Past the Shallows

Past the Shallows is a memorable and moving Australian novel written by Favel Parrett.

Parrett has authentically evoked the teenage voices of three brothers: in particular, the engaging and vulnerable younger brother, Harry. The prose is often spare and understated as it captures the overwhelming sadness of the family’s situation in coming to terms with the loss of the mother in the tough environment in which they live and work.

The novel explores many human experiences: loss, friendship, despair, tragedy, families and the challenges to communicate with the important people in one’s life. This novel reveals people whose lives have been impacted by secrets and are irreparably damaged. There are also the ideas of living in small communities where there are few choices and life is difficult.

Parrett knows the ocean in all its moods which is captured with precision and power in this novel echoing Tim Winton’s coastal landscapes. It is a joy to read and is compelling in its characters and insights.

Key questions based on the rubric

What ideas about human experiences are in the text and how has the composer used techniques to communicate these ideas?

How does Past the Shallows represent individual human experiences?
How does Past the Shallows represent collective human experiences?
How does Past the Shallows give insight into anomalies and paradoxes of human experience?
How does Past the Shallows give insight into inconsistencies of human experience?
How does Past the Shallows represent human qualities?
How does Past the Shallows represent human emotions?
How does Past the Shallows express and reflect particular lives and cultures?
How does the world of Past the Shallows connect to issues in the wider world?
How has the composer of Past the Shallows used language to represent individual and collective human experiences?
How has the composer of Past the Shallows used characters (human experiences) to provoke responders to see the world differently and ignite new ideas?
How has the composer of Past the Shallows used characters (human experiences) to provoke responders to challenge assumptions?
How has the composer of Past the Shallows used characters (human experiences) to express universal themes?
How has the composer of Past the Shallows used form, structure, stylistic and grammatical features (form and techniques) to shape messages about human experiences?

Reading the epigraph

An epigraph is a quotation that is placed at the beginning of a text. It usually has a link to the text or sets the mood. At the beginning of her story Parrett includes an epigraph from the French navigator Admiral Bruni D’Entrecasteaux:

It would be vain of me to attempt to describe my feelings when I beheld this lonely harbour lying at the world’s end, separated as it were from the rest of the universe – ’twas nature and nature in her wildest mood…

Admiral D’Entrecasteaux, 1792

This epigraph is about Tasmania where the novel is set.

What mood and ideas is the novel promoting by foregrounding this quotation?

Chapters One and Two

Past the Shallows Chapters one and two.pdf

Re-read the opening page

Out past the shallows, past the sandy-bottomed bays, comes the dark water – black and cold and roaring. Rolling out the invisible paths. The ancient paths to Bruny, or down south along the silent cliffs, the paths out deep to the bird islands that stand tall between nothing but water and sky. Wherever rock comes out of deep water, wherever reef rises up, there is abalone. Black-lipped soft bodies protected by shell.

Treasure.

Discuss three features of this story which have been established in this opening page and share your ideas with the whole class.

Also consider:

What questions do you have about the setting?
What questions do you have about the subject of the novel?

Context of Past the Shallows

Past the Shallows is set on the coastline of Tasmania in a place called Bruny Island. The Island is only small and is located off the South East Coast of Tasmania. The population of Bruny Island is approximately 600 people, and its unpopulated areas are covered largely in Eucalyptus. Along many of the beaches are rugged cliffs and volcanic rocks up to 200 metres tall. The island is also a popular place for fishing and boating.

The author of Past the Shallows, Favel Parrett, spent much of her time growing up on similar Tasmanian beaches, searching for “treasures” that had been washed up on the shore. She loves to surf and the ocean plays a significant part in Parrett’s life and to a greater extent, her writing.

On this, she says: ”You could always smell the ocean – the salt and slight smell of rotting kelp in the air. .. to me, the setting became one of the main characters in the book, as it brings something dark, sad and ancient to the story."

Favel Parrett

Knowing something about the author is a valuable way of engaging in a text especially when the author is still alive, young and this is her first novel.

Favel Parrett was born on 18 May, 1974. She grew up in Tasmania and now lives in Victoria. She is Australian and a keen surfer. Past the Shallows is her first novel. Her novel was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award.

Interview: Favel Parret

Once terrified by the power and mystery of the ocean, the surfer and debut novelist now finds it an inspiration, writes LINDA MORRIS.

For the seven years that the young Favel Parrett lived in Hobart, the ocean was never far away. Strolling stretches of sandy beach, she'd invariably dip a toe to test the icy water, only to find it too cold for swimming, and then while away hours digging for discarded treasures through the sea's washed up flotsam, gritty shells, crab husks and driftwood. Like a Crusoe castaway, she'd sign her name in the sand and watch as the tide carried it away.

From the shoreline, the slate green Great Southern Ocean looked forbidding and mysterious. Once, when venturing into the sand dunes on a school camp on Bruny Island, she came across an Aboriginal midden and it suddenly occurred to her how tiny her footstep was in the vast ocean of time, and how treacherous and unknowable was the sea.

t wasn't until years later, at the age of 25, that Parrett learnt to surf and became intimate with life beyond the shallows. Surfing gave her new eyes. She came to see how the sea sucked and moved with swells, with silent currents and dark undertows that lay invisible to the naked eye; the way the board rolled rhythmically on the hips of the sea and how that energy radiated from wave to rider.

Were it not for that late introduction to surfing, Parrett says she would have not had the language and the understanding to write Past the Shallows, her debut fiction work launched at this year's Sydney Writers' Festival. When Parrett's young Harry declares he feels the ocean ''right inside him'', he's articulating the author's sacred connection with nature.

''I was this young and fairly impressionable girl and the ocean was always this big, terrifying, wild thing to me. But just sitting on top of the water and letting the energy pulse roll over you, there is thesudden realisation that the ocean is so much bigger than you,'' Parrett says.

''You are not so much a grain of sand in comparison to the forces that govern tides and winds.'

If surfing gave her the power of intimate observation, the untamed coastline of southern Tasmania, once her home, provides a dark backdrop for Past the Shallows, serving as a state of purgatory for Harry and his brothers, Miles and Joe, living with their brooding, malevolent father in a tumbledown shack on the scrubby fringes of civilisation.

Blue-eyed Harry - mistrustful of the ocean, as Parrett had once been - and Miles - forced to quit school for drudgery on his dad's trawler - find themselves caught in an ominous cloud of unresolved tension surrounding their mother's death. Bereft of adult love, they turn to each other and the village outcast, the disfigured George Fuller, to shelter from the rages of their erratic father, whose anger only quickens as he is forced to take dangerous risks to harvest black-lipped abalone.

When Parrett was 15 she spent a year - and many subsequent summers - with her mother Lyn, who moved to the far south coast to renovate an old federation farm house. The French explorer Admiral d'Entrecasteux had surveyed this lonely piece of coastline in 1792 and declared he had arrived at the world's end: ''T'was nature and nature in her wildest mood.''

''You could always smell the ocean - the salt and slight smell of rotting kelp in the air. When the tide went out, the river edges would become a giant mud pool. I also remember the night sky - how incredible and endless it was, so full of stars. To me, the setting became one of the main characters inthe book, as it brings something dark, sad and ancient to the story.''

At 36 the diminutive, auburn-haired Parrett carries the look of sweet surprise of someone who still can't believe her luck that she is to be a published author. Never did she seriously think it possible that it would happen to her. Past the Shallows took three years to write from concept to final draft. Always a ''scribbler'', she had short stories published in journals, including Island and Wet Ink and then, after dropping out of university and working as a postman, started a creative writing course at TAFE. She never did complete the class but pressed on with the novel. With some flesh still to be applied to the bare bones of her manuscript, she was selected to take part in the Hachette Australia/Queensland Writers Centre Manuscript Development Program in 2008, which saw promise in the story of three brothers. The next year she was awarded a mentorship by the Australian Society of Authors.

Underlying Past the Shallows is the primal fear of a loss of a sibling and it doesn't take a psychologist to sense that Parrett and her brother James, a noted Melbourne sculptor, are close. The siblings held fiercely together through their parents' troubled marriage and their relocation from Victoria to Tasmania. Shy country kids alone and friendless in Hobart, they used to go roller skating together at Woody's Roller World. They went there most Saturdays for six months. Favel was eight and James was six.

It was James who later taught her to skateboard, urged her to take up surfing, resume writing after giving it up for university study and persuaded her to spend her grandmother's inheritance to set up a writing studio in the Nicholas Building in Melbourne, in the same room where Gregory Roberts wrote Shantaram.

''The way I feel about my brother is all in my writing,'' says Parrett, who bequeathed James's blond curls to Harry. ''One of the worst things that could have happened to me when I was a child would have been losing my brother. Often siblings from broken families have to rely on each other because that's all you've got. And it's not like we didn't fight but just not as much as other siblings. We always thought we'd be OK, no matter what happened in our family, because we had each other.''

Parrett writes with the minimum of verbal strokes. Her ungarnished, direct prose denies her the chance of reflective distance, but in her defence she says it was about finding the right rhythm and weight of words of her child narrators. Something of the compressed, linear narrative is told off the page, in the spaces between words; in the awkward silences between an incommunicative father and sons without language to articulate hurt.

The story tumbled out in fragments, in stepping stones, with nothing like a map or outline to guide the author. The cherry red interior of the family car, the bits of its carcass discovered in granddad's shed, came to her out of sequence and made sense only when she much later inserted the flashback scenes of the car crash, so pivotal to the father's course of self-destruction.

'For me, writing is dealing with unknowns. It is like staring into the darkness to try and see what is there. Slowly scenes appear, slowly the picture becomes clear - but it takes consistent work and concentration. Mostly it takes time.''

Fellow Australian author Robert Drewe, who has probed similar coastal landscape as Parrett, thinks Past the Shallows is an evocative and confident first novel. Hyperbolic comparisons between Tim Winton and any new young Australian novelist who writes about the coast are inevitable but ''I think she has the goods to make her own reputation''.

These days Parrett divides her week between the Melbourne studio, where she is threading together her second novel, and Torquay, where she is out most mornings surfing on her old and grimy 6ft 10in Ashley board. One morning when we exchanged emails she was elated she had Torquay Point to herself. Instead of inscribing her name in the sand as she did as a child, she scratches out ''Aloha'' on the beach. ''[It's] to say I realise that this is something special. That it means something. That it is a gift of time and space.'

Write

After reading this article write a 250-word reflection opening with:

Reading this article has given me new insights into/about …

Where is the story set?

The setting for any story is a significant part of the text’s meaning. While it is not definite when this novel is set there are hints and the mood of the 1980s but the geographical setting is very clear and indeed, a significant element of the novel’s distinctiveness and appeal. Parrett knows this area of Australia, Tasmania, which gives the novel much of its authenticity and realism.

Most importantly, the role of water – both the ocean and the rivers – is a compelling element of the setting and engenders much of the text’s dark power.

Bruny Island – and its Southern end in particular – is a wild and untamed area which attracts tourists for these features. Its pristine waters are well known for growing mussels, scallops and abalone. So, geographically this novel is set in the isolated and rugged south coast of Tasmania. The weather is often changeable, unrelenting in its cold and bleakness and is home to small towns and settlements where the people depend on the fishing industry for their livelihood. Swimming and surfing are challenging because of the weather and the temperature of the water.

The novel actually opens at Cloudy Bay which is a beach break exposed to the Southern Ocean on Bruny Island and one of Australia’s most southern surfing beaches. Surfing sites warn about the water temperature, rips and sharks but applaud the lack of crowds and the excellent surfing conditions during a northerly wind.

Socially and culturally the novel focuses on the small, coastal settlements where the main work is associated with the fishing industry and specifically, abalone harvesting. While the final abalone meat is a delicacy and is very expensive, it is difficult work and the financial rewards can be limited. This is a culture represented by white, essentially Anglo-Saxon and conservative values where life is difficult and making a living is often precarious. This is the life of the Curren family.

Watch this video of Bruny Island. As you watch, write down some descriptive words and phrases that you could use in creative writing, like visual imagery, descriptions of mood and so on.

Watch these videos to get a sense of what working on a fishing trawler is like

Creative Writing

After viewing the videos, write an imaginative piece of writing by these settings.

Write around 600-700 words

What are we looking for as we read the novel the first time?

Use this reading journal to gather key quotes from the novel.

Reading Journal - Past the Shallows

Page updated

Report abuse