Anam blends fiction and essay, theory and everyday life to imagine that which has been repressed, left out, and forgotten. The grandson mines his family and personal stories to turn over ideas that resonate with all of us around place and home, legacy and expectation, ambition and sacrifice. As he sifts through letters, photographs, government documents and memories, he has his own family to think about: a partner and an infant daughter.
Is there a way to remember the past that creates a future for them? Or does coming home always involve a certain amount of forgetting? He is the co-founder of Behind the Wire, the award-winning oral history project documenting the stories of the adults and children who have been detained by the Australian government after seeking asylum in Australia.
While offering reflections on philosophy, history, language and memory, Anam is primarily a story of family relationships. Lovingly domestic in parts, boldly theoretical in others, for a country full of migrants, living amid unresolved questions of place and belonging, Anam is a profoundly relevant novel. Read more. Growing up in a poor farming family in country New South Wales but clever, energetic and determined, Dolly spent her restless life pushing at those doors.
Most women like her have disappeared from view, remembered only in family photo albums as remote figures in impossible clothes, or maybe for a lemon-pudding recipe handed down through the generations.
Restless Dolly Maunder brings one of these women to life as someone we can recognise and whose struggles we can empathise with.
