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Points For Discussion - The Bread with Seven Crusts
‘I curse this war. I don’t see what’s so bloody exciting about it. People get killed you know.’ - Hal - page 49
The characters in the novel have varying attitudes to war. In most cases they change during the course of the story. They seem different from ours today but maybe not so different from George W Bush’s.
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‘I did something really terrible in marrying you. I thought it would be all right.’ -Eddy- Page 441
There are two babies born during the course of the novel. Their arrival causes consternation. Unreliable methods of contraception and strict moral codes forced women into unsuitable marriages or illegal abortions that often lead to misery or death. In a novel set in the Australia of 2002 young women don’t have these problems.
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‘War changes things.’ -Eddy - Page 38
It is commonplace to remark on the way women found emancipation and self confidence in the men’s jobs they were ‘allowed’ to do in wartime. Men also had to face changes.
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-She had been awkward and suspicious with him, but after only two or three visits she looked for him to come. - page 209
There is a correlation between the way we are treating refugees who come here without invitation now and those enemies who ended up here for the duration of the war as prisoners. Attitudes have changed We are more fearful now than we were then.
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‘You come home at night looking like thunder. You hiss and snarl. Or else you’re silent and don’t want to see anyone or go anywhere. If you ever smiled . . . I don’t ask for laughter.’ Eddy. page 441
The men who returned in 1945 after being prisoners of the Japanese for three and a half years, some of them from working on the Burma railway, would these days been given trauma counselling. People are now begining to question its efficacy. The silence by which it was handled by the returned soldiers from WWII might have been better.
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‘Well it’s better if those sort of people are safely put away for the war at least. We don’t want to take any risks. There are enough odd bods about as it is.’ Yvonne. page 193
Australia interned many men of Italian and German origin during World War I and II. Very little is known about that and very little sympathy afforded them. Another parellel to the forgotten refugees in our detention centres.
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-Grace, who’d been seen at a club and again at the races with an American officer while her husband fought it out with the mosquitoes and the Japanese.- page 341
War upset the social status quo. Mores were challenged. Most obviously in what people wore and how they behaved sexually. Although it faded out pretty quickly in the 50’s it came rushing back in the 60’s as if the 50’s had never happened. The attitudes of the baby boomers were a direct result of the effect of the war on their parents.
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‘You love this place.’ Hal broke the silence. Did she? She supposed so. In the way you do your crippled child, because it is yours and because you pity it. She resented it for not being more and admired it for not caring less. - page, 46.
The landscape is one of the characters in the book. Every character has his or her own relationship with it and most are ambivalent to it. Giuseppe’s attitude changes. Even he is affected by it. Environment is so important. The farmers at that time, clearing and establishing broad acres of monoculture had no idea what their families would be facing at the end of the century in the way of land degredation as a direct result of their practices.
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Further Reading
Italian Farming Soldiers Alan Fitzgerald 1981 Melbourne University Press.
Not As A Duty Only Henry Gullet 1976 Melbourne University Press
The Naked Island Russell Bradden 1974 Pan
Westonia Wheels of Change Jocelyn Maddock 1996 Westonia Shire Council
The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea Randolph Stow 1965 Penguin
Yilgarn Lyall Hunt 1988 Yilgarn Shire Council
Oceana Fine Tom Flood 1989 Allen & Unwin
The Hierarchy of Sheep John Kinsella 2001 Fremantle Arts Centre Press.
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