ERIN HORTLE A Catalogue of Love. Reviewed by Annette Hughes

Neika – scientist, surfer, and irresistible protagonist of A Catalogue of Love – attempts to classify emotions in Erin Hortle’s new novel.

Neika is a scientist, an ornithologist studying the migration of the shearwater population of her beloved Bruny Island, where she first encountered the birds as a child. When her colleague Nathan asks why she chose that particular species, she replies, ‘I love them.’

Being a natural scientist, she is trained to make accurate observations, to identify patterns and to articulate her findings in ‘science-y’ language, but somehow that feels too clinical for Neika. She has so much more to say than can be couched in mere objectivity. Her observations, gleaned from her study of gannets, in particular Nigel, a gannet who chose to stay in the company of a flock of concrete birds rather than leave to search for a living colony, begs the question in Neika’s mind: do animals express love and loss in the same way humans do?

Before she can answer that question, Neika feels the need to work out what she even means by those words. What does she understand of love and loss at a personal level? In doing so, she begins to try to make sense of her own migratory life, her connection to her own personal rookery of family and place, and to figure out what she has truly loved and lost.

Neika is 50,000 words into the ‘field notes’ of her life before her best buddy, Meg, suggests that she may actually be writing a memoir. Meg is the first true love to appear in Neika’s investigation into the workings of her battered heart. An arts graduate, Meg is a foil to Neika’s science nerdery. Since their uni days they have fed each other’s emotional, physical and intellectual experience of the world to the extent that Meg has grown into one of Neika’s constant and devoted friends, who speaks to her ‘imagination in ways science never did. What is love? What is grief? What is art?’

Neika is a motherless girl, which is perhaps why Meg means so much to her – part big sister, part confidante and major female emotional influence. Neika’s connection with her father is deep and abiding, as is his grief for her mother, who died when Neika was only two, and although she senses that loss, it only comes to her filtered through her father’s memories and stories. She wonders if she can even feel grief for the loss of a mother she never knew, but whom she knows must have loved her.

But now she has Sean, the sheep grazier next door. Sean kindly offered to mind Neika and her older brother Heath so her newly widowed dad could go surfing. Soon Sean and her dad were holding hands and then sharing a bed, and Sean slipped seamlessly into their family. To little Neika, as Sean’s presence in her life grew, her heart expanded accordingly to include him in the same category as ‘father’. Her childhood experiences begin to solidify into memories, but she finds this problematic:

I can’t quite separate me now from me then. It’s possible that I’ve coloured in the shape of this memory with the person I’ve become. I suppose that’s what happens when we make memories mean something.

Neika was 12 the first time she ‘flew though the ocean and burst into the sky’. Pre-pubescent girl as seabird! Her body strong and immortal, filled to bursting with pure joy. Hortle has a knack for finding just the right visual metaphor to contain all the emotional power required to propel Neika into each stage of her getting of wisdom.

She inherited her love of the icy waters of Cloudy Bay from her surf-mad dads. Mike was a ‘cruiser’, but Sean ‘could find barrels where they didn’t exist, tucking himself up into the pocket of the wave while it curled, and then exploding out from beneath the fold of its lip’. Neika wanted to shred, so she made herself his protégé, to make him proud of his new daughter. Hortle’s description of the exhilaration of surfing is crafted with such precision, it’s hard to believe Neika is the work of Hortle’s exceptionally vivid imagination. Her nature writing is mesmerisingly affecting.

Excursions with her park-ranger dad Mike form the bedrock of her passionate engagement with life – all life, not just her own.

‘We always saw the shearwaters … swarming and circling in their flocks, wings held wide as they coasted on pockets of briny air, skimming the surface, veering up into the sky, spiralling slowly back down. [they] were a constant … like the gritty cold of the air that rumpled salt water and the dark grey of the towering dolomite cliffs, the deep turquoise of the ocean; constant like Dad standing at the back of the boat, hand on the tiller, red Stormy Seas life jacket bled to pink by salt and wear.

This immersion in Bruny Island’s geography nurtures Neika’s nascent scientific mind. When she gazes at the sets rolling in, she perceives the vista though the screen of a synoptic chart rippling with isobars and pressure ridges. When she pulls on her wetsuit for a dawn surf, the scent of the shearwater rookery filling her nostrils draws her towards an as yet unimagined future path.

In her ever-expanding catalogue of love, Neika’s brief brush with the burgeoning fantasy sex-lives of other teens, told tenderly and hilariously by Hortle, does little to prepare her for her own hormonal rush. At 15, her friendship with fellow surfer Sam has intensified to a full-on crush, in all its scalp-prickling, face-burning, gut-churning alarm. All that intensity with no release; all that desire with nowhere to go. When she discovers that to him she’s ‘not just any girl’ – a girl friend, not a girlfriend – she still continues coaching him how to woo the girls who come to sit on the beach and watch him while he surfs with her. She pushes down her disappointment until the hope of Sam finally fades, but the irritation remains like sand in a wetsuit.

Soon she must leave the deep, grounding familiarity of her beloved Cloudy to embark on her further education in Hobart, away from her birds, her board, her bay. Then, a year later, out of the blue, her father reveals he has accepted his dream job in Antarctica, leaving Sean to care for her while she finishes high school. Sean is gutted. She realises that her close, fuggy burrow is no longer snug and secure, and that somehow a deep sense of unease is undermining her former confidence in the surf. While out on the water in the line-up, ‘not just any girl’, but not a man either, she feels judged for a failure to catch a wave and voila, for the first time, Neika loses her cool and finds herself rage-surfing. When Sean chips her for ‘occupying too much space in the line-up’, she is both hurt and angry, and simmering with resentment.

So begins her catalogue of loss. At 18, those prior emotional setbacks leave her wrong-footed. Whether it was ‘wanting to prove something to Sean or impress Sam’, she finds herself pissing into her wetsuit at Shipstern Bluff, paralysed in the face of monstrous waves: ‘Powerful. Bulging up, mushrooming out, flattening into broad plateaus then swelling up into steep ridges again.’ She knows she is there for the wrong reasons. It takes her some considerable self-talk to eventually leap into the fleeing surge from the rocks and paddle out.

She calls it the Day Probably Nothing Happened, because from that day on, Neika’s losses begin to pile up, threatening to undermine her capacity for love as she learns that the other half of love is grief. Hers is an enthralling, courageous and compelling ride into adulthood.

Neika is irresistible. Impossible not to love.

Erin Hortle A Catalogue of Love Summit Books 2025 PB 304pp $34.99

Annette Hughes is a singer-songwriter performing with Geoffrey Datson in their duo Datson Hughes. Their second studio album, Now and Forever, is out now on vinyl: www.datsonhughes.com

You can buy A Catalogue of Love from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW.

You can also check if it is available from Newtown Library.

Tags: Australian fiction, Australian writers, Bruny Island, coming of age, Erin | Hortle, family, gannets, shearwaters, surfing, Tasmania