The Bodysurfers

by Robert Drewe

Tells the stories of Max, Annie, and David Lang, who are raised by their father alone after the death of their mother

Genres: Short Stories, Australia, Fiction, Classics, 20th Century, Book Club, Contemporary

Paperback

First published October 20, 1984

About the author

Robert Drewe is among Australia’s most loved writers – of novels, memoir and short stories. His iconic Australian books include The Shark Net, The Bodysurfers and Our Sunshine. He is also editor of Black Inc.’s Best Australian Stories annual series. Recently, he has revisited the short story himself, with a masterful new collection, The Rip. Jo Case spoke to him for Readings about storytelling.

Reviews

[Velvetink · Rating 2 out of 5]

Disappointing.

'His characters repeatedly hurl themselves at life and lovers. There is something very powerful and poignant in these stories.' …..so says one reviewer.

For me though - overall I found something ambiguous and essential lacking in the stories. They let me down severely with too few satisfactory resolutions. Maybe that is what short stories are supposed to be about - to leave you wondering?. I don’t know. I like a good twist at the end but this selection left me floundering like a fish washed up and gasping on the shore. Mostly it wasn’t a good place I was left in.

Drewe does blend character development with absorbing scenarios. Whilst each tale is different, they all leave you pondering, with deliberately loose ends to be considered. The Bodysurfers vividly evokes the beach, with the scent of the suntan oil, the sting of the sun and a lazy sensuality, but actually suggest a deep undercurrent of a sickly suburban malaise. I start to like each story but by the end I’m left with a bitter after taste that I can’t quite put my finger on...

The Bodysurfers in locating stories at the coast, the depiction of beach scenes in story after story soon suggests a preoccupation;
In ‘Looking for Malibu’, Peter Boyle expounds his theory on the beach:
‘You know something? When Australians run away they always run to the coast. They can’t help it. An American vanishes, he could be living in New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, the mountains, the desert, anywhere. Not an Australian – he goes up the coast or down the coast and thinks he’s vanished without a trace’.

In ‘Shark Logic’, for instance, the protagonist, who has fled his family, has wound up on Australia’s Pacific coast where he dreams of escape to New Zealand: “I was thinking about New Zealand when I left the shop this afternoon and set off for my usual walk along the beach”
Drewe’s collection opens with ‘The Manageress and the Mirage’, set on the West Australian coast, from where “the Indian Ocean stretched flat and slick to Mauritius and beyond before curving into the sky”.Despite the fact that Mauritius is thousands of miles across the ocean, for Drewe, the beaches of Western Australia suggest it.

The Bodysurfers, mentions far-off islands and continents hinting at Australia’s and New Zealand’s geographical isolation, and the intensity with which escape is longed for. The beach as escape is not only signalled by its relative proximity to other places. However, Drewe marks the beach as the place at which illicit sexual activity occurs, and in so doing contribute to a convention that has its origins at least two hundred years before them in the writing spawned by European exploration of the Pacific. Commentators on Australian and New Zealand writing of the twentieth century also see the beach as the site of carnal pleasure.

Drewe exploits the sexual aspect of beach culture. Nude bathers crowd his beaches. ‘The Manageress and the Mirage’ finishes with a widower’s encounter with a new lover. ‘The Silver Medallist’ closes with the revelation of the incestuous character of the relationship between a lifesaver and his daughter. ‘The View from the Sandhills’ is the account of a pervert and ex-prisoner who spies on nude bathers.
The preoccupation with what is often very casual sexual activity is a steady stream of foundering marriages. The one married couple to survive an entire story together in the collection – Angela and David in ‘Looking for Malibu’ . It’s kind of a sad statistic I think.

Against this backdrop of marital discord, the sex at the beach promises freedom from the constraints and disappointments of the domestic life without ever quite delivering it. The beach, screaming of escape, is no mere playground, but essentially ambiguous in its significance.

I was drawn to the cover illustration first. A painting by Charles Meere (Australia 1890–1961), ”Australian beach pattern” (aka “Beach Pattern” which won the 1940 Sulman Prize exhibition. It was Meeres’ painting that prompted me to pick up the book. Meere was one of a group of Sydney artists whose work modernised classical artistic traditions as a means of imaging national life during the inter-war period. The epitome of his vision by the late 1930s is 'Australian beach pattern'; a tableau of beach dwellers whose athletic perfections take on monumental heroic proportions. Meere created a crowded and complex composition through a pattern of bodies which appear as a still life of suspended strength. Perennially popular, the painting has contributed more than any other in Australian art towards the myth of the healthy young nation as told through the metaphor of the tanned god-like body of the sunbather.

I wanted to really love this book, here was an Australian writer who had won the Walkley and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin. The problem for me with “The BodySurfers” is that the characters in the stories are not godlike and only superficially depict that myth of the healthy young nation and I don’t mean physical but morally.

There is a good article/interview with Drewe here http://users.tpg.com.au/waldrenm/drew...

Robert Drewe was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1943. He grew up and was educated in Western Australia where he took up journalism with the West Australian in 1961. He was the literary editor for the Australian from 1971 to 1974. He won the Walkley Award (Australia's highest such award) twice for journalism in 1976 and 1981. Drewe's novel, The Drowner was shortlisted for the 1997 Miles Franklin Award. Fortune won the National Book Council fiction prize in Australia. One of his anthologies, The Bay of Contented Men, won a Commonwealth Writers' Prize, while another, the best-seller The Bodysurfers, has been adapted for film, television, radio and stage. Robert Drewe is also a film critic, playwright and the author of several screenplays. His stage drama, South American Barbecue, was first performed in 1991.

[Janelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed these stories of Australian life at the beach. All mostly from male points of view (and as it dates from 1984 there seems to be a bit of an obsession with topless women at the beach), they concern family life, relationships, sex and just life in general. They are sort of interrelated with characters from the same family appearing in different stories. A quick and easy read.

[Ian Laird · Rating 3 out of 5]

10 November 2015: minor edits and I have added a quote I had noted earlier (my notes are on bits of paper everywhere, and I keep finding them, later). Hrumfph.

This collection started off with a thrill but gradually became repetitious and surprisingly distasteful.

The stories are linked thematically in two ways, perhaps three. First and most obviously they are set on the coast, by the sea, and quite often in the sea. That’s fine, it’s Australia, the most urbanised country (of any size) on the planet and most of us live on the coast. At one stage one of the characters says of Australians fleeing capture or wishing to lose themselves, that they head for the coast, whereas Americans might head inland. Don’t know whether it’s true but it rings true. There is a poignant story (Shark Logic) about a headmaster who flees to a small coastal town to run away from the financial ruin he has created and wrestles with getting in touch with his wife and family. How could you leave your children?

The second thematic link is the Lang family – quite a number of the stories feature different members of the family through different generations in different places and different circumstances.

At first I thought this was a terrific idea, but then found it an annoying distraction, trying to work out how the relations fitted together. Then I realised that it did not actually matter, the stories are pretty independent of each other, and with a couple of exceptions, would have worked just as well with different names.

One of the exceptions is a story of an affair featuring a bottle of baby oil (Baby Oil), told from the perspective of the man having the affair. This has a bitterly satisfying twist. A later story, After Noumea, features the woman’s partner, Brian and the unhinging impact the affair has on him. This is quite a bitter story and illustrates the dichotomy between dream and reality: Anthea's dream is to buy a coastal hideaway for Brian so he could work and they could swim and frolic in the sun. Doesn't turn out quite that way: 'They made soft romantic plans and stayed in the hard city.' (p73). This is also a satisfyingly mystifying tale. Drewe regularly makes the reader work.

I think the third thematic element is disintegration – of relationships, personal well-being, self respect, moral probity, respect for women. Disintegration with an air of desperation.

One of the early stories, The Silver Medallist, features a former Olympic swimmer and his attractive teenage daughter. He has a business on the beach hiring equipment and selling suntan oil. His glory days are well and truly over and his focus has become sadly and odiously narrow. He is humiliated by a turkey. It’s a terrific story.

Then follow a series of tales along the thematic lines I have described. Others have done excellent critiques of many of these stories. A number are quite good. I quite liked The last Explorer for the contrast in style and sentiment: an old pioneering explorer looks to the dry inland rather than the coast.

However the cumulative effect of the collection is to leave a bitter taste. Perhaps these stories should be read at intervals, rather than straight through, but as I say, they get off to a good start, but end up sour.

The cover illustration, the painting Australia Beach Pattern by Charles Meere, is miraculous.

[Toby · Rating 4 out of 5]

I moved to Australia in 2007, ending up in Fremantle as a used book dealer. Whilst there I was repeatedly told that I should read Robert Drewe, that nobody captured what it meant to be from Perth more accurately, specifically the impact of the constant sound and siren song of the Indian Ocean on the psyche of the people. Over time I repeated this to countless tourists and fellow new Australians in an effort to sell (and sometimes give away) the large volume of Robert Drewe books that ended up in the store. I kept telling myself I would read them, that it was important to understand my new home and my new friends, yet it took until 2021 and living on the opposite side of the country to that home and those friends for me to take some time to experience this essential short story collection.

There's a lot of outdated sexual and social attitudes on display throughout and Drewe's characters straddle that narrow boundary between damaged masculinity and toxic masculinity, and I think that's actually his point. It would be easy to criticise through a 2021 lens but he doesn't revel in their toxicity merely shows how easy it is to become toxic when you allow these damaged people to go through life with their views and behaviours unquestioned. I want to believe that he is telling us to take care of our young people and help guide them towards better behaviours.

I thoroughly enjoyed how the ocean is a character in every story, its power and drama infiltrating the minds and behaviours of those drawn to the coast and that was worth the price of admission alone. I miss my home and I miss my friends and I miss the ocean, having chosen to move to a city that has turned its back on the ocean in favour of the brown snake of a river that runs through it and all of the different impacts that has on its people.

[Grrtch Kvetch · Rating 4 out of 5]

I might've rated this lower immediately after reading, but the collection has continued to resonate. I picked up the Pocket Book edition on a whim during a layover in Sydney. It's cultural treasure trove. Drewe's portrayals of unattainable masculinity in Australia vividly evoked people I met during my travels. For an American already perplexed by masculine identities in the States, The Bodysurfers shed welcome light on those darn Aussie men. It's a classic, absolutely!

[Ellyn · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is really only a review for the title story of the book, as it's one of a list of short stories that I was given to choose from to read for school. I've not read the rest yet, though likely I will once I get the time.

Of the four that I chose (this one, Closer by David Malouf, Postcards from Surfers by Helen Garner and, for a bit of something different, The Landlady by Roald Dahl) this is the one that I have the most conflicted feelings about. The story seems to be attempting a lot of things. Whether or not it succeeds I'm really not sure, because it is bizarre and kind of weirdly sexist to the point of distraction.

It begins by telling us about a macabre murder that took place near the beach shack where the main character, David, his girlfriend and his children are going for the weekend, a couple of days beforehand. This murder is referenced a few more times later on, as it has understandably affected David quite a bit. Then we have some character interactions, which are interesting enough, and the family heads down to the beach.

Now, from the other reviews, I gather that this book does deal quite consistently with sexuality and perversity. I don't have a problem with this kind of thing, but this was downright weird. David's girlfriend, Lisa, goes topless on a public beach. Following this is quite a detailed description of her rubbing suntan lotion into her breasts. The only real comment is David being well, not embarrassed, but "slightly unnerved", and checking where his teenaged son is looking — this trip, I might add, is the first time Lisa has met his children.

Then, this:

I wonder if women know what they're doing, David wondered. How did those tits which had been used to sexually tempt him at 3.00 a.m. suddenly at 11.30 become as neutral as elbows? ... He was awestruck by the grey areas, the skating-over, the 180-degree turns that women made these days. The breakup and his new status, or lack of status, had made him hypersensitive to the female dichotomies — fashion versus politics, the desperate clash between ideals and glands — and their magical sleight of hand which not only hid it all and kept the audience clapping but left you with a coin up your nose or an egg in your ear.

...What?

No, no, seriously: what?

Redundant first sentence aside, there is so much strange in there, coupled with odd little sexist sentiments ("tits which had been used to sexually tempt him"? "desperate clash between ideals and glands"?) that I... really don't know how to approach it. Like, at all. He portrays Lisa as being little more than a sexual, thrill-seeking being. And how can you generalise about all women in the context of this particular incident? I know very few women who would ever regard breasts being as neutral as elbows in any context. In fact, this entire story deals a lot with female sexuality (the female who was murdered was being tested to see if she'd been "assaulted", his ten-year-old daughter who is growing breasts and impersonates a supermodel and wants her ears pierced, the son who used the word vagina and upset the daughter, the REALLY REALLY WEIRD dream at the end where his mother has some kind of an implied thing going on with a dolphin), but not in a way that rings true to me even remotely.

And yeah, that dream. That dream that just pops up out of nowhere at the end of the story. The dream where he goes to some beachside place called Aurora and there are King Neptune statues and his mother talks to dolphins in French (who talk back) and does this:

'Je t'aime,' she murmured to Jason [one of the dolphins], unnecessarily I thought, raking her inch-long red nails down his tongue. He crooned appreciatively.

Yup. I think at this point the quotes speak for themselves. I'll end this review (which, funnily enough, is the most fully-fledged review I've written, and yet it's for a single short story) with David's dream-mother's final, contextless statement:

'You know something?' my mother said to me conversationally, and the sunlight on the sheen of her swimsuit was so glaring it hurt my eyes, 'It may be perpetual summer here but I'm against adultery.'

'Who isn't, Mum? I said.

'So put that in your pipe and smoke it,' she said.

Indeed, dolphin-loving shiny Aurora dream-mother. Indeed.

[Jazzy Lemon · Rating 5 out of 5]

A collection of short stories, like a polaroids from an Australian life, each one remarkable in its ordinariness.

[M.N. Cox]

Not a review but there is a disturbing, yet excellent, story half way through about a pervert who likes hanging around the (nude) beach. Brilliant, but chilling.

[Keen Reader · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 Stars!

Drewe does an admirable job of capturing scenes from various corners of coastal Australia, with even one from California thrown into the mix too. This is his first collection of short stories, first published back in 1983 and almost all of them are still relevant and relatable as they were back then.

These stories may be short but they manage to penetrate deeper into some interesting and memorable places and spaces, and so we get a feel for time, place and culture without falling into clichéd pitfalls or other Aussie stereotypes, which makes this a rewarding and refreshing collection.

[Georgie Simon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thoroughly enjoyed - a book about the Lang family, who regardless of generation cheat on their partners. Short witty stories dripping in visceral and textural imagery of pinpointed Australian lives, landscape, and cultural signifiers

[Jeremy · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Bodysurfers is a collection of interlinking short stories that predominantly follow the generational fortunes of the Lang family. Most of the stories are set on either the west or east coast of Australia, with one set on the west coast of America. It is not an exaggeration to claim that Australians have a strong connection with the ocean, with nearly all of the major cities lying along our coastlines. Sun, surf and sand is part of our national identity and stands in strong contrast to the unforgiving outback that has a long tradition in the arts as being a signifier for a darkness at the heart of the Australian psyche.




The Bodysurfers begins with the story The Manageress and the Mirage. Almost immediately Drewe’s thematic premise is established with a simple mirage metaphor. The Lang children lunch with their father on a hot Christmas day in a hotel overlooking the Indian Ocean. Looking out to sea they witness Rottnest Island split into three by a mirage. The notion that surface appearances can be deceiving is a theme that is repeated throughout The Bodysurfers; coupled with the use of the ocean as an analogue for the characters various psychological circumstances. These themes are quickly expanded upon in the next story, The Silver Medallist, which features a former swimming champion who runs a business on the beach with his beautiful teenage daughter. The champion is not all he seems and the ridicule he feels for being made to look foolish by a black swan is merely the tip of a troubled psyche.




The next story, Shark Logic, features a man on the run from his life on
Australia’s east coast. Whilst hiding out in an apartment on Western Australia’s west coast he contemplates moving on again. He becomes obsessed with the sharks on display in an aquarium close by the beach, not realizing that despite his fear of sharks he has more in common with them than he thinks. The Last Explorer highlights the contrast between the coast and the interior. An old explorer lies in convalescence, recollecting his inland voyages. He’s a resilient man, but can’t stand the view of the ocean through his hospital window. All he can think about is the harsh Australian interior. Is it better to look outwards, or to look inwards? In most of these stories the characters choose the former, in perpetual denial of the home truths they are often confronted with. Looking for Malibu features David Lang and his family living and travelling along the west coast of California. Their lives and the lives of other expats they meet stand in stark contrast to what they perceive as an optimistic coastline of myth and opportunity. The reality is, of course, far different, including what they hope for in their own lives.




Drewe’s writing style is versatile and unselfconscious, he excels in creating psychologically deep characters by placing them in recognizable life situations that also act as subtle metaphorical landscapes. Despite the brevity of the collection The Bodysurfers seems bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. This is perhaps due to several generations of the Lang family featuring in the majority of the stories. The reader is kept busy making the connections between each story and pondering the overall significance of the various situations the characters find themselves in.




The final story, Stingray, is inspired by Drewe’s own encounter with an unknown stinging sea creature. That it also extends the ocean analogue makes you wonder just how much of Drewe’s own life had been an inspiration for all the dark undercurrents the various characters face throughout the collection. Considering The Bodysurfers populist style and brevity I suspect that the autobiographical content helped provide Drewe with his clever sleight of hand when it came to exploring the national psyche via otherwise obvious ocean analogues. Throughout this collection of stories Drewe managed to be both literary and populist; a considerable achievement that makes The Bodysurfers well worth reading.

From my blog: http://excelsiorforever.blogspot.com.au/

[Meg · Rating 3 out of 5]

A decent collection of stories, some were quite good. But I find with short stories they have to be amazing to be truly memorable and I'm not sure that these will be.

[Lisa of Hopewell · Rating 3 out of 5]

My Interest


I was almost late to the Aus Reads Month party so I knew I had to pick carefully to get it read in time. [I still failed.] I have a couple of friends I could have asked for their own recommendations of what to read from their country, but I felt that was almost a silly question. I imagined myself sputtering to someone requesting a "typical" American novel to read. I dug around on the internet, finding lists of Australia's best or newest or shortest or longest reads. I looked at the Amazon previews and then chose this collection of short stories that are somewhat related.

The Story

Here is how Amazon describes this collection:

Set among the surf and sandhills of the Australian beach - and the tidal changes of three generations of the Lang family - this bestselling collection of short stories is an Australian classic. The Bodysurfers vividly evokes the beach, with the scent of the suntan oil, the sting of the sun and a lazy sensuality, all the while hinting at a deep undercurrent of suburban malaise.
From first publication, these poignant and seductive stories marked a major change in Australian literature.

Various stories were related, it is true. A few (Body Oil being one) were mostly related. One did not "work" to me (Looking For Malibu). Most told slightly depressing tales of weary people who did not seem real but who were surrounded by often vividly described scenery, scents, or feelings. Many, I'm sure, would earn the sobriquet "gritty" even if no one was killed, overly drunk, or similar at the time of the scene.

Here are two passages that did not leave me depressed or weary:

Just beyond the Gosford exit warm spring whiffs of eucalypt pollen and the fecund muddy combustion of subtropical undergrowth suddenly filled the car with the scents of the holidays. (The Bodysurfers [title story])

The electric cleansing of the surf is astonishing, the cold effervescing over the head and trunk and limbs. And the internal results are a great wonder. At once the spirits lift. There is a grateful pleasure in the last hour or softer December light. The brain sharpens. The body is charged with agility and grubby lethargy is washed away. (The Stingray)


An occasional worthwhile observation helped to move a story along, such as this one in After Noumea:

Brian picked her at once as a nosy bourgeois person.

This was possibly the most astute judgment in the collection.

My Thoughts

The people felt like worn-out factory workers. The place felt worn out. Both of these seem wrong in a post World War II setting in a young country with vast natural resources and gorgeous coastline. Was this intentional? Most of these stories were actually good reading--just not very happy or uplifting. Such stories have their place. They did evoke, I suppose, the time and place of their setting. I could hear and feel the see--just couldn't get to know the people. I could sense the emotions of the flat, unreal characters which sounds contradictory, but isn't. The characters lacked a personality but still had emotions. I think that must be a talent for a writer. I imagine he did not want the personalities to overwhelm the stories which were, after all, supposed to be about their time at that place.

The Bodysurfers by Robert Drewe

My Verdict
3.0

[Smitchy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a bit unexpected as I had not realised that this is short story collection - I know there has been a tv series so I was a bit surprised as most of these stories have little to connect them apart from the beach setting they share. I'm assuming that the tv series is only loosely based on the book.
The blurb says the stories follow a family through three generations but I really didn't pick up on a generational theme at all - maybe I wasn't paying attention and maybe it really wasn't relevant to the stories being told?
These stories could really be set on any Australian beach at almost any time - they are stories of life, love, isolation, heartbreak and change, and death. Little glances into everyday life of ordinary people.

[Kirstie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gutsy and often hilarious in it’s portrayals of mostly frustrated lives seeking satisfaction in 80’s Australia. I enjoyed stepping so easily back into that era. More languor. Less PC observances. No mobile phones. Baby oil and Chablis!
There’s something satisfyingly honest about these stories and characters. The ever-present coastal backdrop teases throughout with it’s promise of providing a kind of graceful liberation to all who seek it, but as often as much plays the role of witness to all that is desperate, uneasy and banal in our rootless culture.
Shit things are not meant to happen at the beach but they often do and we can readily relate to the disappointments.

[Tom Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

bloody good. 🥁badumchiii

[Gavin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short stories, well executed, are like little intrusions into a life. Wonderful stuff.

[Boy Blue · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some short story collections work really well when the stories are linked and in Western Australian literature there's a few examples most notably Tim Winton collections, particularly The Turning, in which he does a brilliant job of creating stories with their own impetus that still gain something from being part of a larger mesh of meaning. While Drewe is a contemporary of Winton, his stories don't have the same strength, his style is not quite as fluid. Winton seems to be able to breathe underwater, whereas Drewe is always wearing a snorkel.

The order of the stories within the collection is one of the two issues with Drewe's work. In fact it's the first two stories being placed next to each other that blow the whole thing up. They give you the sense of some immediate chronology and set your expectations so that on the third story it takes half the story to realise it's not the deceased mum from the first two in some cross dressing role but a completely different character.

The other major issue with this collection is Drewe's inability to examine the unconscious mind and the motivations that drive people beyond the surface veneer of their daily routine. There are glimpses of his awareness of deeper motivations of behaviour most notably in The Bodysurfers where he tells in depth a character's dream (which isn't particularly effective) but many of the stories feel quite hollow and the connection between them adds little.

Part of me also wishes Drewe had just turned the Lang family into an Australian family saga novel.

In the same way people often say they're most fond of home when they are away or that they love their country most from overseas, I found Drewe's best story was the one set in California "Looking for Malibu". It was only in an overseas setting that I felt Drewe get a firm grip on the Australian psyche and even then only the male Australian psyche.

Which brings up my final point about these stories. Much of them felt like Drewe wrestling with his own issues about Australian masculinity. He seemed incapable of writing female characters that weren't props for guys to use on their journeys of self-discovery. This and the other issues may be more symptomatic of the time the stories were written than Drewe's writing abilities I'll have to read Whipbird next.

Lastly, I only picked up on this because I'm a Kiwi but what was with the incessant mentioning of New Zealand?

[Dylan Jeffries · Rating 3 out of 5]

Definitely written from a male perspective

[Bree · Rating 2 out of 5]

I just wish the author didn't write so much about women's bodies. It got kind of wierd after a while. In every story I was like, "alright, where's the part about the glistening sun on her bouncy breasts?" And of course, the passage would show up shortly after. Sort of made me repulsed by men.

Besides that, there are some not terrible stories in here. I loved the picturesque descriptions of the Australian landscape, it felt perfect to sink into during my cold Canadian winter. But still, I was let down by this book. I couldn't tell if it was supposed to read as one long story (as some of the characters are reused throughout the book) or seperately as short stories. It confused me, flipping back and fourth to try and figure out the consistency that I now know is not there.

Every story was desperately sad. I'm not really sure what the whole point is. I appreciated all of the nostalgia, but was off put by all of the tragedy. These stories weren't tied up neatly in the end and this frustrated me.

[Jake Goretzki · Rating 3 out of 5]

[And so continues Antipodean season]

Good. I can see why this feels noteworthy: here's the (mostly Aussie) beach - a place we associate with joy and hedonism (more so in Australia than almost anywhere else, bar California where a couple of the stories are set). Yet here it's a place of relationship breakdown, sleaze (incest, even), deceit and emotional numbness. The sea is always the backdrop, and it's generally not doing what it's supposed to be doing for us.

Which I found really quite refreshing.

As noted, several of the stories revisit characters from the same family (and their cuckolds), giving us a rewarding alternative take on earlier events and pairings.

My favourites were the 'Silver Medalist' (re the sleaze); 'Baby Oil' (touch of Roald Dahl sexual paranoia there) and 'The View from the Sandhills' (which has a pretty unbeatable first line, surely: "I'm admitting it, I've seen some great tits"). Wowser.

[Jacinta Fintan · Rating 2 out of 5]

A book of short stories. Yeah, it was okay. But I found myself drifting away from these "slightly older man" stories themed loosely around the ocean. To be honest, I chose it because I had run out of Winton and I wanted Winton. Which isn't a fair way to read a book. The story about a hippy that thinks he can beat the recession by saving energy is good. Who knew that tampons and margarine could be used as DIY lighting.

[Jesse Dixon · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are twelve short stories in this book. "The Last Explorer" was probably my favourite. But "Baby Oil" was good and "The View from the Sandhills" was different but interesting, with the man using ocker language. I guess you could call him an unsavoury Aussie ocker. I enjoyed reading these short stories.

[Mersha Aftab · Rating 5 out of 5]

Scandalous, jaw dropping short stories....

"One the other side of the label, well below his last mark, almost at the bottom of the label, was a clearly........"

You have got to read them all. Superb¡

[Joshua Kent · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was...very interesting.
It took me way too long to 'get' the point of the book, and after I connected the fact that each story was actually connected, I actually appreciated the book a lot more as a concept. I was enjoying connecting all the pieces together and understanding the Lang family tree. That concept on its own I think was enough to warrant its existence for me, which is good, because the individual stories themselves varied wildly in quality:

THE MANAGRESS AND THE MIRAGE:
I cannot tell you a single thing about this story. It serves as a boring prolouge to the rest of the stories.

THE SILVER MEDALLIST:
This one was fun. The descriptions in this were entertaining, and it was a wild ride. But then the ending kind of taints it al for the sake of edginess.

SHARK LOGIC:
I can't tell you how this one fits into the broader story, and it ends before anything of interest actually happens.

BABY OIL:
Literally just sweaty descriptions of two people having sex. Not my thing.

LOOKING FOR MALIBU:
This was my favourite in the collection I think. It was long enough to actually establish a complete plot and justify why it exists as a story. Although it started out a bit slow, by the end, I was finding David quite relateable. I even understood what the the theme of this one was supposed to be.

AFTER NOUMEA:
Another one that seems to end before the inciting incident happens. It builds up quite nicely to something happening. I thought perhaps it might be a nice romance, but then it just ends and I realised that the book just wasted my time for twenty pages.

THE VIEW FROM THE SANDHILLS:
I absolutely hated this one. I know that paedophiles exist, but I don't need to read a story from their perspective. It's vulgar for the sake of having shock factor, and as far as I could work out, the story is only tangentially connected to the Lang family.
it's just a thinly veiled excuse for Robert Drewe to describe boobs.

SWEETLIP:
This was my runner-up for best in the collection. A rather quite intruiging murder mystery from the perspective of the family from someone who was on the outside looking in. Although at this point, I started to realise that the real overarching theme of this book is stories that end before they follow up on their inciting incidents. This murder mystery remains unsolved, a fact which will come back and irritate me from time to time.

THE BODYSURFERS:
the namesake of the book is probably one of the better written stories, and I was quite enjoying it But then we become the book of Daniel in the end, throw the plot out the window, .and try to be artistic in a way that seems completely unconnected and incoherent.

EIGHTY PER CENT HUMIDTY:
This one is just another excuse to describe boobs. It's a small novelty, but once again, it doesn't justify it's existence enough to be considered a complete narrative.

THE LAST EXPLORER:
This one is similar to the view from the sandhills, where I have no idea how it is connected to the rest of the Lang family. This one also seems to be placed wrong in the timeline of the stories. And once again, I know what I'm reading, but now why.

STINGRAY:
The book ends with another whimper, and another misadventure of David, the guy who is physically incapable of holding a steady relationship. I think this story is just there to have another go with the one character in the book that Drewe obviously knew how to write. At least, it has a beginning, middle and end, but the conflict and overall narrative structure is paper thin and doesn't add to the overall experience of the collection.

[Stewart · Rating 4 out of 5]

Three generations of the Lang family take up many of the stories in Robert Drewe’s The Bodysurfers (1986), a work that leans in on the men, their faltering relationships, and the perennial comfort of the Australian coast. It’s a place of sex, surf and sharks; a place where so much happens so as to seem inseparable from life itself.

In the opening story, The Manageress and the Mirage, the themes are quickly set as Rex Lang takes his children out for a Christmas meal at a hotel. The narrator, his son, Max, notices the manageress informally calling his father by name. And when she pulls out presents for them, it becomes clear that he’s introducing his new partner to his kids. These kids - Max, Annie and David - are visited again, across their lives in the following stories. Like their father’s situation, their own doomed relationships, coming and going like the tide, form the focus of many. David’s Lang’s lovelife, especially, sees different partners from tale to tale.

The only story set outside Australia (Looking for Malibu) sees David in California, where he observes that “when Australians run away they always run to the coast. They can’t help it.”), which is certainly thematic of the collection. The beaches that provide these stories are there for the escapes they provide, whether that be for crimes (Shark Logic), infidelities (Baby Oil), or, as in the title story, a break from domestic living.

While the stories mostly come at the Langs from different angles the family is not always the focus. In The Silver Medallist, we look back at their mother’s original fiance, an Olympian who, it turns out, had a dark secret that was eventually exposed. After Noumea revisits a side character from an earlier story, exploring how he’s coping following the end of another doomed relationship.

Drewe’s writing is wonderfully varied, shifting tonally to each story’s needs; at one moment poetic, another matter-of-fact; at home in third person as he is in first. The View from the Sandhills may cause some to roll their eyes, with its sexual and outdated language, as it invites us to inhabit an ex-con’s story. Clearly unable to form bonds, and perving from a safe spot on a beach, it’s an increasingly sinister piece that is only tangentially related to the Langs, primarily Anne. But it's well ventriloquised and embodies the character absolutely.

If that story touches on the Langs, there are others that seemingly bear no relation, such as The Last Explorer, which turns its gaze inland from the beach. It’s an oddly different piece from all the others, while staying on theme, but its historical account and unnamed character leave a certain vagueness. That said, many of the stories have a certain ambiguity to them, but one can never feel that it is anything other than controlled restraint and that the clues, if not directly referenced, are there, implicit in the text.

Given the disparate nature of the stories, the range of characters and the various times they inhabit, there’s much to reread here, drawing lines between them. If anything, the beaches that provide Drewe’s stories are the only unchanging things in a world where the characters' lives are in flux. They are a sunny, sandy asylum for a maddeningly complex world, and it’s no wonder the people retreat there given how much events seem to pour down on them.

[Su · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Bodysurfers is a collection of interconnected short stories about one Australian family. All of the stories take place by the ocean and feel like a love letter to the ocean, the beach, and surfing. Aside from writing about the ocean, Drewe’s stories are concerned with relationships; both romantic and familial. The relationships portrayed here are somewhat troubling and disconnected: characters have affairs, split up, and have fights with one another. Set against the backdrop of a beautiful location, it makes the contrast even more stark, like trouble in paradise.

This book was published in the 80s and it shows—there are some outdated male ideas about sexuality and women in this book.

The writing is simple and uncomplicated, yet beautifully evocative of Australian summers spent at the beach, bobbing up and down in the waves, the feel of saltwater and sand on skin, eating ice cream on a hot day, and the caw of seagulls around you as they clamor for your food. In this book, though Drewe doesn’t explicitly comment on Australian identity, he seems to be implicitly commenting on how tied up Australian identity and culture is with the ocean—this is something I also felt to be true while growing up—going to the beach is a pastime so ingrained in Australian culture and was also such a big part of my life growing up and now.

[Emily · Rating 2 out of 5]

Read this on holiday, having bought it as a penguin paperback alongside about 3 other books a few years ago when I had a whitcoulls voucher and was trying to make said voucher go as far as possible.

I didn’t really like this book. Unfortunately it is one of those classics that goes right in a particular category that I believe is exemplified well by Stephen kings writing of “having to tell you in detail about every one of the female characters boobs”. Even when the boobs are in no way relevant to what is going on. Even when they belong to a person whose boobs you as an adult man should be erring on the side of caution re describing them in in a novel, such as a 12 year old girl. The reader does not need to know these things, and frankly, is grossed out.

As far as the story went; fun Australian iconography but elsewise little to offer. I don’t really have much to take away from this book. The title is cool and that’s about it.

[Kris McCracken · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading this connected group of stories from one of Australia’s most esteemed writers evokes an Australia of long ago, but one that resonates quite powerfully today. Despite the common backdrop of sunshine, heat and beaches, the stories are gritty, disturbing and, oftentimes, quite repugnant. Yet, the author’s skill makes them very readable. Pain and self-pity – one of Australia’s favourite pastimes – is at the forefront here, and anyone following the news these days will recognise the impact of these experiences on the generations that followed.

[Maureen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this immediately after finishing Janette Turner Hospital's collection of short stories Forecast: Turbulence and found the Drewe collection so much more satisfying. The Australian coast runs through this book along with a collection of characters which always intrigued and interested me. From a man who had run away from his family to the beach due to financial difficulties to a man marking a baby oil bottle each time he sees his married lover in order to determine what other dalliances she might be having, every story was worthwhile for me.