Geata Póeg na Déanainn

Seeing life in inspired ride on the wild side September 26, 2023

This post is part of a series of articles that I previously published in various Australian newspapers when I was working as a reviewer between 2001 and 2012. The vast majority of these do not exist in digital format, and I’ve decided to reprint them here for digital preservation. Much of what is said in these republished reviews does not represent my current thinking, but rather my understanding at the time of writing and original publication. The titles of the posts are the titles that were given to the articles by subeditors upon publication.

Allan Baillie’s book of short stories for young adults, A Taste of Cockroach, demonstrates the truth of Plato’s maxim that ‘the unexamined life is not worth living.’ It’s also a plea for tolerance of difference. Its cover tag is ‘stories from the wild side,’ and most of the stories are inspired by Baillie’s own experiences on ‘the wild side’ as a freelance journalist in South-East Asia, and later as an author who kept his eyes open for the unusual and bizarre.

The stories are loosely tied together by their theme of cultural differences — the experiences of the foreign and strange, the challenge of prejudices. In ‘The Domestic,’ a 19th-century Anglo-Australian girl strikes up an unlikely friendship with her Aboriginal servant, the pair united against the injustices of a society which denies women the right to a decent education and Aboriginal people the right to a dignified existence. In ‘Only Ten,’ Hussain, a refugee boy, has difficulty coping with normal life in Australia, as his classmates struggle to relate to someone whose life experiences are so alien to their own.

It is in the stories based on real events that Baillie demonstrates his talent for observation, however, and that his power as a writer really shines. Nothing escapes his notice, and no event is too banal or insignificant to inspire a story. In ‘The Bull,’ the reader can soak in the atmosphere of 1950s Portarlington, sharing in a childhood world where camaraderie can be found jumping off a pier into the ocean, or swinging on a tree in a paddock. In ‘Snatch,’ an unlucky encounter with thieves while on a family holiday in Naples leads to musings on the lifes of such Neapolitan petty criminals — a surprisingly charitable response considering it was a bag containing souvenirs and photos of the trip that was stolen. And characters met on Baillie’s journeys — in Laos, Vietnam, Nepal and Burma — inspire eloquent and evocative depictions of their lives and countries. That most of these encounters took place more than 30 years ago says much about Baillie’s phenomenal memory.

In A Taste of Cockroach, the reader is confronted with life in all its complexity, conveyed with warmth and affection by a writer who appears to have made it his mission to absorb and chronicle the breadth of human experience. At a time when it’s perhaps hard to feel happy about what’s happening in the world, Allan Baillie’s book reminds you that it’s good to be alive.

This review first appeared in the 7 May, 2005 issue of The Canberra Times.