Author: Tom Holloway
Published: 2010
Synopsis: Father is a fire-fighter, the local hero, and his youngest daughter has just been born. His love for her is unlike any other kind of love – deep, long, protective – but as she heads towards adolescence he has to confront how our hyper-sexual culture is forcing young girls to grow up fast. All this in the midst of the gods’ wrath, who’ve stopped the wind and made the forests burn, forcing him to choose what sacrifice he is willing to live with.
What moved me: My familiarity with the Iphigenia myth upon which this work is based allowed me to see the full extent to which Holloway had allowed it to be infected by an Australian sensibility. Athena’s refusal to allow the wind to blow and so release the Greek fleet on its way to Troy is our craze-inducing heat in which we wait with baited breath for the first fire of the season to break. The fire-fighter is our Agamemnon, who we look to when we need to be saved (and who is an unimpeachable archetype of Australian masculinity).
I also loved the dilation of Holloway’s language. Every scene unravels as a layer of images slathered upon each other – we think it is one thing, but then it becomes another, and another, and another, until we almost stop trying to assume we understand what we are seeing and wait to be told.
vimh 