Resilience is one of the themes in Poppy’s Monster by Shelly Higgs and Francesca Costa.
Poppy’s Monster (Starfish Bay Publishing, Australia, 2024) by Shelly Higgs and Francesca Costa deals with childhood anxiety. While our little heroine is going about her daily activities, fear creeps up on her like a dark overwhelming cloud.
Shelly Higgs describes the symptoms of Poppy’s anxiety – increased heart rate, dry mouth, clenched fists, shallow breathing – and inertia. Francesca Costa expertly portrays these emotions in her cartoon-style illustrations – eyes squeezed shut, shoulders hunched, hands covering ears, the picture of distress.
Only when Poppy visualises her fear and transforms it to a swirling mass of colour does she master her anxiety. Knowing her fellow students all carry a small monster on their shoulders also helps.
Everyone feels afraid sometimes. And that’s fine. It can be protective caution; knowing that allows Poppy to walk with confidence into whatever life throws at her. Adapting and coping with minor changes and challenges is part of growing up.
Crucially, it is the realisation of the abstract into a seeable image that breaks the hold it has on her.
Irma Gold’s Shift is a social commentary on the chance of birth that sees some live in relative ease and luxury, others in poverty, violence and despair.
In a similar way, Arlie, the main protagonist of Irma Gold’s Shift (Midnight Sun Publishing, Australia 2024; cover design Abby Stout) defines his experiences through the medium of photography. Image making is his way of making sense of the world. Like Cazneaux, he is a quiet observer, standing outside and making pictures of moments.
But Arlie also craves a sense of belonging and love. Struggling with life in Australia, he takes a trip to his mother’s birth country, South Africa, in particular to Kliptown, the place where the Freedom Charter was adopted in 1965. Here he finds its principles of equality of opportunity regardless of race, colour or sex, to be sadly lacking. Human rights, security, shelter and peace are in short supply.
The contrast between his life in Australia and that of the South Africans is painfully clear. And yet here he finds that sense of belonging and personal peace which has eluded him under the shadow of his family – his easily successful brother, his renowned architect father, his emotionally ailing mother.
Feeling that he is somehow wanting because of his lacklustre career to date in art photography, his string of failed relationships with women and his fractious relationship with his father, in Kliptown he falls in love with Glory, warms to her young brother Samson and finds friendship with the charismatic choir leader Rufaro.
He has found the place where image making makes sense for him and he begins to make raw portraits of the local people in all their pain, poverty and dignity. An exhibition of this work, he believes, will help people see the truth about South Africa.
Pressure to return home comes with an unexpected visit from his father. The prickly relationship is a constant challenge and it is Glory who points out that he should be grateful to his father, that his father loves him.
Irma Gold writes in a deceptively simple style, an easy prose embellished with poetic turns of phrase. The pace is unhurried as we move inexorably to the tragedy we already know will shift Arlie and his attitudes, change his life.
This technique of foreshadowing the climax on the first page is clever in several ways, not least because we spend the whole story waiting for it – its explication and expansion. A sense of nervous anticipation is thus inbuilt from the start and everything in the story from there is an inching step towards the fall.
Shift is at once affecting fiction and a pertinent social commentary on the chance of birth that sees some of us living in relative ease and luxury, others in poverty, violence and despair. Travelling inside Arlie’s youthful head, the reader sees his enlightenment as clearly as he himself sees the ‘it’ images he has created.
The confidence photographers have that their work can sometimes change the world is written large in these pages. Sometimes it is true – Nick Ut’s photograph of Phan Thi Kim Phuc and Turkish journalist Nilüfer Demir’s photograph of the little drowned Kurdish boy, Alan Kurdi, testify to this. Some writers, too, achieve this – the power of their words to persuade. Irma Gold is clearly among these.
Barbie Robinson is co-founder and a content creator for Living Arts Canberra, a not-for-profit media outfit supporting arts and community in the Canberra region and books worldwide through its website, podcast interviews and a 24/7 internet radio station at Living Arts Canberra
