The Captain's Daughter Downunder: COOKING & CURIOSITIES

The cookery blog WHAT WE ATE documents 70-odd years of personal experience of the food and culture of New Zealand & Australia, and some of the history of the recipes. Find the version which uses the revised Blogger software, with links to the earlier posts, at: What We Ate:

Some oddities and favourite things, some for sheer fun, some because they’re so attractive I wanted to share them, feature in A Modern Cabinet of Curiosities:

Enjoy! Any queries or comments? The “Blogger” software allows you to post them online, but you can always contact me at katywiddop@gmail.com

SYNOPSIS

The Captain’s Daughter Downunder is the 3rd volume in The Captain’s Daughter series, and the sequel to The Captain’s Wife. The scene has now changed to Australia, and we meet a different cast of characters.

It might seem a long stretch from the wilds of suburban Australia to a movie location for exotic Singapore in the 1950s, but not when your cousin’s Lily Rose Rayne, 21st-century Marilyn Monroe and darling of the tabloids, and when the film in question is Derry Dawlish’s production of The Captain’s Daughter, with exotic bits of the Queensland rainforest posing as exotic Singapore.

Dot Mallory is only twenty when her story begins, and her cousin Rosie hasn’t even left for England yet, let alone metamorphosed into the famous Lily Rose. And when you’re a uni student living at home you’re at the mercy of your rellies, and liable to suffer the awful fate of being sent off to stay with Aunty Kate for a typical Adelaide Chrissie in a very nice Adelaide suburb.

Which is how Dot meets the composer David Walsingham. And this is where the story really begins…

Dot has to cope, with mixed results, with the trauma of 9/11, with the embittered David, who’s nearly twenty years her senior, with the temptation to throw in her interesting IT job in favour of the fascination of the Big Screen, with a crush on that rising star of British Theatre, handsome Euan Keel, with the rellies—not a minor point—and just generally with life as we know it.

The bright, common-sensical Dot’s story intertwines with that of the visiting firemen in the movie production, and of Ann Kitchener, the journo who gets the plum job of following the progress of the film from “go” to “woe”. And there’s plenty of woe. But plenty of laughs, too.

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COOKING & CURIOSITIES

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