Gregory Day – May 9 2021

Time of Remembrance and Reconciliation for Those Who Lost Their Lives during the Second World War – 8-9 May

Gregory is an award-winning novelist, poet and musician. His CDs include The Black Tower: Songs from the Poetry of WB Yeats, which was hailed by the Yeats Society of Ireland as the finest musical interpretations of Yeats ever made, and The Flash Road, which narrates in a sung and highly literary musical style the building of the Great Ocean Road in southwest Victoria in the years following The Great War. Gregory’s other writing includes the Mangowak trilogy novels The Patron Saint of Eels, Ron McCoy’s Sea of Diamonds and The Grand Hotel, ‘The Neighbour’s Beans’ which won the Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, a regular feature called ‘Mislaid Books of the Sea’ for Great Ocean Quarterly magazine, regular contributions to the literary pages of The Age, The Australian and The Sydney Morning Herald, and long form literary criticism for the Sydney Review of Books. His collaborations include two artist books with Jiri Tibor Novak, visitors and A Smile at Arm’s Length, and the poetry books Six Different Ways with Kieran Carroll and Michael Farrell and Trace with photographer Robert Ashton.

Archipelago of Souls
Picador Australia, 2015; ISBN 9781743537190
In the aftermath of WWII, Australian soldier, Wesley Cress, seeks solace and comfort on King Island. He carries in his heart the infernal story of the Battle of Crete, the disappearance of his brother in the ensuing evacuation, and the hellish journey he was forced to take after he was left behind on the ancient island. When he meets Leonie Fermoy, the granddaughter of an American whaler with her own nightmares, the private and the public battles of their post-war worlds begin to fuse. Through the agency of John Lascelles – postmaster and crusader for the rights of returned soldiers – Wes and Leonie attempt to negotiate a future in which love can prevail in a morally devastated world. Archipelago of Souls is a novel exploring the difficult realities of nationhood, war, morality and love. Compelling and beautifully realised, it is about the creation of identity, the enigmas of memory and the power of the written word to heal the deepest wounds.

A Sand Archive
Picador Australia, 2018; ISBN 9781760552145
Seeking stories of Australia’s Great Ocean Road, a young writer stumbles across a manual from a minor player in the road’s history, FB Herschell. It is a volume unremarkable in every way, save for the surprising portrait of its author that can be read between its lines: a vision of a man who writes with uncanny poetry about sand. And as he continues to mine the archive of FB Herschell – engineer, historian, philosopher – it is not the subject, but the man who begins to fascinate. A man whose private revolution among the streets of Paris in May 1968 begins to change the way he views life, love, and the coastal landscape into which he was born…