Families we have, families we choose and families we long for. 

The only family 9-year-old Ruby has ever known is her father; nomadic, free-spirited, self-absorbed Mitch. Since the death of her mother soon after her birth, Ruby and Mitch have lived an unconventional life, moving across Australia from town to town, busking, entertaining the locals with their acrobatics, finding odd jobs; living from day to day, hand to mouth. Ruby is loosely homeschooled on the road, through the nature around them and the situations they find themselves in. She looks up at her father in awe, through rose-tinted glasses; this handsome, charismatic, carefree man, full of life. But as time goes on, cracks start to appear in the lenses; maybe it’s not ok that he leaves her alone as he goes to meet women, or when he is offered a job out of town for a few days. 

When they temporarily settle in a new town, Ruby starts to make friends and gets a taster of ‘normal’ life. And then she is offered the chance to stay for awhile with a family she has become very friendly with as Mitch heads away in search of the next job; an offer she takes up, and a job from which he doesn’t return. Years later, when Mitch finally returns with his new family, now living an alternate and more sedate lifestyle to the one he pushed on her throughout her childhood, everything she thought she knew is thrown into question, including the legitimacy of keeping her own family history from her. Finally, but still with some trepidation, Ruby sets out to push for answers to the questions she was never allowed to ask.

This coming-of-age story has a wonderfully drawn main character in Ruby; resilient but vulnerable, almost continually sticking by her father’s side despite everything he does, it’s a beautifully captured portrait of how we can idealise parents, flawed as they might be, and how we can accept little when it’s all we have. We watch on frustrated as she, for the most part, sticks by him, even as the people around her lose their patience with him; but we also feel for her as we have seen the daughter-father bond that was formed all these years they only had each other, strengthened by the happy moments of which there are many. I loved how Perry explores Ruby’s relationships, both as a child and later as an adult, with those around her who are older than her, always influenced and shaped in a way by the relationship she had with her father. At times she finds herself openly giving to others what he never wanted or needed from her; at times she finds herself holding back as his aloofness taught her. This is a tender and compelling story of yearning for belonging and stability, the search for identity, unravelling and unearthing hidden family histories, and discovering that things are not always as simple as they may seem. I listened to this as an audiobook read by Australian actor Ayesha Gibson, which added to the transportive sense of being drawn across Australia, and immersed in its towns and communities, with Ruby and Mitch.

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My Father the Whale was published by HarperCollins in 2023.

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Gina Perry is an Australian writer, science historian and registered psychologist (although she’s non practising these days). Gina lives and works in Naarm/Melbourne. She is author of the acclaimed Behind the Shock Machine and The Lost Boys and her debut novel My Father the Whale was published by Harper Collins in June 2023. Gina’s feature articles, columns, and essays have been published in newspapers and magazines including The Age, The Australian, Cosmos and New Scientist. Her co-production of the ABC Radio National documentary about Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments, ‘Beyond the Shock Machine’, won the Silver World Medal for a history documentary in the 2009 New York Festivals radio awards. She was runner up for the Bragg UNSW Prize for Science Writing in 2013 and her work has been anthologised in Best Australian Science Writing (2013 and 2015). Her debut novel My Father the Whale was shortlisted for the Banjo Prize in 2021.