Cassie McCullough

But, Johan, what do you make of these characters and their names?

but if we turn to to gordon the central figure of this book i mean he wants to he wants to stay connected to the surf but it's very specific it's bluebird beach and it's this particular part of the coast that means so much to him he loves the place he loves the building he never wants to leave and it's described by knox as a living museum to the milestones of his adolescence

And he goes on to say, old blue birders generally looked at each other with a fundamental aesthetic forgiveness.

Having known each other all their lives, they still saw the youthful beauty, the prime of life, buried under the wrinkles and sun damage and double chins.

So Gordon wants to stay where he is.

He was a print journalist.

His marriage has fallen apart.

So what else, what's keeping him there, do you think, Cassie?

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.