Everyone has a limit – what they can and can’t read or watch – mostly due to their personal experiences in life and how they are triggered by fiction. I avoid disaster movies. And, until now I did not realise I was avoiding books like The Leaves by Jacqueline Rule. I don’t mind a harrowing story – Shuggie Bain for instance. But, there you go. That is the thing about book clubs – at least ours – you must read outside your usual choices.
The Leaves by Jacqueline Rule is the story of Luke, a young Aboriginal boy who loses his mother and spends his childhood with a succession of foster carers, followed by homelessness and juvenile detention. Rule is a lawyer with a PhD in literature and has the statistics right. Children who enter child protection are more likely to become homeless and more likely to enter the youth justice system.
The book’s voice is hard to describe – there is a dreamy quality to the prose, with a mixture of poetry and immediacy which took me a while to appreciate but proved to be immersive. Being inside the heart of Luke, his confusion and need in such a present way, the powerlessness he experiences, is dispiriting. The prose rolls out like a series of memories being made in real-time. Rule is not telling us this story. She is showing us what it feels like to be Luke and it is harrowing.
He can’t open his eyelids until he rolls over, his chin
Pressed downwards, embracing the floor, a horizontal
Slab, stiff, sallow, glassy against his palms.
From the corridor, whimpers, cries, breathless boots.
– Jacqueline Rule, The Leaves
My criticism is that Luke is portrayed as a victim of a system, and the people in the system, the social workers, and the foster carers seem comparatively soulless. And yet, I know foster carers and people working in the child protection system – both in government and non-government – who are completely dedicated to the welfare of children and young people who often carry deep trauma. The book is challenging and you could be left thinking everything is hopeless. But it can’t be and it is not allowed to be. There is a dire shortage of foster carers in Queensland. There is the thing you can do. You can be a foster carer.
Kathryn Gossow has been writing and publishing short and flash fiction in a variety of genres since 2006. Her debut novel Cassandra was a finalist in the Aurealis Awards for Best Fantasy Novel in 2017. Her second novel, The Dark Poet is a collection of short stories on the dangers of charisma. Her third novel, Taking Baby for a Walk a little thriller in a little country town was published in 2021. Kathryn is also one of the editors of South of the Sun: Australian Fairy Tales for the 21st Century. Her books are available (almost) everywhere