Rural tale wound with tension

Some book reviews take a while to write; others just flow. This took a while.

It wasn’t because this isn’t a well-told story or because the setting is inauthentic; the Outback Australian town where the past few years have been punishingly dry, rings all too true to farmers in New South Wales and Queensland.

The main figures are strong women: Neralie, who left town some years ago but is back to run the local pub, and the almost-universally disliked Mandy who, in Neralie’s absence, married her ex, the hapless Mitch. The last of the female troika is Glenys Dingle, dodgy head of the local water board looking to make a fortune at the expense of the farmers. Each is instantly recognisable but none is particularly likeable.

A dark satirical note runs through the novel — Ham’s third after her acclaimed debut, The Dressmaker — billed as a love song to the land and community in which the author was born.

The elemental nature of rural Australia underpins the book. A river divides the town and those who live in the community — town versus country, urban versus farmer, even sibling versus sibling. Anyone with even the slightest connection to living on the land will be aware of the integral role of water, especially in a drought, and how big picture even the smallest day-to-day decision can become.

Reference again the current political situation in Queensland with its urban-driven grazing laws putting farming communities under threat to capture urban votes in a corner of the state.

It is a story riven with tensions set in a landscape whose tapestry is threaded with tension.

And maybe that’s why writing this review took time. While The Year of the Farmer’s protagonists are funny and quirky and people we know, they are also dark, wicked, mean and a bit tragic. Tension winds the fabric of the novel together and maybe the slight unease when you get to the end is, not surprisingly, the reflection of this tension. Maybe, too, it’s just that this novel has to find its feet outside the shadow of The Dressmaker.