Category: Middle East

No Going Back

30/3/2018

Lisa Kennedy: Echo Publishing $32.99

“I FEEL guilty and… ashamed. I’m one of those stories you hear about in the news.” Lisa Kennedy’s candid admission sums up the shock and humiliation of having been deceived absolutely by her partner of almost a decade.
Very few Australians know Kennedy’s name. The situation could have been quite different, however, had a story filmed by current affairs program 60 Minutes been broadcast as planned.
In 2010, during what was intended to be a brief visit to introduce baby Daniel to his grandparents and aunt in Istanbul, Kennedy’s Turkish-born husband announced without warning that he had initiated divorce proceedings against her and that their son would live with him. Daniel was seven months old at the time.
After eight years of marriage, Kennedy was completely alone in an unfamiliar country where she spoke only a few words of the local language and whose laws were at best confusing and at worst unashamedly biased against foreigners.
The Australian Government was unable to intervene in what was essentially a domestic matter as far as the Turkish legal system was concerned.
Without her own parents, siblings or friends around her, Kennedy was left to choose between two unpalatable options: concede that she would never regain her son and return quietly to her old life in Melbourne, or dig in stubbornly and weather the antagonism being directed towards her by her husband and his family to continue fighting an expensive and emotionally exhausting battle for Daniel’s custody. Kennedy chose the latter.
When their case was eventually referred to the Family Court in Australia, the report was placed on hold by 60 Minutes. Seventeen months later a film crew from the program was detained by the authorities and an Australian child-recovery operative was jailed for their role in an eerily similar situation involving two Australian-born children Lebanon.

The Desert Vet

2/9/2016

Alex Tinson: Allen & Unwin $29.99

REPTILE collector, camel expert, big-cat doctor, gazelle wrangler, antiques aficionado, father of five: Alex Tinson juggles disparate roles in balancing his career as a veterinarian and researcher with his pride in heading up a happily blended Australian-Emirati family.
Raised on Sydney’s North Shore watching Daktari on TV and reading zookeeper Gerald Durrell’s books, Tinson studied in Melbourne and gained his early vet experience at Bacchus Marsh and Tweed Heads.
While overseeing a Bicentennial camel race across the Outback in 1988 he was approached by a representative of the United Arab Emirates’ ruling family. Within weeks Tinson had relocated to Abu Dhabi and from there to the remote oasis town of Al Ain to hone the crown prince’s stable of racing camels. There he found animals developed over generations to weigh less than a fine-boned Thoroughbred horse. The Melbourne Cup might stop Australia but throughout the oil-rich Gulf countries it’s camel racing that dominates.
Tinson’s story is ripe with exhilarating highs (the births of the world’s first embryo-transfer and frozen-embryo camel calves; a slashing of race speeds by 30 per cent; the advent of the camel ‘beauty’ show) and devastating lows (most notably, losing two babies to sudden infant death syndrome). He details the fervour with which he has pursued the most coveted trophy in the billion-dollar sport of camel racing: the Golden Sword.
Tinson writes candidly of his successes and failures, both professionally and as a husband, son and father. Tinson also delves into the psyche of Bedouin Arab culture: the importance of tradition, the loyalty to family and the laid-back “it’s God’s will” attitude that so surprises many Westerners.
His passion for camels – the animal that has fuelled his life in the Middle East and allowed him to pursue groundbreaking breeding projects in Western Australia, Mongolia, Pakistan and India – is obvious at every stage.

Hack in a Flak Jacket

26/8/2016

Peter Stefanovic: Hachette Australia $29.99

DEATH, disasters, destruction, disease: Peter Stefanovic has endured the worst imaginable circumstances in some of the world’s most dangerous places in the course of his employment as a television news journalist.
In a sensitive yet self-deprecatingly humorous professional memoir, Stefanovic recounts the highlights and lowlights of his eight years as a foreign correspondent for the Nine Network, based firstly in Los Angeles and later in London as he covered events across North America, Europe, North Africa and the Middle East.
Having followed his brother Karl into the media, the younger Stefanovic was posted overseas at the age of 26.
Among his earliest assignments were bunkering down in Texas as Hurricane Ike swept ashore and interviewing distraught fans on the day Michael Jackson died. In 2010 he was despatched to Haiti while the earthquake that killed at least 100,000 people was still reverberating.
From London he travelled to South Africa for the original trial of Oscar Pistorius, to Norway in the wake of a fundamentalist right-wing gunman’s murder spree, to France as the hunt for the Charlie Hebdo assassins was in progress and to Iraq for a meeting with an all-female militia unit behind ISIS lines.
Stefanovic takes readers for an edge-of-the-seat ride through the Arab Spring uprisings, the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi’s dictatorship in Libya and the relentless warring that is characteristic of Gaza. He records the anguish and agony created by the carving up of Ukraine and describes the suffering wrought by the 2015 Nepalese earthquake.
On the surface the “flak jacket” of the book’s title is literal: the body armour Stefanovic wears while reporting from the frontline or shadowing rebel groups among bullets, tear gas and low-flying bombers. More deeply, however, it is a perfect metaphor for the subconscious emotional defences he erects in response to traumatic stress experienced repeatedly while at work.

Spice Journey

24/3/2016

Shane Delia: Murdoch Books $49.99

THREE kitchen ingredients say “Easter” in Australian like no other: seafood, lamb and chocolate.
This year a plethora of fresh takes on that trio is offered in Spice Journey, the printed accompaniment to Shane Delia’s SBS TV series of the same name. In this beautifully illustrated book Melbourne restaurateur Delia documents his travels through the regions whose people played crucial roles in the creation of Easter as we know it today.
Delia starts his exploration in Malta, his parents’ country and an island with a culinary style coloured in the centuries immediately before Jesus’ time by its Phoenician heritage.
Heading east, he visits Lebanon (the ancestral home of his wife Maha’s family), Turkey and Iran. At the other end of the Mediterranean Delia finishes with tours through Morocco and Andalusian Spain.
All six cultures contribute dishes to Spice Journey, some of the most inventive of which have seafood, lamb or chocolate as their hero.
On the seafood front there’s cured salmon with beetroot mayonnaise, pumpkin puree and fennel vinaigrette; cornbread-and-fennel-seed-crusted sardines; and scallop-filled zucchini flowers with smoked-eel dressing and orange and coriander crumb.
Lamb comes in an array of incarnations: as kofte with eggplant yoghurt and a black bread garnish; braised with saltbush and caramelised rockmelon; and slow-roasted with garlic and Lebanese seven-spice powder and served with berry and toasted pumpkin seed yoghurt and nigella-seed bread.
What better to these mains than hot chips sprinkled with flaked almonds, Aleppo pepper, coriander and sumac?
The desserts too combine the best of Middle Eastern and Mediterranean flavours: mastic pudding with chocolate soil, blackberry sorbet and rosemary pearls; chocolate and pistachio m’hencha (coiled pastry); and smoked chipotle and chocolate fondant with Pedro Ximenez sherry and almond milk icecream.
Thanks to Delia, adventurous Easter dining at home this year is well within reach.

Heat

19/2/2016

Ranulph Fiennes: Simon & Schuster $32.99

WHAT a difference a handful of decades makes.
When Ranulph Fiennes began his career as a young soldier seconded from the British army to Oman, he found himself fighting with the Sultan’s forces to defend Muslims from Marxist rebels in the country’s southern-most province, Dhofar. In the mid 1960s, Russian-trained fighters flooding overland from Yemen were vehemently opposed to Islam – a far cry from the current generation of Yemeni terrorists with their pseudo-religious fanaticism.
From an isolated base at Salalah on the Indian Ocean coastline, Fiennes led foot patrols through the Arabian Desert – one of the world’s hottest, driest and deadliest wastelands. Also known as the Empty Quarter, this expanse abutting Saudi Arabia had to that point been little explored by Europeans, creating an opportunity for Fiennes to not only serve the Sultan but at the same time indulge his quest for adventure by setting out to search for a mythical ancient city known as Ubar. That Oman is today one of the region’s most politically stable, peaceful countries is due largely to that era.
His memories of those years, and of the challenges of an earlier hovercraft expedition up the Nile River from the Egyptian delta to Lake Victoria (along the way meeting dictator-to-be Idi Amin in Uganda), make up the bulk of Heat, Fiennes’ tribute to some of the world’s most inhospitable climates.
In full uniform Fiennes later trained in the sweltering equatorial jungle of Brunei and contemplated joining a British counter-insurgency force on the Afghanistan-India border; in civilian life he circumnavigated the planet and ran seven marathons on seven continents in a single week, including in Singapore.
Most recently, aged 71, he became the oldest Briton to complete an infamous 251-kilometre footrace through the Sahara Desert, shedding blood, sweat, tears and skin while raising £2 million for charity.

The Underground Girls of Kabul

11/9/2015

Jenny Nordberg: Hachette Australia $22.99

WHAT would drive a mother to willingly dress her newborn baby girl in masculine clothing and assign her a boy’s name? Why would parents choose to begin disguising their six-year-old daughter as a son? And what would motivate a pubescent teenager to pray that god grant her a flat chest and facial hair?
These are questions Swedish journalist Jenny Nordberg answers in The Underground Girls of Kabul, an exploration of the little-mentioned but entrenched practice among Afghan families of raising a selected female child as male. Although this tradition is virtually unknown in the West, in Afghanistan so important is it to produce an heir that even “a made-up son is better than none at all”.
Thus, the pattern of anointing one daughter to become a household’s bacha posh (literally “dressed like a boy”) continues to flourish, albeit covertly.
Through extended interviews with five such boy-girls of varying ages, Nordberg explores the thinking behind the choices made by parents and, later, by a minority of the bacha posh themselves as they approach adulthood and fight to retain their male identities.
For some, the rationale for their gender-bending upbringing is purely practical: a divorcée needs to have a protective young man in her home for the sake of respectability, a poor couple depends on income from a boy’s after-school work to put food on the table for their younger children, a son is required to act as a bodyguard for vulnerable siblings.
For others, however, the situation is far more nuanced: experiencing a false boyhood enables a little girl to taste freedom to a degree that is simply unfathomable for a female child in Afghan society. It is this liberty that some bacha posh are reluctant to relinquish as they mature and are pressured to embrace a future as prospective brides.

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