Digby Hildreth reviews Robert Drewe’s latest book, Swimming to the Moon, a collection of Drewe’s newspaper columns and finds them wry, entertaining and insightful.

Prolific Northern Rivers-based novelist Robert Drewe long ago mastered the short-form newspaper column, telling stories, exploring the goldmine of memory and providing insightful educational précis in about 700 finely crafted words.

Among the 50 vignettes offered here, there’s much that provokes loud laughter, such as the piece Sitting Backwards on Chairs, which turns a sceptical eye on the movie cliché used to signify male earnestness. “The hero (a cop, a reporter, a private eye) can only nut out the problem in hand by spinning a chair around and sitting on it backwards,” he notes, although the serious professional men in films, doctors, judges and so forth, “always sit on chairs the right way round”. Just as, he wryly observes, “…in my experience, do all men discussing problems in real life”.

Swimming to the Moon examines such conundrums of popular culture (including popular names for children and their increasingly outlandish spelling variations), makes small histories out of the everyday (such as the loss of his grandmother’s generation’s seemingly endless talent for baking cakes, biscuits and puddings, each lovingly recalled, their sweet delights still fresh in the memory).

There’s more: stirring recollections of an early childhood in Melbourne, followed by a coming of age in WA, with all its golden glow of nostalgia and wince-making efforts to woo his town’s brown-limbed girls.

His “West Australianness, for want of a better description, is more accepting than it was back then. Though more sharply tuned by experience, it’s also more romantic and sentimental”.

Romantic perhaps, but Drewe never lapses into sentimentality. He has too sharp a sense of irony, of the absurd; he’s too curious about today to be mooning about the yesteryears.

And some things are always with us: mention of WA’s doublegee prickle segues into a mini essay on the bindii, which has recently unsheathed itself once again for the summer season, to punish any barefoot chancers. “Prickles” is devoted to the horrible, painful phenomenon but, characteristically, Drewe doesn’t dwell on his personal encounters with the spiky weed, to bleat about the discomfort induced by “the devil’s claw”, but looks more deeply into his subject to reveal, wonderfully, that one type of bindii (Tribulus terrestris) is used by men (and gym junkies) to boost muscle growth and sexual performance. However, he warns (always going that further step into discovery), a study of sheep that ate the plant showed they developed the staggers “and couldn’t mount”.

He gets out and about, revelling in the desert, the shores of the Southern Ocean, and country pubs and fairs, whose activities offer so much to the writer’s eye. “You couldn’t make this stuff up,” he says of the elaborate, often sadistic, shenanigans of the local agricultural show. He doesn’t have to invent material but, as they say, it’s the way he tells ‘em.

Whether drilling down into the details of everyday life, finding the extraordinary in the mundane, navigating his past and current connection with landscape and family, or mocking the vanities of the present age, Drewe maintains his quiet, amused tone: his writing is droll, vivid, clear-sighted, nuanced. He is, above all, witty and entertaining, a restless, inquiring mind shaped by an enviable sense of wonder and expressed through a gift for the exact word.

Swimming to the Moon is, as he remarks about plunging into the ocean after a scorching day, “as good as it gets”.

Swimming to the Moon by Robert Drewe.

Fremantle Press, rrp $29.99 pp224

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