'In September 1883, the South Australian town of Fairly huddles under strange, vivid sunsets. Six-year-old Denny Wallace has gone missing during a dust storm, and the whole town is intent on finding him. As they search the desert and mountains for the lost child, the residents of Fairly - newlyweds, landowners, farmers, mothers, artists, Indigenous trackers, cameleers, children, schoolteachers, widows, maids, policemen - explore their own relationships with the complex landscape unsettling history of the Flinders Ranges.
'The colonial Australia of The Sun Walks Down is unfamiliar, multicultural, and noisy with opinions, arguments, longings and terrors. It's haunted by many gods - the sun among them, rising and falling on each day that Denny could be found, or lost forever.' (Publication summary)
Epigraph:
Three hearty cheers for the flag, the emblem of civic and religious liberty, and may it be a sign to the natives that the dawn of liberty, civilisation, and Christianity is about to break upon them, JOHN MCDOUALL STUART, PLANTING THE BRITISH FLAG IN THE CENTRE OF AUSTRALIA, 1860
Now is so small a part of time. OODGEROO, 'THE PAST'
The province of the poem is the world.
When the sun rises, it rises in the poem
and when it sets darkness comes down
and the poem is dark.
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS, PATERSON
'“How are they losing their children like this, all over the country?” asks an Afghan cameleer as he passes through the town of Fairly, where The Sun Walks Down is set. Days earlier, the farmhand Billy considers the fear that “a lost child” evokes in the people now implanted on his Country: it is “the one cost of settling on this land that they consider unreasonable”. His sister, once employed as a nursemaid, retells the tale of the Pied Piper, speaking of her two stolen daughters; an Irish housekeeper, in counterpoint, describes an Indigenous story once overheard, about a mother spirit looking for her missing children.' (Introduction)
'“How are they losing their children like this, all over the country? They aren’t used to the desert.”
'These are the thoughts of a Pashtun cameleer in Fiona McFarlane’s second novel, The Sun Walks Down, set in South Australia’s Flinders Ranges in 1883. This “bit part” cameleer is one of the few characters with a first-person address in McFarlane’s polyphonic, multifaceted saga that explores the cultural narrative, anxiety, and stain of white Australian presence on arid Australian land.' (Introduction)
'Early in The Sun Walks Down, Mary Wallace – mother to six-year-old Denny, who has gone missing in a dust storm – throws her husband a ‘general look of bafflement at having found herself here, in this place, with these people’. It’s a symptomatic moment early in a novel that contains myriad displays of perplexity by various characters – at each other, at situations they create or must navigate, at the meaning of life.' (Introduction)
