By Kerryn Goldsworthy
Her
Garry Disher
Her. By Garry Disher.
Hachette, $29.99
Garry Disher is best known for his crime fiction, particularly the Challis and Destry police procedurals, set around the Mornington Peninsula and distinguished by their superb sense of place. His latest novel is likewise vividly evocative of its setting, this time around rural Victoria in the back-country hinterland of the goldfields. It is 1909 and a hawker living on stony land he calls a "farm" has bought himself three women and girls, most recently a child of three sold to him by a large, destitute family. These female slaves are in thrall to their master, they provide him with food, sex, shoddy home-made goods for sale, and new children to train as thieves, until the flu epidemic of 1918 suddenly changes everything. This distressing but compelling book has echoes of the Barbara Baynton classic Bush Studies.