Jock Serong, a multi-award-winning Australian author, says of his latest book that he wanted to tell a story conceived from pure imagination rather than something more conventional. When inspiration came to him in a dream that (like most dreams) made no logical sense but was brimming with haunting, magical and multilayered connections, he found a way to translate it into Cherrywood.
Serong’s imagination is clearly a rich repository as Cherrywood is storytelling at its most magical and convincing. The story alternates between two time periods and sets of characters, a device that at first seems arbitrary. However, as events play out and revelations about how the two threads are linked come to light, the plot becomes coherent.
At the outset we are introduced to Thomas Wrenfether, a wealthy Scottish industrialist who is lured from his comfortable home and marriage in 1916 Edinburgh to sail across the sea to Melbourne, Australia, and take on a groundbreaking ship building project. Having come into possession of a trove of rare European cherrywood, Thomas conceives the idea of building a paddle steamer to ferry passengers across Port Phillip Bay. In contrast, there is Martha, a lawyer in 1993 Melbourne, who is lonely and dissatisfied with life. When one night she goes into a strange pub in Fitzroy called The Cherrywood, her life begins to change in bizarre ways. As the story unfolds, the history of Port Philip in the early 20th century and contemporary Fitzroy with its winding backstreets become integral to the story and ground it in enough reality to give it depth.
Fantastical tales of intrigue, mystery and magic don’t usually appeal to me, but thanks to Serong’s engaging storytelling powers, I found it persuasive and compelling.
Reviewed by Anne Green
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jock Serong grew up in the suburbs of Melbourne, and like a poorly-tied dinghy, he’s been drifting away ever since.
As a student and young lawyer he volunteered with the Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service on the Bringing Them Home inquiry, and did a stint in the Western Desert building a native title claim with the Martu people.
He drove a ‘73 HQ panel van around the country, spent some time sorting frozen prawns in Carnarvon and changed lightbulbs in Darwin Casino for seven bucks an hour. He fetched up on Victoria’s west coast in the mid-nineties, then left again and became a criminal barrister. He worked with asylum seekers back when detention centres were onshore.
As Senior Grump in a young family he moved back to the coast, and something about the kelp and the storms and the long nights kicked him into gear: writing for Surfing World and other publications, he began trying to tell stories that weren’t sports-writing so much as people and place-writing. Environments, First Australians, mental health, forgotten histories, the tiny miracles of life on a reef. As surfing itself expanded beyond 20th century stereotypes, Jock’s writing kept pushing into new corners of the experience.
Alongside Mick Sowry and Mark Willett, Jock edited and published Great Ocean Quarterly for two fraught and wonderful years, and has produced five novels: Quota (2014), The Rules of Backyard Cricket (2016), On the Java Ridge (2017) and the Bass Strait historical novels Preservation (2018) and The Burning Island (2020).
He divides his time between Port Fairy in western Victoria and Flinders Island in Bass Strait’s Furneaux Island group.
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