Born in 1945, Helen Hodgman came to Tasmania from Britain as a child. She went to school at Hobart High, and worked in a bank and a bookshop before marriage and motherhood in 1965. She co-founded the Salamanca Place Gallery in 1969; soon after making that important gift to the Hobart arts community, she left for Europe. Her writing career began in London with Blue Skies.

For all its 1970s feminist feeling, the novel evokes an earlier decade. It could be an antipodean Mad Men. Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip, published only one year later, belongs to a different world.

I can’t say that Blue Skies comes up smiling. The popular song offers an ironic commentary on a black comedy, all the darker for being set in the domestic world of prams and lawnmowers. The unnamed narrator lives with her husband, James, and baby, Angelica, in a nice little house close to a beach, within a bus ride of Hobart. Round the corner lives the baby’s doting grandmother, whose disapproval of her daughter-in-law is made evident in broad hints about the right way to do nearly everything. The two women tolerate each other because the young mother’s need for a regular escape from home coincides with the grandmother’s wish to have the baby to herself.

Tuesdays and Thursdays are the narrator’s days of escape. She has a friend for each day, both of whom are shady as well as crazy. As she is quietly unhinged too, they give one another a sense of release. The Tuesday friend, Jonathan, owns and ineffectually manages a Hobart restaurant where the two of them sit in a corner and drink through lunchtime. Back at his flat, he sleeps all afternoon while she rummages among his chaotic belongings. Her day with the Thursday friend, Ben, who is an artist, and husband of her best friend, Gloria, combines dressing-up games, sex, sleep, and mutual boredom; they fill in the day. On the way home, she is the last passenger in the bus. Without fear, desire, or pleasure, she accepts the greasily lascivious bus driver’s sexual advances.

Helen Hodgman

The disappearance of Jonathan, pursued by scandal about a pornography charge, doesn’t seriously disturb the young woman; she visits his flat, packs up a dozen eggs so as not to waste them, and, for no special reason, takes home a pair of boots and a whip.

The visits to Jonathan and Ben are varied with interludes in the city’s Museum and Art Gallery, where the paintings show ‘vulnerable white bodies beneath flawless blue skies’. A new painting brings on a panic attack.

Large Aboriginal figures stood staring out from a background of native grave-posts and ritual totems. Somewhere, out beyond the tightly knit group and the grave-post barricade the landscape burned and glowed. In its place, in proportion. There was a message somewhere in all this but today was not the day to get it. I made it to the door.

The novel is vague about time and place. The days are too long. The domestic routine goes on. The washing machine completes its daily cycle; the morning newspaper is thrown on to the lawn. At the edge of vision there are incongruities, ghostly presences. Everything is slightly out of proportion. Images of Tasmania’s slaughtered Aborigines appear on the darkening beach as well as in the gallery. The domestic interiors are too bright, too perfect; the conversations full of breezy little platitudes. No one is directly addressed by first name; words like ‘love’ or ‘my dear’ are said mechanically. The baby has as little reality as a carefully dressed doll.

Blue Skies is a Desperate Housewives story with an unsettling edge. Boredom, inertia, anti-depressants (which are prescribed but not taken), give a minimal explanation for the narrator’s incapacity to feel. The disappearance of Jonathan, leaving bloodstains on the carpet, seems unimportant. Gloria’s fate is only briefly disturbing. The narrator’s strongest emotion, apart from the fear roused by the shadowy Aborigines, is her rage at her next door neighbour, a garrulous woman who tends obsessively to her rectangle of unconvincing lawn, a pale, thin growth, shaved almost daily. The lawn is a ‘pampered patch’ among native grasses that rustle and sway in the wind.

The ending of this elegantly written, atmospheric novel works neatly. Instead of the smashed pram on the cover, the designer could have given us a lethal lawnmower. It comes to the same thing.