A luminous and spacious window into the lives of a mother and daughter in rural Australia 1940s-50s
An exquisite love letter to the outback landscape of rural News South Wales. When Anna’s father abandons family and farm, she and her mother are left to fend for themselves on a piece of land by the river, mired in debt and his longtime neglect. Undaunted, her mother, Martha, manages to keep the farm going with the help of her young daughter.
It is a lonely upbringing for Anna, whose four siblings have gone away to boarding school and college. But Anna, like her mother, has a special relationship with the land and the plants and animals that inhabit it: As Martha writes home to her parents after she arrives in Hay: “I’ve fallen in love with the grey teal ducks, dabbling and upending in the shallows for riverbed… Their creamy feathers are patterned like scalloped flower petals radiating out from the neck and up from the belly, edges shading from bark-brown to glossy dark chocolate.”
Both Martha and Anna seem to belong to this stark country, with its raging summers, bleak winters, and winds that tear across the plains, and where at night “the stars are a milky scarf thrown over the dark shoulders and breasts of the sky.” Their stories are delicately embroidered with many such poetic meditations on landscape, flora and fauna.
But their hearts ache with their shared loss, and the relationship between mother and daughter is not an easy one. Anna’s and Martha’s stories are scalloped together, with ancestral patterns that both unite and divide them. This fictionalized memoir of mother and daughter is founded in detailed historical research and memories of the forties and fifties in Hay, New South Wales. Small town life. A family torn apart. The endless plains and skies of rural Australia. And the fierce pride of a woman, trained as a teacher and scholar, who is determined to persevere on the land, no matter what.
I was deeply moved by this memoir, its portrayal of the resilience of mother and daughter, the unconditional love of each for the other and the land that binds them together, and the ravages of disappointed hope and betrayal they must contend with.
As one of the author’s three daughters, stepping into this story was like being given a luminous and spacious window into the lives, loves and hardships of my mother and grandmother. I feel blessed have witnessed such an intimate portrait of their lives and to be descended from such strong, courageous, and fiercely loving women.
