KIRSTY JAGGER Roseghetto. Reviewed by Karen Chisholm

Kirsty Jagger’s debut novel is a confronting story about growing up in the worst of circumstances, and how violence and poverty can happen to anyone.

Potential readers will need to take into account the author’s note at the front of this novel:

This book is about breaking the cycle of violence. It contains depictions of violence perpetrated against women, children and animals. It also deals with the very real consequences of repeated and sustained trauma, including substance abuse, self-harm, suicidal ideation and revictimisation. I believe these are critical issues that we need to discuss and examine. I also recognise that survivors of domestic, family and/or intimate partner violence may find some of the content triggering. But please remember: this is a story about breaking the cycle, not being broken by it. It’s about strength, resilience and ultimately, triumph. There’s lots of hope, love and light amongst the darkness.

The issues explored in Roseghetto are confronting and profoundly distressing. However, Jagger approaches them in a careful and considered manner without lessening the impact. This novel is a brave undertaking, tackling awful issues from the point of view of the woman that the child at its centre has become, looking back as she returns to the public housing estate where her life was so badly impacted by the adults around her.

I haven’t been back in sixteen years, so I take the scenic route via Dickens Road, Ambarvale. Nothing’s changed. It’s still as scabby as ever. Illegally dumped household items pollute the street, so poor and pathetic even Mum and Rob, problem hoarders, wouldn’t give them a second glance.

Shayla’s story starts when she’s three, when she and her mother Lauren move to Rosemeadow, a public housing estate in Sydney’s western suburbs, in the 1990s. It’s a tough life for Shayla, as she’s subjected to sexual abuse from her father, psychological abuse from her mother’s boyfriend and, eventually, his mother, all while witnessing her mother struggling with poverty and the domestic violence perpetrated against them both, as well as a string of other horrific events.

There are small signs of hope, though – her maternal grandparents are her anchor, and despite questioning their daughter’s choices and not always handling things as well as you’d hope, they are always there for both of them. Shayla has great memories of her grandparents, and many reasons to be grateful for the safe harbour they provide.

The front yard is Nanna’s garden. The backyard is Poppy’s. Nanna loves flowers. Real ones outside, fake ones inside. She’s taught me the names of all her flowers and which ones grow by slip. Flowerbeds run along three sides of short, soft, very green grass. There are petunias, pansies and pigface, of all different colours. Purple bougainvillea climbs the fences, full of thorns and bees. Pink azaleas and camellias have been planted in the corners. Dark-red roses, the colour of Mummy’s hair, bloom by the front door. They’re Nanna’s favourites. She has geraniums the same colour too.

It’s quite a contrast to her own house in Rosemeadow, as her own child-like recollection shows:

Every house is the same shape and colour, has the same fence, letterbox and carport. Ours looks a bit nicer because Nanna hung white lace curtains in the windows instead of old sheets. All our furniture is inside the house, not on the front lawn. And our garden is neat and tidy because Poppy comes to mow every second weekend.

Her experience of her paternal line is nowhere near as positive – it’s not just her father, a sexual abuser and violent lowlife. His mother is an awful human being, but then again, so is the mother of Lauren’s boyfriend Rob – there’s much about these women to make readers’ skin crawl.

Using a gentle, deft touch, Jagger is careful to make as much as possible palatable, setting the timeframe, in particular, via the 1980s pop music soundtrack of Lauren’s life. Not that she’s necessarily pulling punches, or failing to convey the awfulness of many of the situations that Shayla finds herself in. Rather, she tells the story through the prism of hope and resilience. A resilience that seems to come through first in Shayla, with her mother eventually learning from her daughter’s example.

While Jagger has taken some care to make this about breaking the cycle of violence, poverty and abuse, as she explains in her opening note, it’s hard to see it coming at points. Lauren, in particular, has to dig herself out of a very big hole after leaving Shayla’s father for another nasty piece of work and proceeding to have two more children with him. Shayla’s resilience might be building at this time, but it is fuelled by a level of anger until desperation threatens to overwhelm her.

Magic isn’t real. God ain’t coming to Rosemeadow. Fairy rings are fungus.

The awfulness of their home life coincides with an increasing sense of desperation and craziness in the community around them, and for a split second it looks as if Lauren has found it within herself to make the change they all need.

I don’t know where Rob is. Maybe he sleeps in his car or stays with his brother for a few days – because that’s as long as Mum’s resolve lasts. She spends most of that time listening to ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ by Sinead O’Connor, which does my head in, and then he’s back.

The resolve Lauren found meant a move to a new housing estate, but Rob is back, and his antagonism, and Lauren’s complete mishandling of Shayla’s first relationship with a boy, turns from a trickle into the eventual flood they need. But again it’s Shayla who has to make the decisive move.

When the going gets tough, the tough go to Nanna’s. I had a T-shirt that said that as a kid. It had a koala on the front with an Akubra on his head and a bindle stick slung over his shoulder. It’s not a short walk to Revesby and it’s slow going because every single step hurts.

At this point you might be wondering if things could get any worse for Shayla, and while they most definitely do, somehow they also get better. She makes some choices for herself that break the cycle of poor decisions, young parenthood, poverty and desperation, tension and regrets. She gets away from the worst of it, and stays close to the best, making something of her life. While there’s triumph against the odds here, there’s also a lot of lessons to be learned, and the sobering realisation that no matter how much you rise above, there’s always somebody who doesn’t, and so the cycle perpetuates.

Kirsty Jagger Roseghetto UQP 2023 PB 320pp $32.99

Karen Chisholm blogs from austcrimefiction.org, where she posts book reviews as well as author biographies.

You can buy Roseghetto from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW or you can buy it from Booktopia.

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

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Tags: Australian fiction, Australian women writers, breaking the cycle, domestic violence, Kirsty | Jagger, poverty, public housing, resilience