It should have been a paradise, but paradise is what you lose, it is what you might have had.
An elderly woman who has lived for many years on a tropical island off the Queensland coast with her beachcomber husband waits for help from the mainland. For three harrowing days, alone. He has died, his body lies in their cabin just up from the beach, and while she awaits help she reviews her reclusive life there, of nearly 25 years with him. She is a woman with a glint in her mind's eye.
The Beachcomber's Wife draws upon the published writings of E.J. Banfield, who lived an isolated life with his wife Bertha on Dunk Island through the first decades of the twentieth century. He made very little reference to her in his work (Confessions of a Beachcomber and others). This account imagines what it might have been like from her point of view. It follows Banfield's practice, of fact cemented with fiction.
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Adrian Mitchell was born in Adelaide, and for many years taught and published in Australian literature, at the University of Adelaide and then at the University of Sydney, where he remains an Honorary Research Associate. His interest now is in retrieving the stories of those who have been passed over or forgotten, and in finding new ways of re-presenting them.
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'Artfully constructed … Adrian Mitchell has written a thought-provoking fiction in The Beachcomber's Wife.' - Lisa Hill, ANZ Litlovers Litblog
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'A beautifully told story of one woman's struggle to make a home against all the odds … Adrian Mitchell's exquisite writing captures the essence of the island in such a way that the reader becomes immersed in the life upon it.' - Phillip Howlette, The Compulsive Reader
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'The Beachcomber's Wife is an ode to the rarely-mentioned Bertha Banfield (nee Golding), and imagines her life as the companion to an irascible but brilliant chronicler of everything around him… except his wife … Of her life, Bertha says, 'I would have liked to have known that I mattered.' Thanks to Mitchell's efforts, we can assure her that she did.' - Helene Williams, Historical Novel Society
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'This narrative is imaginative and beautifully told by Adrian Mitchell.' - Ian Lipke, Queensland Reviewers Collective
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'Adrian Mitchell's willingness to listen to a long silent woman's voice not only rectifies an historic imbalance but, in the process, has produced a delightful and insightful novel of marriage, isolation, adventure and a life in nature.' - Danielle Clode, Transnational Literature