“Photography has without doubt made her a seer; she is a woman of the future, someone leaning into time, beyond others, precarious, unafraid to fall.”
In 1860, when they are just eight and ten, Lucy Strange and her brother Thomas are orphaned. Left now in the care of their uncle, the children begin slowly, frighteningly, to find their place in the difficult world. And so begins Lucy's adolescent journey of discovery, one which will take her away from her childhood home in Australia, first to London, then to Bombay and finally, to her death, at the age of twenty-two. It is a life abbreviated, but not a life diminished. Lucy is a remarkable character, forthright, gifted and exuberant; she touches the lives of all who know her.
Written in confident, finely interwoven and intricate layers, Sixty Lights is the powerful chronicle of a modern and independent young woman’s life in the Victorian world. Objects evoke memories and hint at the future in a narrative that flows between pleats in time. Through her observation of such objects Lucy’s photographic vision is apparent. Her world is a series of still images which one day, printed on albumen paper, she will leave as affecting mementoes of her own extraordinary life.
Epigraph: "There has never been a time without the photograph, without the residue and writing of light." - Eduardo Cadava
'Whereas much scholarship still associates migrant fiction in Australia with social or documentary realism, this chapter emphasizes its playful, iconoclastic, and experimental qualities. It questions the conventional long form as a closed, stable narration that relies on summation and style. Instead it turns to short fiction, examining writers such as Tom Cho, Nicholas Jose, and Melanie Cheng who operate as transnational, experimental, and decolonial forces in Australian writing.' (Publication abstract)
'The Australian writer Gail Jones excels at "transnational writing" and Sixty Lights is one prominent example. The novel explores the themes of home, travel and "intercultural fort\da" by highlighting the fluidity of identity. Lucy changes her "home" frequently only to showcase the difference of her identity, and her three journeys across the ocean construct her identity within the sameness. Hence Lucy carries out the practice of "intercultural fort\da," pursuing "the contact zone," which exemplifies "contradictory subject positions," "relationality," and "situationality." In this neo-Victorian novel, Lucy’s identity transcends space and time, dispelling the contradictions and anxieties in the construction of her cultural identity. She finally becomes a unique "global traveller" and a "woman of the future."' (Publication abstract)
