Pages Menu
Abbey's Bookshop
Plain engish Foundation
Booktopia
Categories Menu

Posted on 30 May 2019 in Fiction |

MELINA MARCHETTA The Place on Dalhousie. Reviewed by Jessica Stewart

Tags: / / /

Melina Marchetta has come a long way since Looking for Alibrandi; in her new novel she explores themes of home, family and belonging.

Melina Marchetta has written a story about home in The Place on Dalhousie. Home is both a place — where you live, the geography, the cityscape, the country — and a state of mind, the comfort and familiarity of having people around you ­who know you and care for you. Home is support in its different guises.

Rosie Gennaro has lost the most important people in her life — her mother when she was 14, and now her father — and she feels she has lost her home, the house her father built for her and her mother. She has moved in with a boyfriend, then out again, and she has taken off travelling, working odd jobs, moving on when it suits. The book opens with Rosie in a regional town where she has found work as a carer. She seems drawn to other people’s homes.

The town floods and she stays on to help, working alongside Jim, an SES volunteer:

 It’s rained for forty days and forty nights, so when a guy who looks like Jesus in orange SES overalls comes to stand next to her, Rosie thinks it’s all a bit biblical.

Marchetta’s few words bring us the familiar orange uniform we associate with tension, disaster and recovery, a bearded young man and Rosie’s weary fatefulness.  The story’s timeline moves back and forth among an ensemble of characters and piecing it together is part of the enjoyment. This is a book to reread.

Rosie and Jim have a brief relationship, seeking comfort in one another, but then lose contact, travelling in different directions. It is only the beginning of their story, though. When they meet up again in Sydney several years later, the landscape has shifted. Rosie has returned to what was her home, her father’s house in Haberfield in Sydney’s inner-west, the place on Dalhousie, with her new baby. Also living there is Martha, her father Seb’s second wife, and both women lay claim to the house.

Martha and Seb had met in the cancer ward where they were caring for dying loved ones. Marchetta handles weighty themes with a light touch. Death, and the search for solace by those left behind, rears up often. Seb has also died prematurely and we see the repercussions of loss. Marchetta’s strong women show us that death is a part of life. Though it is one end, it is not the end.

Marchetta’s characters find support in different forms. Jim is searching for his parents, but his close-knit group of friends from school, and their parents, brothers and sisters, are his family:

He’s home, and he knows he’s home because they’re here and that’s the way it is, just the certainty that one of them will always be around, and it feels like everything’s going to be okay …

Martha’s school friendships, reforming around an adult netball team, are another source of support with a shared history. The pokes at netball prima donnas are laugh-out-loud funny for any woman who remembers school teams. In another forum, the bitchy competitiveness of a mothers’ group is shown to be a veneer: underneath is solid, practical support.

Responsibility is a constant theme — responsibility to one’s children and one’s parents, financially and emotionally. Rosie’s Italian grandmother comes back to the house on Dalhousie, worried for her granddaughter. Of Jimmy’s job as a fly-in fly-out worker in the mines, Martha says, ‘You need to make this work, Jimmy.’ Frankie, Jimmy’s best friend, who knows his patterns and his history, says to him, ‘That little boy needs you, no matter what.’

And the migrant experience is here. When family is on the other side of the world, the neighbourhood becomes de facto family:

Martha had never sensed Loredana in this house before, but she’s imagined her languorous walk down Dalhousie chatting to every second person outside their home … That husky strong accent attracting the foreigners, the rapid musical dialect comforting the old-timers.

Martha’s responsibility, too, becomes clear in the end, and the place on Dalhousie becomes home again.

Melina Marchetta The Place on Dalhousie Viking 2019 PB 288pp $32.99

Jessica Stewart is a freelance writer and editor. She can be found at www.yourseconddraft.com where she writes about editing, vagaries of the English language and books she’s loved.

You can buy The Place on Dalhousie from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW here or you can buy it from Booktopia here.

To see if it is available from Newtown Library, click here.