ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

By coincidence, Emma from Book Around the Corner in France, recently requested some suggestions for books set in Western Australia, and I just happen to be reading Stephen Orr’s new novel The Hands: An Australian Pastoral.  Orr is from South Australia, not the west, but this novel is set in marginal farming country on the cusp of the Nullarbor Plain that spans over a thousand kilometres from east to west  – a vast tract of featureless land that covers a great swathe of South Australia and Western Australia.  Marginal land like this, bleak and dispiriting country to those trying vainly to make a living there, has a savage beauty that has broken many a farmer’s heart.  I think Orr’s novel certainly conveys a sense of outback life …

Here, just for you, Emma, are some descriptions of the land, from Orr’s discerning pen:

They returned to the ute.  Bundeena was marginal country.  It could carry cattle, sparsely.  To Trevor, this was where Australia became desert, where man – following the east-west railway, before it seriously set its sights on the Nullarbor – had given up on agriculture.  Most men, at least.  Except for them: sixth-generation Beef Shorthorn producers who’d wrestled with the land for 130 years.  This was country that hadn’t asked for farmers but had got them anyway.  On the southern edge, the railway line, and to the north, nothing.  They had neighbours to the east and west, but they might as well have been living in New Zealand.  (p. 4)

I try to read this description of the house as Emma might, with images of the French countryside in my mind:

Then he went out through the sliding doors to the front of the house with its view from the hill, down the slope of old bloodwoods.  ‘Harry!’ he called, but there was no response.

He stood on the wide porch which, although at the front of the house, was really the back, away from the chaos of the compound.  Broken tiles.  A bull-nosed verandah that leaked, although they knew where to sit to stay dry.  There were several old chairs – wicker, tube-steel, a fluffy stool from Carelyn’s ABBA days – and an old tranny, although there was no signal for it to pick up.

This is where they’d come on hot evenings to escape the house, to watch distant freight trains or the Indian Pacific, scurrying between oceans.  They’d watch them come into view, and an hour later, disappear.  They’d follow their every painful inch, as if it were the first time they’d ever seen a train.

‘Harry!’

Nothing.

He’d warned him so many times: stay within calling distance of the house.  He could remember a night when Harry was three or four, when it was pelting down (the first time in years), the fork-lightning picking up the glint of the railway tracks, strobing the cattle-eye desert.  And there he was standing in this same spot, calling out ‘Harry, where are yer?’ (p. 12)

A big blow comes in, a north-westerly at first, smelling of dry grass.  They’re in for a blasting.

At one point, he looked out of the window and noticed the sandstorm.  ‘Wow, that’s bad,’ he managed, looking at Trevor.

Who, by now, had consulted the satellite image.  He’d seen the front moving east, darkening everything in its path, Bundeena descending into days of blight; day turning to night, and the generator taking over from the solar panels (themselves sand-blasted clean); moods darkening, supplies of DVDs taken out of the cupboard and most of all, like Murray, he’d seen his stock sheltering beside the skeletons of gidgee trees, waiting.

By evening the storm was shaking the eaves, coming in and under the house and up through the gaps in the floorboards.  Trevor stood looking out of the front window and saw sheets of iron blowing across the flats.  Waited, consulting his watch.  Saw the hazy, dot-dash yellow lights of the Indian Pacific.  Watched it moving, consumed and spat out by the storm until it was gone, in the dust.

They went to bed and fell asleep to the accompaniment of rattling iron.  (p. 45)

Even when we don’t live in these desolate places ourselves, they are part of our Australian consciousness.  They are part of the Australian soul…

The Hands: An Australian Pastoral, by Stephen Orr, Wakefield Press, 2015, ISBN 9781743053430