Romancing the Red Centre
ROMANTIC fiction is not something I’d usually turn my pen to, but I’ll be the first to admit Alice Springs author Jo Dutton’s From Alice With Love is more than worth it.
Her novel is a rarity, an intelligent romance.
Filled with the passions and struggles that are writ so large across the open blue skies and red hills of Central Australia, Dutton seems to express her own great love for the region through its pages.
Yet here also ring the echoes of frontier conflict, born a century and a half ago, but which still resound in Australia’s chambers of power from Alice to Darwin, through Canberra and back again.
Against this stark desert setting — where the protagonist admits early on that there will be ‘‘no hiding from myself’’ — Dutton stitches strident political and social commentary in a seemingly effortless weave with her romantic narrative.
After the break-up of a longterm relationship, 36-year-old childless teacher Alicia is called unexpectedly back to her childhood home of Alice Springs where her mother Ros has taken ill.
Ros is a feisty activist for Aboriginal rights, ‘‘ every funding body’s nightmare’’; in fact, the exploration of her relationship with daughter Alicia is one of many great strengths of Dutton’s portrait.
The jolt of coming home to where the old red gum still stands, the flame tree blazes with flowers and ‘‘fat purple fruit weighed down the mulberry tree’’, conspires with Alicia’s recent break-up and the strain of caring for mum to spark a period of intense self-reflection.
Soon enough, she rediscovers her love for the Red Centre and the formative relationships she had all but forgotten in the city.
In these relationships emerges a key to Alicia’s future, as well as a new love interest, which ultimately carries the narrative.
But there is so much of interest in the many threads which comprise this novel, that it is perhaps unsurprising the romantic dimension does not overly dominate.
Set between a remote Aboriginal settlement called Promised Land where Alicia runs the school, and the town of Alice Springs, From Alice With Love is a charming and insightful introduction to life in Central Australia.
In Dutton’s trademark down- to- earth prose, the novel manages to counter some of the narrower, even misleading representations of the town and region rife in the region’s literature.
Typified in the goodnatured banter between Alicia and her childhood friend and trainee teacher Lekisha, the Aboriginal characters of From Alice With Love are warm, cheeky and hilarious. Dutton’s pages burst with their good- natured mischief-making under difficult circumstances, in lives conducted in overcrowded dwellings and underequipped schools.
But neither does the novel squib on the many intractable issues of life in the Centre — alcohol, welfare dependence and cultural obligations — that often run counter to western expectations.
For anyone who has lived in remote Australia, this is familiar territory.
But for the average reader with little experience of Outback life, Dutton’s Aboriginals will come as a refreshing change and one long overdue in Australian fiction.
For this reason, From Alice With Love is the closest thing to an insider’s view of con- temporary Alice Springs published so far in popular form.
Through her extensive lived experience of the Centre, to which she alludes in an afterword, Dutton’s fiction tastes, smells and feels strongly of memoir, with all the associated resonance.
But for all its evocations of home, the preparations for camping trips replete with fresh eggs, vegetables from the garden, and the seemingly ubiquitous home- baked sourdough, the political landscape of central Australia is never far away.
For as activist Ros so poignantly observes, Alice is the face of Australia’s contact history . . . the ‘‘ one place where colonisation had not neatly run its wheels of change over people’’.