Cassie McCullough

I mean, what did you make of this man, Gordon?

And there is such a sense of a relationship to a complex past in this book, not just the personal family story, but also the relationship to local politics, to layers and layers of different levels of history and nostalgia and change, and even perhaps to an older Australia.

And for me, that was what kept this book interesting, was the number of characters and sort of

untangling all those relationships and layers of secrets to each other.

Stuart?

Well, I spoke to Malcolm Knox recently and I asked him what his characters understood about their place at Bluebird Beach.

This is what he said.

But what a contested set of memories they are.

Although I felt it was undercut in a really interesting way by characters like Kelly, Gordon's wife, who is not herself white.

And even by his very manipulative sort of mother-in-law, Leonie, who is a Thai woman.

So Bluebird is changing around them.

And at some point, they're going to have to recognise that.

I mean, what did you make of this changing culture at Bluebird Beach, Stuart?

But in a way, it's like there's, well, I'm wondering if it's a novel that as well as being about all these characters, and there's a lot of characters in this book.

Yeah, a lot of characters.

Well, it becomes a bit of a saga and almost melodramatic as it gets on and there's more and more action happening.

But given that we've got surfing and then we've got Gordon's son, Dan, who's also obsessed with cricket, it's like he's prodding away at the old images of a certain sense of Australia and Australian-ness.

I mean, would you read this as a social critique?

There were certainly things that made me laugh.

And at the very beginning, we're told that he loves the lodge and is invested in it.