Reading Three Stories of Palm Island

• Main Author: Leigh Dale
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: James Cook University 2017-12-01
• Series: eTropic: electronic journal of studies in the tropics
• Subjects: genre; fiction; non-fiction; Palm Island; cultural history; Indigenous Australia
• Online Access: https://journals.jcu.edu.au/etropic/article/view/3617

After briefly introducing Palm Island and its history as a place of punishment for Indigenous people, this essay looks at how readers respond to three books about Palm: Thea Astley’s The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow (1996), Chloe Hooper’s The Tall Man (2008), and Cathy McLennan’s Saltwater (2016). Using reviews posted by contributors to Goodreads, I investigate the colocation of terms which recur in positive reviews, in search of a specific form of reading, described here as “absorption.” Against the publishing and broader cultural conventions which differentiate fiction from non-fiction, the evidence shows that readers who describe themselves as having become absorbed tend also to praise these books for their truth, regardless of genre. The essay proposes some points of reference for thinking about the reading experience, and concludes by briefly noting the limits of using of genre in marketing, reviewing, and studying books. The essay is built on an awareness of the radical imbalance in the distribution of literacy in the region these books depict.