' In an interview in the Guardian in 2004, the renowned American author Annie Proulx spoke of her admiration for the work of a little known Australian writer called Barbara Baynton. The creator of Brokeback Mountain described how she was drawn to the work of another female writer whose work was "aesthetically rudimentary, but takes harshness, between men and women, and the land, to a painful level of implacability" (Edemariam). Proulx was referring specifically to her favourite Baynton short story, Squeaker's Mate, though her comments are applicable to almost every story in Baynton's Bush Studies (1902), a collection characterised by relentlessly unsentimental and brutal depictions of life in remote Australian locations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.' (Publication summary)