By Review by Mark McGinness
ROMANCE
The Woolgrower's Companion
Joy Rhoades
Penguin, $32.99
Pastoral romance has enjoyed a long and popular run in the history of Australian literature. And some memorable heroines – Henry Kingsley's flighty beauty, Gerty Hillyar in the 1860s; Miles Franklin's spirited Sybylla Melvyn at the time of Federation; and Colleen McCullough's lovely, cursed Meggie Cleary in 1977.
The Woolgrower's Companion by Joy Rhoades.
Yet novelists seem to have avoided wartime tales of Australian countrywomen falling for the Italian POWs who slaved on their family properties. The amore that dared not speak its name?
Six decades on, the genre has flourished among the crowded field of pastoral romance from Susan Temby's The Bread with Seven Crusts in 2002 to Fiona Palmer's Sunnyvale Girls in 2014.
Joy Rhoades' story, The Woolgrower's Companion, centres on soldier settler, Ralph Stimson, who had won a property on the New South Wales Tablelands. He named it Amiens, after the battle where he had lost so many friends. Through grit, grind and a ruthless streak, he acquired more blocks when two fellow settlers failed. By 1945, Ralph was widowed, and increasingly bearing the psychological scars of his time at war he continued to resist the support of his only child, Kate, recently married to the absent, serving Jack Dowd.
The arrival at Amiens of Vittorio Bottinella and Luca Canali, at a time of drought and default and the decline of her father, challenges the accepted conventions and prompts Kate to question her role in a hidebound rural community. This is deftly handled. Period and place are also beautifully evoked. As the drought deepens and debts mount, Kate visits Sydney for the first time to pawn her pearls – her only totem of respectable prosperity given by her mother, who had always been so keen to see her daughter "a lady", an equal to other pastoralist daughters. Back at home, her father is playing checkers on the veranda as a pair of rainbow lorikeets fly over the clothesline to a nearby jacaranda tree. Driving towards the homestead at night was "like driving into an inkwell".
Another powerful theme that runs through The Woolgrower's Companion is the treatment of Aborigines. In this case, it is the plight of 14-year-old Daisy, brought to work at Amiens from a home for "half-castes".
This is an era when no Aborigine – from the women to the stockmen – can share the same quarters as a white Australian. No townie, except perhaps the doctor, is entertained by graziers; first generation pastoralists are looked askance by the more settled settlers, although the next generation is acceptable; men make all the critical decisions; women do not do men's work – they dispense tea and Anzac biscuits, which complement every conversation; foreigners cannot be trusted, especially around women.
Nearly 50 years after Miles Franklin's My Brilliant Career, the life of a landed daughter in the drought, be it Bruggabrong, Possum Gully or Amiens, had hardly changed. Nor had prospects for women. While young Sybylla imagines a bright world before her, the slightly older, more pragmatic Kate can only see ruin and disgrace; but both have a steely resolve. During the 10 months that the novel covers, the heroine recognises not just her own prejudices but also her strengths. Joy Rhoades' Kate Dowd is Elizabeth-Bennet-meets-The-Drover's-Wife.
The strength of expatriate writers is another Australian literary tradition. In this accomplished debut, Joy Rhoades shows promise in joining them.