173 pages.
FourWPress, Wagga Wagga, 1999.
ISBN: 1-86467-052-5.
RRP: $ 15.00. (plus postage)

          What the critics say

          Reviews by
          The Daily Advertiser, The Canberra Times,
          Gleebooks gleaner, Australian Book Review, Ulitarra, Imago,
          Famous Reporter

With well over 70 short stories and poems published in leading Australian, American and European literary magazines since the beginning of the 90s, Jane Downing is an exciting new Australian writer. Published at the end of the decade, Searching for the Volcano is her first short story collection.

Rich with ambiguity, playful with possibilities, Jane Downing's intelligent stories in Searching for the Volcano explore imaginary  worlds spun around Australia, the Pacific and the World.  Nothing is  ever quite as it seems.  Surfaces slip together and apart.  Memory and desire mix inevitably.  A suburban wife seduced by dreams of  Mendelssohn and Shakespeare ... Allegories of fish anatomise expatriate communities in the Pacific ... Exotic and mythical places are re-imagined.  Human cruelties and pleasures are subtly interplayed.
 

Stories included in this collection:

Australia
Killing Time * Through the Broken Glass * A Midsummer Day's Dream * The Fairy Ring * The Crown Prince

The Pacific
The Cleaner Wrasse and the Moray Eel * Cure for a Jelly Fish Sting * The Placental Societies * Reflections on The Pool * The Greenhouse Ark

The World
Leda and the Swan * Kilimanjaro * The Oracle * Sandcar Racing * Searching for the Volcano

The following stories have been previously published: 'Killing Time' in Antipodes (USA); 'Through the Broken Glass' in Westerly; 'The Cleaner Wrasse and the Moray Eel' in Australian Short Stories; 'Cure for a Jelly Fish Sting' in Voices; 'Reflections on the Pool' in Southerly; 'Leda and the Swan' and 'The Oracle' in fourW; 'Kilimanjaro' in Southerly; and 'The Crown Prince' and 'The Greenhouse Ark' have been read on ABC Regional Radio. 'Searching for the Volcano' was a prize-winner in the 1999 Bauhinia Literary Awards

About the author Jane Downing was born in Brisbane in 1962, and left three weeks later. She lived in aPapua New Guinea on a little island off the little island of Manus where Margaret Mead did her field work, she was in Tanzania when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, and when she got to Ireland they were still talking about mixed marriages, only there it meant between Catholics and Protestants. An old woman and her cats lived in the gutter outside her house in Jakarta and in Moscow in the time of Breznev it was safe to walk the streets at night. She also managed to live inBeijing before the arrival of that supreme symbol of capitalism, McDonalds. In the late nineteenth century Robert Louis Stevenson called Majuro, now the capital atoll of the Marshall Islands, the Pearl of the Pacific: it had lost a lot of its lustre by the time she went to live there. Jane Downing also lived inAustralia on and off, enough to cultivate a taste for Vegemite, not enough to understand the passions around the Melbourne Cup. Her formal education was at the closest school, whichever country she was in at the time, and she went on to gain a (everyone has one) B.A., this one in Psychology, Sociology and Religious Studies from the Australian National University.

Her career started at the American Embassy in Moscow when she was eighteen. She has since worked for the British Embassy in Beijing, the United Nations in the Marshall Islands (as an Australian Volunteer Abroad), the Australian Public Service, the National Gallery, two Youth Refuges and a Domestic Violence Crisis Service. She has also cleaned houses, answered phones, sold door-to-door, and will no doubt go on doing any and all of the above.

Jane Downing started writing fiction while in the Marshall Islands, even though she was immersed in the reality that the truth is often stranger than fiction. Her short stories have been published widely in Australia, in such journals as Southerly, Westerly, Voices, Imago, and Mattoid. Stories have also appeared in Europe Kunapipi, Paris Transcontinental) and the US Antipodes). Her poetry has appeared in a number of Australian journals. A list of these publications, amounts to over seventy.

In the area of non-fiction Jane Downing compiled and edited a collection of myths and legends of the Marshall Islands,Bwebwenatoon Etto. The trickster god Letao, who appears in many of the legends, has been an inspirational figure in her work ever since.

She was also, at this time, commissioned by the Ministry of Education to write a history of the Marshall Islands for third graders,Mour Ippen Don Im Ippam, and to adapt and illustrate two legends for fourth graders. These areThe Hermit Crab and the Needlefish andThe Whale and the Sandpiper, the latter was re-published by the University of the South Pacific.

Jane Downing has co-edited and annotated a series of articles from the Town and Country Journal of 1870-71, titled My Adventures and Researches in the Pacific by a Master Mariner which will be published later in 1999 by Mulini Press. The last century author of this "creative" biography has been located through historical sources on a long-boat off Samoa with the notorious buccaneer 'Bully Hayes', a large Newfoundland dog and a very small poodle.

As the traditional end to a short biography demands, it must be said: Jane Downing is married with two young children.
 

Searching for the Volcano  can be obtained from all good bookstores or directly from the Booranga Writer's Centre, Locked Bag 588, Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga NSW 2678, Australia. E-mail  booranga@csu.edu.au