I think schools do better these days at supporting ‘circles of friends’ for children with disabilities, but there was nothing like that when I was a child. To my shame I remember as a very small child being frightened of the calipers and braces whcih were part of the paraphernalia of paralysis, and while I was never so cruel as to taunt polio’s victims as Roberta’s classmates do, until I was older, I avoided contact with these disabled children out of a fear that no one knew about and therefore did not address. Clear-eyed, ambitious, empathetic and wonderfully stubborn, she is forced to overcome physical and social disability when in 1954 she contracts polio in childhood, (not long before mass vaccination began in Australia in 1956). This horrible disease is all but eradicated now but I have vivid memories of classmates whose lives were irrevocably altered by its crippling effects. The central character and first-person narrator, Roberta, is a terrific creation. Two novels set in New Guinea on the one Miles Franklin longlist! Drusilla Modjeska’s The Mountain is a more complex work tackling more significant issues ( see my review) but Annah Faulkner’s The Beloved is a satisfying debut novel from a perceptive author, and I liked its theme of the importance of being true to oneself.
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