What are we talking about? Wild Chicory is the accomplished first novella from Australian author Kim Kelly. It follows several generations of the Kennedy family as they move from the coast of County Kerry in Ireland to rural New South Wales and the slums of Sydney’s Surry Hills. Nell Kennedy comes to Australia as a young girl and leaves it as an old woman (in death)—having experienced a lifetime of love, laughter and loss in the years in between. Nell’s granddaughter, Brigid, carries her grandmother’s stories and interweaves them with her own to create a heart-warming tapestry that celebrates the resilience of Australia’s Irish immigrants. It’s worth a look.

Elevator pitch … This evocative novella traces an Irish immigrant journey to Sydney at the turn of the 20th century—revealing the challenges and opportunities this family faces and embraces down the decades as they forge a life in their new homeland. It’s a book about the power of storytelling and the special relationship that can arise between a grandmother and granddaughter. It’s also about how the land—our land in rural Australia—can get under people’s skin and how this love of the land can be passed on.

The buzz … The praise is building for Wild Chicory and here’s some of it: ‘Story-telling is clearly encoded in [Kim Kelly’s] DNA’ … ‘A beautiful story, deeply emotional’ … ‘The kind of story that lingers long after the last page’ … ‘An uplifting, absorbing, surprising read with sly wit and a lightness of spirit’ … Read Wild Chicory soon and add your thoughts to the list.

The talent … Kim Kelly’s four novels are Black Diamonds, This Red Earth, The Blue Mile and Paper Daisies. Wild Chicory is her first novella. Kelly is also a book editor and literary consultant, better known as Kim Swivel. While Wild Chicory is primarily a work of fiction, Kelly drew on stories shared by her grandmother, Lillian Kelly, to fuel the narrative. She also swirled a smattering of the lore of her Irish family (the Kellys and the O’Reillys) and her husband’s family (the Brownlees and the O’Brees) into the mix to give her tale heart and veracity. Read Wild Chicory then tell me: Do you, too, think Kelly has the Irish storytelling gene?

The backstory … ‘Taking a break between novels, this little story sprang unexpectedly out of my heart and wrote itself in a month,’ says Kelly. ‘I suddenly felt the need to express to my readers and to myself where my stories come from, and what my cultural roots are, how the Irish storytelling tradition has worked its way in me. I’ve never been more excited about one of my books, not least because I’m trying something new and different.’

In a nutshell … This is a compelling slice-of-life portrait featuring several generations of ordinary Irish-Australians as they find their feet in their strange, new land. It is stories that help these ‘hard-working dreamers’ (as Kelly calls them) celebrate their joys and bear their losses as they live through war, peace, poverty and prosperity. The indelible bond between a granddaughter, Brigid, and her grandmother, Nell, is also beautifully conveyed. It’s a slip of a book at around 100 pages but it punches well above its fighting weight.

Interesting quote to mull … ‘As they left the Irish coast from the mouth of the Lee, Dan Kennedy held his small daughter’s hand tighter for seeing his green country disappear in to the grey mist and the sea for the last time. There was no question of ever coming back; it was not in the realms of his imagination, nor a practical reality, that he would ever raise the fare again to return. He would never again have a farm to sell—nor a Father Maloney to arrange for the church to purchase it at such a fair price as he’d got or so he’d been assured. That his family had held on to that little patch of Ballymacyarn through famine that stole a million lives, and before that through generations of penury by taxes and rents charged by generations of lords who ruled over them, only for him to leave now in this whispering, dragging defeat smashed him to pieces inside. He felt so near to crying, his wife knew not to say a word to him as he gazed out across the Celtic sea.’

Why wild chicory? How does the plant feature? Why wild chicory?—well, it’s not a potato! The potato famine in Ireland in the mid-1800s ruined countless lives and left a bitter legacy. When Nell’s family emigrates from Ireland to Australia they’re looking for a fresh start in a place they won’t starve. Wild chicory grows in the paddocks of Nell’s father-in-law’s property. As Nell says: ‘They were such lovely things, these blue flowers, blooming so sweetly out of their shabby, spindly stalks, that would rise up by midsummer shoulder-high. They became her new, giant forget-me-nots, in this new, so foreign place, and when she walked among them she would remember her own lovely father, that kind and lively colour to his eyes.’

Nell’s father-in-law manages the wild chicory well so it brings ‘a small profit in a good year’. Likewise Nell’s parents drink chicory powder to ‘warm them on the inside’. Throughout the novella, wild chicory acts as a symbol of hope, health and transformation. While Nell had once seen the plant as ‘a sack of rotten, twisted witches’ fingers … [she soon realised it] was something else again. Reborn. Replanted. So life goes; so wisdom grows.’

What’s it got to do with the central west of New South Wales? Originally from Sydney, Kelly now lives in Millthorpe, in the hills of central western New South Wales. When Kelly and her husband first saw the land that would later become their ‘little patch of paddock-paradise’, she heard the wild chicory whispering to her that she’d write ‘amazing things’ in this place. It was true: The words flowed freely but Kelly doubted the worth of her creative efforts. It was at this point she saw a vision of her grandmother, Lillian. Lillian is about to tell her a story—one of the many she’d told Kelly about being poor and Irish in Sydney in the early 1900s. The vision reminded Kelly that the stories she writes are not hers alone but, rather, arise from ‘the centuries of love and wonder and courage that put me here on this earth, on this particular patch of paradise’. Wild Chicory was the result.

When Nell marries her sweetheart Stevie O’Halligan (a pig-farmer’s son from Armagh) they move to Stevie’s father’s property in Guyong in the central west to help him with the farm. Jim O’Halligan is a miserable coot who carries with him ‘a ghostly cloud of grief … two hundred years in length’. It’s the grief of the Irish oppressed by the English and by starvation from fickle seasons. (A few historical hardships Kelly mentions include: ‘the bloody rebellion of 1798 that saw men burnt alive, their women raped and slaughtered’, ‘the great grain famine of 1740 that killed two million’, and the disastrous potato famine of the mid 1800s.)

Stevie is transplanted in his youth from Ireland to Australia—into what Jim calls ‘grow-anything soil’—and has a cheerful disposition. He chooses to break free of the ‘vinegar on the soul’ that has crippled his father but war soon intervenes to dampen his reverie. When Stevie returns home in 1944, he has witnessed the horror in the islands and in the jungles of New Guinea. Nell notices that he smokes more than he did. He also tells her by his ‘careful silence, “You don’t have to worry about me, Nell. There are plenty who’ve had a much harder time of it.”’ She knows it’s true.

What about Wild Chicory’s beautiful cover? Hunting for cover images, Kim Kelly sent a photograph of the wild chicory that grows near her home in rural New South Wales and that inspired her novella to her publisher Lou Johnson from The Author People. Johnson sent Kelly a photograph of her daughter Ruby—and Kelly was elated: ‘She [Ruby] was Nell—the little girl in my Wild Chicory. The little girl sprung from the stories my grandmother told me, and from the love we shared.’

You’ll love it if … You love a pacey narrative packed with sensually rich descriptions like this one: ‘Ellen Mary Kennedy—otherwise known as Nell, Nellie, Hell’s Nell or Stick Legs—was born on New Year’s Day, squawking into the dawn of 1906, so loud she brought a ton of snow crashing from the roof. She’d come early, in every way, and so was skinny as a rake from that very first minute of her life. No matter what her mother fed her, it never stuck to her bones.’ You’ll also love it if you want some history, romance and a tug or two at the heartstrings. Prepare to be moved.

What else can I read that’s like Wild Chicory? I immediately thought of Ruth Park’s Harp in the South and Poor Man’s Orange. Published in 1949, Poor Man’s Orange is the sequel to The Harp in the South (published in 1948) and continues the story of the Darcys, a Catholic, Irish-Australian family living in the Sydney suburb of Surry Hills, which was then an inner-city slum. Both books are fabulous—seek them out. There is also a prequel called Missus, which I’ve not read.

Why read Wild Chicory? … It’s short, shapely and transporting. In fact, read it twice to make sure you unearth its many gems. I loved this one, ‘She [Nell] hardly weighed more than ten feathers in a paper bag, so her dad would always say. “She couldn’t tear a spider web if she ran through it with a hammer,” her mother would tell Mrs O’Neill at the door.’ Enjoy!

The details …
Wild Chicory
Kim Kelly
The Author People, $14.99 PB, $6.99 eBook