The Seal Woman by Beverley Farmer. New edition Giramondo, 2025 (original edition UQP 1992)

Beverley Farmer was awarded the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction for her collection of short stories, Milk, in 1984 and was shortlisted/ longlisted for the Miles Franklin and Stella award/prize respectively for other work. But perhaps her most prestigious honour was the Patrick White Award in 2009, which White established in order to afford acknowledgement to Australian writers who had not been sufficiently recognised.

Farmer’s body of work included several genres, and The Seal Woman was her second-published novel, firstly in 1992 by UQP, and then, this new eidition, by Giramondo in 2024. There is little surprise as to why the book has been re-presented, as it is a mesmerising text about loss, the connectedness of all living things – whichever hemisphere of the planet they are in – and a warning about the ever-growing damage to their ecosystems. The grey-toned painting, Woman and Sea, by Joy Hester, one of the members of the Angry Penguins and Heide Circle of Modernist artists, is on the front cover of this new publication.

Seals are prominent in various world mythologies because of the peculiarity that they are able to live on land as well as sea. Selkies, seals that live as water animals and also as humans, (most commonly in Celtic and Norse tales), have been associated with the themes of transformation, freedom and loss, as well. Selkie women tended to be treated badly by men, and the main love interest for the protagonist/narrator in The Seal Woman fits somewhat into this paradigm.

The novel, set in 1988, is a first person narrative written from the point of view of Dagmar, a middle-aged Danish woman who spends a year in neighbouring villages, Swanhaven and West Head, on the Victorian South Coast. Recently widowed when her husband, Finn, is never found after a boat explosion on The Kattegat, a bay in Southern Scandinavia, Dagmar returns, at the request of friends, to the area in Australia where she had spent time, twenty years before. A lover that she meets on this return trip, Martin, and her relationship with Finn, consume much of the narrative. Martin is a librarian at the local university, knowledgeable on the arts in general and, in particular, mythologies.

Employing a narrator from Northern Europe now living at the other end of the planet is a clever device by Farmer, in terms of her character navigating a foreign culture and language. The Seal Woman is dense with ancient beliefs, practices and myths from Old Norse, the Innuit and Indigenous Australia. Conception, the connections between humans and other animals, including seals, as well as death are prominent topics in these traditions. Dagmar, Martin and Tessa, a local librarian friend to Dagmar and love interest for Martin, educate each other from their different perspectives about this knowledge. In the interests of a sophistication of prose, most of the narrative avoids Dagmar’s difficulties with English, but in conversation with Martin, she is portrayed as negotiating the nuances of Australian English vocabulary.

The natural world, mainly of a small geographic and marine area, is observed with astonishing detail and precision in the novel. (For many years, Farmer did reside and work in the towns of Queenscliff and Pt Lonsdale, which Swanhaven and West Head are based on). Dagmar states:

Vandmœnd, thick jellyfish, were in the water around the jetty one day…In the shallows they were blown eels of glass, as fine as the eels in a fen, glass bones in waves of flesh. (152)

Later, she also refers to herself as having “glass bones”. Many of the descriptions about non-marine entities are in oceanic terms, also, such as:

In the moonlight the silvery corrugated iron on the roofs drips with dew and they look like scallop shells (9)

and

The shape of time is the winding stair, coil, a spiral … A wentletrap, and a life is the seaflesh folded inside. (109)

For this reader, Farmer is more than a match for Winton in the literary representation of coastal Australia.

Environmental concerns are ever present in the narrative. Dagmar says of Finn, and Knut, a close family friend in Denmark:

Of all the harms the earth suffers at the hands of man, most of all those two men feared what is foretold for the ice: global warming, the melting of the ice caps, the loss of their white worlds. (130)

Occasionally these concerns are presented overtly as blocks of information from references, such as when Tessa finds articles for Dagmar on seals in Scandinavian waters suffering from toxins. Interestingly, since the first publication of The Seal Woman, the impact of acid rain, which is referred to in the novel, has now significantly lessened in Northern Europe, where stronger emission controls have come into being.

The Seal Woman is a novel with a clear narrative arc, albeit a slow-moving one, but overwhelmingly it is a patient reverence for the continuity of time, rhythm of the seasons, the oceans and, of course, its living creatures.

 – Lyn Chatham

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Lyn Chatham was awarded an MA in Writing and Literature at Deakin University in 2024. In 2022 she had an essay published in Meanjin and in 2018, her poetry chapbook, Artisan, was published by Melbourne Poets Union. In 2005, her memoir, Martino’s Story, was shortlisted in the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards.

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The Seal Woman by Beverly Farmer is available from https:/ /giramondopublishing. com/books/beverley-farmer -the-seal-woman/