THE FRAMING (Melbourne University Press 2026) is an interesting memoir by Fernanda Dahlstrom, an Asian/Australian writer of Swedish heritage. Now a lawyer in the Northern Territory, through a series of loosely connected memories Dahlstrom attempts to excavate her turbulent childhood and adolescence and examine what happened to her – and the peripatetic life she led with her single mother – through her freshly adult eyes of a university education, life experience, and conversations with her partner.
When Dahlstrom was only eight years old, her mother was sent to prison and their ‘idyllic life in rural Victoria was shattered’. The story of what happened to her, and how she survived over the ensuing decade is almost unbelievable. Staying with random family members, foster placements, and most disturbing of all, living alone in her house at only 11 years old, paying bills from a seemingly bottomless joint account with her mother, getting herself to school and even flying overseas as a minor – all of these things and more comprise her most unusual and eccentric childhood.
Throughout this entire time, she believes her mother is innocent. She has been framed. Her mother tells her this every time she is convicted of another offence and spends more time behind bars. Her mother shows her evidence of corrupt police officers and judiciary members from all around Australia determined to bring an innocent woman down. Dahlstrom may be young but she’s smart, with her book learning much advanced beyond her years. She believes her mother because her mother is so credible and provides so much evidence. But what the author tells us in the first two thirds of the book seems impossible and unbelievable – where is all the money coming from? Why would child services not act in a more proactive way? How on earth does a child that young survive on her own? But it is all explained, as much as Dahlstrom can construct from her (admittedly sometimes conflicted or confused) memories, or from her reconstructed and possibly misinterpreted versions of the truth she was given at the time.
She and her mother share an unbreakable bond. They are co-dependent and enmeshed (a fact Dahlstrom cannot admit until much later). They are Thelma and Louise. The team of two. Inseparable emotionally (if not always physically) despite the odds. The life they lead in between her mother’s prison stints is fantastical – overseas trips, owning several houses, going on adventures, shopping, eating out, living the life of Riley. At the age of eight or 10 or even 12, who would question how this life is possible? Dahlstrom is her mother’s greatest ally, believes in her wholeheartedly and is her proudest defender.
Most of the book consists of a series of memories or reconstructed events from her childhood which did become a little confusing at times. I felt a stronger edit might have resulted in a more chronological timeline. The story jumps from the present to the past to the more recent past. But perhaps this was the author’s intention – to demonstrate the chaotic nature of her upbringing.
It all comes together in the last quarter when Dahlstrom – older and wiser – begins to doubt the knowledge she has always accepted as perfect truth. She begins to research, to google her mother (close friends with Judith Durham! Then charged as stalking her as the friendship dissipated! Police reports in full when as a child she’d only seen parts. Newspaper articles about her notorious mother. Reconnecting with estranged family members and reading old letters that tell a different story than her mother has always espoused.)
As she tries to navigate life, love, sexuality, work and self-identity, her relationship with her mother becomes more complicated, swinging back and forth from no contact to an enmeshed closeness.
But what is the truth? Was her mother framed? Every time? Or is she mentally ill? Or did she spend all those years lying to her only daughter? By the end of the book, even Dahlstrom herself is still unsure. Her mother is a conundrum wrapped in an enigma. An intelligent woman with energy and pluck, daring and self-confidence. Did she instil those same qualities in her daughter or did she emotionally damage her through benign or outright neglect?
Some sections, particularly the memory sections, could have done with some tightening up, and the author could perhaps have been a bit more judicial with what she chose to include or not include; there are quite minor and insignificant memories mixed with significant life events. But again, perhaps that’s the point: when you’re a child, how do you know what is crucial and what is not? How do you differentiate? How are you expected to make adult decisions as a 10-year-old?
If you are interested in children living adult lives, resilient children by expectation not by choice, intellectually curious children, female incarceration (and especially the organisation Sisters Inside), mother/daughter bonds, the legal and justice system, or just a highly unusual coming-of-age memoir, then this book will resonate. It is one of the strangest childhood upbringings I have read about and if it is all true (not doubting Dahlstrom but as she says herself, she realises she may doubt her own childhood memories, or the truth of what she accepted as a child, now as an adult), it is certainly an extraordinary story.