Southern Lights - Liz Arncliffe

The world's highest quality precious opal is found in Australia, which is home to larger opal fields than those in the rest of the world combined. Australian opals account for 95% of the world's supply. It’s quite literally everywhere.

This fact is important because if you know anything about opals, they need to be dusted off, cracked open, washed down, to let the sunlight reflect the remarkable colours that radiate from the centre of the stone. Like fireworks. Like an astonishing collection of all the colours of the spectrum. A kaleidoscope.

Sloane, after the death of her wife, is on the Gold Coast in Queensland in Australia, teaching for a year, because it’s easier being there than back home. She is still a metaphorical opal covered in grey and guilt and sadness and pain and so much grief that she howls at the world as she punishes her body with multiple kilometre runs, and tortuous mountain bike rides. It is better to feel in pain than be in pain, because grief is mobile and doesn’t leave just because you do.

All the while, she’s steadily falling in love with her neighbour, Ava, which is an experience so conflicting that at first she sits in her grief because while it’s painful, it’s comforting. Towards the end of the book, Sloane describes what it means to have lost her wife, Julia. Among other things, Sloane says she misses Julia. Her wife. The  intimacy and gravity of the word, wife.

Ava has her own grief; a sense of shame that she can’t shake, even twenty years later. It rides on her shoulder and whispers messages of long ago that impact on Ava’s ability to maintain a relationship now. Meanwhile, she’s rather quickly falling in love with Sloane but knows that any type of relationship will be impacted by her actions from when she was in her twenties. She carries her own darkness. Her own dust.

Through Ava’s careful steps, her daughter’s unbridled energy and love, and Ava’s mother’s keen observations, both women begin to realise that love has all the colours from deep inside that opal. Shake off the shawl of dust and sadness and let the lights—the southern version—shine in to make the colours shimmer.

The book is called Southern Lights for a reason. Yes, the Aurora Australis rates a mention, but it’s more than that. It’s all that makes up the lights of Australia. Liz Arncliffe makes a point of describing the specks of lights that are the colours of the birds, the trees, the city, the buildings, the art installations, the water, the little stones that Sloane picks up to give to Ava. It is a slow, then sudden—just like the crack to open an opal—awakening for Sloan and Ava. Because the choices they make can  either tighten their grip or allow to bloom the colours they create. It is their sky.

This book is beautiful and funny and devastating and fast and slow and meandering, much like the creek that flows past Ava’s property, past the little cottage where Sloan lives for a year. It is necessary to read this book, simply so you can experience all the colours of the southern lights.