'Volcanic Stories: Searching for the Volcano & Other Stories'
by Jane Downing
Carmen Leigh Keates

Volcanic Stories: Searching for the Volcano and Other Stories, Jane Downing
four W press, 1999

Jane Downing's short story collection in three parts (Australia; The Pacific; The World) employs an anecdotal yet highly conscious articulation of character, depicting colourful (but sometimes heartbreaking) episodes of acutely eavesdropped human interaction.

The first story in the volume, 'Killing Time', tells of a modern, self-reflexive nuclear family armed with a battery of contemporary pop-psychology, a family bolstered with all the creature comforts technology can offer. When it comes to relating to his offspring, however, the father, Bill, still struggles under the heavy burden of the past generations' quirks. Aware his own childhood was rough, Bill compensates in his adult life by being a manic provider, even protecting his children from nature - never allowing a drive in the family car without air-conditioning to blow away any climatic discomfort:

It was important to have the windows tightly up and the buffeting, whipping wind shut outside. Not like the old truck, windows wide, white metal hands lowered and raised through them as indicators of left and right, the sickly sweet smell of pineapples on the verge of rotting always blasting in.