Book Description

Meredith Jackson is 17 when her father drowns in an accident at a ScoutJamboree. Mer is left to pick up the pieces with her mother and brothersand re-focus their lives. However, another tragedy is not far away andthe family is in turmoil again. Mer’s mother, Annabel, is a celebrity from the golden era ofAustralian swimming in the 1950s. Annabel is the ‘darling daughter’of the Windsor community west of Sydney. Her fame originates froma dramatic rescue from the June 1949 Hawkesbury River flood atthe age of fourteen. Just three years later a controversy surroundsAnnabel’s failure to reach the Olympic 200m breaststroke final at the1952 Helsinki Olympics. She makes amends when, as a mother of two,she makes it into the final at Melbourne in 1956. But much of whathappened in Finland remains unexplained. Guiding Mer through her personal odyssey is the strange etherealpresence of the osprey, which Mer identifies as being like her personaltotem. There is also the uncanny relationship she has with the paintingsof Ari Niemela, a Finnish artist whose body is recovered from the surf infront of her on a hot summer’s night at Currumbin Rocks. Complicating Mer’s search for understanding is her mother’s closerelationship with Bishop Rev. Peter Hale, an outspoken social reformer,but still, in Mer’s artist’s eyes, the embodiment of all she wants to rejectin the form of organised religion. Eventually in Finland, through thelove of a caring family, and the wisdom of the aged shaman, Margita,truth is able to be unravelled. Some of the emotion in the story is embossed through extracts fromJohn Shaw Neilson’s nature poetry, providing a subtle tribute to one ofAustralia’s great lyricists who sadly is so little known.