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In Sunshine or in Shadow
As a young man growing up in Tasmania, the fourth of six children, Martin Flanagan was confronted by the great absence of his past. Although his island home bore the imprint of a dramatic history, it held no memory of either Flanagan’s Irish convict forebears or the indigenous Australians before them. The sum of the parts didn’t add up to a whole.
Over twenty-five years, Flanagan’s deeply personal search into the place he was from took him to the other side of the world and through different parts of Australia, meeting characters who helped him to understand better not only the tragic history of his homeland but its impact on five generations of his family and, through that, its impact on himself.
In Sunshine or in Shadow is a unique exploration of what it is to find home, and to belong. Humorous and full of heart, it is one of the most original and personal works of non-fiction in recent years.
Over twenty-five years, Flanagan’s deeply personal search into the place he was from took him to the other side of the world and through different parts of Australia, meeting characters who helped him to understand better not only the tragic history of his homeland but its impact on five generations of his family and, through that, its impact on himself.
In Sunshine or in Shadow is a unique exploration of what it is to find home, and to belong. Humorous and full of heart, it is one of the most original and personal works of non-fiction in recent years.
- GenresNonfictionMemoir
237 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2002
22 people want to read
About the author
Martin Flanagan
39 books15 followersMartin Flanagan is the author of twenty books, a play and two movie treatments. He is one of Australia’s most respected sports journalists and wrote for The Age from 1985 to 2017.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
December 27, 2015
‘All my conscious life, I’ve been looking for those who were here before me.’
Tasmania has a long history. While the European component is comparatively short, it is full of paradox and puzzle. While this is Martin Flanagan’s memoir of his relationship with Tasmania, I can relate to a lot of it. For much of the nineteenth and twentieth century, there were frequently gaps in personal histories, silences about ancestry and revisions of events. How could so few of us have convict ancestry? Was it true, as so many of us were taught during the 1960s and earlier, that there were no remaining indigenous Tasmanians? Why did so many – who had never even seen England – refer to it as home?
Martin Flanagan is the fourth of six children, a Tasmanian of Irish descent. His father was a teacher in rural Tasmania: in Longford in the northern midlands, and then at Rosebery, a mining town in Tasmania’s west. These are very different parts of Tasmania, with very different stories. Or are they?
‘Walking to school one morning behind the silent figure of my father, surrounded by dark mountains of thought, I first experienced the sense of absence that would mark me as surely as any belief in God. Years later, when I read towards the end of her life Truganini was accompanied by a feeling she called 'big lonely one', I wondered if the two absences, hers and mine, were somehow related.’
As Martin Flanagan explores his own family history, the history of European settlement in Tasmania and the impacts of that settlement on native species and on Indigenous Tasmanians, it becomes clear that this sense of absence is central. Where is the truth about the Irish convicts, about Truganini ‘the so-called Last of Her Race’, about the thylacine (the Tasmanian tiger)? A world and a history has been constructed where silence marks past existence with echoes (at least) in the present.
This is a book which combines biography and history, memoir, opinion and political issues in an exploration of the past and what going home means to Martin Flanagan. And for others? If you know nothing about Tasmania, this book will invite you to explore and consider Tasmania’s history. For me, as an expatriate Tasmanian, it increased my longing to return, to learn more about my own family and about those we displaced.
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
Tasmania has a long history. While the European component is comparatively short, it is full of paradox and puzzle. While this is Martin Flanagan’s memoir of his relationship with Tasmania, I can relate to a lot of it. For much of the nineteenth and twentieth century, there were frequently gaps in personal histories, silences about ancestry and revisions of events. How could so few of us have convict ancestry? Was it true, as so many of us were taught during the 1960s and earlier, that there were no remaining indigenous Tasmanians? Why did so many – who had never even seen England – refer to it as home?
Martin Flanagan is the fourth of six children, a Tasmanian of Irish descent. His father was a teacher in rural Tasmania: in Longford in the northern midlands, and then at Rosebery, a mining town in Tasmania’s west. These are very different parts of Tasmania, with very different stories. Or are they?
‘Walking to school one morning behind the silent figure of my father, surrounded by dark mountains of thought, I first experienced the sense of absence that would mark me as surely as any belief in God. Years later, when I read towards the end of her life Truganini was accompanied by a feeling she called 'big lonely one', I wondered if the two absences, hers and mine, were somehow related.’
As Martin Flanagan explores his own family history, the history of European settlement in Tasmania and the impacts of that settlement on native species and on Indigenous Tasmanians, it becomes clear that this sense of absence is central. Where is the truth about the Irish convicts, about Truganini ‘the so-called Last of Her Race’, about the thylacine (the Tasmanian tiger)? A world and a history has been constructed where silence marks past existence with echoes (at least) in the present.
This is a book which combines biography and history, memoir, opinion and political issues in an exploration of the past and what going home means to Martin Flanagan. And for others? If you know nothing about Tasmania, this book will invite you to explore and consider Tasmania’s history. For me, as an expatriate Tasmanian, it increased my longing to return, to learn more about my own family and about those we displaced.
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
August 25, 2024
Part family history, memoir particularly of his days with anecdotes of being a journalist with the Examiner and The Age, stories of Truganini, Banjo (an aboriginal original), aboriginal history, Weary Dunlop, G.A. Robinson, being Australian, Flangan’s own egalitarian philosophy and ethics, all told with some sentimentality, virtue-signaling and mysticism. Excellent writing in itself but much is saying what occurs to him as he writes, so there is repetition and apparent lack of structure.
January 17, 2022
Something I wouldn't normally read; an exploration of belonging and finding one's home. This is the author's personal journey.
December 23, 2014
Having read a fair few memoirs this year, I expected something different from this book. I'm sure lots of people will enjoy it but I didn't. For me it just seemed like a collection of stories about other people, written by someone who seemed to like boasting about his contacts with famous Aboriginals and others. Instead of learning about his life, we end up being treated to interpretations of Tasmanian Aboriginal history and a mish-mash of stories based on interviews with others. Maybe I need to read his other books to learn more about his life (apparently he wrote one about his daughters which sounds interesting), and I do get the point that a lot of his working life was focused on writing about other people and many of these encounters have had big impacts on him, and I have read that people find it hard to categorise this book so maybe I should have been more open-minded about what I expect of a memoir, but anyway, even taking all that into account, if I am honest, I found it to be a bit boring. Bob Brown's latest memoir, "Optimism" shares some aspects of style (for eg. short chapters chronically different experiences with different people) but I found that much more interesting and endearing.
February 22, 2015
I enjoyed the ramblings of Tasmanian and Australian history. I loved the way the author was able to describe detail. I would agree that the book was disjointed and that is why I used the term 'ramblings'.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews