ANZAC Day & Courtenay's Solomon's Song

Today is ANZAC day and here's the latest reporting from TVNZ, "Thousands attend 'emotional' Anzac Day services:"

Around 10,000 people braved the weather to attend the country's biggest service at Auckland's War Memorial Museum. It has been 98 years since Anzac forces landed on the shores of Gallipoli. "I spent some time in the New Zealand Army deploying to Afghanistan, it's a big day for me, probably the most important day of the year," said Damian Walker.

For a novel about Australia and New Zealand's experiences in WWI (and at Gallipoli), try Bryce Courtenay's Solomon's Song:

Solomons are pitted against Solomons as the families are locked in a bitter struggle that crosses battlefields and continents to reach a powerful conclusion.

New Zealand's Legalization of Gay Marriage & Hulme's The Bone People

From yesterday’s BBC article “New Zealand legalises same-sex marriage:”

New Zealand's parliament has legalised same-sex marriage, the first country in the Asia-Pacific region to do so.

Lawmakers approved the bill, amending the 1955 marriage act, despite opposition from Christian lobby groups. The bill was passed with a wide majority, with 77 votes in favour and 44 against.

For a novel set in New Zealand, try The Bone People by Keri Hulme:

In a tower on the New Zealand sea lives Kerewin Holmes, part Maori, part European, an artist estranged from her art, a woman in exile from her family.

One night her solitude is disrupted by a visitor—a speechless, mercurial boy named Simon, who tries to steal from her and then repays her with his most precious possession. As Kerewin succumbs to Simon's feral charm, she also falls under the spell of his Maori foster father Joe, who rescued the boy from a shipwreck and now treats him with an unsettling mixture of tenderness and brutality.

Out of this unorthodox trinity Keri Hulme has created what is at once a mystery, a love story, and an ambitious exploration of the zone where Maori and European New Zealand meet, clash, and sometimes merge.

Indonesia's Mining Controversy & Hirata's The Rainbow Troops

From yesterday’s Reuters article, “Indonesia softening mining policy after industry backlash:”

Indonesia appears to be softening a controversial mining policy amid industry criticism and legal challenges to rules whose implementation could cost Southeast Asia's largest economy up to $10 billion a year in lost exports...

Last year Indonesia asked all miners to submit plans to build refineries or smelters ahead of a January 2014 ban on raw mineral exports. Until then a 20 percent tax on ore exports has been levied.

Deputy Energy and Mineral Resources Minister Susilo Siswo Utomo said the focus is to add value to exports, and for that smelters need not necessarily be built. "The word process does not mean you have to build a smelter. Sometimes you need to wash, to separate the soil and mud. This is also processing," Utomo told an Australian mining conference in Jakarta on Tuesday.

For a novel set in an Indonesian mining town, try The Rainbow Troops by Andrea Hirata:

Ikal is a student at the poorest village school on the Indonesian island of Belitong, where graduating from sixth grade is considered a remarkable achievement. His school is under constant threat of closure. In fact, Ikal and his friends—a group nicknamed the Rainbow Troops—face threats from every angle: skeptical government officials, greedy corporations hardly distinguishable from the colonialism they’ve replaced, deepening poverty and crumbling infrastructure, and their own low self-confidence.

But the students also have hope, which comes in the form of two extraordinary teachers, and Ikal’s education in and out of the classroom is an uplifting one. We root for him and his friends as they defy the island’s powerful tin mine officials. We meet his first love, the unseen girl who sells chalk from behind a shop screen, whose pretty hands capture Ikal’s heart. We cheer for Lintang, the class’s barefoot math genius, as he bests the students of the mining corporation’s school in an academic challenge.

Bali Plane Crash & DeMille's Night Fall

I posted about airliner glitches a few weeks ago but, thankfully, there haven't been any major crashes in the news since then.  That changed with a major crash yesterday.  The good news is everyone on board survived. 

Here's today's BBC coverage, "All survive after jet lands in sea off Bali Indonesia:"

An airliner has ended up in the sea off the Indonesian island of Bali after missing Denpasar airport runway, but all those on board survived.

Hospitals treated 22 people after the crash, which involved an Indonesian Lion Air plane carrying 101 passengers and seven crew. Photos posted on Twitter showed the jet with its fuselage cracked, sitting in water near rocks, with dinghies nearby.

The Boeing 737 was on a domestic flight from Bandung in West Java. It missed the runway reportedly from a height of 50m (yards) and landed in the ocean nearby. Terrified passengers made their way ashore through the shallow water in life jackets as police in rubber dinghies rowed out to rescue them.

A transport ministry official told BBC News it was too early to talk about what had caused the plane - a new Boeing 737-800 - to crash.

For a novel about a plane crash, try Night Fall by Nelson DeMille:

The book is centered on an investigation of the July 1996 crash of flight TWA 800, "when... a big Boeing 747 bound for Paris with 230 passengers and crew on board, exploded off the Atlantic coast of Long Island, sending all 230 souls to their deaths."

In July 2001, Federal Anti-Terrorist Task Force detective John Corey, a brilliant, smart-ass detective last seen in Plum Island and The Lion's Game, accompanies his FBI agent wife, Kate Mayfield, to the fifth anniversary of the disaster. John, whose wife worked the crash in 1996, understands that Kate has brought him along because she doesn't buy the official finding of "mechanical failure" and wants him to mount his own investigation.

Indigenous Australians & Pilkington's Follow The Rabbit-Proof Fence

I’ve posted about Native American tribes in the US. Now let’s take a look at the experience of indigenous Australians.

Here's Monday’s BBC article “Living Black: Australia's trail-blazing indigenous show:”

Australia's trailblazing indigenous TV programme "Living Black" is celebrating a decade of bringing stories of triumph, resilience and tragedy to a national audience. The country's longest-running indigenous news and current affairs show has survived tight budgets and management changes to become a beacon of broadcasting in a country where indigenous life can be ignored by the mainstream media. 

"It is a unique programme that is filling a void," said Karla Grant, presenter and executive producer at the Living Black studio in Sydney. "No one else is doing the stories that we do." "We are closer to the issue because we may have faced it within our own families. Our programme gives indigenous people a voice right across the country," she said. 

The programme's small production crew is responsible for 26 episodes each year that aim to give in-depth coverage of social justice, employment, health, and housing issues. All are areas of crisis that make Australia's first peoples its most disadvantaged.

For a novel about Aboriginal Australians, try Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence by Doris Pilkington:

The remarkable true story of three young girls who cross the harsh Australian desert on foot to return to their home. 

Following an Australian government edict in 1931, black aboriginal children and children of mixed marriages were gathered up by whites and taken to settlements to be assimilated. In Rabbit-Proof Fence, award-winning author Doris Pilkington traces the captivating story of her mother, Molly, one of three young girls uprooted from her community in Southwestern Australia and taken to the Moore River Native Settlement. At the settlement, Milly and her relatives Gracie and Daisy were forbidden to speak their native language, forced to abandon their aboriginal heritage, and taught to be culturally white. 

After regular stays in solitary confinement, the three girls scared and homesick planned and executed a daring escape from the grim camp, with its harsh life of padlocks, barred windows, and hard cold beds. The girls headed for the nearby rabbit-proof fence that stretched over 1,000 miles through the desert toward their home. Their journey lasted over a month, and the survived on everything from emus to feral cats, while narrowly avoiding the police, professional trackers, and hostile white settlers. Their story is a truly moving tale of defiance and resilience.