TRACY SORENSEN The Lucky Galah. Reviewed by Michelle McLaren

There’s much more to Tracy Sorensen’s impressive debut than just an original premise.

In Port Badminton, a tiny coastal town in Western Australia that’s watched over by a towering satellite dish, Evan Johnson, a radar technician in horn-rimmed glasses, is about to plunge from a cliff to his death. Meanwhile, his young wife is being fitted for a shimmering silver dress for the town’s upcoming Moon Ball, while she broods over a secret she’s been keeping for far too long. And everyone – not just in Port Badminton, but all over the world – is holding their breath as men in spacesuits prepare to walk on the moon.

It’s more than just a giant leap for mankind. For an intelligent young galah who has spent most of her unfortunate life locked in a cage, this sequence of events represents a significant turning point. The Lucky Galah is, in effect, the story of her life. It’s also the story of a town and the people who live there … and without being grandiose, it’s a story about Australia, too.

Ambitious? Definitely. But there’s so much more to Tracy Sorensen’s impressive debut than just an original premise. The Lucky Galah is a bold and astoundingly brave novel – and yes, to be totally clear, it’s narrated by a galah called Lucky.

But Lucky isn’t just any galah. She receives regular transmissions from Port Badminton’s satellite dish – transmissions not from the depths of outer space, but the innermost thoughts of Port Badminton’s residents, beamed directly into Lucky’s mind.

Or, at least, that’s what Lucky tells us. She warns us from the novel’s beginning that she’s not exactly the most reliable of narrators. ‘My stories are outsider art,’ she tells us, ‘self-taught, mostly stolen, highly embellished.’

The town’s secrets are safe with Lucky, though. She might be able to think in fluent English, but when she tries to talk, Lucky is only able to squawk inarticulately, or use a handful of borrowed phrases (like ‘dance Cocky dance’ or ‘stupid dickhead’) and the sound of a toilet flushing to make her feelings known.

As her name implies, Lucky lives a fortunate life. Her companion, Lizzie, treats her to regular cups of tea and biscuits. However, for all her special treatment, Lucky’s wings are still clipped, and she watches with barely restrained rage as her peers fly about in the trees, screeching to each other in their native language.

A natural literary critic, Lucky keeps her beak and her mind sharp in captivity by tearing cheap paperbacks to shreds. In the opening passage of The Lucky Galah, she devours Donald Horne’s The Lucky Country, originally published in 1964 – and it’s in this manner that Sorensen cleverly intertwines Lucky’s narrative of life in the 1960s with the same themes as Horne’s classic work of non-fiction.

The Lucky Galah is a novel about luck – or, to put it slightly differently, it’s a novel about privilege, and the kind of people who take their privilege for granted. People like Evan Johnson, who, with his clean white socks and his horn-rimmed glasses, is the very personification of white male privilege. Early in the novel, Lucky compares Evan to the man on the cover of her copy of Horne’s book:

On the front cover of The Lucky Country there’s a painting by Albert Tucker of a man with a beer in his hand, an ace of spades in his pocket, sun and sea and sail behind him, his mouth shut because all of this speaks for itself.

When Evan Johnson arrives in Port Badminton with his beautiful wife, Linda, and their young daughter, it’s the early 60s and the beginning of the space race. The family has moved across the country for Evan’s new job as a radar technician at the Port Badminton Tracking Station, a huge satellite dish on the outskirts of town that forms a necessary part of NASA’s communications network. Linda is excited by the idea of a new life at first, but as she quickly ascends to the top of the Port Badminton social scene, she becomes bored with the town – and everyone in it. She forms an awkward alliance with Marj Kelly, her next-door neighbour and local dressmaker.

Meanwhile, in a cage in the Kellys’ back yard lives a young, furious pink and grey galah who, in better times, will come to be known as Lucky. For the time being, Marj and Kev Kelly and their flock of redheaded girls call her ‘Cocky’.

From her position on the margins of the Johnsons’ story, Lucky tells us from the very beginning that hapless Evan Johnson’s inevitable demise is somehow connected to her own changing fortune. As the years pass, she gleefully reminds us of the amount of time he has left to live as if it’s the countdown to a rocket launch.

Evan Johnson might be the subject of Lucky’s particular scorn, but he’s hardly the only character in the novel who benefits from privilege. However, Sorensen is careful to point out that privilege isn’t an ugly relic of the past, like the glass ashtray Marj Kelly dashes to pieces on the concrete in her back yard after her husband’s stroke. It’s more insidious than that. Even in the sections of the novel set closer to the present, the ugliness of the past still lingers. But just as Lucky’s life changes for the better over the years, other marginalised people in Port Badminton are free to find acceptance as well.

The Lucky Galah isn’t exactly a simple novel. Sorensen’s narrative shifts backwards and forwards between time periods; it’s interspersed with transmissions from a giant satellite dish. Her characters pop from the page in all their ridiculous, sordid glory and Port Badminton, swathed in red dust and racism, feels so real that you’ll find yourself waving imaginary flies away from your face. There’s a lot going on at once in this novel, but Sorensen takes care not to overwhelm her reader. She’s in control at all times, guiding her audience with the grace of an accomplished storyteller.

The Lucky Galah is an irrepressible squawk of a novel that’s a pure joy to read. It’s hilarious, wildly clever … and almost certain to ruffle a few feathers.

Tracy Sorensen The Lucky Galah Pan Macmillan 2018 PB 304pp $29.99

Michelle McLaren lives in Melbourne and is a fiction co-editor for Verity La. She blogs about books, time travel and nice, hot cups of tea at Book to the Future (www.booktothefuture.com.au).

You can buy The Lucky Galah from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW here.

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Tags: Australian fiction, Australian women's writing, Tracy | Sorensen