Book Club: Robert Drewe’s Nimblefoot delves into the life of ‘Australia’s first international sporting hero’

NIMBLEFOOT

Robert Drewe (Hamish Hamilton, $32.99)

Some years ago, Robert Drewe was shown a portrait, dating from 1866 and held in the National Library of Australia collection, of a boy named Johnny Day. Though the renowned WA writer — the author of titles including The Shark Net and The Bodysurfers, and a long-time columnist for The West Australian — had never heard of Day, he was intrigued by the story of his achievements as a world-champion competitive walker and later a Melbourne Cup-winning jockey — all before the age of 15.

It’s easy to see the appeal: Day was, Drewe writes, “Australia’s first international sporting hero, and possibly the world’s youngest-ever world champion”, succeeding in the then-popular sport of pedestrianism and winning the Cup riding a horse named, of all things, Nimblefoot. And yet, Drewe writes that “research into his life after his Melbourne Cup victory proved fruitless. How strange, I thought, that the famous walker and rider had left no cultural footprint.”

Drewe’s latest book, also called Nimblefoot, aims to remedy this, boldly blending historical truth with invention to fill in the very wide gaps in official records, from Day’s childhood as a Ballarat butcher’s son through his rise to sporting prominence. The mystery of his life after his horseracing win, meanwhile, becomes a larger-than-life tale of a young man on the run after witnessing a murder in a brothel, gaining narrative momentum as the novel imagines its subject’s adventures throughout the colonial-era South West of WA.

Switching between first and third-person narration and incorporating extracts from newspaper reports and letters, Nimblefoot evokes the feeling of a life assembled from snatches of archival material even as Drewe blurs the line between the factual and the imagined. The result is a playful, meandering novel whose vivid vignettes offer an exuberantly detailed and often idiosyncratic portrait of a historical figure previously lost to popular memory.

HOLY WOMAN

Louise Omer (Scribe, $29.99)

Before Louise Omer’s marriage split up, she was “a wife, a Pentecostal, a preacher”. After the relationship broke down, she began to question not only these roles but also whether “women can belong in a patriarchal religion”. Omer is a candid and engaging guide to the feminist-minded spiritual seeking that followed, as she set off with only $500 to her name on a journey that would take her from Australia to Ireland, Mexico, Morocco and beyond. Interwoven with this is the story of her path into religion, after meeting a charismatic school pastor as a teenager searching for “someone who knew I was special, who could tell I was destined to be extraordinary”.

FLIPPER AND FINNEGAN

Sophie Cunningham & Anil Tortop (Albert Street, $19.99)

After a 2001 oil spill threatened the penguin population of Phillip Island, near Melbourne, volunteers sent in more than 100,000 hand-knitted penguin-sized jumpers to help with the rehabilitation process. (Wearing the jumpers not only kept the birds warm while their feathers were oily, but also prevented them from preening, and thus ingesting the oil, while waiting to be cleaned.) The story has inspired acclaimed author Sophie Cunningham to write her second children’s picture book, illustrated by Anil Tortop, about two penguins called Flipper and Finnegan who get caught up in a similar situation. “I hope this book helps parents and kids see how wonderful these animals are, and their autonomy — but also how humans need to help animals when they’re vulnerable,” Cunningham says.

THE REUNION

Polly Phillips (Simon & Schuster, $29.99)

British-born, Perth-based journalist-turned-novelist Polly Phillips follows up her 2021 debut, My Best Friend’s Murder, with this psychological thriller about class, privilege and power, inspired in part by her time studying at Cambridge. Told in dual timelines, it centres on protagonist Emily, a full-time mother of twins whose own student days at the illustrious university came to a hinted-at early and traumatic end, leaving her “with nothing but fear and shame” and ruining her plans for a law career. As she and her husband, Nick return to their Cambridge residential college for its 15-year reunion, Emily is determined to get even with the former so-called friends she identifies as “the three architects of my downfall”.