What would Father do when he realised the man whose shadow he’d grown up in was living only an hour from us? Probably nothing. Father’s a placid man, not given to anger. I can’t imagine him wanting to confront or seek revenge. He’d probably have a faraway look for a few days, while pondering the …
Father’s meeting with Everleigh Blandell-Collins sets a quiet, yet disturbing scene for collapse. While Finn had given a rundown of some of the stages of collapse in the previous chapter, it’s a distant thing, he repeats the words given to him, he has no direct experience. Father provides the brutal reality. Even those with good …
Dang, I love Akiva! Little spitfire. Her partial nudity is interesting. She’s exposes the tattooes her parents gave her as a form of self-defense. Being naked since a child it’s completely natural to her. Most indigenous cultures have less puritanism than we do around exposing the female breast. Akiva’s possibly the start of reverting to …
I have a soft spot for Hog. He’s one of my favourite characters, though he and Piper are already dead by the time this book starts and, as with Eamon, known only by the stories their survivors tell. Hog deepens the Father/Son theme. We don’t need to be related to people to form strong bonds …
Finn meets the residents of the Huon Settlement. They’ve created a new way of being and I find it fascinating to compare them to the Hobart Mob (an Australian Indigenous people word use). In the absence of paper/pens the Huon Settlement has reduced the importance of them and increased their skill at remembering prodigious amounts …
Did you spot that Hairy Man was the unknown man on the exodus from Hobart who handed the grieving Dan the nail gun to attach his grandmother’s body to the tree? That was the most disturbing scene I wrote. I came unstuck over it. It’s fiction, but it may be that our descendants will be …
Finn cuts his finger and decides to hide the wound from Father – thinking it a small ‘cutting away of the child from the man.’ Such an insignificant wound in the scheme of things, and a moment he returns to throughout the book. When he returns to in Chapter 38, it’s with potentially fatal wounds. …
I recall writing the section about Recoinciliation in the middle of the night (lucid dreaming and then forcing myself to pull back out before I fall asleep) and thinking, oh how wonderful, imagine using our currency to incentivise peace rather than competitiveness, which creates distrust, acrimony, jealousy and fuels war. When someone is given a …
Reciprocity is the ancient recipe for equilibrium. Reciprocity is the belief system of The Huon Settlement. They each find ways to give back and look at the balance of how much they take, and the services they return. The frog ponds at the kindness circle fosters the lives of frogs, an endangered species, while also …
Last year I read Roman Krzarnic’s book The Good Ancestor, it confirmed for me why I wrote Eat My Shadow. I want it to help reconnect people to the concept of being one people, not divided by time into generations of unknown others. They are not ‘the people in the past‘ masses of unknown people, …
