What do you think?
Rate this book
Darkfall
Darkfall is a potent and unforgettable work of compelling writing about an adolescence lived in Australian country town in the 1980s: desolate, dusty and bleak. Indigo Perry's narrative is a journey of grief, arranged around a score of music from alternative and post-punk sources, music unavailable outside cities in an age before the internet. This music, she contends, provides an imagined soundtrack, a ballast, for her isolation.
Darkfall identifies a legacy of extreme toxic masculinity and gendered violence, containing little in the way of justice. The author's deep retrospective unstitching of her reality is presented to us with profound poetic strength, uncovering the power that resilience can unleash on an adult body. It is an act of recovery and reclamation.
Darkfall identifies a legacy of extreme toxic masculinity and gendered violence, containing little in the way of justice. The author's deep retrospective unstitching of her reality is presented to us with profound poetic strength, uncovering the power that resilience can unleash on an adult body. It is an act of recovery and reclamation.
- GenresNonfiction
209 pages, Paperback
Published April 15, 2020
3 people are currently reading
34 people want to read
About the author
Indigo Perry
3 books4 followersI'm the author of Darkfall (UWA Publishing), released in April 2020 and of Midnight Water (Picador). These books are both memoirs and I also write poetry. I'm a Senior Lecturer in Writing, Literature & Culture at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia. I live in a village in the Yarra Valley on Wurundjeri country.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
April 28, 2020
There are countless books and then there are rare, great works of art that show us the true potential of the written word. Writing serves many purposes. But at its highest and most profound, writing can transmute life’s silent or raging suffering (of which we all have our own versions), into a thing of beauty and luminosity, thereby offering it healing and solace. Darkfall does this in a way that surpasses any other book I have read.
The subject matter in Darkfall is not light and is at times confronting and harrowing. The book deals with bullying, broken manifestations of sexuality in rural Australia, the dreamlike reality of an artistically-natured girl with no one else like her around her. It lays bare the darkest sides of masculinity and a culture built upon keeping secrets and burying truth so as not to create disturbance. As the story of Perry‘s traumatic childhood unfolds, so too does a stunningly accurate evocation of Australian culture in 1980s rural towns that is simultaneously vivid and dun-coloured. This is a book for those who are interested in experiencing profound beauty, but also confronting intense and un-withheld truth.
Alongside her celebrated memoir writing, Perry is a gifted poet. The writing throughout Darkfall is luminous and profoundly poetic. Certainly, her writing is among the best of Australian prose on offer today. The book’s layout is fascinating and unique. It is set out in a series of small chapters, whose titles have subtitles based on names of underground songs from the 1980s, when the book is set. These song titles are grouped at the start of the book as ‘Score’ (and would no doubt make a wonderful playlist). The poetic nature of the writing is so strong, that the book feels at times like a series of prose poems, linked by narrative.
Perry, like Jack Kerouac, has perfect memory. Her descriptions of childhood – the town where she lived, the skies, nature, her garden, animals, birdsong – are not acts of imagination, but acts of recall. Consider the following passage: ‘The drops of water are the size of the ladybirds as they swell to perfect ovals on the petals of her grandmother’s hydrangeas. The petals are pale pink. But the drops are blue. They are the sky, she thinks, come to earth on the skin of petals.’ It is as though she is looking at her memories with perfect visual clarity.
Residing in Warburton, Australia, Indigo Perry lives alongside a river. She is also deeply interested in music and dance. The writing in Darkfall embodies these things. The cadence of the rhythm throughout the book is a thing of beauty and wonder, and is one of the things that makes such a harrowing tale so effortless to read. Her words flow like a river – pooling, cantering, flowing through rapids, tumbling over a sudden drop. Her involvement with live music in her performance art project Illuminous and the referencing of music in the layout of the book, are in evidence in the rhythmic beauty of her writing. In fact, musicality, sonority and the tension/release of rhythm are fundamental aspects of her writing style.
Darkfall deserves to be placed in the highest echelon of contemporary Australian literature. Not only for the luminosity and brilliance of its writing, but for its clear evocation of a time and place in Australian culture.
The subject matter in Darkfall is not light and is at times confronting and harrowing. The book deals with bullying, broken manifestations of sexuality in rural Australia, the dreamlike reality of an artistically-natured girl with no one else like her around her. It lays bare the darkest sides of masculinity and a culture built upon keeping secrets and burying truth so as not to create disturbance. As the story of Perry‘s traumatic childhood unfolds, so too does a stunningly accurate evocation of Australian culture in 1980s rural towns that is simultaneously vivid and dun-coloured. This is a book for those who are interested in experiencing profound beauty, but also confronting intense and un-withheld truth.
Alongside her celebrated memoir writing, Perry is a gifted poet. The writing throughout Darkfall is luminous and profoundly poetic. Certainly, her writing is among the best of Australian prose on offer today. The book’s layout is fascinating and unique. It is set out in a series of small chapters, whose titles have subtitles based on names of underground songs from the 1980s, when the book is set. These song titles are grouped at the start of the book as ‘Score’ (and would no doubt make a wonderful playlist). The poetic nature of the writing is so strong, that the book feels at times like a series of prose poems, linked by narrative.
Perry, like Jack Kerouac, has perfect memory. Her descriptions of childhood – the town where she lived, the skies, nature, her garden, animals, birdsong – are not acts of imagination, but acts of recall. Consider the following passage: ‘The drops of water are the size of the ladybirds as they swell to perfect ovals on the petals of her grandmother’s hydrangeas. The petals are pale pink. But the drops are blue. They are the sky, she thinks, come to earth on the skin of petals.’ It is as though she is looking at her memories with perfect visual clarity.
Residing in Warburton, Australia, Indigo Perry lives alongside a river. She is also deeply interested in music and dance. The writing in Darkfall embodies these things. The cadence of the rhythm throughout the book is a thing of beauty and wonder, and is one of the things that makes such a harrowing tale so effortless to read. Her words flow like a river – pooling, cantering, flowing through rapids, tumbling over a sudden drop. Her involvement with live music in her performance art project Illuminous and the referencing of music in the layout of the book, are in evidence in the rhythmic beauty of her writing. In fact, musicality, sonority and the tension/release of rhythm are fundamental aspects of her writing style.
Darkfall deserves to be placed in the highest echelon of contemporary Australian literature. Not only for the luminosity and brilliance of its writing, but for its clear evocation of a time and place in Australian culture.
April 27, 2020
Darkfall elucidates the shapes and shades of a prolonged night. The child/girl/indigo-woman between the pages finds some sense of space to hide within the white between entwined vignettes. These interludes between relentless torments play into the notes of an accompanying musical score of 70s and 80s alternative soundtrack, pairing song names with each chapter, embedding consolation, and a framework of moxy into the broken glassed path of the narrative. Darkfall is ostensibly prose but is densely and powerfully formed of a self-reflexively poetic, literary language that works to pin the reader, to hold and keep them from averting their gaze from the shattered poetics of these Mallee-gothic scenes. Throughout the act of bearing witness/of writing and purge, a kind of magic is enacted, a skin cast off, and another kind of covering donned, an un-ashamedly-itself-skin in all its naked, freakish glory.
Darkfall reaches into an unbearable past and throws lifelines back from the present, which makes it the perfect book for these times.
Darkfall reaches into an unbearable past and throws lifelines back from the present, which makes it the perfect book for these times.
April 27, 2020
A peaceful presence in the midst of wild animals, Indigo Perry invites you to follow her gaze, gently at first. To follow her moving finger as it traces rivulets in dust, ants, beetles' feet, worms doing the same.
The fragments are sky pieces. Hold them, turn them, don't throw them down for not fitting. They all have a place. The sky is violet storm.
She knows the darkness that falls out of the middle of the day. Strong, compelling, essential.
The fragments are sky pieces. Hold them, turn them, don't throw them down for not fitting. They all have a place. The sky is violet storm.
She knows the darkness that falls out of the middle of the day. Strong, compelling, essential.
September 7, 2020
A jagged memoir, written in staccato bursts and short chapters. An anthem to all the weirdos and outsiders trying to fit into a small town life - ill suited to creative intelligence bound in an awkward adolescent body. Taunted and reviled and molested and sexualised by fellow children, Indigo Perry has seemingly put her Mallee childhood into this book in a purging of the past. A harsh, hard life for a young girl.
August 5, 2020
Dark and hauntingly beautiful. As soon as I finished I was ready to start reading it again. But I’m going to wait a few weeks
September 18, 2020
Bought this on the strenghth of previous reviews and was disappointed.
The fragmented format was irritating and not conducive to relaxed time spending.
The subject matter was trite, the writing, although eloquent, too formulatic and contrived resulting in a stiltedness which exacberated the dischordant tone of the book.
Many superior examples of this well worn genre to be found on the shelves.
Shall remember when reviews are too good to be true they generally are.
The fragmented format was irritating and not conducive to relaxed time spending.
The subject matter was trite, the writing, although eloquent, too formulatic and contrived resulting in a stiltedness which exacberated the dischordant tone of the book.
Many superior examples of this well worn genre to be found on the shelves.
Shall remember when reviews are too good to be true they generally are.
October 22, 2021
Poetic. Dark. Bleak. Authentic. Gut-wrenching. Portrayal of father-love is very moving.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews