Colonel William Light is celebrated as the surveyor who designed Adelaide’s grid layout and surrounding Parklands, a man well regarded today but shaped by the conventions of his time. This novel imagines his story through Clarissa FitzRoy, a woman of mixed ancestry who travels from London to South Australia seeking information about her mother amid a turbulent family history of colonialism, disinheritance, dispossession and exile.
The book jumps across place and time, using water imagery – from ocean voyages to flashes of folklore that intersect with the novel’s realism – to explore identity. Clarissa, wealthy and worldly, hires a whaling ship and crew to take her to South Australia. The sailors become protective of this woman, whose fearless interactions with them are among the book’s best moments.
Light is less fully drawn. We see a man who has achieved much, is of mixed race, and bears an injury that affects his self-esteem. He is shaped by a world that didn’t always accommodate someone like him, yet he leaves his mark regardless.
Salt Upon the Water won the 2024 Arts SA Wakefield Press Unpublished Manuscript Award. It offers an intriguing portrait of a man whose influence endures in Adelaide’s streets – a giant of South Australia, well worth remembering.
Reviewed by Lesley West
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ABOUT THE AUTHORLyn Dickens is a writer, editor, and academic living on unceded Kaurna land. Her debut novel Salt Upon the Water was the winner of the 2024 Arts South Australia Wakefield Press Unpublished Manuscript Award. Of mixed Singaporean Peranakan Chinese and Anglo Celtic Australian heritage, Lyn is the Managing Editor and Co-Founder of The Saltbush Review.
Lyn has been shortlisted and longlisted for a variety of awards including the Deborah Cass Prize, the Lucy Cavendish Prize and the Richell Prize, and she was the winner of a Write It Fellowship with Penguin Random House. Lyn’s writing has been published in Australia, the UK, and the USA, appearing in journals such as Kill Your Darlings, ArtsHub, and Liminal. She has a doctorate in Sociology from the University of Sydney and she was a visiting researcher at the University of Cambridge. Lyn is a member of the JM Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice at the University of Adelaide, where she is currently completing a PhD in Creative Writing.
After many years in Sydney, Cambridge, and London, Lyn now lives in Adelaide with her husband and two children.
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