Set on the banks of Lake Illawarra in New South Wales, "Storyland" is essentially a fictionalised history of Australia, spanning four centuries. Its focus is very much on how people are shaped by the environments in which they live and vice versa — or, as one of the characters explains in the first chapter, “The land is a book waiting to be read. Learn to read it and you will never go hungry”. It’s also a timely warning about how we treat the land and the indigenous people who know it best. It's a remarkably engaging and compelling novel.

3.5★
I’m a fan of short stories, especially linked or interconnecting or overlapping ones, where something from one story appears in another. In this historical fiction about the Illawarra region of NSW Australia, we see a stone axe and a giant fig tree (like the one on the cover) appear as significant items to people from the late 1700s to the future. The author has included some maps at the end to indicate where the area is and the names by which landmarks were known.

The stories move between a few groups of people in different eras. I enjoyed the first era—“Will Martin 1796”—which included Matthew Flinders as a young, fairly humourless lieutenant). They’re sailing south from Sydney looking for a good river and fresh water. But it’s pretty scary, and I’m glad I wasn’t there.

“Yes, I have heard tales of cannibals living south of Botany Bay, but hearing tales is different from standing on a beach knowing one could soon hunt me. Here, death and life are wrangling twins and I am standing in between.”

The second era is “Hawker 1822”, which is about settlers and convicts struggling to grow corn and protect it from the natives who are raiding the fields. They keep their grog and guns at the ready, there is a slaughter, and I’m glad I wasn’t there then, either.

“For the forest is thick with giant trees and ferns and vines, and also with unnatural animals and birds that screech and fight all through the night. I never feared a forest before. . . Had not reckoned on the dark days it gives me, days when I go out with a stirring to shoot everything in sight; a stirring stilled only by grog. This forest grows a part of me I never knew.”

The third era, “Lola 1900” revolves around a young girl and what’s left of her family on a dairy farm, milking Illawarra Shorthorns, handsome red dairy cows that were just being established as a recognised breed. The idea of being mixed-blood is abhorrent to the white community. Again, there’s a murder, so I’m equally glad I wasn’t there then.

“I told him you and Abe ain’t even half-castes, Mary, told him you is quadroon. He said back to me it makes no difference you both being quadroon because your skin tricks people into thinking you is both exotic and not two dirty blackfellas . . .”

The fourth era jumps nearly a century to “Bel 1998”, which is closer to current times, and revolves around a mixed bunch of kids with a dog who have built themselves a raft and play. One of the kids describes the fig tree which features in all the stories. They are amazing looking things.

[My Goodreads review has a photo of one of these great trees.]
Photo of a Ficus obliqua

“It’s a great tree because the roots are above ground. They look like elephant hide. Actually, it looks like lots of different trees plaited together but it’s not, it’s one tree. And when you sit underneath, it’s like being in a huge huge tent that has all the flaps open.”

The kids befriend and hang around an older girl who lives with (I use the term loosely) her boyfriend (I use the term loosely) who beats her up. They are artists, selling Aboriginal art to tourists. I’m here today, like it or not.

The fifth era “Nada 2033 & 2717” is an extremely strange futuristic session where a ‘therapist’ is taking Nada back through her ‘membank’ to remember the past. This is a really unsettling section and boy, I’m really glad nobody I know will be living in 2717!

“We don’t know what happened. You lived in a period of great upheaval. No one lives permanently beyond Border 29 any longer.”

The first four eras are revisited (in reverse order after Nada), but a lot is still unresolved. And that is pretty much my feeling after finishing the book. There seemed to be some loose ends that left me feeling disappointed.

There is a lot to like in these fictional histories, and I look forward to more from the author.

Thanks to NetGalley and HarperCollins for the preview copy from which I’ve quoted (so quotes may have changed). I hope the few anachronisms I spotted haven’t made it to the final publication.

Storyland is a hard book for me to rate; in the end, I have settled on three stars. I enjoyed the five narratives and their characters, but I didn't love them. I wasn't on the edge of my seat turning the pages; although, neither was it a slog. It was simply a middle-of-the-road read for me: enjoyable but not breathtaking. I think part of the problem is the use of the same narrative style as Cloud Atlas. In that work, it was bold, new and, therefore, a huge selling point. However, now it's been done, some of the shine has worn off. All that structure really accomplished in this case was to make me constantly compare this work to Cloud Atlas, and Storyland just doesn't have the same scope or captivating brilliance of Mitchell's earlier book.

That said, this is by no means a bad book, and I would highly recommend it to people who enjoyed Cloud Atlas and are looking for something else similar, and to those interested in historical fiction in an Australian setting. It's a pleasant read; it simply didn't blow me away as I'd hoped it would.

This fantastic book had me entranced from start to finish. Spanning centuries, these interconnected stories share a common location - Australia's Lake Illawarra and nearby Five Islands.

The five stories are separate, yet inescapably connected by their surroundings. Features of the landscape reappear throughout: a cave system, a body of water, a thousand-year-old fig tree. Geographical details are so vividly rendered that I felt like I was there, sailing down the coastline, paddling up a river, or traipsing through the bush.

The book's structure consists of nested narratives that break off mid sentence, which will draw obvious comparisons to David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. But Mitchell's stories are highly saturated, brightly coloured things, whereas McKinnon's Storyland is sepia-toned, tinged with menace and portending violence. The structure works well here, both to build suspense and to demonstrate that the history of a place is always present within it.

Storyland is about the stories we tell ourselves, and the land which connects us. And it reminds us that, in the long run, neither are as transient or as immutable as they might seem.