The Silence Factory by Bridget Collins (HarperCollins, $36.99)
In the mid-800s in the fictional town of Telverton, Devon, the charismatic Sir Edward Ashmore-Percy is trying to commercialise the production of a delicate silk woven by spiders on a remote Greek Island.
Sir Edward meets Henry, a young widower who comes looking for an audiology test for his young daughter, who is congenitally deaf. Using his substantial charm, he enlists Henry, who has a gift for words, to sell the appeal of this extraordinary silk – it has incredible silencing powers – to wary investors and the public. We soon discover it was not Sir Edward’s uncle who found the spiders but rather his wife, the long-suffering Sophia.
The impressionable Henry becomes totally infatuated with Sir Edward and the idea of his silk. But its production begins to concern: some of the workers in the silk factory, many of them children, are going deaf because of the noise. And Sir Edward and his motley crew have other, more nefarious ideas in mind for the product.
Bridget Collins, author of the extraordinary The Betrayals and The Binding, is excellent at sweeping up the reader into mesmerising historical worlds, her convincing characters thrown into strange circumstances, which intrigue and terrify them. Her writing effortlessly conjures up the loud, bawdy and harsh times of the 1870s.
The Gallows Bird by Barbara Sumner (Pantera Press, $32.99)
The first novel of New Zealand writer and film maker Barbara Sumner explores the experiences of early women convicts who were shipped from Britain to Australia in their thousands from the 1830s. Sent to prevent the largely male population from any “unnatural behaviour”, these women, who had often stolen to feed a child, had few human rights and were essentially sold to the highest bidder.
The story is told through the feisty but vulnerable heroine, Hannah Bird, known as Birdie, born to a gentlewoman in London, who was cast out by her family after becoming pregnant. Her mother dies in poverty but not before she sends Birdie into service as a lowly laundry maid at a grand house. Knowing her mother’s story, she doesn’t take well to service – why should she be the servant of other people’s dreams, she asks. As she casts around for escape, she meets a crew of street thieves led by a charismatic young man, Joe, who involves her in their criminal activities.
Before she knows it she’s being sent to prison for a heist, and rather than be hanged, she’s put on a ship to Sydney with a ragtag collection of women. She soon discovers they are seen by the crew and officers as their very own personal brothel, and Birdie, with her silver hair and aloof attitude, attracts the attention of one of the most unsavoury senior officers. But thanks to her ability to read and speak French, her friendship with a French-Canadian priest saves her skin a number of times.
In Sydney, the women are to be auctioned at the Parramatta Female Factory to an unprepossessing community of men. For Birdie and her friends, it’s marriage or jail, but they have other plans, possessing a collection of useful skills they believe can support them in the new world.
Will they manage to escape their fate? The Gallows Bird keeps you guessing. It’s a wonderful debut. Sumner captures the heart and soul of Birdie and her friends on the hazardous journey, the wild-west world of Sydney, that first sight of kangaroos, and the convicts’ friendships with the Aboriginal women who are also being held to break their spirit.
Mrs Hopkins by Shirley Barrett (Allen & Unwin, $37.99)
Also in Sydney, this time in 1871, where a collection of girls and young women, through accident of birth, have ended up in Biloela Industrial School For Girls, a former prison on Cockatoo Island. It’s an institution for girls and young women who have been collected off the street and deemed in need of discipline and schooling, with the idea they’ll be trained to go into service in the big homes of the city.
But in an institution where they’re not given enough to eat and are punished harshly when they play up, their only option is to rebel. They are dirty, disobedient, sexually precocious and argumentative. The adults in charge of this beleaguered institution, an ever-changing cast, aren’t much better. And the newly arrived Mrs Hopkins, well-meaning though she is, is no saviour. For a while you think she might turn into a Sound of Music Maria character as she gets them to sing and pray, but Barrett is not interested in that.
A widow who lost her daughter seven years earlier, she has her heart in the right place with the girls, but they are much too wily for her. One girl reminds her of her daughter, and she dotes on her, though the girl rejects the attention.
As we get to know Mrs Hopkins, we find she has more and more flaws, her personal ghosts visiting her and affecting her mental wellbeing, even as some in the institution decide she might be a witch. And while she is pious, she’s not averse to sleeping with a man out of wedlock. She worships the institution’s director, Mr Craddock, and he is attracted to her.
With Mrs Hopkins, Barrett has created a funny, dark novel. The goings-on at the island institution – a couple of unfortunate deaths, a dungeon, food poisoning, crooked rulemakers, illicit sex – all test our unlikely heroine. There are comical moments but also serious matters raised about children being taken away from their mothers and the impulse to punish bad behaviour rather than to understand it.
