Just Relations: 2

by Rodney Hall

"The residents of Whitney's Fall are aged between 80 and 114. In this remote Australian mining town they are a bastion against the empty promise of progress. In fact they are the guardians of the land's unfulfilled dream, a mountain of gold awaiting the gentle kiss of gelignite..."

Genres: Fiction, Australia, Novels, 20th Century

502 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

Born in Solihull, Warwickshire, England, Hall came to Australia as a child after World War II and studied at the University of Queensland. Between 1967 and 1978 he was the Poetry Editor of The Australian. After a period living in Shanghai in the 1980s, Hall returned to Australia, and took up residence in Victoria.

Hall has twice won the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal, and has received seven nominations for the prestigious Miles Franklin Award, for which he has twice won ("Just Relations" in 1982 and "The Grisly Wife" in 1994).

Reviews

[Big Pete · Rating 5 out of 5]

A rich, symphonic novel that is beautifully written and deeply Australian. It's a shame it isn't better known - Rodney Hall's imagination is vast, and his prose is gorgeous; simultaneously crystal-clear and complex, as lustrous as a nugget of gold washed down from a mountain stream.
It's a terrific example of cutting-edge 20th century world literature. It's funny, tragic, grotesque, wise, tender, enjoyable and ultimately moving.
Just Relations is, as Salman Rushdie once said, "so good that you wish you had written it yourself"
Verdict: A Great Australian Novel that should be better remembered in its own country.

[Geoff Wooldridge · Rating 4 out of 5]

It took me a few chapters to work into this novel, which won the Miles Franklin Award in 1982. At first, I struggled with its eccentricity - its cast of characters, its locality and its circuitous prose.

Over time, I figured it to be a comedy, mostly dark, sometimes bordering on slap stick. It was satirical, almost a spoof.

The novel, set in the mid 1970s, features the residents of Whitey's Fall, a small town the back blocks of NSW, which has been largely forgotten. And that's just how the residents, who are mostly related to each other, like it.

When the government offers them funding to upgrade their civic infrastructure, the residents, led by Felicia and Sebastian Brinsmead, who run the local store and have a dark secret of their own, tell the government to shove it, thanks very much.

The big secret is that Whitey's Fall sits on a mountain of almost pure gold. It began life as a gold mining settlement in the last century, and it had apparently been mined out. The local residents stayed on, as they and the town decayed towards oblivion, but they wanted no outside interference.

But there were longtime rumours of a major lode of gold. Someone knew where it was, but others wanted to blow up access to it, to ensure it remained a secret from the wider world.

The local Senator visited the town to convince the locals that progress was inevitable as part of regional development plans, and that a highway past the town was under construction. He argued for the economic prosperity the new road would bring, but the locals were not for turning.

When the road construction machinery uncovered a seam of gold during excavations (without seeming to know just what it was), the locals took decisive action and formed a guerilla 'seniors' army, complete with gelignite and ancient weapons to wage war on the road crew and the government.

This is pretty funny stuff for the most part, with each of the town residents being highly eccentric and/or loopy in their own way. And yet, there was a degree of pathos, of poignancy about how these simple, mostly elderly, folks cared for their mountain, which was the altar upon which they practised their religion of Remembering.

Just Relations wasn't always completely coherent - Hall jumped about and got lost a few times in his own witty prose. There was a degree of self indulgent showing off. The ending was also just a little bit ridiculous and unsatisfying.

This is the 42nd Miles Franklin winner I have read, and I would rate it in the lower half of my favourites. Nevertheless, there was plenty to enjoy in this rural Australian romp.

[Mark · Rating 2 out of 5]

Perhaps the worst ever Miles Franklin winning book. I’ve read the reviews by literary experts and found it more grinding rather than ground breaking. I found it hard to follow and tedious from beginning to the very end. Shallow characters and random pages of words without any sentence structure - no idea why this sort of writing was considered to be ground breaking.

[Jarmby · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn’t finish it
I don’t have the literary skill to comprehend what some authors are saying no matter how skilled or talented they may be
I wanted to enjoy it but life is too short to labour for scant reward