Review: Barbed Wire and Cherry Blossoms by Anita Heiss

From the moment that I picked up my copy of Barbed Wire and Cherry Blossoms, I was utterly hooked. Not only is it a love story, it's a story set in Australia during World War Two from the perspective of people that this particular part of history often glosses over. 

The novel opens with Hiroshi, a Japanese POW living in Australia. Along with many of his fellow prisoners, he manages to escape ... and finds himself alone--and ashamed--in a strange country that he does not understand but knows that he is the enemy. Through chance, he finds himself on Erambie Station, an Aboriginal mission, and he encounters Banjo Williams--a good, honest family man and member of the community, who knows the difference between right and wrong. With the help of his family, and some other members of the community, Banjo helps to hide Hiroshi, sharing what little they have, in a time of war when their people are not recognised as citizens and have few rights. Soon, Banjo's oldest daughter, Mary, finds herself attracted to Hiroshi and the feelings are mutual ...

As I said at the beginning of this review, I was hooked from the moment that I picked up this book. It was interesting to read about an important part of Australian history from two different perspectives. This isn't a story of how men are on the frontline, or how the wives and girlfriends are surviving back home. This is a story of people who barely had any rights, yet were expected to stand up and be patriotic and loyal to a government that had taken their land, their culture and their rights away. I admired the strength of Banjo, a man with a strong moral compass, and who did what he knew was right, rather than what was expected of him. Meanwhile, I found my heart both beating and breaking for Mary, as I watched her love for Hiroshi grow. 

Overall, this is a great Australian novel, one that is deserving of every bit of recognition that it gets.

Thank you to Simon and Schuster Australia for my copy of Barbed Wire and Cherry Blossoms.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Peppermint Patty: I Cried and Cried and Cried

Image
Unrequited love is a common theme in the Peanuts Comics and is one that I have previously explored on this blog. We know that Lucy loves Schroeder, Sally loves Linus and Charlie Brown has a crush on the unseen, unnamed and utterly unattainable Little Redhaired Girl. But perhaps the saddest unrequited love stories from the comic is that which ran in late June 1972. It was the series of strips where the usually self-confident Peppermint Patty came face-to-face with the Little Redhaired Girl with the intention of thumping her and then something surprising happened: Here we have a usually self-confident girl, who is funny, unashamedly herself and talented at sports reduced to tears by the realisation of who she is not and never can be. I really feel for her in this series of comic strips. She knows that Charlie Brown can never love her, when he is so hung up over a girl who represents a supposedly ideal feminine beauty. Fortunately Linus, the most spiritual member of the Pean...
Read more

Charlie Brown, Lucy Van Pelt and the Football

Image
One of the longest, and arguably, most infuriating, running gags in Charles Schulz's otherwise brilliant Peanuts comic strip, is where Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown and then pulls it away at the last minute, causing Charlie Brown to fall flat on his back. A typical strip looks like this: Source: Go Comics The gag is one of the darker themes in the strip. It works on the concept that every year, Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown. Every year, Charlie Brown is initially filled with doubt but is eventually pushed on by a kind of optimism that perhaps, this time, Lucy might just let him kick it after all. As a metaphor for life, it is pretty simple. It talks of the moments when we choose to put our trust in people who have let us down only to be taken by surprise when they let us down, again. Lucy is, arguably, one of the crueller characters in the comic. Described as crabby by the other characters, she is often selfish, takes delight in wilfully hu...
Read more

Phrases and Idioms: Tickets on Himself

To have tickets on himself: (Australian slang.) To be conceited or vain. To have an overinflated opinion of oneself.  He's got tickets on himself if he thinks that any woman would fall for that. I was thinking about this particular bit of Australian slang the other day, after my boss said, "He's got tickets on himself," to describe the actions of a particular individual. At the time, I smiled, knowing exactly what the boss meant. Later on, I started to ponder on this unusual phrase and wondered where it might have come from. A search on google helped me find the definition, but that was about all. There are no references to it being used in pop culture or literature (if you find one, let me know,) and at the time of writing this post, Tickets on Himself was not listed on Urban Dictionary. (I tried to add it, but the fuckers rejected my definition. They probably think I have tickets on myself or something for trying to add a relatively common piece of A...
Read more