Book Review: Cicada

Posted on 20 April, 2014

This year, I made several New Year’s Resolutions, a surprising number of which I have managed to keep. One of these has been to read more books. This month, I devoured Questions of Travel by Michelle de Krester, and then quickly moved on to A Wild Sheep’s Chase by Haruki Murukami. However, recently, I read a book that stopped me in my tracks. This book, authored by Canberra’s own Moira McKinnon, is called Cicada.

I had the fortune of being given this book by my neighbour, who, as a literary agent, recommended it to me, saying something along the lines of it being one of the most beautiful books she had read in a long time. If I had known just how breathtaking this book was, I would not have waited a month before picking it up.

Cicada is set on a remote cattle station in the desert in the Northern Territory or Western Australia in a time where the aristocratic English travelled to Australia by steamship and tried to tame a land whose original inhabitants knew could never be broken.

The first chapter is visceral and bloody, as Lady Emily Lidscombe gives birth to a black child who cannot be the son of her white husband, William. In the ensuing pages, as McKinnon describes the cicadas bursting from the ground and out of hibernation, Lady Lidscombe flees the station and her murderous husband, who has murdered her new born child and its suspected father in his rage and is seeking to murder Emily.

Cicada tells the story of Emily’s flight and her struggle to survive in the Australian desert, mothered and kept alive by an Aboriginal woman, Wirritjil, who leads her along the songlines of the desert to the sea as they flee the men her husband sends to find her and bring her back.

I have never read a book that describes with such clarity and such beauty the Australian desert; its ancient rock formations, its hidden sanctuaries, its birds and fish and mammals and lizards, its scorching sun and savage bushfires and soaking rain. McKinnon describes all these things in such a way that I could feel the course sand between my toes and smell the damp earth of the billabongs she described. This book grabs you by the shoulders and hauls you forcefully and unforgivingly into a world often dismissed as hostile and deadly, but not often depicted through the eyes of its original inhabitants.

As a reader, McKinnon gives you the privilege of viewing Australia through the eyes of Wirritjil – all the plants and animals are called by their ‘skin names’, the names which Aboriginals give to every living thing, and the two women travel across the earth’s songlines, the invisible paths etched by the songs of the dreaming into the landscape. McKinnon describes in intricate detail how the women find water in the dessert, the dance to welcome the new rains and the story behind the lovesick moon, growing fatter and thinner in his yearning for his loves, the stars.

I relished every page of this book, acutely aware that I would never be able to experience each word and each phrase of it as I did for the first time. I remember the moment I finished the book: I just sat on my bed with both hands on the front cover, attempting to digest it in its entirety.

Beyond a physically and emotionally gripping story of survival, of courage and of physical hardship, beyond a stunning portrait of the Australian landscape, this book is an unparalleled examination of the culture and practices of one tribe of Aboriginal people, of their songs and language and people and dreaming stories. And beyond this, it is a narrative of the ignorance of racism, of the arrogance of colonialism, and of the brutality of man.

This book is not a book that should be read once and then left on the shelf to gather dust – this book is a book that should be read and re-read, passed between friends and family, recommended and discussed. Its pages should be dog-eared, its passages underlined. This is by far the most beautiful, most stunningly written and most vivid depiction of early Australia, its landscape, temperaments and its people and their ways of life, as contrasting as they were.  This is the best book I have read in a long time – grab it now, before the bookshop runs out.

Want to meet the author?

Nibblez Catering and Paperchain Bookstore are presenting a literary lunch with Moira McKinnon at 12 noon on Thursday May 1 at the Sports Club Kaleen, 16 Georgina Crescent, Kaleen.

Two Courses and Tea and Coffee for $25 per person.

Bookings can be made by ringing Nibblez Catering on 0438 718 190 or Nibblez @ Kaleen on 02 6241 1560, in person at the Bistro at Kaleen Sports Club or email catering@nibblez.com.au