Jack and Jill

by Helen Hodgman

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Jill and her dad are happy enough after her mother dies. Theirs is a simple life in the outback, far from the big city where a coathanger is being built across a sparkling harbour. Until Jack arrives at their door one evening, and steps inside to find the skinny, wild-looking child sitting with her grim-faced father. It's the start of all Jill's problems. 'Absence makes the heart grow fonder,' threatens Jack, as he marches off to war. And he's right, in a way - but this is no ordinary show more romance. Spanning the period from the Depression to the freewheeling '60s, Helen Hodgman's second novel, winner of the Somerset Maugham Award, is a masterpiece, a twisted fairytale told with her characteristic dark wit. 'What a boon to Australian writing Helen Hodgman is - the playful, brooding ice sculptor of human weirdness.' Craig Sherborne show less

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anzlitlovers 2,077 reviews

Novellas in November is a good time to tackle some of the backlog of Aussie titles from the 20th century.

The late Helen Hodgman (1945-2022) was a Tasmanian author of six highly regarded novels. Jack and Jill (1978) was her second novel (after Blue Skies, 1976, see my review) and it won the Somerset Maugham Award.

Although Jack and Jill is set in outback NSW, this macabre novella has the ambience of Tasmanian Gothic.

From the first page, Hodgman demolishes any ideas of a bucolic lifestyle.

Wilma Limb lay beneath greying bedclothes, so thin she barely raised a bump. Her daughter Jill, that impatient baby, pounded her tight-shut lids with blunt fingers. The bruised flesh slit open far enough to release a flicker of jaundiced spite and then

closed again. Eager for more attention, Jill gathered a fold of flaky skin from her mother's cheek and pinched. Wilma groaned and clawed at her, parting her lips in a rigid grin, a slight scum gathering at the corners of her mouth. Crowing happily, Jill fled to the kitchen. The black wiry hair that framed her round face in a halo of crinkly strands shone in the morning sun. 'Little Bottle Brush', her father called her. Today there was no Daddy to tickle and tease her. He was off mending fences. (p.7)

By the time he comes back, Jill has been alone in the house with her mother's corpse for four days.

Spurning curiosity and probable judgements about his wife's ghastly end, Douggie sets off for elsewhere with Jill, abandoning her occasionally for overnight trysts with the policeman's wife. He locks Jill inside with the Correspondence School wireless set so that she can't skive off. He doesn't want any stickybeaking stranger accusing him of not doing his best.

And he does do his best, running his farm single-handed, buying books for her from Sydney and even learning to knit. They're better off than most...

Douggie heard over the wireless set how things were bad. The jolly swagmen increased. Each carried his woeful tale of no jobs, dole queues, steakless days and hard times. As they told of wives and kiddies left behind in squalor, Jill grinned at her father, poked fun at them behind their unmanly backs. She didn't trust these no-hopers and kept an eye on them from the tops of trees, lying in wait to drop dead leaves down the backs of their necks. (p.13)

By now, Jill is five.

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