, March must reassemble and reconnect with
his family, who have no idea of what he's endured.
So that's one of my favorite of Geraldine Brooks books,

(15:06):
available in audio and also in Braille from the library.
The next book is nonfiction, and it's a bit of
a delightful book. I think it is. Color Travels Through
the Paintbox. This is by Victoria Finlay. Color tells a
remarkable story of Victoria Finlay's quest, or Finlay's quest to

(15:26):
uncover the many secrets hidden inside the paint box. On
her travels, she visited remote Central American villages where women
still wear skirts dyed with the purple tears of sea snails.
Learned how George Washington obsessed about his green dining room,
when he should have been busy with matters of state
and investigated the mystery of Indian yellow paint, said to

(15:48):
have been made from the urine of Indian cows force
fed with mango leaves, from mascara to violin varnish, from
nomadic carpets to stained glass to pillar boxes to crayons.
The Story of Colour is a story of the efforts
of artists and artisans to reproduce the rainbow, and the
impact their work has had on the world. Let's hear

(16:09):
a sample of Colour Travels Through the Paintbox by Victoria Finlay.
It's narrated by Deidre Rubenstein.

S6 (16:16):
In the lakelands of Italy, there is a valley with
10,000 ancient rock carvings. These petroglyphs of Valle Camonica are
signs that Neolithic people lived there once, telling stories and
illustrating them with pictures. Some show strangely antlered beasts, too
thin to provide much meat for a feast, and others

(16:40):
show stick people hunting them with stick weapons. Another rock
has a large 5000 year old butterfly carved into it.
Although my visit coincided with that of a hoard of
German schoolchildren queuing up to trace it, and sadly, I
couldn't see the original through all the paper and wax crayons.

(17:01):
But in a quieter place, far away from the groups,
I found a flat dark rock covered with 50 or
more designs for two storey houses with pointy roofs. It
didn't feel particularly sacred to me as I stood looking
at it. It was more like an ancient real estate office,
or an architect's studio, or just a place where people

(17:21):
sat and idly carved their domestic dreams. The crude carvings
are not coloured now, of course, any paints would have
disappeared long ago in the alpine rain. But as I
sat there contemplating the past, I saw what looked like
a small stone on the ground. It was a different
colour from all the other mountain rubble. Whatever it was,

(17:43):
it didn't belong. I picked it up and realized something wonderful.
It didn't look promising. A dirty, pale brown stub of
clay like earth. About the size and shape of a
chicken's heart. On the front it was flat, and on
the back there were three planes, like a slightly rounded
three sided pyramid. But when I placed the thumb and

(18:05):
the first two fingers of my right hand over those
three small planes, it felt immensely comfortable to hold. And
what I realized then was that this piece of clay was,
in fact ochre, and had come from a very ancient
paintbox indeed.

S2 (18:22):
And that was a sample of Color Travels Through the
Paintbox by Victoria Finlay. Victoria is v I t o
r I v I t o r I. Finlay is
f I n l a y f I n l
a y. Lay, and that book goes for 18 hours

(18:43):
and 15 minutes. That book is available in audio and Braille.
And also there is another one, Buried Treasure by Victoria
Finlay travels through the jewel box. Amber is the tears
of prehistoric trees. Peridot falls to earth from space. A
man has turned into a diamond. When we put on jewels,
what are we really wearing? Victoria Finlay travels across the

(19:04):
world to tell the true stories of these miraculous oddities
of nature. Her search takes her to the Australian opal
fields with their underground towns, through a ruby market in Burma,
under the watchful eye of the military junta, and to
the Native American reserve that holds the world's biggest supply
of a forgotten gem. Throughout, she asks, in an era

(19:25):
when we manufacture synthetics, why do jewels still hold their appeal?
And that's available in audio and braille as well. Victoria
Finlay was born in in England. She's a British writer
and journalist, known for her books on colour color and jewels.
She worked as a journalist for Reuters from 1991 to 2003,
and she says she became obsessed with color as a

(19:48):
child when her father took her to Chartres Cathedral and
said that people were no longer able to make the
blue in stained glass. So in 2000, she decided to
investigate this and other aspects of color. And I note, too,
that she has written other books that we don't have
in the collection. One is called Fabric The Hidden History
of the Material World, and another book published in 2002,

(20:11):
which is color A Natural History of the palate. The
next book by is by Australian author Sophie Cunningham. It
is this devastating fever. Alice had not expected to spend
the first 20 years of the 21st century writing about
Leonard Woolf, when she stood on Morrell Bridge watching fireworks
explode from the rooftops of Melbourne at the start of

(20:33):
a new millennium. She had only two thoughts. One was
the fireworks are better in Sydney. The other was. Was
the world's technology about to crash down around her? The
world's technology did not crash, but there were worse disasters
to come. Environmental collapse, the return of fascism. Wars a
sexual reckoning, a plague. Uncertain of what to do. She

(20:54):
picks up an unfinished project and finds herself trapped with
the ghosts of writers past. What began as a novel
about a member of the Bloomsbury set, colonial administrator, publisher
and husband of one of the most famous English writers
of the 20th century, becomes something else altogether. Let's hear
a sample of this devastating fever by Sophie Cunningham. It's

(21:17):
narrated by Abby Holmes.

S6 (21:19):
1910 Up Here, two miles above the sea in the
populous plains, it was almost silent. The to and fro
of the workers on tea plantations couldn't be heard. There
was nothing but the occasional echo of chanting which drifted
up from the temples below. It was cool, cold even

(21:39):
compared to the coast, which was not so far away.
Down there the heat was so intense it was like
a living thing. The constant buzz of cicadas, lowing cattle,
sun beating down onto salt pans. Some days Leonard fancied
he could hear water being sucked up from the earth

(22:00):
by the hot air. Water holes shrinking into a muddy ooze.
The low moan of the animals gathered around the jungle
that pressed up against the edges of the compound in
which he lived. Never ceased its murmuring. The call of birds.
The clack, clack, clack of a leopard's teeth. The hysterical

(22:22):
chattering of the monkeys in the moments before they misjudged
the distances between branches and fell into the leopard's jaws.
At this altitude, though Dough. Just the whip of wind
and clip of hooves. The wind ever present sang its
way through the air, twisting the rhododendrons into a magnificent

(22:44):
old age. Though gnarled, they stood tall and enraging bloom. White, pink, red, yellow.
Nothing like the neat safe bushes to be found in
an English garden. On this morning the fog was so
thick he could see neither the rhododendron beside him nor

(23:06):
the path ahead. It was as if he was riding
across an English moor on a grey winter's afternoon instead
of this.

S2 (23:14):
And that was a sample of this devastating fever by
Sophie Cunningham. Sophie is spelt s p h I s
h I Cunningham c u n I g h c
u You double n I n g h. That book

(23:35):
goes for ten hours and 50 minutes. Sophie has also
written a non-fiction, Warning The Story of Cyclone Tracy. And
that was published, um, after the 40th anniversary of the
nation's most iconic natural disaster. So Sophie Cunningham went back
to the eyewitness accounts of those who lived through the
devastation and those who faced the heartbreaking cleanup and the

(23:58):
backbreaking rebuilding. We also have Melbourne by Sophie Cunningham. This
is where a series of authors, each from a different
particular state, wrote about their city that they come from.
So there's Perth, um, Hobart. Uh, well, every, every capital
city in Australia, in Sophie Cunningham's Melbourne, she takes us

(24:19):
through a year in the city's life of Melbourne, a
year that takes us from the heatwave that culminated on
Black Saturday, when temperatures soared to 47 degrees to the
destructive deluge of a hailstorm. She walks through Melbourne's oldest
suburbs to its largest market. She goes to the footy
and to the comedy festival. She talks publishing and learns
how to use a letterpress, and along the way she

(24:41):
journeys deep into her own recollections of the city she
grew up in, and tell stories from its history the
theft of Picasso's Weeping Woman, the Hoddle Street massacre, William
Barracks trek from Healesville, the Westgate Bridge disaster, the high
drama of the 1970 and 2009 AFL Grand Finals and
the market murders of the 60s, as well as much more.

(25:03):
I'm just going back briefly to this devastating fever. The
Guardian reviewed it in on the 6th of September, 2022. Um,
it took Sophie Cunningham 16 years to write, and it
also blends autofiction with metafiction about the writing of the book.
It's very funny, very clever and surprisingly moving. To the

(25:23):
reviewer was Steph Harmon in The Guardian. And I very
quickly to finish off with what is metafiction? I didn't know.
Metafiction is a form of fiction that emphasises its own
narrative structure in a way that inherently reminds the audience
that they are reading or viewing a fictional work. Metafiction
is self-conscious about language, literary form and story telling, and

(25:46):
and works of metafiction directly or indirectly draw attention to
their status as artefacts. Metafiction is frequently used as a
form of parody or a tool to undermine literary conventions
and explore the relationship between literature and reality, life and art,
and the term metafiction was first coined in 1970 by
William H. Gass in his book fiction and the Figures

(26:10):
of Life. Thank you for joining us on Hear This Today.
Thank you to Fe and Bob for your recommendations. And, uh,
there's some radio news we want to hear from you.
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(26:34):
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(26:56):
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a lovely week and we'll be back next week with more.

(27:17):
Hear this.