ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

From a book about First Contact in Canada, to one set in the Coorong of South Australia, a coastal wetland between Goolwa and Mount Gambier and one of the most beautiful wild places on earth.  The Coorong is a national park now, and has been since 1966 though the birdlife in the lagoon is fragile due to reduced freshwater inflows from silting upstream.

In this elegiac novel, Lucy Treloar writes of the damage done by settlers to the complex ecosystems which sustained the traditional owners, the Ngarrindjeri people for thousands of years.  And like Joseph Boyden in The Orenda, she writes of the misguided arrogance of a proselytiser who believes in a mission to ‘improve’ the indigenous people and the disastrous consequences of the settlement.  But there the resemblances end, because Treloar chooses a very different style, tone and characterisation for her novel, a novel which justly deserves its nomination for this year’s Miles Franklin Literary Award.  (It has already won the Indie Book of the Year (Debut Fiction Category) 2016.)

Through the sole voice of her character Hester Finch, Treloar subverts the pioneer myth.  The novel begins in Chichester in England 1874 with Hester (Hetty) reflecting on events, but most of the story reverts to her youth in the Coorong in 1855.  There, with revolving debts that he refuses to acknowledge, Hester’s feckless father has ruined his family and brought them to his sole remaining asset: a pastoral lease on The Coorong where he has built a ramshackle home of found timbers.  His failed enterprise was a whaling station, and his flock of sheep has been shipwrecked.  So now he intends to raise cattle for cheese making, to restore their fortunes.  This dictatorial father rejects any help from wealthy grandparents in Adelaide and builds castles in the sand.

Grieving for her losses (including the death of one of her small children) his wife is suffering from depression though it’s not named as such, and teenage Hetty struggles to manage the domestic responsibilities that fall to her.  These include – as well as cooking, cleaning, washing, sewing and cheese making – the care of her mother and the baby Mary, the teaching of her younger brothers Albert and Fred, and the discipline of her wild and wilful sister Addie (Adelaide).  Her thuggish older brothers Hugh and Stanton are arrogant and disdainful about Hetty’s unusual looks, her high intelligence and her unconventional independence. It could be a lonely life of drudgery for this family, but the children find ways to amuse themselves when the day’s work is done, and despite a catalogue of disasters all of them in their different ways have a faint shred of hope that things could improve.

The land on which Finch settles is already occupied, of course.   Wisely, Treloar does not appropriate a conjectured perspective of the dispossessed Ngarrindjeri people: the reader encounters instead Hetty’s generally empathetic interpretation of their point of view, but the reader can see that she often gets it gravely wrong.  Through the mixed-race character of Tully, whose white parentage is left open to conjecture, we see a young man stranded between two worlds.  He speaks English because his mother learned it from the whalers who captured her, but he knows the stories of every corner, every outcrop, every island.  Brought into the Finch household to be educated as a ‘civilised’ mentor for his people, but not officially adopted, Tully rarely counters the unconscious racism of the family, but when he does, it’s devastating:

In a moment of crisis, Hetty thinks her sister will be safe because she is white.

‘He wouldn’t hurt Addie, surely.’

‘Because she is white?  That makes her safe?’ He regarded me in silence for a few seconds, as if he saw something in me that filled him with melancholy.  ‘You don’t think you are better than black people.  You know it, don’t you?  It is inside you, this belief, like your heart.’  He thumped his chest.  ‘Birds don’t think: I will fly.  They are flight. It is what they do and it is what they are.  In what you do, what you are, you know that you are better, but not to me, not to blacks, to yourselves only. (p. 319)

Hetty’s brothers are scornful about the Quaker philosophy that all men are equal and they are dismissive of any rights of the remaining indigenous people. Conflict erupts over fishing grounds and water rights, but it is when Addie falls in love with Tully that Finch’s hypocrisy is revealed and the story reaches its devastating climax.

Salt Creek is a haunting story, beautifully written and quietly subversive.  It’s a spectacular debut.

Peter Pierce reviewed it in The Australian.

Author: Lucy Treloar
Title: Salt Creek
Publisher: Picador (Pan Macmillan), 2015
ISBN: 9781743533192
Source: Personal library, purchased from Benn’s Books $29.99

Available from Fishpond Salt Creek and good bookstores everywhere.