The Dressmaker’s Secret by Rosalie Ham

I enjoyed reading The Dressmaker by Australian author Rosalie Ham, and adored the film starring Kate Winslet, Judy Davis, Hugo Weaving and Liam Hemsworth, so was excited to learn that The Dressmaker’s Secret continued Tilly Dunnage’s story.

For women in Melbourne in 1953, wearing a beautiful dress to a ball to celebrate the queen’s coronation was the only thing that mattered. Tilly Dunnage had left Dungatar for Melbourne where she was working as a dressmaker for a would-be fashion house in the Paris-end of Collins Street.

I’m not giving anything away by saying that Tilly’s secret was that she had a baby who she named Joe after the death of Teddy (played by Liam Hemsworth in the movie). As Tilly was a single mother Joe had been taken to a children’s home where Tilly visited him every Sunday. Sergeant Farrat, who had also left Dungatar for Melbourne, gallantly offered to marry Tilly in a marriage of convenience so she could bring Joe home but on their wedding day, he fell in love with another woman. Tilly encouraged Sergeant Farrat and Julie’s romance and in an unusual twist, he spent his wedding night with Julie.

As Sergeant Farrat and Julie’s romance blossomed, Tilly continued to battle the Child Welfare Officer, her small-minded employer and most of the residents of Dungatar who hated her because she was no longer around to make them dresses (and because that she had burnt the town down when she left).

The story jumped around between Tilly, Sergeant Farrat and Julie, plus other new characters and a cast of thousands from Dungatar. Although I remembered some of the Dungatar characters from The Dressmaker, I couldn’t recall all of them and felt confused about where some of them fitted into the story.

The Dressmaker’s Secret was completely over the top but did not have as strong a sense of fun and black humour as The Dressmaker. I would have preferred the sequel to have left the characters from Dungatar behind and followed Tilly in her fight for Joe and her career, plus better conditions for her fellow workers at Salon Mystique.

I think The Dressmaker’s Secret will only appeal (and possibly make sense) to reader who have read The Dressmaker.

If this book is also made into a film, I’ll definitely see it. I can’t wait to see the dresses!

My purchase of The Dressmaker’s Secret by Rosalie Ham continues to satisfy my New Year’s resolution for 2021 which is to buy a book by an Australian author during each month of this year (February).

The Year of the Farmer by Rosalie Ham

The Year of the Farmer is by Australian author Rosalie Ham and will be enjoyed by readers who appreciate dark humour in a novel. Ham’s previous novels, The Dressmaker, Summer at Mount Hope and There Should Be More Dancing share this trait.

The Year of the Farmer is a contemporary story of life on the land featuring Mitch Bishop, whose drought-stricken farm somewhere up in the Riverina has been in his family for generations. Mitch is married to Mandy, who used to be the town bike (I know this is 2020, but in this small town these things still matter). No one likes Mandy, not even Mitch.

Mitch should have married his school sweetheart Neralie, but she left town to make a go of it in the city and left to his own devices, he succumbed to Mandy’s attentions. Mandy suckered Mitch into getting married by telling him that she was pregnant, but as everyone else in town knew, she couldn’t have fallen pregnant as she’d had “an infection.”

When Neralie returned to town to run the only pub in the area for 100 miles, Mitch and everyone else’s lives were turned upside-down.

Not only was Mitch’s marriage a mess, but the drought had been going on for years. Most punishing of all for him and other local farmers was their battle with the Water Authority Board to get enough water from the river to irrigate their land. To make things worse, a pack of townie’s dogs were killing sheep, rain at the wrong time was threatening to ruin the crops and Mandy’s constant need to make other people unhappy was adding considerably to the town’s woes.

There are multiple factions in the district, all with a different opinion about what was best for the river (and themselves). Corrupt politicians and townies were trying to make money from selling the water, developers wanted to siphon water into a man-made lake overlooked by a new apartment building and even the farmers had different volume requirements depending on what they were farming. The farmers weren’t in agreement with each other on other matters, either. Some were using chemicals which were detrimental to the river while others didn’t use chemicals on their crops when they should have which caused weeds to infiltrate their neighbours’ properties. I appreciated everyone’s point of view but think if I had to take a side I’d go with the Riparians, who had the health of the river at heart.

For those readers who struggle with cruelty towards animals that farmer’s consider to be vermin, be warned that a cull was required to set things right.

Not only is the humour in the Year of the Farmer dark, but it is mean. I really enjoyed it.

Summer at Mount Hope by Rosalie Ham

Summer at Mount Hope is by Australian author Rosalie Ham, who also wrote The Dressmaker and There Should be More Dancing. Unfortunately, Summer at Mount Hope lacked the cutting humour and style of the other two books.

The story is set in the 1890s. The heroine is Phoeba Crupp, who wants to run her father’s vineyard near Geelong alongside him. Other farmers in the district run sheep but are struggling due to the drought and depression. Phoeba’s family need the dry for the grapes, but they are also struggling financially and as a family. Phoeba’s parents are unhappily married and Phoeba’s mother hates the isolation of living in the country. The story’s theme is the lack of power that women have over their own futures.

Phoeba’s friend Hadley is keen to marry her, but she sees him as a friend rather than a lover. Phoeba’s mother wants her to marry Hadley to secure her future, but Phoeba is interested in someone else. Phoeba’s spoiled sister Lilith is doing her best to catch a husband and is aiming at the most eligible man in the district, the recently widowed squatter’s son.

Summer at Mount Hope, like this author’s other works, is a black comedy, but is not as polished or as enjoyable as this author’s other stories. The story is slow, jumps around, and I felt the slang and dialogue was wrong for the times. There were a few running jokes, such as Phoeba’s constant struggles with horses and the non-arrival of a peach-parer in the mail which got old quickly.

I also had issues with the timeline. The story starts on New Years Eve in 1893 and ends two months later, at the end of February, but during that time a character managed to catch a man, fall pregnant and drag him to the altar!

I was interested to read about the itinerant workers and the difficulties which arose when farmers tried to introduce machinery to their farms and thought that these sections of the book made it worth reading. I also enjoyed hearing about the characters going out one night to watch the electric lights being turned on for the first time in far-off Geelong.

The painting below is ‘View of Geelong’ by Eugene von Guerard from 1856. This hangs in the Geelong Art Gallery.

I hope Rosalie Ham publishes something new soon, as The Dressmaker left me wanting more and Summer at Mount Hope has not satisfied me. I know this author can do better!

The Dressmaker by Rosalie Ham

The Dressmaker by Australian author Rosalie Ham was made into a wonderful movie starring Kate Winslet and a mob of Australia’s best actors last year. Since watching the movie I had been looking forward to reading the book, especially since having read There Should be More Dancing by Rosalie Ham.

The Dressmaker is set in a fictional Australian country town called Dungatar, and with a name like that, you just know it is probably out on the far side of Woop-Woop. Dungatar comprises of a railway station, a pub, general store, a police station, pharmacy and a Post Office. Everyone in town knows everybody else’s business, and ignore most of each other’s dirty little secrets, unless they can use them to their advantage. Most of the townspeople are either victims or bullies, with only a handful of genuinely kind-hearted people amongst them.

Dungatar gets the shake-up it needs when Tilly Dunnage arrives to look after her mother, Mad Molly. Molly, who lives in poverty and squalor, is suffering from dementia and neglect. Most of the townspeople have ignored Molly, who gave birth to Tilly out of wedlock, leaving her to rot in her falling down house which sits on the hill above Dungatar. Sergeant Farrar, Dungatar’s cross-dressing policeman, and the town’s poorest family, the McSwineys, were the only people who cared for Molly until Tilly’s return.

Tilly was sent away from Dungatar as a child after the mysterious death of another child. She became a dressmaker and studyied with the most famous names in couture, Dior, Balmain and Balenciaga. When Tilly returned to Dungatar, it didn’t take long for the local women to employ her skills. Very soon, most of the women were swanning around town in outfits that the rest of us could only dream of wearing. (If you are at all interested in clothes, watch the movie, The Dressmaker. The costumes are a joy to look at, glamourous and beautiful, and totally out of reach in real life. I was lucky enough to see a display of the costumes from the movie and have been dreaming about them ever since).

On returning to Dungatar, Tilly fell in love with Teddy McSwiney, and for a little while, it looked as if she had a chance of being happy, but unfortunately, this was not to be. (In the movie, Teddy is played by a Hemsworth brother, not sure which one, but they are all lovely to look at).

Eventually, Tilly decides to get her revenge, and wreaked havoc on the whole town and everyone in it, which in my opinion served them right.

I liked The Dressmaker, with a few reservations. I’m not sure that readers from other countries would enjoy this story quite as much as an Australian reader, as a lot of the humour and descriptions are probably better suited to local tastes. The story got a bit complicated towards the end, too. My biggest complaint about the writing was how often the author mentions scrotums. Yuck. There are things I don’t need to know about, or have described to me. The mental image of a withered, dangling, tomato-like scrotum will probably stay with me longer than I would have liked.

The best things about The Dressmaker were that it doesn’t showcase Australia in the best possible light, as the plot is dark, most of the characters are nasty and the town itself is unpleasant. Mad Molly is a scream. She cuts everyone down to size in a few sarcastic words, and generally gets away with behaving as badly as she likes. (In the movie, Molly is played by the great Australian actress Judy Davis and stole the whole show). Then, there are the clothes… (sigh of happiness). Reading about beautiful clothes is up there with reading about chocolate, or baking…

So, my advice to non-Australians would be to watch the movie, The Dressmaker, and if you really love it, follow up by reading the book.

There Should Be More Dancing by Rosalie Ham

There Should Be More Dancing is by Rosalie Ham, the Australian author who wrote The Dressmaker.

The Dressmaker is on my list of books to read, but I enjoyed There Should Be More Dancing so much that it will probably get bumped up a few spots on the list. This author has a sense of humour and a style that is recognisable from The Dressmaker movie.

There Should Be More Dancing is set in Melbourne, and is the story of a dysfunctional family, told in turns by the matriarch, Margery Blandon and an omniscient third narrator. After a lifetime of doing the right thing, Margery is thinking of throwing herself off the top floor of the hotel where her family took her to celebrate her 80th birthday.

The last straw for Margery was when her family foisted Florence, an old barmaid on her, to live in the family home. According to Margery’s values, (which she cross stitches onto everything in sight), Florence is an old floozie, a “thief, a liar and an adulteress.”

Prior to Florence’s arrival in Gold Street, Margery’s daughter Judith, (who in my opinion is a cow), wants to put Margery into an old age home in order to sell the family home and reap the financial rewards, along with her no-good, wheeling and dealing husband. Margery’s eldest son, Walter, otherwise known as ‘The Brunswick Bull’, took too many hits to the head during his career as a boxer, and her other son, Morris, disappeared in Thailand and hasn’t been seen for years. Don’t ask Margery why Morris won’t come home, because while the rest of the neighbourhood know, she doesn’t. Margery’s husband, Lance, died years ago when he lit a cigarette and blew up his oxygen tank at the local pub. The explosion decimated the pub and killed another character’s husband.

I laughed my way through this book. Walter and Morris had a stand up brawl at Lance’s funeral, Margery knocks a motorcyclist off his bike driving to the local shops, (she goes the long way, in order to avoid turning right across the busy traffic on the main road), Margery and her neighbour Pat fight with each other for thirty years after Margery accidently pulled off Pat’s wig at the 1976 Ladies Legacy Luncheon. Not to mention that the neighbours steal power from Margery’s house for their drug lab.

None of these things, including the difficulties of ageing, should be funny, but the way the story is told by Margery is darkly funny and sometimes laugh-out-loud hilarious. Some of the time the story is sad.

Margery tells her story of the past and the present to her long-dead twin sister Cecily, who is the person she has always loved the most. She keeps saying, the truth will out, and eventually it does. The reader sees the truth long before Margery does, but the story is about how Margery deals with the truth, rather than waiting for revealing twists and turns in the story.

There Should Be More Books by Rosalie Ham is a motto which I want to cross stitch on to something.