Sydney Morning Herald / The Age
Non-fiction: Anwen Crawford’s No Document and three other titles

April 30, 2021
By Fiona Capp

ABC Saturday Breakfast
Lines to the Horizon

19th March, 2021
By Molly Schmidt

Nothing stops Madelaine Dickie getting waves... not rat-sized spiders, or even being 34-weeks pregnant. She's one of six Aussie authors who have published their sun-soaked and salty surf stories in a new book, "Lines to the Horizon" published by Fremantle Press. Madelaine tells Molly Schmidt why even the shore bound will enjoy this book. 

Duration: 9min 46sec
Broadcast: Sat 20 Mar 2021, 6:00am

Goodreads Review - L Phillip Lucas
Red Can Origami

8 May, 2021
By Luke Phillip Lucas

Madelaine Dickie's second novel, Red Can Origami, takes as its subject journalist Ava, who – newly arrived in Australia’s remote northwest – is drawn into the storm surrounding a proposed uranium mine on Indigenous land.

Dickie’s mastery of metaphor and expression is breathtaking. As with so many poets who translocate their eye for detail and crisply original perspective into prose – image, action and emotion are rendered with enchanting beauty and richness. Fittingly for its setting, however, it is never dainty, but rather raw, comic, profound, guttural, mystical, and so very Australian.

Lovers of language will unearth manifold instances of my favourite kind of simile and metaphor, which evinces the essence of its subject with striking yet elegant incongruity, reflecting the ultimate oneness of all things, even those which otherwise seem most disparate. There are crab carapaces ‘big as handbags’ and dugong bones ‘curved like the creamy frames of harps.’ Roads dissolve ‘like red aspirin’ and croc eyes blaze in torch light, ‘bright as fallen stars.’ The moon throws ‘silver rungs down on the mud.’ The sun drips ‘like molten coffee over stone country’ and turns stones into ‘rose lozenges of glass.’ The title itself is an ingeniously apposite analogy for the twisting dance between the Kimberley and Japan that animates so many layers of this succinct novel.

But Red Can Origami is so much more than just pretty.

The truth it knows is this: ours is a world where violence is wrought through ignorance. From afar, the uninitiated presume all realms of knowledge open before them at first glance, never imagining the tricks of the light and distortions of distance confounding their naïve assumptions and brusque conclusions. They move confidently, arrogantly, oblivious to lifetimes and generations of knowledge, dismissing whole disciplines devoted to understanding up close and in context, and searching even still.

In its sensitive inhabitation of the murky realm of competing interests that surround a mining proposal – local, political, economic, environmental, national, international, first nations – the novel defies such simplification. It lives not only in the contest of perspectives between the mining companies and the environmentalists and the native title groups and the locals and the fishermen but within each of them, belying the totalising reductionism of each label. We see the individuals who comprise the corporate edifice, the groups within groups pressed into a unitary native title entity for the sake of bureaucratic ‘consultation.’ The novel is engaged in a continual exercise of dismantling that most misleading of pronouns: ‘them.’ It is a plea for patience, empathy, and attentiveness to the complexity of reality in a space that is so often rife with the opposite.

It laments that atrocities can be so easily forgotten and sacred responsibilities shirked, that a few blithe lines of dissembling corporate-speak can wield so much power. That a grain of truth robbed of context can swell so easily into prejudice. That self-righteousness can be so intoxicating. That noble principles are marshalled to ignoble ends and thereby tarnished.

It’s for others to judge how successfully Dickie has wrangled Australia’s complicated relationship with race. But this seems to me one of the noblest tasks of good literature: to make even slightly more three-dimensional things that are so often reduced to caricature, and to do so with charm, authenticity, humour, beauty and grace. There is so much humanity pressed within these pages. I can’t wait to see what their author turns to next.

The Weekend West
Poetic Pindan

January 26, 2020
By Gemma Nisbet

The Sydney Morning Herald
Red Can Origami

December 21, 2019

Young journalist Ava has moved away from the city, taking up a job as a reporter in a tiny tropical town in Australia’s north. Gubinge is a far cry from the big smoke - a place with picturesque sunsets where you can catch barramundi by hand. But the tranquility is disrupted by an ongoing dispute between Burrika Native Title claimants and Gerro Blue, a Japanese uranium mining company that wants to pay handsome royalties to extract the ore. The proposal deeply divides the Aboriginal community: some see a way out of poverty, others only destruction of sacred country. Red Can Origami feels remarkably uncontrived, despite being narrated in the unusual second person, and is written with verve, wit and a travel writer’s eye for detail.

The Australian
Books of the Year

Ed Wright
December 14, 2019

In poetry, I’ve really enjoyed Chloe Wilson’s Not Fox Nor Axe, MTC Cronin’s God is Waiting in the World’s Yard, and Duncan Hose’s scurrilous The Jewelled Shillelagh. I also went back to TS Eliot. It’s wonderfully strange; what got me was the humour and the musicality, as if the phrases were singing in your head. I also reread much of Les Murray’s wonderful Collected Poems and was reminded of his greatness in the year he left us. I had the pleasure of meeting the Indian writer Tishani Doshi this year. Doshi’s novel, Small Days and Nights, as well as the powerful poetry contained in the collection Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods are superb. My novel of the year, however, was Ceridwen Dovey’s Garden of the Fugitives. Her exploration of character is superb. Madelaine Dickie’s Red Can Origami, set in the Kimberley, has a special quality that has lingered. Rick Morton’s memoir, One Hundred Years of Dirt, is a fantastic account of a difficult upbringing. I’m a sucker for big-picture history and Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari really hit the spot.

Radio New Zealand RNZ
A book review of Red Can Origami

Good Reading
Fiction Book Reviews

Melinda Woledge
January 1, 2020

Ava is an ambitious 20-something journalist. Sick of Melbourne and sure she'll have a better chance of making a name for herself away from the city, she takes a job in the small town of Gubinge in northern Australia. She quickly becomes captivated by the country, going fishing for barramundi, drinking beer to beat the heat, enjoying the sunsets and desiring local man Noah. She stumbles on a big story, which could jeopardise her new life. A Japanese-owned uranium mining company, Gerro Blue, wants to start mining uranium, bringing it into conflict with the local Burrika people and threatening to tear the community in half. Ava writes a story that catches the attention of Gerro Blue's CEO and she is offered a job as the company's Aboriginal liaison offer. She is conflicted about joining the 'dark side' but believes she can better influence the outcome if she is working from the inside out. Can she stay true to her principles, keep her job and still win Noah's heart?

This is a powerful novel on every level. The writing is stunning, capturing the wild nature and beauty of Australia's north. The politics of native title, of white versus Indigenous culture, and of corporate might against the call of country are all thoughtfully explored. If the mine is going to go ahead anyway, is it better for the Burrika owners to receive something rather than nothing? Some believe the mine will destroy their country while others think it will lift their people from poverty. Ava's conflict shows there are no easy answers in this debate. * * * * * Fremantle Press $29.99

Fremantle Shipping News
Book Review - Red Can Origami

MICHAEL BARKER
Fremantle Shipping News
December 2, 2019

I was really intrigued to read Madelaine Dickie’s latest novel, Red Can Origami – just published by Fremantle Press in time for Christmas – as soon as it arrived on my desk.

The reason was that the words in the title – ‘Red Can’, suggesting what is sometimes to be found in Australia’s outback, and ‘Origami’, a Japanese paper art – and the blurb on the back cover, suggested to me a plot line involving an unusual confluence of the cultures of mainstream Australia, Aboriginal Australia, and Japan.

Very little has been written in fictional form, until very recent times, about such a confluence of cultures, and especially the weaving together of Indigenous culture and the wider mainstream Australian culture.

Having said that, Carpentaria by Xavier Herbert (1938), a non indigenous writer, partially gives the lie – although it was pathfinding in its day and remained exceptional for a long time.

And the recent prize winning novel, Too Much Lip by Melissa Lucashenko (2018) shows how Indigenous writers are now moving fast into this field.

One reason for reticence, from a non-Indigenous writer’s point of view, I suspect, for not entering this field, is that not many non-Indigenous writers have the experience, or the insights, or the confidence to do so. It has minefields everywhere, not the least being that bearing the warning of cultural appropriation. Can a gardiya write about Blackfellas and other gardiyas- Whitefellas – in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, for example? Is that permitted?

Well, of course it is. But as a writer, you need to know what you’re doing, where you can go, where you can’t. Offence can be easily, if unintentionally, given. Madelaine Dickie is a writer with an unerring sense of direction, knowing exactly how to negotiate this tricky terrain, where to place her feet safely, where she can go.

For all these reasons, and the fast moving plot too, I loved this book. It is actually something of a page-turner.

Dickie’s first novel,Troppo, was published to critical acclaim in 2017. It involved action in Indonesia. Western values meet Indonesian’.

In Red Can Origami, Indigenous Australian values meet those of the mainstream, and Japanese.

It is set against a native title debate about a mining proposal involving a Japanese-backed company, Gerro Blue, its Japanese executive, Watanabe, and the local Burrika people.

The action happens in a fictional town called Gubinge, which feels a lot like Broome in the Kimberley. Given Dickie worked in that region for a significant period, I think we can safely assume it is.

The Burrika have to decide if they are willing to negotiate an agreement to facilitate the mine. A ‘Yes’ vote might mean the community coffers will be filled, but would that be a good thing for culture?

Noah, a charismatic guy, is the main man for the Burrika. But in his community, as important as he is, his word is not the only one likely to sway the community. He has an ex-wife, Katherine. But how ‘ex’ is she? And what drives her?

Noah also has a feisty sister, Lucia, who works at the local paper.

As does a gardiya journalist, Ava, who has turned up from down south and becomes involved, in everything, with everyone; including the white, ‘expat’ community of gardiyas in Gubinge.

Imogen, Ava’s Melbourne-based sister, provides some outside world ‘reality’ check on where Ava is at at crucial times.

As does Mandy, the flak for Gerro Blue. The mining company wants to enlist Ava to push the native title negotiations to a successful conclusion. Will Ava sup with the devil? But is it the devil?

And there is, of course, a real baddy in all of this, The White Namibian, de Beere! He doesn’t like people with native title rights coming anywhere near his land. Why? And is he all that bad?

There is also a massacre site at Lalinjurra, in the vicinity of the mine site, that muddies the waters.

The scenarios painted by Dickie in this novel are only too real.

You must read this book, obviously, to find out what happens in the end. You will be entertained, you will laugh, and your emotions will be affected. And the plot moves along. As I say, it’s something of a page-turner.

But really good novels also inform and leave you thinking. And this novel does that too. You learn by living through Ava’s experiences: all her high moments, and the low ones too.

So, let me conclude with a couple of final, cryptic notes I made about Red Can Origami as soon as I finished reading the book –

*So well written.

*Evokes the Kimberley so well.

*Gets Indigenous groups and their dynamics.

*Understands the limits of native title.

*So accurately portrays the pressures on people like Noah.

*Respects Aboriginal culture.

*Has a fascinating side line on sex and the single woman.

*Racially blind in so many ways.

*A really good plot.

This is a wonderful second novel. Share it around, once you’ve read it. Better still, buy your friends and family a copy for Christmas! You and they won’t be disappointed. You’ll rightly feel you have learned new insights on the dynamics of native title.

Recently we spoke to Madelaine Dickie about her craft, and this book, listen here. She’s a very interesting person and writer.

The Jakarta Post
A novel bridge between us and them

DUNCAN GRAHAM
The Jakarta Post
February 6, 2017
Original article here

This is how Troppo starts: “The first story I hear about my new boss is in a brothel in Bandar Lampung. I don’t realize it’s a brothel at first. From the outside it looks like a typical Indonesian beauty salon; pink curtains tacked up in a prayer arch over lace, a gritty Salon Kecantikan sign at the front and a becoming ladyboy at the door with toilet paper molded into boobs.” That’s an addictive intro.

Troppo is Australian slang derived from “tropical.” To “go troppo” is to abandon normal conventions, to “go native.” It also means turning crazy.

In the hands of West Australian writer Madelaine Dickie, Troppo is a sinewy take on the people next door seeing Indonesians as humans with flaws and qualities, not economic units in a government statement.

The surfing, skateboarding knockabout’s literary talents won her a Prime Minister’s Australia-Asia Endeavour Award. She used this to live in West Java, where she was mentored at Universitas Padjadjaran and Universitas Islam Bandung while writing her debut novel. The result may not be what they expected.

Promoted as a book about “black magic, big waves and mad Aussie expats,” Troppo follows the life of Penelope, a name associated with steady faithfulness. That’s not her bag, so she becomes Penny, as in dreadful.

Miss adventurous enjoys the Indonesian lifestyle, though her hosts have trouble slotting her into their mindsets. And so will many readers who are not into the religion of surfing and the worship of waves, or too old to remember overwhelming lust and its aftermath.

(Read also: Australia-Indonesia cultural relationship: Those who shaped our critical mind)

It’s 2004, two years after the Bali bombing. Penny is 22 going on 16. She’s a part-time hangover artist and full-time risk-taker on a break in Indonesia from her older conservative boyfriend in Perth. As she says, a bolter when things get too hard.

Soon this liberated lass is getting perved in the shower by masturbators, stalked in the bush by weirdoes and stoned by kids before making it into bed with a thigh-biting pilot who already has a pregnant girlfriend.

While her demure Sumatran sisters are treading an ancient path of service, mapless (but not hapless) Penny is desperately seeking self before her use-by date when tissues sag and a bikini is inadvisable.

The gap between Indonesians and Australians could hardly be wider despite Penny’s sympathies, empathies and occasional eruptions of guilt. She wants to find a bridge, but doesn’t know how, so turns to gin in a water bottle.

She’s set for a job at a resort, where the arrogant and explosive bule boss Mister Shane, a former freedom fighter in Aceh, is in deep trouble with the citizenry.

Penny gets warnings aplenty, but this surfing tragic is still in Pollyanna-land even when thugs hurl rocks through windows while a boozy party is underway.

Yet this libidinous lass is no naïf. She speaks Indonesian, likes street food and sleeps with a knife under her pillow, ready to turn unwanted amorous advances into limp retreats. She can even handle unflushed squat toilets.

The tension builds. Fundamentalists are talking bombs. The expats tell her to go. So do local friends. But with only a third of the book gone and knowing Penny’s temperament, we doubt she’ll be dozing on the next bus south.

Penny’s Indonesia doesn’t feature in airline mags. People are kind and cruel, honest and thieving, dirty and clean, treacherous and loyal — like anywhere. Their cut-andpaste view of outsiders has been colored by brash, exploitative drunks with too much money and too little understanding.

Like Elizabeth Pisani, author of the essential Indonesia Etc, Dickie has insights to offer through her unstable heroine: “For Indonesian people, Islam is a symbol, not an ideology,”

Penny asks a mountain village woman why she has started wearing a jilbab, expecting a deep discourse on faith. The reply — to keep warm.

She ponders the treatment of the elderly: “Here the old people aren’t shut away. They continue to be part of the communi- ty […] everyone has a place”.

The expat group is a handy literary device to explore at- titudes: Aging academics in an ethnographic wonderland, balding failures seeking compliant brown virgins as the whitegoods market has closed, hucksters running businesses denied permits in their rule-bound homeland — and the driftersturned-stayers.

One long-timer says; “The whole world speaks English. Why would I bother learning Indo?”

On the other side are teens trapped by customs dictated by men, controlling clerics, venal cops, dutiful wives whose dreams of a liberated lifestyle are destined to be trashed by frustrated and jealous husbands. They ask Penny about “free sex” and boyfriends, questions as predictable as “where you from, Mister?” Ponders Penny: “Sometimes there are things you can’t explain. Cultural difference so vast you don’t know where to start.” She says she’s from New Zealand. Australia carries too much baggage in Indonesia. What these generally unpleasant people share is a common hatred of Mister Shane, so plot his downfall through black magic and violence, which is bound to cause collateral damage. Enough said. Less able writers would have resorted to clichés in exploring this swamp, but Dickie doesn’t use a monochrome palate. She has a fine sense of places “where the earth holds a memory,” but is more at home with the sea, like compatriot writer Tim Winton. What is it about these beachcrazed West Aussies? They’re always looking away, unlike Indonesians who know they’re at one with the land. Troppo has already won a major award named after journalist and author Tom Hungerford, so Dickie, now 29, seems set to make a mark. Hopefully through revealing another Indonesia: “There’s something intoxicating about living in extreme places, among extreme people. You never, for a moment, forget that you are alive.”

The Sydney Morning Herald
Troppo: Surf, sex and danger in Indonesia

KERRYN GOLDSWORTHY
The Sydney Mornings Herald / The Canberra Times / The Brisbane Times
September 9, 2016
Original article here. 

Penny is a young Australian woman who lives for excitement and pleasure. She likes surfing, sex, alcohol and danger, and having left her partner behind in Perth for a job managing a resort in Indonesia, she is finding plenty of all these things. She describes herself as "restless and reckless", but this hedonistic narrator is also curious and thoughtful about other people, attuned to cultural difference, and alert to the need for respect and empathy.

The plot gathers pace as it goes along, involving a cast of finely drawn characters. There is also some terrifying action, involving the growing climate of resentment against moneyed, heedless tourists, the corruption of the police, and the community's dislike of Penny's boss. There is some beautiful descriptive writing about Indonesia and about surfing and the ocean, lyrical but never gushing and always original.

The Australian
Reviews: Sarah Drummond’s the Sound, Troppo by Madelaine Dickie

DANIEL HERBORN
The Australian
12:00AM August 13, 2016
Original article here.  

(excerpt) . . . 

In Dickie’s Troppo, Penny leaves Perth for a job managing a surf resort in Indonesia. It’s a return to the country she spent time in as a teen that is motivated by her life as a “sleepwalker” in Australia as much as anything else. Yet the story is too smart and too dark to allow its characters to successfully use Indonesia as a land of uncomplicated, hedonistic escape, and members of the bule (foreigner) community she becomes part of are inevitably frustrated in their attempts to break free of their malaise.

In Penny’s case, she has left behind a stalled career and Josh, a seemingly reliable but dull older boyfriend. The resort job is projected to last a few months, but she has no immediate plans to return to their shared home beyond that, if at all. Almost instantly, she meets another Aussie, Matt, who is crossing over from tourist to local and decides she would “like to whip him into long, dangerous conversation”. While he is vague on details about his life or relationship status, his cultivated air of mystery only makes him more appealing: “I’m certain Matt’s a hell-man … and like all hell-men, he courts darkness.”

While the story sets up as being about Penny’s role at the resort, most of the action ends up taking place in the somewhat aimless days before the job begins, when she is getting a feel for the area. It makes for somewhat strange pacing, with a languid set-up abruptly shifting gears and hurtling towards a climax.

Where Troppo is particularly sharp, however, is in its abstract yet precise evocations of the sensory overload of Indonesia and in its dense, poetic riffs on the almost narcotic pull of chasing waves.

During her time with the sensible landlubber Josh, Penny lost this wildness but in Indonesia her thirst for the adventurous, nomadic lifestyle of the hardcore surfer returns as she reflects on “that obsession, that hunt for the perfect moment”.

Meanwhile, Penny’s boss Shane looms in the background like some bogan Colonel Kurtz, with stories suggesting he has well and truly gone troppo. A ladyboy in a beauty salon warns of his volatility, while other expats cast a wary eye over his penchant for drunkenly flouting his adopted home’s cultural norms.

When Penny visits the resort for a bit of pre-work reconnaissance, he presents a rakishly appealing front and paints a dark picture of the recent spike in anti-Australian sentiment. “Elements of sharia law are being adopted all over the place,” he tells Penny. “We’re gunna see more bombings, we’re gunna see beheadings.”

Shane may have trouble looming on yet another front as Matt also has it in for his compatriot and has been seeing a witch doctor for advice. It’s yet another sign to Penny that she should run, but instead she delves deeper into the shadowy world of dukuns.

“There’s something intoxicating about living in extreme places,” she reflects later. “You never, for a moment, forget that you are alive.”

Perhaps not, but both these impressive maritime tales make the subversive, disquieting suggestion that what presents as life-affirming, character-building danger for their protagonists may be just a straight death sentence for somebody else.

Daniel Herborn is a writer and critic.

The West Australian
 

The Broome Advertiser

NICOLA KALMAR
The Broome Advertiser
August 18th, 2016

The annotations of Nathan Hobby - A literary blog from Perth

NATHAN HOBBY
The Annotations of Nathan Hobby - A Literary Blog from Perth
10th September 2016
Original article here. 

I had the pleasure of meeting Madeline Dickie at the TAG Hungerford Award ceremony in March last year. It turns out she’s a good friend of a school friend of mine. She was announced as the winner that night and I’ve been looking forward to her novel coming out since.

Troppo’s first person narrator is Penny, an Australian in her early twenties who’s returned to Indonesia escaping the boredom of her career-focused older boyfriend, Josh, and the sterility of life in Perth. She lives for surfing, adventure, and the excitement of new people. “Risk,” Penny writes, “always make things sharper, throws into contrast the highs and lows, gives clarity. As a surfer, I know this, I’ve lived this. Living in Perth, like a sleepwalker, I’ve missed this.” Penny is drawn to a new man and is torn between her attraction to him and her loyalty to Josh. At the same time, she’s about to begin a new job at a resort run by Shane, an expat with a reputation as a psycho whose business is the focal point of growing tension between the “bules” and the locals. 

There’s an element of Kurtz from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness about Shane and the early chapters feel, in a good way, a little like Marlow’s journey toward a confrontation with the “troppo” madman. Then Penny ventures to the resort ahead of time and the narrative moves in a less linear fashion. In Shane, Dickie has succeeded in creating a dangerous and fascinating character.

Penny is an interesting character too – overwhelmingly physical and tough, yet also self-reflective. She’s looking for the meaning of life just as much as the bookish characters I usually read and write about, but she’s finding it in a different sphere. She’s colloquial but obviously smart. The complexity of her character is revealed in her unlikely penchant for poetry which comes out at several points of the narrative and culminates in a reading of a poem by Geoffrey Lehmann. Too often I think the “rules” of fiction require writers to make characters consistent to the point of reductionism for the sake of verisimilitude; this aspect of Penny is an interesting resistance to this.

Troppo is a celebration of Indonesia. It’s a place which must hold magic for Dickie, and she captures its allure for her, its beauty, dangers, and dirt. “The night air is sticky as cut mango.”  “Hear the sea somewhere below, churning tissues and turds.” Even Bali-belly is a spiritual exercise of a kind: “It’s almost like you have to unlearn everything you know… The first bad nasi campur and you come unravelled. It’s only after hitting battery acid bile that you can start to reweave your resistance, unpick and restitch.” There’s almost an edge of the evangelistic at certain points. “Here, the old people aren’t shut away. They continue to be part of the community.”

I like the short, punchy chapters. They suit Penny and they suit the setting. It’s a novel which is paced both fast and slow; at one level, there’s a lot happening, and yet a lot of it is conversation, speculation, and anticipation. Conversation is actually a major theme – Penny’s fascinated by the idea and rituals of conversation – how locals talk, how expats talk, who’s a good conversationalist and who’s not.

Troppo is a novel which captures the spirit of many people’s early twenties. As well as a compelling depiction of life in Indonesia, it’s an important exploration of Australian identity, as revealed in our complex and problematic relationship with our neighbour. What’s more, it’s a page-turning, accessible read.