Point Venus - A Portrait of Norfolk Island - Softcover

Moran, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1876040084 ISBN 13: 9781876040086

Publisher: Brandl & Schlesinger, 1998

Synopsis

Norfolk Island, ‘a place fit only for angels and eagles’, is one of the most remote locations in Oceania. It lies one thousand miles north-east of Sydney across the Tasman Sea. In the nineteenth century, this lonely paradise became a hellish prison for convicts transported from Britain and later home to the descendants of the Bounty mutineers. Paul Seagrave, an unstable young concert pianist, has abandoned his promising career after a nervous breakdown and fled there from the Australian mainland to recuperate.

Point Venus is a complex blend of historical novel and modern drama, a tale of two forbidden loves. Paul experiences a lyrically erotic relationship with the mysterious island woman Mareva, a descendant of the mutineers, acted out amidst the lush scenery. Later he discovers a secret journal kept by Paulina, the cultured wife of a brutal Commandant of the penal station in the nineteenth century. He reads of her breathless passion for a young Polish cavalry officer stationed at the military garrison - an affair painfully conducted in the shadow of the gallows.

In this interwoven story, the menace of the days of cruelty and degradation are finely balanced against the sensuality and innocence of contemporary island life.

About this title

Review

...immense power...few Australian novelists since Patrick White have so precisely understood the tragic European dimension to the antipodean colonial dilemma. -- Robert Carver - critic for Times Literary Supplement

".......a meticulously researched and imagined novel of great power and force. Few Australian novelists since Patrick White have so precisely understood the tragic European dimension to the antipodean colonial dilemma as has Michael Moran."
ROBERT CARVER
author and critic Times Literary Supplement

"......he vividly describes an island of stunning beauty, a "land for eagles and angels" ......a trip to the islands worth taking."
WALLY MASON
The Australian's Review of Books March 1999

" For me, it is the 'remote island of pines', this sub-tropical paradise east of Sydney that becomes the main protagonist in the story. This is an intense book, the historical background of Pitcainers and convicts meticulously researched........Moran has captured the intensity of European colonial society in a small place. Point Venus is an ambitious book with a fine balance drawn between cruelty and romantic sentiment."
ELIZABETH DEAN
The Australian Book Review August 1999

"Reading this exotic book is like visiting another planet."
ANDRAS BERKES
Journalist in Budapest

"......highly romantic......a young woman seems to have stepped straight out of a Gauguin painting. Mareva has all the attributes of a dream woman, right down to the lustrous eyes, golden skin and sensitive yet sensual lips.....she soon displays the Siren's ability to turn men's minds to mush."
LESLEY BEASLEY
Canberra Times

From the Author

My first encounter with Norfolk Island, a speck of land lying a thousand miles off the east coast of Australia, was as a young man on holiday from university in Sydney in 1969. Being Australian, I have travelled around the idyllic South Seas a great deal, but Norfolk seemed mysteriously cemented into my consciousness and I felt compelled to settle there for a while. The layers of history fascinated me - first the pre-history of an island visited and later abandoned by Polynesians, then in the nineteenth century as the most cruel and terrifying penal settlement of the entire period of convict transportation from Britain to Australia, and finally the island paradise where Queen Victoria resettled many of the descendants from the crew of the mutiny on the Bounty when they began to outgrow Pitcairn Island.

The superb sub-tropical landscape is covered in endemic pines, lush rainforests and dotted with fine Georgian buildings. Stunning beaches punctuate the shore. The graceful and charming descendants of the Pitcairners, known long ago as 'the children of Eden', readily befriended me. I learned their 'Norfolk' language, a tongue uniquely forged from the love affair between the mutinous English sailors and their Polynesian lovers. I fell deeply in love with a beautiful and sensual part-Polynesian descendant of the Bounty mutiny and listened to a great deal of music in the still Pacific nights under the stars. I lived on a cliff above the sea, opened a 'coffee lounge' (the first on the island), and as the broadcasting officer for the administration, helped set up the first radio station. I also drove my dilapidated MGA around the dusty coral roads in fine style. It was a great life. In the novel I attempted to capture all the historical periods of the island - in particular the mysterious symbiosis of beauty and cruelty that existed during the penal settlement era. Interwoven with this history is a contemporary story - the destiny of a young musician in the early 1970s encountering Oceania for the first time. Those years were a period of exuberance and liberation, of innocent joy the like of which we will probably never see again. I wrote the book in London and Cornwall some twenty-five years later during a period of great emotional isolation, hoping to lift my gloom with memories of the tropical sun and a gloriously misspent youth. It did.

Edition details

• Publisher: Brandl & Schlesinger
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1876040084
• ISBN 13: 9781876040086
• Binding: Paperback