Formidable Stuff

Hugely impressed by Mary Durack's Keep Him My Country. Initially I wasn't quite sure as to where the plot was leading and was misled by the references on the book jacket to a tragic love affair into thinking that the story-line would be driven by a romance crossing racial lines. In fact there's precious little in the way of a distinct plot. In very general terms we might wonder what the future has in store for the novel's protagonist Stanley Rolt, the guy running the homestead, a sort of ranch, on which the work is centred, but there are any number of loosely entwined narrative lines, each of which has its own interest. In the end I suppose the book is about the stuff that happens to the various inhabitants of the homestead, and that stuff proves to be pretty engrossing, due to the fact that life in the outback just is that way, or was in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. (I assume 'outback' is the right term for this area of the Northern Territories of Australia, but can't recall its use in the text, now I come to think of it.) Interestingly the writer frequently switches point of view, although Rolt is distinctly the central consciousness of the text, and convincingly includes a sense of the aboriginal perspective, though never claiming any privileged insights in that regard.

At times the writing is distinctly, consciously, poetic, but the overtly descriptive passages are nearly all given over to an evocation of landscape that works wonderfully well so that this aspect of style doesn't come across as forced or overly precious. And the writer has an eye for the harsh brutality of this world as well as its many beauties, so this is a bracing kind of poetry, indeed bitingly practical at times. You are left in no doubt at all as to how tough this world is, regardless of its beauty.

It's a short novel but encompasses quite a range of characters, and they are all done well in terms of being convincingly realistic and rising above obvious stereotypes. Everyone is flawed, some spectacularly so, but there's much to admire and much to like. Above all the depiction of Rolt himself is a bit of triumph: he's genuinely complex, in some ways puzzling, even to himself, yet curiously heroic.

On the evidence of the text, I can't help but think that Ms Durack must have been quite a formidable character herself as well as a gifted writer.