With the island community they share stories, song and superstitions, and - never confident in English as their bilingual daughter Hilda is - they feel comfortable retaining some of their traditions. Though the lifestyle is harsh, both are entranced by the beauty of the landscape, and they feel more at home among the Finnish community than they do on the mainland. Although the story moves through three generations of this family, it is the characterisation of these two, Onni and Alva which is the core of the novel. In homage to his brother’s memory, Onni decides to take up Nalle’s lease, bringing his wife Alva with him. Some time passed before Sulo turned up, his hands in his pockets, an apologetic look on his corrugated face.Īnd as the sun moved over the sky, and Onni allowed himself to calculate the days since Nalle had gone missing, he understood that all this searching business, those long stretches adrift on the boat, were likely for his sake more than Nalle’s. As he waited by Sulo’s boat, he felt like a forgotten child. Onni understood that the fishermen were returning to their work. The distant sound of motors grumbling to life, a skipper calling to his deckhand. He saw fishermen sculling out to their moorings.
He noted the slow habitual movements of the island folk. On the third morning, Onni waited again at Sulo’s boat. Onni arrives in time to join the search for Nalle, but it’s called off after two days. There were only a few solitary types, like Latvian Igor, who remained on the island year round. For the other half of the year, when most of the fishermen and their families moved back to the mainland, it was a floating ghost town. During the fishing season, for almost six months every year, it became a small, bustling community, way out here on the verge of the Indian Ocean. It resembled a small, ramshackle village.
Twenty-one corrugated-iron camps now lined the island’s eastern flank, from which a series of topsy-turvy jetties extended like fractured finger bones.
While Onni was labouring in the mines at Northampton on the mainland, Nalle had set up a rudimentary hut on Little Rat Island and become part of the small community of Finnish migrants setting lobster pots during the season, with sojourns on the mainland for the rest of the year. Nalle was the adventurous, ambitious one, a somewhat reckless man willing to take a chance in pursuit of a fortune. The story starts with Onni Saari’s sombre realisation that his brother Nalle has been lost at sea. But in the mid-1950s when the novel begins, life was rugged, precarious and lonely. It’s the absorbing story of a Finnish migrant family who settle on Little Rat Island, off the Western Australian coast in the Abrolhos Islands. Today this cluster of 122 islands 60km from Geraldton is home to WA’s lucrative western rock lobster fishing industry and a tourist destination famed for its exquisite coral reefs, unique wildlife, and intriguing shipwreck history. Shortlisted for the 2020 Vogel Award, Emily Brugman’s novel The Islands is a striking debut.