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Building on sand and stone

by
September 2005, no. 274

Black Diamonds and Dust by Greg Bogaerts

Vulgar Press, $25 pb, 262 pp, 095807951X

Book 2 Cover Small (400 x 600)

Sandstone by Stephen Lacey

Hodder, $32.95 pb, 340 pp, 0733618162

Building on sand and stone

by
September 2005, no. 274

Working-class settlements north of Sydney are the common setting for these two family sagas. Between them, they take us from the 1880s to 1951. Jack Wallis, who labours in a quarry in the sandstone country that gives Stephen Lacey’s book its title, is born in the early twentieth century; Edmund Shearer, a Newcastle miner of the coal or black diamonds of Greg Bogaerts’s title, nears his death by that time. Both novels might have been designed to answer recent calls for Australian writers to turn their attention to the lives of ordinary people. How many other recent novels explain to working-class readers how their own parents and grandparents, not those of the social élite, thought and acted? Where else, for instance, could today’s renovators read about how their progenitors built their own homes?

Black Diamonds and Dust

Black Diamonds and Dust

by Greg Bogaerts

Vulgar Press, $25 pb, 262 pp, 095807951X

Sandstone

Sandstone

by Stephen Lacey

Hodder, $32.95 pb, 340 pp, 0733618162

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