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Chargement... Working Bullockspar Katharine Susannah Prichard
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Classic novel of the Australian outback by one of Australia's most gifted authors. This reprint of a story first published in1926 describes life amongst Western Australian timber workers in the early twentieth century. An evocative tale of social relations, working culture and romantic bonds set in the context of the beauty and majesty of the great Karri forests. Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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My 1991 Imprint Classics edition includes an introduction by Ivor Indyk (now of Giramondo Publishing, founded in 1995), but its cover image from a panel of 'Riverbend' painted by Sidney Nolan, alludes only to the majesty of the forests. It doesn't even hint at the power of Prichard's story. Working Bullocks does feature superb evocations of the natural environment which would win any nature-writing prize today, but KSP wrote social realism with political intent, and this novel exposes the hardships of the working poor who laboured far from cities and towns, in the timber industry.
Chapter 21 'The Karri Forest' in Nathan Hobby's award-winning biography, The Red Witch (2022) tells me that the catalyst for this novel was KSP's motorbike trip to Pemberton with her husband Hugo in 1919.
Perhaps by the 1990s marketing departments sought to capitalise on the prevailing interest in environmental issues with a cover depicting trees, but these earlier covers are more true to KSP's social concerns. They show the teamsters at work...
Set in the early 1920s in the Karri forests southwest of Perth, Working Bullocks is a story of powerful men crushed by a system of body-breaking work, poverty and little prospect of advancement. When we read this story, almost a century later, it is to recognise how brutal working conditions were for the timber workers of that era. Single men in the forests mostly camped out in the bush. They lived on meagre campfire meals with the basics brought from town. They supplemented this diet with what they could catch, rabbits and 'tammas' (Tammar Wallabies). When they could, they came into town for a bath and a decent meal at a boarding house and what passed for a social life at the pub.
Married men lived in crude company housing, so pitiless that KSP's story tells of women and children who died while requests for decent housing were 'being considered'.
(A rake is a form of rail transport: rolling stock coupled together.)
The size of the families reminds us that this was an era without effective birth control. The indefatigable Mary Ann Colburn has 18 children, and a useless husband. She makes ends meet by decades of incessant work, not just the labour of cooking and cleaning for her own brood, but by doing washing, ironing and mending in town. When the story opens, her daughter Deb — barely into her teens — is about to start work in Mrs Pennyfather's boarding house, and like her brother Chris working with Red Burke's bullock team, she will give her wages to her mother. Mrs Pennyfather provides board and lodging and three meals a day for up to 40 men, and it will be Deb's job to make the beds and do the laundry and lay the tables and do the kitchen prep. These scenes are vivid, almost certainly drawn from KSP's observations of women labouring seven days a week in this way.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2024/01/01/working-bullocks-by-katharine-susannah-prich... ( )