"Everybody is a dreamer, so all of them have tales to share with other human beings, thus keeping the age-old art of storytelling alive."
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Then, Now and In-Between:
Short Stories from Australia and Elsewhere by Eddie Whitham Trafford Publishing
book review by Julianna Helt
Storytelling is an art form. It is the age old tradition of passing a story down through the generations. It is recounting an old story you heard long ago. It is sitting down next to a stranger at a cafe and striking up a conversation and telling that story to that stranger. You may tell this stranger about your grandfather who worked forty years as a Station Master only to die the night he retires. You may tell this stranger about the mysterious story you heard from a neighbor about the fireballs that cartwheeled through a small town destroying everything in their path.
That stranger may have been Whitham, who has travelled extensively throughout Australia and the world, and has taken pen to paper and wrote down the stories he has heard from the strangers he met along the way. They range from a possible alien attack in "Orange Cartwheels" to an elderly woman being victim of a robbery in "What's Mine is Yours." The more interesting stories are thought-provoking while other stories are more mundane. The author's choice of words brings us along with him on his travels to small villages in Australian and all the way to gritty Ukraine. We hear the voices of men from long ago arguing over the colors of the town's football team in "The New Team Colours" and the train barreling along to the station in "The Last Day." His candor and brevity in each climax of the story is refreshing. These are entertaining stories told by a masterful storyteller.