Category: Maritime

Mourning in Malmö

17/1/2020

Torquil MacLeod: Torquil MacLeod Books $3.15 (Kindle e-book)

EIGHT hundred and fifty-two people died when the Baltic ferry MS Estonia sank just after 1am on September 28 1994.
It remains the deadliest peacetime shipping disaster ever in European waters and the second-worst involving a European-flagged vessel after RMS Titanic’s loss more than 80 years earlier.
In the midst of a ferocious storm, roughly midway between Tallinn, Estonia, and Stockholm, Sweden, the ferry shuddered violently, then began taking on water and quickly capsized. The wreck was never salvaged and most of the bodies now lie trapped on the sea floor.
Conspiracy theories abound. With the former Eastern Bloc disintegrating, in the early 1990s cross-border smuggling of people, technology and equipment was rife. Is it possible something or someone on Estonia that night could not be allowed to reach land?
Among those on board was Anita Sundström’s father, Jens Ullman. Now a police inspector, Sundström has never fully understood the circumstances surrounding her papa’s death. The surfacing of a tenuous link between Estonia and a pair of baffling attacks in Malmö, southern Sweden, reignites her curiosity.
Markus Jolis has attempted to murder his elderly wife with a kitchen knife and then reported his own crime to the authorities; he has dementia, however, and can’t so much as recall – let alone explain – this bizarre behaviour.
In the same city, businessman Iqbal Nawaz has been found bludgeoned on the periphery of a sports ground, apparently overpowered while jogging. The forensics team reports that the weapon used is wooden and ridged but so far nothing of this type has been found.
Against a backdrop of cross-cultural distrust and entrenched prejudice, Sundström pushes the boundaries of her sometimes-conflicting roles as a senior officer, professional colleague, long-distance girlfriend and doting grandmother. As she juggles her priorities, one misstep could cost Sundström much more than just a figurative rap over the knuckles at work.

Through Ice & Fire

18/10/2019

Sarah Laverick: Macmillan Australia $34.99

TWO things of note occur in Newcastle, near Sydney, in 1989: the city experiences a magnitude 5.6 earthquake that damages 50,000 buildings and cost $4 billion in repairs, and Australia’s first locally built Antarctic icebreaker, Aurora Australis, is launched.
It isn’t exactly an easy birth. Early in the process engineers at Carrington Slipways discover inconsistencies in plans supplied by renowned Finnish shipyard Wärtsilä Marine: ducts do not join up, services overlap, pipes are forced to compete for the same bulkhead space. With patience and ingenuity the team forges ahead – only to have production derailed again shortly thereafter when Wärtsilä enters bankruptcy.
Despite these hurdles Aurora Australis is completed on time in 1990 and delivered to operator P&O Polar on behalf of the Australian Government.
Fitted with 133 berths, it incorporates an array of laboratories, hull-mounted oceanographic sensors, a central data-logging system, a commercial-sized trawl net, finer sampling nets, a conference facility, a photographic darkroom and a surgery. It is the most sophisticated vessel ever used by the Australian National Antarctic Research Expedition.
Its first voyage of significance is to Australia’s three stations on the edge of the continent itself (Casey, Mawson and Davis), combining on the brand-new ship both new personnel and new systems – a recipe for certain frustration if not complete disaster.
This is the start of a 30-year career during which Aurora Australis survives fires, besetment, breakdowns, a grounding, illness and injuries, and the failure of key pieces of scientific monitoring and recording equipment, all while making a priceless contribution to Antarctic research. Presented in biographical style, Through Ice & Fire records the highlights and lowlights of three decades of sailing in one of the world’s harshest environments and pays tribute to the people who populate the ship through until its retirement in Hobart at the end of the 2019–20 summer season.

Fled

19/4/2019

Meg Keneally: Echo Publishing $29.99

MORE than 231 years after Cornish highwaywoman and thief Mary Bryant arrived in Sydney Cove with the First Fleet, only the barest details of her life are known. In an age when full literacy was relatively rare, Bryant’s own words, thoughts and feelings were certainly not written down and nothing beyond the sketchiest facts of her crimes and sentence were documented officially.
In choosing to use Bryant as inspiration for the fictitious Jenny Trelawney-Gwyn, the heroine of her first solo novel, however, Meg Keneally has reprised one of early Australia’s most remarkable characters, fleshing out the skeleton of Trelawney’s experiences and achievements with exhaustive research into the circumstances of female transportees in the late 1700s.
When the death of her fisherman father leaves the teenaged Trelawney desperate to support a grief-stricken household, she takes up robbing lone travellers near her coastal village in Cornwall. Her work, though successful, is predictably short-lived; within months Trelawney is arrested, convicted and incarcerated on a rotting convict hulk, Dunkirk, in Plymouth harbour, where unscrupulous guards are ever-willing to take advantage of an attractive young woman’s desperation.
Pregnant and severely malnourished, she is transferred to the tall ship Charlotte and despatched to an as-yet-unestablished British colony on the far side of the world.
While Trelawney and her fellow convicts at first think conditions on board are unbearable, worse looms. Their disembarkation in Sydney is truly hellish as, back on dry land for the first time in years, they encounter a subsistence infinitely more foul than anything imagined in England, with starvation, brutality and abuse commonplace and the chances of a small child surviving to adulthood almost nil.
With only street cunning and grim determination in her favour, Trelawney must find a way to feed and defend not only herself but a daughter born at sea and, later, a tiny son.

Cold Bones

5/4/2019

David Mark: Mullholand Books $45.00 hardback or $19.99 Kindle

HULL is freezing – literally. Straddling the muddy estuary of the River Humber in northern England, this once-rich cod fishing port is experiencing its coldest winter in years.
At first it is hardly surprising that an elderly woman living alone is found dead, apparently having been unable to save herself after losing her balance in a bathful of rapidly cooling water.
Detective Sergeant Aector ‘Hector’ McAvoy quickly becomes suspicious, however. Small clues scattered around the site suggest at least one other person was present either during or immediately after former social worker Enid Chappell’s drowning.
More than 1600km to the north-west, McAvoy’s superior, Detective Superintendent Trish Pharaoh, is on the isolated, wind-ravaged Skagi Peninsula in Iceland investigating the discovery of another body: that of a journalist believed to have a tenuous connection with Hull.
Not too many decades earlier the two locations were waging an unofficial war as newly independent Iceland turned its gunships against the English trawlers that threatened to strip its territorial waters of irreplaceable fish stocks. Now Icelandic police are being pressured to co-operate with Pharaoh in a covert alliance.
With his attempts to uncover a potential motive for the murder of Chappell stagnating McAvoy finds his attention diverted by a series of gruesome attacks on elderly fishermen throughout the city – longtime crewmates who once served together on one of Hull’s most tragically infamous cod boats. Who could possibly have cause to harm feeble old men who by all accounts have been working to create a public tribute to the industry that for generations supported thousands of Hull residents?
A failed bid to uncover the identity of two corpses washed ashore in the Russian Arctic is yet another frustration for McAvoy’s colleagues at Humberside Police.
It seems progress has stalled on every front – and time is running short as powerful people demand results.

Manhattan Beach

26/1/2018

Jennifer Egan: Hachette $19.99

ANNA Kerrigan is intimately acquainted with the unconventional side of life.
Not only has Anna grown up in an all-female household in a rough-and-tumble area of Brooklyn with no man as its protector but her mother is a former Broadway chorus-line dancer, her younger sister is chronically disabled, her aunt is an aging alcoholic seductress whose looks are sagging and her now-absent father forged his way in the Great Depression by “running errands’ for one of New York City’s most notorious crime lords.
It’s hardly surprising that when Anna enters a workforce depleted by the demands of war she is not content to accept one of the menial conveyor-belt roles traditionally allotted to women.
Instead, Anna quickly sets her sights on becoming a Brooklyn Navy Yard maintenance diver – a position so elusive that far more men fail the rigorous training process than complete the life-threateningly dangerous and emotionally draining course.
Surviving in Brooklyn is a challenge for any young woman, let alone one employed on the waterfront. With her instructor manoeuvring openly against her and her classmates offering virtually no co-operation, let alone support, she appears to have little chance of succeeding.
Anna is single-minded in her determination to join the program, however, and equally set on investigating a wispy recollection from childhood that appears to link her late father, Eddie, with a handsome and charismatic New York club licensee and gang leader, Dexter Styles.
Her disregard for the social mores that reign in the 1940s pits Anna against not only conservative individuals within her own community but the broader New York hierarchy at large – a hierarchy that invariably favours men with influence or wealth over even the most resourceful and committed teenage girl.
Part family saga, part underworld thriller, Manhattan Beach delivers a masterfully imagined storyline fleshed out with intricate, factual historic detail.

Fatal Crossing

15/12/2017

Lone Theils: Echo $29.99

STILL deeply shell-shocked in the wake of interviewing a genocidal Rwandan teacher, journalist Nora Sand decides to distract herself from reality with a couple of minutes of retail therapy. In the sleepy surroundings of a small seaside village it’s impossible to know the ramifications her impulsive decision to buy a battered old leather suitcase will have.
As Danish news magazine Globalt’s UK correspondent, Sand is on assignment with a photographer-friend on the south coast of England when she makes her purchase.
Much later, back home in her inner-city apartment in London, she discovers a bundle of Polaroid photographs secreted behind its frayed lining.
One in particular catches her attention. Its subjects are two teenagers standing in front of a sign that reads ‘Car Deck 2’ – but the language isn’t English; it’s Danish.
When Sand recognises the taller girl as one of two orphans who vanished in the mid 1980s from a cross-channel ferry from Denmark while on an outing with their carers, her professional curiosity and investigative instincts are piqued.
Attempting to piece together the background to Lisbeth and Lulu’s still-unsolved disappearance leads Sand into the law-enforcement world of her highschool classmate Andreas Jansson, a fellow Dane now based temporarily in London while studying anti-terrorism with the British police at New Scotland Yard. Complicating the situation, Sand and Jansson have never resolved an awkward conversation that scarred their once-rock-solid bond years earlier.
When the name of infamous UK serial killer William ‘Bill Hix’ Hickley surfaces in Sand’s research, the importance of retracing the Danish girls’ last known movements takes on renewed urgency.
Could this maniac – a man who kept the tongues of his female victims as trophies – have somehow crossed paths with Lisbeth and Lulu during their travels abroad, or might they instead have fallen victim to an unknown accomplice of Hickley’s, or perhaps a copycat?

The Ice Star / In the Shadow of the Mountain

1/12/2017

Christoffer Petersen: Aarluuk Press $1.30 / $3.99 Kindle e-books

COMPLETING a pair of novels in a single calendar year is a rare achievement for any writer; having a third title in the series launched within the same 12-month period is an almost-unheard-of feat.
Yet this is precisely what Danish author Christoffer Petersen will achieve when the final instalment in his Konstabel Fenna Brongaard trilogy is published in its English translation on Christmas Eve.
Petersen’s first Greenlandic thriller, The Ice Star, opens with the torture of young Danish military special forces operative Brongaard by two foreign mercenaries in a hut in an isolated settlement far above the Arctic Circle in northeastern Greenland.
Brongaard has been on assignment with the government’s sled-dog patrol, an elite unit established to defend the sovereignty of Denmark’s biggest and most remote territory. Now, she is in the hands of a pair of unrelenting inquisitors who have executed her partner and seem determined to frame her for the sickening murder.
Brongaard’s sole chance of escaping rests with David Maratse, a local policeman in the village in which she is being held.
Set against the severity of Greenland’s harsh, icebound, arid terrain, Brongaard’s desperate scramble for survival leads from tiny Scoresbysund across thickly packed sea-ice onto a luxurious coastal expedition ship, where the passengers turn out to be every bit as formidable as the pursuers she has so far evaded on land, and to the high-rise offices of cut-throat corporate Canada.
The suspense continues in In the Shadow of the Mountain, in which the life-or-death action is set in three immensely contrasting locations: cosmopolitan Copenhagen, the Arizona desert in the US and an exploratory mine site outside Greenland’s capital, Nuuk.
The third episode in this Bourne-like Nordic adventure, the soon-to-be-released The Shaman’s House, will feature an Australian connection, linking the world’s two major islands on diametrically opposite sides of the globe.

The Woman in Cabin 10

22/9/2017

Ruth Ware: Vintage $19.99

IT HAS the makings of an extraordinary, all-expenses-paid, first-class indulgence: a five-day northern lights cruise to the Arctic tip of Norway aboard a lavishly appointed vessel so exclusive it carries no more than a dozen handpicked passengers.
Not surprisingly, British travel writer Lauren ‘Lo’ Blacklock is acutely conscious of her privileged status alongside fellow journalists, photographers and potential investors invited to join the maiden voyage.
At the same time, her enthusiasm is overshadowed by the echoes of a violent burglary at her flat in London only days before her scheduled departure that has left Lo with bruises on her face and a case of crippling insomnia. Her preparation is dampened even further by an ill-timed argument with her boyfriend and the temptation to self-medicate with alcohol.
It’s an unfortunate lead-up to what Lo has been hoping will become her big career break: the chance to finally show off her professional capabilities.
Surely such luxurious surrounds will be the healing balm that’s needed to help Lo conquer her nightmares and refocus – or so she thinks.
Within hours of boarding the tiny ship, however, Lo finds herself fearing for her safety all over again.
Jolted out of her boozy, sleepless, post-midnight daze by a human scream, she staggers to the railing of her cabin balcony to glimpse a female body slipping beneath the surface of the near-freezing ocean.
When her attempt to alert the ship’s security chief is brushed off, Lo begins to suspect that something truly sinister is occurring.
Is there a murderer lurking somewhere on board – one of the VIPs with whom she has already shared a dinner table, perhaps, or a member of the beautifully mannered but timid crew? Or did the mysterious ‘dead’ woman never exist at all, as an increasing number of people around Lo now insist?

A Dangerous Crossing

9/6/2017

Rachel Rhys: Bantam Australia $32.99

ON AN ocean liner bound for the far side of the world, everyone’s running away from something – or so it’s safe to assume, considering that perfectly contented, secure individuals rarely uproot themselves from a successful, established life in order to start afresh.
When Lily, 25, a waitress hoping to find employment in one Sydney’s grand English-style mansions, embarks on the adventure of a lifetime from Tilbury, London, she has little idea what the next few weeks of sailing will bring.
It is mid 1939, and with the possibility of war hanging over Europe, Lily is not the only one looking forward to exploring options far from home.
Her dinnertable companions include siblings Edward and Helena, a conservative pair driven out of cold, damp England by poor health, and George, an only son being sent by his father to sit out the impending upheaval in the safety of New Zealand.
Sharing a cabin with Lily are fellow assisted migrants Ida and Audrey, young women making the trip to Sydney alone at the urging of the two countries’ governments.
Also part of the eclectic mix are Eliza and Max, a hedonistic couple from the first-class deck whose scandalous past is very much present with them even as they pretend to shrug it off.
At the far end of the spectrum are Jewish refugee Maria and a group of Italian wives whose husbands have preceded them.
As the cross-section of society undertakes one of the classic voyages of the mid 20th Century, its members explore the exotic unfamiliarity of Gibraltar, Nice, Naples, Port Said, Suez, Aden and Colombo en route to Fremantle, Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney.
However, nothing they encounter ashore is nearly as dangerous as their time on board, crowded together in oppressive, frustrating conditions where class distinctions and racial tensions test even the calmest of personalities.

Slow Boats to Europe

16/9/2016

Trevor Cherrett: tbcherrett@btinternet.com £5.00

TAKE two adventurous Englishmen, a desire to float clear across Europe and an assortment of watercraft, conventional and otherwise.
The result? The offspring of this rare blending is a highly entertaining travel memoir that is in equal measure informative, instructional and hilarious.
When community planner and long-time recreational sailor Trevor Cherrett and his offsider Pete decide to bring to life their shared dream, neither can foresee exactly how their exploration of three of the continent’s great rivers will unfold. All the pair can say with certainty is that they are determined to see through their pledge to journey together to the far eastern fringe of Europe. Having dismissed the idea of making the trip in a boat of their own, they agree to take a combination of whatever waterborne transport they can secure along the way.
What ensues is a three-year, five-stage pilgrimage from the North Sea to Romania’s Black Sea coast, bisecting the seven countries that hug the banks of a 3500km span of the Rhine, Main and Danube rivers.
The tone of Cherrett’s narrative is set in the opening pages, when an inauspicious start in the Netherlands sees the friends struggle so severely with unfamiliar technology, techniques and language that they risk capsizing the project on their first afternoon afloat.
Cherrett’s pen-sketches of the towns and cities through which the pair sail are lively, colourful and down-to-earth.
He describes with self-deprecating humour and humility the embarrassing, frustrating and heartwarming incidents that eventuate, writing at an engagingly personal level yet providing a thoughtful, sensitive and knowledgeable general commentary on European history, culture and politics in an era of significant change. This context makes Slow Boats to Europe a fascinating insight for sailors and landlubbers alike.
The inclusion of route maps and dozens of photographs throughout the book adds to its appeal.

Out of the Ice

5/8/2016

Ann Turner: Simon & Schuster $29.99

DR LAURA Alvarado has just completed a long, dreary over-winter stay in Antarctica and is looking forward to spending a few weeks in leafy inner Melbourne when word of a new opportunity arrives. Rather than speeding towards a comfortable summer on mainland Australia, Laura finds herself heading off to a tiny, barely inhabited former Norwegian outpost between the Antarctic ice-shelf and Argentina’s southernmost tip.
On South Safety Island her task is to carry out a thorough environmental impact assessment of an abandoned whaling station, Fredelighavn, in response to a request to have it opened to tourists. For the duration, her temporary home will be the neighbouring British base, Alliance – a tightly bonded, secretive community in which, it is quickly apparent, she is very much an unwelcome outsider.
With her sole survey partner’s posting delayed by illness and Fredelighavn off-limits to her Alliance hosts, Laura is forced to begin her study alone.
Distressed by thoughts of wholesale whale slaughter and haunted by a lifetime of personal loss and grief, she struggles to hold her nerve in the ghostly settlement. Although the deployment of her friend Kate as a backup scientist is comforting, signs of human interference compound Laura’s unease: freshly smoked cigarette butts inside one of the houses, abnormal aggression among colonies of seals and penguins, a shadowy figure moving between blubber rendering vats and, most disturbing of all, an eerily pale-skinned boy seemingly trapped behind a thick, impenetrable ice-wall and screaming for help.
What is the evasive Alliance team’s covert mission? Are the unexplained happenings at Fredelighavn related to this, or is her mind betraying her, exhausted by too many months in the field?
Laura’s investigations take her from South Safety to Nantucket in the US, then Venice, Italy, as she strives to free an explanation from the unyielding ice.

Midnight Watch

13/5/2016

David Dyer: Penguin $32.99

A CRYSTAL-CLEAR, moonless night, an iceberg and not one but two ships steaming at full speed into danger: they’re as thrilling a combination of ingredients as any writer could dare to dream up.
The plot to Sydney author, literature teacher and former lawyer and merchant marine Dyer’s first novel is based not on the writer’s imagination, however, but on real life – specifically, the events surrounding the “unsinkable” Titanic’s sinking 104 years ago.
Largely fact augmented by selective fiction, The Midnight Watch revisits the world’s worst maritime disaster from a vastly different viewpoint to that taken in most retellings: that of individuals on a second, little-known cargo ship, Californian, which like Titanic finds itself on the night of April 14 1912 surrounded by ice.
However, unlike its huge English cousin, Californian cuts its engines and settles in to wait for daylight before continuing its voyage towards the US.
By the time morning dawns, Titanic is on the ocean bed and Californian is a ship divided – divided not by the captain’s decision to delay its progress but by his apparent refusal to respond to distress rockets fired from a vessel nearby. The hours, days and weeks that follow are a time of claims and counter-claims, accusations, allegations and acrimony as Californian’s officers and crew turn on each other and on the press amid a flurry of newspaper fascination with every detail of Titanic’s demise.
Told through the eyes of fictitious Boston American reporter John Steadman, this tale of mystery explores everything from maritime practice to personal conscience to US-English antipathy.
Dyer sets a newsroom-style pace that keeps readers engrossed and eager to uncover the next column centimetre of this brand-new take on one of history’s most dramatic stories as Steadman pursues an explanation for an otherwise-exemplary captain’s dismissal of Titanic’s plea for help.

Waterfront

27/11/2015

Duncan McNab: Hachette Australia $32.99

POINT a police detective turned investigative journalist in the direction of Australia’s docklands and the material unearthed is likely to make for a juicy – if not entirely family-friendly – dossier.
That’s precisely what Duncan McNab has produced in Waterfront, a thoroughly researched examination of 200-plus years of “graft, corruption and violence”, as he terms it, in and around the country’s major ports.
McNab’s carefully chronicled history begins with the opportunistic pilfering of supplies from the newly landed British First Fleet and interweaves politics, socioeconomics and conflicting community ethics into a storyline populated by prostitutes, sly-groggers, assassins, drug runners and standover men. Names made familiar most recently by the various Underbelly TV series are scattered throughout the text: Kate Leigh, Norm Bruhn, Tilly Devine and the Kanes.
Waterfront at times veers away from the shoreline and into the inner-suburban underworlds of Sydney and Melbourne, putting into context dealings in some manner linked to the painters, dockers and waterside labourers of each era as the maritime mobsters’ tentacles stretch inland from what McNab refers to as “Australia’s crime frontier”.
The book doubles as a history of the union movement across the two centuries since colonisation, tracing at the same time the establishment of distinct political parties as the country now knows them and detailing a tradition of parliamentary manoeuvring, undermining and deceit dating from the very earliest days of federation.
It also records the arrival of diseases imported unintentionally by sea – smallpox, Spanish flu, the much-feared plague – and reports the wholesale human evictions carried out by governments spooked by these epidemics.
While its focus is primarily wharf-related, Waterfront is not merely for readers with an active interest in ships. Rich with picket lines, scab labour, double-dealing, backbench infighting, opium hazes, royal commissions and more than one clichéd drunken sailor, McNab’s book is every bit as entertaining as it is informative.

This is Your Captain Speaking

25/9/2015

Gavin MacLeod: Thomas Nelson $27.99

HANDS up, those who’ve never watched so much as a single episode of The Love Boat. The Mary Tyler Moore Show? No-one?
Aside from being two of the most crisply written, longest-running and most commercially successful US TV comedies of the late 20th century, these international hit series have one more thing in common: now-84-year-old actor Gavin MacLeod.
Raised in small-town America, MacLeod – or Allan See, as he was known then – was from an early age a natural performer. However, his childhood was far from privileged and his transition to working professionally was a challenging and at-times-conflicted process.
Beginning with bit-parts alongside iconic film stars such as Gregory Peck and Cary Grant, MacLeod slowly and steadily earned increasingly lucrative roles. For the diligent, ambitious up-and-comer, these achievements had their drawbacks, though: namely, the frustration of playing unsatisfying peripheral characters. With that boredom came drinking, and with drinking – as MacLeod admits – followed the dissolution of his once-stable homelife and a need to rethink his choices.
This autobiography – just released in paperback – is simultaneously open and honest and heavily optimistic, presenting a glass-half-full account of MacLeod’s relationships on- and off-screen as he regrouped to become pivotal in the ensembles of Mary Tyler Moore (as writer Murray Slaughter) and then Love Boat (as father figure Captain Merrill Stubing). His generally positive, will-do attitude to life is evident throughout as he details his experience as a divorced Catholic who rediscovers Christianity and becomes passionately “born again”. (Warning: the final third of the book is particularly rich with religious references – something that may not always sit comfortably with Australian readers unaccustomed to middle America’s proclamations of faith.)
As one of the world’s most recognisable comedy actors, MacLeod writes with insight on not only himself but also Hollywood peers including Robert Redford, Bette Davis, Aaron Spelling and Marilyn Monroe.

' Books are treasure for the spirit and the soul. '

— VB 2020

Book reviews

WABONGA Press produces an original book review every Friday. Books are chosen from among the latest English-language fiction and non-fiction releases in Australia and internationally.
Each 300-word review is accompanied by a high-resolution cover image.
All are available for licensing to print media in selected regions.For less than the cost of one takeaway cup of coffee each week, a publication can make use of this service to access a new review every seven days, backed by a written guarantee that the same content will not be licensed for use by any direct competitor.
Please contact Wabonga's publisher, Rosalea Ryan, to discuss how this service can be tailored to your newspaper or magazine.