Biography/Australian History
Book Details

The Facing Island

A Personal History

Jan Bassett

This imaginative and moving memoir uses letters sent by a young New Zealand soldier to the author’s maternal grandmother during World War I as a springboard for an account of her own life.

Opinion

‘A fitting tribute to a remarkable woman.’ (Australian Book Review, October 2002)

‘This is a book which should be read widely for a range of reasons. . . Bassett’s writing edifies the soul and and makes us look at life afresh and more tenderly.’ (The Canberra Times, 2 November 2002)

About this Title

The most exciting aspect of this work is its inventive playfulness with the genre of memoir. ‘Playfulness’ seems an unexpected word to use about a project undertaken when the author was ill with cancer, undoubtedly in pain much of the time, and facing death at far too young an age. The text is saturated with Bassett’s awareness of on-coming death, and part of its power lies in the reader’s awareness of a woman making sense of her life.

This is the writing of a sensitive woman gifted with imagination and skilled as a scholar. I found that project of writing life into death immensely moving.
Lucy Frost

In 1916 a young man called Wilson Tong enlisted in New Zealand. Soon after his troop ship sailed for Egypt, Signaller Tong placed a message in a bottle and dropped it into the sea. The bottle washed up on a beach on Phillip Island, where a young woman called Edie Harris—Jan Bassett’s maternal grandmother—picked it up. Thus began a correspondence that Edie treasured for the rest of her life.

After Edie’s death in 1966, Jan Bassett discovered the box containing Wilson Tong’s brave and spirited letters from the battlefields of France. Decades later, at a time of devastating personal crisis, she used them as a springboard for this imaginative and moving memoir.

In The Facing Island, each of Wilson’s long-lost letters to Edie is followed by a contemporary, meditative letter from Jan herself to her beloved Nana. As we read, links and parallels emerge between the young man living with the fear of death in the trenches and the woman, eighty years later, facing her own premature death from breast cancer.

In her own ‘letters’, Jan reflects on her life—particularly her childhood on Phillip Island—and her own confrontation with mortality. Her story is courageous and moving, while the young man’s letters stoically convey the adventure and horror of war.

Jan Bassett completed this manuscript shortly before her death.

Table of Contents

Foreword by Peter Rose
Editor’s Note by Janette Bomford

Beckoning
Intensifying
Vanishing
‘Balnarring Beach’

Notes
Jan Bassett’s Works
Index

About the Author

Jan Bassett (1953–1999) was an Associate in the Department of History at the University of Melbourne. A respected historian, she published many books, anthologies and articles, including Guns and Brooches: Australian Army Nursing from the Boer War to the Gulf War (1992), the Oxford Illustrated Dictionary of Australian History (1993) and As We Wave You Goodbye: Australian Women and War (1998).

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978-0-522-85029-1