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felicitylouise's review
5.0
I pass through the place that David Sornig calls “the Zone” every day, travelling from Footscray to the city. It’s mysterious and impenetrable, occupied by railway yards and port operations, waterways overshadowed by concrete flyovers. The gateway to the west. When it rains heavily, Dynon Road floods, a reminder that the Zone was once a swamp. Blue Lake is a fascinating and detailed history of this area post-European settlement, which remains obscure to most despite its close proximity to the city. Sornig traces the lives of its inhabitants, who dwelled on the margins of the city and of society. A brilliant read.
scribepub's review
A scrubby sludge of lowland seeping through the centuries; three woebegone characters born two World Wars ago: everything nondescript and forgotten. Starting with these apparent dregs, David Sornig confects a wonderment of time travel, factual imagination, and the humane urge to bear witness.
Ross Gibson, Author of 26 Views of the Starburst World and Seven Versions of an Australian Badland
The destruction of the Blue Lake on the fringe of Melbourne has long been a sad symbol for me of the ugly order associated with the European conquest. But Sornig shows how in the “zone” of tameable mud that replaced this wondrous wetland, the soul of the country and an underground freedom miraculously survived.
James Boyce, Author of 1835: The Founding of Melbourne and The Conquest of Australian
Sornig uses the shifts in time, along with his own personal insights, to contemplate the way a city physically and culturally folds back on its past … Blue Lake is unusually searching; its indirect nature and focus on memory has traces of the elegance of V.S. Naipaul, W.G. Sebald, and Annie Dillard. 4.5 STARS
Books + Publishing
David Sornig wants to take you on a walk to where the past and the present seem to co-exist and the ghosts are just as real as the living.
Herald Sun
His insights and imaginings into the lives of Elsie, Lauder and Jack are tender and illuminating, and ensure the reader, whether they can locate the Zone itself, can know it through its inhabitants.
The Saturday Paper
Sornig is a precise writer, sometimes lyrical and sometimes direct, with a strong style that houses his many diverse methods of understanding a place he sometimes calls “the Zone”.
Ronnie Scott, Weekend Australian
Imaginatively constructed and with erudite first-person guidance, this is the kind of riveting non-fiction that deserves the term ‘creative’.
Anthony Lynch, ABR’s ‘Books of the Year 2018’
Blue Lake may be about West Melbourne, but armchair travellers elsewhere who are familiar with the pyscho-geographic urban writing of London’s Iain Sinclair will also appreciate David Sornig’s lyrical prose and eye for the forgotten places in our cities.
JourneyOnline, The Uniting Church of Queensland
[A] sprawling, era-traversing expose ... The true star of Sornig’s sordid story of neglect, squalor and life on the margins is the setting itself. Blue Lake is an attempt to discern the history of a place so bereft of understanding it defies identification.
Liam Fallon, Right Now
[Sornig] has done thorough newspaper and archival research … Blue Lake recreates a lost landscape and the contours of lost lives ... greatly enjoyed it.
Janet McCalman, University of Melbourne Labour History
Ross Gibson, Author of 26 Views of the Starburst World and Seven Versions of an Australian Badland
The destruction of the Blue Lake on the fringe of Melbourne has long been a sad symbol for me of the ugly order associated with the European conquest. But Sornig shows how in the “zone” of tameable mud that replaced this wondrous wetland, the soul of the country and an underground freedom miraculously survived.
James Boyce, Author of 1835: The Founding of Melbourne and The Conquest of Australian
Sornig uses the shifts in time, along with his own personal insights, to contemplate the way a city physically and culturally folds back on its past … Blue Lake is unusually searching; its indirect nature and focus on memory has traces of the elegance of V.S. Naipaul, W.G. Sebald, and Annie Dillard. 4.5 STARS
Books + Publishing
David Sornig wants to take you on a walk to where the past and the present seem to co-exist and the ghosts are just as real as the living.
Herald Sun
His insights and imaginings into the lives of Elsie, Lauder and Jack are tender and illuminating, and ensure the reader, whether they can locate the Zone itself, can know it through its inhabitants.
The Saturday Paper
Sornig is a precise writer, sometimes lyrical and sometimes direct, with a strong style that houses his many diverse methods of understanding a place he sometimes calls “the Zone”.
Ronnie Scott, Weekend Australian
Imaginatively constructed and with erudite first-person guidance, this is the kind of riveting non-fiction that deserves the term ‘creative’.
Anthony Lynch, ABR’s ‘Books of the Year 2018’
Blue Lake may be about West Melbourne, but armchair travellers elsewhere who are familiar with the pyscho-geographic urban writing of London’s Iain Sinclair will also appreciate David Sornig’s lyrical prose and eye for the forgotten places in our cities.
JourneyOnline, The Uniting Church of Queensland
[A] sprawling, era-traversing expose ... The true star of Sornig’s sordid story of neglect, squalor and life on the margins is the setting itself. Blue Lake is an attempt to discern the history of a place so bereft of understanding it defies identification.
Liam Fallon, Right Now
[Sornig] has done thorough newspaper and archival research … Blue Lake recreates a lost landscape and the contours of lost lives ... greatly enjoyed it.
Janet McCalman, University of Melbourne Labour History
wtb_michael's review
3.0
An idiosyncratic history of Dudley Flats, a messy wetland remnant that became a zone in Melbourne where people on the margins lived out their lives. The book tells the story of 3 people and through them of a part of Melbourne that remains hard to pin down.
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