"THE PROLOGUE OF JEMMA RAGLAN"
T. R. Edmonds
e-book 2016 - Kindle, Kobo.
Jemma's father is Irish-Australian, is young and vain and has few parental instincts. He is addicted to port, the horses, and women. Jemma's mother is emigrant English, is young and naïve and also has few parental instincts. She is addicted to a teenage notions of love and romance.Jemma accepts her mother as she is, but in the earlier years she carries a flickering hope her father may yet rise above his addictions, until their stuttering relationship is irrevocably destroyed by his own hand.
But Jemma is an aimsitheoir - she finds things - safety pins, money, buttons, branches hanging low with fruit, a hollow tree, a scraggy white cat, a frog the colour of mud, a barefoot Irish girl with a basket of kelp. She will also find horror, courage, grief, grit, music, her voice, an excess of laughter, and several versions of God, and - eventually - wings.
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"THE HOUSE IN GONDWANALAND"
T. R. Edmonds
e-book 2016 - Kindle, Kobo.
The lost decade between 1945 and 1955 - between the death of Glenn Miller and the birth of Rock'n'Roll - was filled with returned war-damaged men, newly-independent women, and a welter of kids caught between the two. It was a period of manic reconstruction, when working-class families would do anything for a house of their own, usually in one of the new paddock suburbs, and in a world undergoing enormous transition.This is the story not only one of those families, but of one of those frontier suburbs and the lives of the people it contains.
Allan and Dorothy Pryor are a pair of small-town, country-bred teens, both natural loners, and each with impossible aspirations. The meet, get pregnant, marry, give up on their separate dreams and move to the city, buckle down to the slog of raising kids, but soon drift apart, both using World War II as an escape.
After the war, and as much more mature people, now with three pre-war daughters and a mid-war son, they get back together and take up a block in a new suburb at the margins and set about building a house in the face of crippling shortages.
Tackling this new age with them is an assortment of inter-acting families and characters - a blunt old farmer and his wife, who lost their only son at Buna; a war-broken American single father raising a headstrong girl and her crippled twin brother in a shed; a sixty-year-old man helping his deserted daughter-in-law raise ten kids in a railway carriage; Dorothy's estranged half-brother; and a cynical young ex-gunner who falls for one of Allan and Dorothy's too-young daughters.
Together this mis-matched collection of battlers struggle to re-build their damaged lives, their relationships, and their families, while turning a tract of farm paddocks into a neighbourhood.
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"NORTH AND WEST OF MELROSE STREET"
T. R. Edmonds
Simon & Schuster 1993
e-book 2016 - Kindle, Kobo.
Review from "WHO MAGAZINE"(Top Ten Reads of 1993)
"This clever book is not what it appears first to be... (and)... the first chapter continues with the deception. Written in the plain, homespun style of a yarn, it introduces 50-year-old Peter Woodley, who has returned to the country town where he was born, to arrange the funeral of his father Tom. The next chapter, dated 50 years earlier, presents a young woman alone in a house made of tar barrels, kerosene tins and corrugated iron. The setting, miles from anything, and the emotion are again what one would expect in a bush yarn.
"From this point, it begins to dawn on the reader that the book is not a fictionalised memoir but a novel of most subtle construction. Peter's childhood and adolescence are conveyed in a series of chapters in which the writing style alters to fit the age of the narrator. As the novel progresses, it becomes apparent that Peter and Michael Coote - son of Tom Woodley's best mate - share a secret neither is aware of, though the reader is. Tension is maintained as one waits for them to discover it.
"Though most of it is set in a country town, this is far from being a typical Australian story. The setting is scarcely relevant, as the drama rests on character and psychology rather than on action. Novels of such intricate structure, perfectly sustained, are few and far between."
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“MYTHS, SINS, AND COSMIC MACHINERY”
T. R. Edmonds
e-Book 2018, Kindle & Kobo
Exhausted, Robbie strays into Pritchard’s Glen, an enclosed valley with only one road in, and peopled by descendants of Welsh agricultural workers brought in during colonial days by Owen Pritchard ‘the elder’.
When Robbie arrives, the third Owen Pritchard, and his attractive young wife, head a successful fruit cannery business that is the only employer, but with a feudal ‘Squire’ and tied-cottage social structure. Owen owns the best of the valley, but his aged aunt holds an isolated section at the base of the ranges, run by her and her great-grandaughter Bronwyn, but a property Owen wants.
Robbie takes up casual work on her farm as a temporary sanctuary, but when Bronwyn falls for him, the old lady sees an opportunity to set up Bronwyn’s future, and put her affairs in order before it’s too late, as the old lady harbours a secret, concerning the empty graves of her two sons and a large and enigmatic building that is sealed and mostly hidden at the back of the property.
But Robbie’s selfish and callow nature soon rises to the surface and becomes not only his own undoing, but triggers +a chain reaction that is catastrophic for Pritchards Glen and its people. It will be twenty-five years before Rob, still not yet a man in his own eyes, returns in an attempt to put his ghosts to rest.
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THE LAST MEETING OF THE FALLING OFF THE PERCH CLUB"
T. R. Edmonds e-Book 2018, Kindle & Kobo
These are some of the stories collected over a lifetime of watching, and listening to, ordinary people simply getting on with the business of living, and being themselves, like...
Alby - who learnt to talk through a hole in his neck.
Hannah - who embraced The Beast and decided to swim to New Zealand.
Ace - who loves two girls and wants to know if it’s okay to kiss both of them.
Tony - who was caught doing the hanky-panky with his wife’s half-sister.
Pam - who got even, one by one.
Bruno - who rode an old green elephant clean through a shed wall.
Bronnie - who had one perfect day. But only one.
Sarah - who dared to ask another Home kid their story.
Mitzi - who refused to pack her husband’s suitcase.
Bert - who was sane and had the certificate to prove it.
Mozza - who fought the technology gods and won.
... and many more. And what can I say? – I love a good story and I’m a compulsive listener. So I’ve written down every sad, funny, poignant one you’ve ever told me. Which is just as well, otherwise all of your beautiful snapshots of passing humanity would’ve just kept rattling around in there and finished up in the coffin with you at day’s end and the world would’ve been much the poorer for it.
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