Secrets in the Outback

The most famous novel about an Australian sheep farm is probably The Thorn Birds, a melodramatic novel about forbidden love that still had a powerful sense of place (Germaine Greer described it as ‘the best bad book I’ve ever read’, and her review in the Guardian is worth reading — who knew Greer was so into nature!).

M.L Stedman’s second novel, A Far-Flung Life, is also a family saga set on a Western Australia sheep farm, but it is quite different in tone, with drama but no melodrama. It also poses interesting questions about family secrets, and whether they should be public and consequently face public humiliation, or keep private to protect the innocent.

Apart from their setting, there are other parallels between the two novels. Strong capable loving fathers who have shocking accidents. Strong competent mothers who run the massive sheep farming household with extreme efficiency, but do not love their daughters enough. Rebellious daughters. Man against nature in the outback. Big secrets which are hard to hide in the small towns with nosy neighbours, and in that time of party-line phone calls.

A Far-Flung Life novel opens in 1958 with an original and very pertinent image:

Strung along the seat of the Bedford, the three McBride men sit, like unpacked Russian dolls. Phil’s straight dark hair and oval face are repeated in Warren, his eldest son, and echoed in Matt, his youngest. Like peas in a pod — same story for generations. Their mother, Lorna, doesnt get a look-in. You can tell a McBride from a mile off.

Two horrifying events frame the Stedman book. The first happens in the first chapter right after the above excerpt: Phil McBride swerves the car to avoid a large roo, and there is an accident; one or more of the McBride men will die, and what will then happen to the farm, wife Lorna and daughter Rose? The second event is more morally shocking; no spoilers here, but it looms large over all the chapters that follow.

Most characters have secrets, and Stedman comes down very clearly on the side of the right to privacy. Private pursuits that do not hurt anyone else are to be enjoyed without criticism from any moral majority. It would be better, she implicitly says, if those could be openly or privately enjoyed rather than hidden out of shame or fear,

The novel moves back and forth in time, and follows different members of the McBride family as well as digressions into the stories of a few local residents. One of my favorite characters was Pete Peachey, the roo shooter, who is a loner with intermittent involvement in the McBride lives, a WWII veteran with his own secret.

As with small towns anywhere, there are gossips. Foremost among them is Myrtle, the postmistress, who keeps a logbook of all the funerals she goes to, and adds notes about any suspicious events relating to them. She is not above ‘inadvertently’ opening parcels addressed to local residents. The mystery of Rose McBride’s death, and the parentage of Rose’s young son Andrew, loom large in her mind. Myrtle has her own secrets too, which could, but do not, make her more sympathetic to other people’s need for privacy.

Less convincing is the new-broom local policeman Rundle, who makes it a project to dig out and investigate any old local event that he deems suspicious. One woman’s husband died of botulism after eating a meal she made; the previous policeman knew that the husband had been brutally beating her, and put his death down as an accident. But Rundle is suspicious, and interrogates the woman, leading to her arrest and jailing, and her children sent to foster homes. Rundle’s motivations were unclear, and it also seemed odd that no one in the community objected to his actions against one of their own. This does not seem like a rule-following community, and they are supportive of each other, so this never quite made sense except as an authorial device to raise tension about Rundle’s investigations into the McBride death.

I must admit to some boredom about Matt McBride and Bonnie’s endless will-they-won’t-they romance, and Matt’s perpetual trauma sometimes seemed dragged out with near-identical event after event. I was also puzzled by the complete lack of aborigines in the environment — had they been wiped out of existence in this area?

Stedman’s very well-received first novel, The Light Between Oceans, and this one, both have babies and their parentage at the core of the novel, making that something of a Stedman theme. Her first was set on an island off the coast, with waves lashing and storms raging and boats drifting. This one is set far inland, on the edge of the Western Australian desert, with scrub and dust storms and humans battling drought and flora and fauna to make a living rearing sheep. In both novels, nature is omnipresent, and described with gorgeous intensity.

Back in England, an acre might support two or three sheep. Here, with the lack of rainfall, you need more like forty acres per sheep. There is heat. There is sun. But on winter nights the water in the tanks will freeze over. The searing light that coaxes life into being here will bleach it out of existence with the same indifferent shrug, leaving blanched trees, and rusted corrugated iron on the roofs of abandoned homesteads. The wind that brings the rain can bring floods and flatten shearing sheds.

The brutality of human existence in this environment is uncompromisingly laid out for the reader. Death, caused by nature and humans, is omnipresent. The roo shooter shoots roos, dashes baby joeys against the ground, skins them and saves some meat for the dogs. Copious amounts of blood are washed off bodies and clothes and equipment (Pete would ‘turn creeks red when he bathed’). The sheep farms survive on a financial knife edge, subject to natural disasters as well as mining operations. It is hard reading at some points.

For me, this was not as good as The Light Between Oceans, but is worth reading just for the immersive outback experience.

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A Far-Flung Life

M.L Stedman

Scribner, 2026