Chasing Dreamtime: A Sea-going Hitchhiker's Journey Through Memory And Myth

Rating:
Summary: A truly captivating memoir filled with love of the sea
Review: Chasing Dreamtime: A Sea-Going Hitchhiker's Journey Through Memory And Myth is the memoir of a woman who, after survivng college and a disastrous marriage in 1975, attempted to sail around the world and had her plans abruptly crushed when she was arrested for a visa violation, hunted by sharks, held at knifepoint, and stricken with tropical fever. She pursued her journey despite multiple brushes with death, sailing the seas and even pedaling a "pushbike" 2,000 kilometers along Australia's coastline, and encountered a stunning glimpse of the Aboriginal concept of Dreamtime. A truly captivating memoir filled with love of the sea, and a profound account of one woman's determination to survive and make sense of her life in spite of cruelty and hardship.


Rating:
Summary: Good Story but too many stereotypical characters
Review: There is much to like about this book. Sullaway is a descriptive, analytical writer who can combine scenery with reflection. There sure is plenty of time for reflection while adrift emotionally, and at sea, as Sullaway is in this book. In the dramatic ending, the author manages to weave meaning into seeming disconnected events.

Maps, hand drawn and almost piratelike, contain clues about about adventures in the book: Three Kings, Glasshouse Mountains, ominous sketches of sharks and cyclones.

Yet for all that, the characters in this book are far too stereotypical and undeveloped. Mick is just another burned out Vietnam Vet; Clari a bitchy British wife born into wealth and irrelevance who married for adventure. Squids is the scrawny but tough runaway kid who ends up at sea. Reading this book you have to ask: aren't there any NORMAL people in the South Pacific?

Like clouds gathering for a storm, the first references to Sullaway's troubled past come in floating sentences and afterthoughts: her fathers' polio, the nuns at her school. Still they are drowned in seafaring stories that are more like disjointed narratives. Only after reading the book a second time did the foreshadowings become powerful to me. Its almost like the author saves TOO MUCH for the end.

Sullaway becomes so cynical the only true pain I feel in this waterborne litany of recycled memories is when she blew off Richard in Brisbane, only to find Katy and Tom weren't in Bundaberg after all. At Innisfail she turns into Dr. Phil with an australian accent. It is too bad; because she shows true mental strength in Weipa, staring down an 'Abo' beating on his wife.

Overworked mentally and physically as a cook and deckhand on the prawn trawler, Sullaway's past was able to come thru without being filtered first by her politically correct takes on Catholicism and its priesthood. Her dreaming---snakes as a metaphor for the groping hands of a priest, for the slithering guilt of original sin, for hands around her throat---crystallizes with stunning effect on the reader in the final pages.

A book sure can be hoky when the climax comes in the last few paragraphs, but not Sullaway's. The snake pattern on the Didgeridoo; the pilots' recovery from the sea snake bite from the Abo healer; the ocean covering her troubled past. Sullaway touched her dreamtime and cast off her memories as easily as they threw the squirming mess of seacreatures back into the ocean after they sorted out the prawns. Having faced her worst fear, the snake saved her life. The snake saved the book as well, for which Sullaway should be grateful.