The Mind's Own Place

by Ian Reid

Two women and three men, displaced in different ways by the rapid transformation of Victorian England, travel separately to a small settlement on Australia’s western rim. With them they carry social ambitions and psychological wounds. As their lives intersect in the Swan River Colony, what they encounter is not quite what they expect.

Though fictional, The Mind’s Own Place is partly based on the actual experiences of historical figures: a pair of convicts from respectable backgrounds, talented and enterprising but troubled; two female immigrants, free settlers, not equally fortunate or resilient; and the first detective in Western Australia, who eventually uncovers more than he intends.

316 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2015

About the author

Ian Reid is a writer and education consultant who lives in Perth, Western Australia. Born and raised in New Zealand, he has spent most of his adult years in various parts of Australia, with periods in the USA.
He has taught creative writing and literature in several universities and is the author of a dozen books, including non-fiction (mainly on literary and historical topics) and poetry, but his main focus now is on writing narrative fiction. His fourth novel, A Thousand Tongues, was published in Sept 2019.

Reviews

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having just recently re-read Roger McDonald’s masterpiece The Ballad of Desmond Kale, I found myself receptive to the idea of colonial Australia as a place of redemption in Ian Reid’s new novel, The Mind’s Own Place. The title comes from Milton’s Paradise Lost where in Book Twelve our lingering parents … hand in hand with wandring steps and slow … take their way into an unknown world, a world which Satan in Book One has told them is theirs to shape:


The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n [Paradise Lost, Book One, Line 255]

As we know from Marcus Clarke’s His Natural Life, Australia was a Hell not of mind but of reality for many convicts, but both McDonald and Reid cast the reader into a world where men of ambition could use their skills to reshape the tragedy of transportation into opportunity.

To read the rest of my review please visit http://anzlitlovers.com/2015/08/11/th...

[Rhonda · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lots of great historical information about the railway era, but I was a little disappointed at the structure, with chopping and changing between people and dates. The stories of the five individuals were more about their pre-Australian English lives. It seemed to take too long to get them all to Western Australia and their new lives. There was a bit too much "hitting the reader over the head" about the central theme of character formation.