The recent history of Australia begins as a penal colony, and when Australians investigate their family history there is no way to tell what they will find. What they may find may be very disturbing: their forebears may have been murderers, thieves or other type of lewd folk. Forecast: turbulence by the Australian author Janette Turner Hospital consists of nine short stories and a memoir. In the memoir, "Moon river" she describes a brief history of her family, that is, of her great grand-father, her grand-father and her parents. Great-grandfather Charles Henry Turner had abandoned his family, wife and infant son, for unknown reasons "crushing debt, sexual scandal, embezzlement?" in 1877 (p. 216). Grandfather Turner, the abandoned son, discovered him in Brisbane, having come through New Zealand and Sydney, and found his father there practising "drunken law". Places are connected with violence and and personal histories of disaster, shame and ruin.

The title story "Forecast: turbulence" (the eighth story in the collection) is perhaps the most startling. A mother calls her daughter telling her "Are you sitting down?" (..) "I think you'll need sitting down" before breaking the news that her "father has made contact". The last they had known about him was his return from the war, his need for (face-) altering surgery (to be patched up), a lot of medication, he did not return to his family as "there was a woman, another woman, who had been haunting him" and he needed 'a new start of life". When Stacey, the daughter, meets her Dad, she fails to recognize him: he has had a transgender operation.

The other stories in the collection are similarly disturbing, centred around very problematic family backgrounds, and often criminal or runaway parents. A runaway father who shows up unexpectedly at a marriage ceremony: "Dad" (..) "You've got a nerve" (..) "I should tell you to bugger off". In other stories there are "seas of blood", suicides, fathers running away from the law, child abduction and paedophelia. In "The Prince of Darkness is a Gentleman" a father stages plays as schools, casting his own daughter as Ophelia; "he was so good with the boys". The grownup children in the stories often hear the truth about their fathers whispered or from the newspapers, as Jodie in "The Republic of Outer Barcoo" has a complete archive on the exploits of her father.

In line with the subject matter, characters in many of the stories use rude language, which not all readers might appreciate. Themes of the stories and the collection as a whole are disturbing: freakish and weird.

There are many references to the weather, especially "turbulent" weather conditions such as hurricanes. While as a metaphor for disturbance, violence, unpredictability and disasters causing major devastation, or simply great forces blowing you away or off your feet, this element is interesting, it is also sometimes distracting. The insistence of quasi-meteorological titles for each story, and the connection of weather conditions to emotions in the fifth story, "Hurricane season" is contrived.

Altogether, an interesting collection of stories not everyone will find a pleasure to read. ( )