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FICTION: Cold Coast, Robyn Mundy, Ultimo Press, $32.99
In the Norwegian archipelago between mainland Norway and the North Pole, there is a small island called Svalbard, a mountainous region of ice and rock, roughly the size of Tasmania. There lived a woman named Wanny Woldstad. She was 39 years old in 1932 when she decided to travel to the rugged, remote terrain of glaciers and the frozen tundras in the north with a team of expert trappers. Each year, they made the dangerous journey through oceans thick with ice to capture bears and foxes for their fur.
Woldstad was a woman who knew her skills and wanted to put them to use. But the world at that time insisted on a woman’s strict domesticity. Certain freedoms were denied to them. The wilderness was a place for men. Women were weak-boned and tender.
Wanny Wolstad and companion negotiate the freezing water dotted with ice of the Norwegian north.Credit:
Robyn Mundy’s immaculate research led her to the translation of Woldstad’s memoir, First Woman Trapper on Svalbard, published several decades after her time in the frozen north, which was an inspiration for her novel, Cold Coast.
Mundy’s own life in the arctic shows in her immersive prose – she’s worked as a ship-based tour guide in Svalbard, Greenland and Antarctica and the Norwegian coast. She knows the landscape intimately – wind that “scours the glacier clean of its covering, early morning light an undulating sea, milky blue, the mountain is a chorus, fulmars wheeling in the breeze”.
Robyn Mundy translated Wanny Wolstad’s memoir.Credit:Matt Horspoll
Woldstad hears the call of the wild – and it’s a sound she cannot ignore. Her late husband taught her how to shoot, and she knows she’s one of the best rifle shooters in the country. She has two teenage sons, but motherhood will not stop her from satisfying her longing – to live with nature, experience a place that leaves a deep and aching impression on every man who goes there.
Before Woldstad, only men had traversed these lands. “This presiding world of men. All this space …” Space relegated by society’s self-sanctioned male dominion – Woldstad knows her gender does not make things easy for her desires, but that doesn’t stop her from pursuing her dreams. “The land commands its own reverence. She feels the power in its harshness. It’s unforgiving strength.”
The world inside her body can only be realised once she’s out there among the bears, the foxes, the whiteness of ice and blueness of the sea.