Mrs Hopkins – Shirley Barrett

Despite living just a couple of suburbs over, I’ve never actually visited Cockatoo Island – though I’m tempted now, having read Mrs Hopkins. The tiny harbour island is the site of the former Biloela Industrial School for Girls, the setting for the final novel by acclaimed author and screenwriter Shirley Barrett. The brilliant folks at Allen & Unwin sent me a copy for review.

The story begins in 1871, with an idealistic new schoolmistress arriving at the notorious former prison. She is, of course, woefully unprepared for what awaits her inside. Instead of the grateful ragamuffins in need of some TLC she was expecting, she finds hardened delinquents who love nothing more than outsmarting their jailers. The conditions are atrocious, with few resources for procuring the girls’ most basic necessities, and the higher-ups aren’t interested in providing even the bare minimum for their schooling (let alone their futures beyond the school). As if things couldn’t get any worse: Mrs Hopkins has ghosts of her own from her past, ghosts that have followed her all the way to Biloela, and they have no intention of resting in peace.

The character of Mrs Hopkins should have been what carried this novel (given that it is, after all, named for her). Unfortunately, her characterisation was spotty, as though Barrett couldn’t quite decide who she should be. Mrs Hopkins veered wildly from a Mary Poppins-type to a Dickensian hypocritical hard-arse, and back again with a few stops in Jane Eyre territory along the way. That might have been an attempt at complexity, but unfortunately it didn’t land.

What’s more, it’s tough to read any colonial-era Australian historical fiction without asking questions about race and the treatment of First Nations people – questions that Mrs Hopkins didn’t acknowledge, let alone answer.

On the whole, Mrs Hopkins is a fine novel, but it left me underwhelmed. I learned more from the powerful Author’s Note that Barrett wrote about the true history of the real Biloela school on Cockatoo Island than I did from the book itself.