![]() ![]() ![]() Jean Finnegan arrives in the Mallee in 1934, as part of the forces of progress, on a government train bringing “science” to the farmers, with the confident expectation of prosperity and progress to follow. Yet sparse doesn’t mean thin all of Australia’s 20th-century history is here – the struggle to find a workable relationship with an ancient continent, to come to terms with its place in Asia, two world wars, the Depression, stories that are indeed not just Australian, but universal. As a veteran of the Australian bush, I can confirm that no form of expression could be more apt words are mere occasional punctuation of a real bushies’ silence. ![]() ![]() “Spare”, “sparse”, “laconic” are the adjectives that might be applied to this account of one woman’s life in the Victoria Mallee, a wheat-growing region that suffered the same fate as the American dustbowl states. Such writers should be sentenced to read Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living, the Orange Prize-shortlisted first novel of the Australian Carrie Tiffany. Far too many writers with hopes of being labelled “literary” believe achieving that status requires them to pile in the adjectives and adverbs, to describe their hero’s every twitch and turn, the leaf of every tree she sits under, the state of every cloud above. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |