Boomerang

This epic novel, written in 1931 and published in 1932, reads like a combination of the historical narrative of a Who Do You Think You Are? feature and the eccentricity of Georges Perec’s Life: A User's Manual. It was the winning novel in 1932 in the prestigious James Tait Black Memorial Prize awards, also won by Liam O'Flaherty, Kate O'Brien and Winifred Holtby, each of whom feature in this project. In this impressive novel the author builds on her own actual ancestry, in particular on the family of her aristocratic French maternal grandfather, Auguste Pierre Clement de Guerry de Lauret, who was born in the French colonial outpost of Pondicherry in 1810. Through this device, she explores English, French and Australian history in the 19th and early 20th centuries, culminating in Australia’s participation in the Great War. The boomerang of the title is a way of explaining how she had come full circle back to the ancestral home in Artois on the Western Front. It also conveys warfare and the narrative includes sections concerned with the Peninsular War and the Franco-Prussian War as well as the First World War.

The author, Helen de Guerry Simpson (born 1 December 1897), was the daughter of a Sydney solicitor and the novel includes some legal cases where the narrator, Clotilde de Boissy, describes family members pursuing careers in law. Indeed the author has used many aspects of her own family history as a framework for the plot of the novel. Whereas she maintains in the foreword that “the characters throughout are either imaginary or dead”, in a sense many of them were somewhat based on actual characters in her own family history. For example, her appreciation of Irish characters in Australian society was no doubt influenced by a knowledge of the relatives on the side of her maternal grandmother, Anna Maria Lett, from Co. Wexford. In addition, she gleaned a few actual events for use in the plot and explained that “of the various incidents related in the book, some of the more improbable are true”. A key autobiographical element of the novel is the presence of the narrator in Europe during the First World War: the author went to England in 1914 to study. Having been reading French at Oxford, in April 1918 she joined the Women's Royal Naval Service as an officer responsible for deciphering and decoding messages in foreign languages.

The narrator’s grandfather had in the outback of Australia requested that her father, the eldest son, would go to France to fight in the Franco-Prussian War. When he refused, he was ostracised and the patriarch himself went to Europe with the intention of protecting the honour of his fatherland. By the time he reached Bordeaux, though, “the war was over, humiliating terms of peace were being added up into a treaty... and France, like a woman in hysteria, was drumming her heels on the ground and shrieking that it was everyone else's fault”. He ended up dying in a duel with an officer of the German army of occupation that he had earlier assaulted, insisting that “the uniform he wears is a challenge and an insult to every Frenchman.” Just as her grandfather was useless to the war effort, so also in the First World War was Clotilde’s aristocratic English husband, who she had met on board a ship, he having been invalided home from India suffering from asthma. When determinedly he came up before an army board, doctors “could hear him whistling rooms away... they were not going to hand out combatant jobs to a fellow who... ought to be wearing a tube in his throat”. Ultimately, therefore, it fell to Clotilde to return to her ancestral homeland to contribute to the war effort as part of a Women's Interpreter Corps. There she encounters an Australian doctor, who she had met in England, and visits him on the battle line, witnessing his death in a futile minor campaign to secure a useless trench. He explains to her,
“There's an attack down for tomorrow morning. The blasted fools are going to make a set at Grease Trench.”

“What's that? Is it important?"
“Important, of course it isn't. It's a bit of a salient that spoils the look of their maps.”