Another shed coming up on the horizon...a low, wide roof of galvanised iron the only landmark in a million square miles of flatness and glare... The sun blazed overhead like a nuclear pile. His hat smelt like a dirty sock. His body was sticky, itchy, tired. The tyres of his old yellow truck, sunk into the sand, gave out a hot, desolate, perished rubber odour, heatwaves ballooning from the bodywork. The impression he had, glancing back towards the vehicle, was of disintegrating material only just holding together. A split in his hat admitted a hot bar of sunlight onto his scalp. His eyeballs felt like pinpoint charred coals and he wanted to slide down into what shade there was...
Yesterday morning he had left a tin-roofed farmhouse far to the south of here - Sharon, his wife, and his three daughters hardly stirring in their sleep as they said goodbye. Then while he was out at the truck tying down the last of his load they woke up more, stumbled from bed and huddled in jumpers, stamping their feet in the chill, hugging themselves in the greyness of first light. Sharon brought him a mug of tea and they stood looking at each other over the steaming rims. Well, there was more to this going away than met the eye. The talk of money. The talk of returning to the country of his childhood. It wasn't the full story...
He took the cool, pre-autumnal, misty dawn track away - across sheep paddocks dotted with poplars. In a ground mist a flock of starlings formed a perfect heart collapsing into the tatters of a pine windbreak. It was a reversed image of emotion. He was leaving a house, making a break, following a pattern he barely understood. He only knew it was happening; that he was making it happen, and was going, and if he didn't there was a kind of death he would face, he couldn't name what it was.
Into the hard-living world of travelling shearers in the Australian outback comes internationally acclaimed writer Roger McDonald, driving an old truck rattling with cooking gear. He has abandoned writing for a time and found work as a cook for a team of New Zealand shearers working through New South Wales, South Australia and Victoria. He is determined to find a sense of belonging: somehow to join his life with the landscape, the places and the people he meets along the way; somehow to fill the inexpressible yearning he feels.
Shearers' Motel is the story of that quest, of its triumphs and its failures - a story told with a heartfelt sense of of the profundity of ordinary lives. Written with an insider's affection and familiarity sharpened by an outsider's perception, this moving account of working life in a classic Australian industry gives a new twist to a long tradition of outback travel writing. It confirms Roger McDonald as one of our finest and most lyrical chroniclers of the land - and of the human heart.
Naked : Cross Turning Over
( dir. Robert Klenner
)
Australia
:
Jan Chapman Productions
Australian Broadcasting Corporation
,
1995
Z817523
1995
single work
film/TV
Hughie, a writer in his late forties, is married with three children and living in the country. Through an uncontrollable desire to step outside himself, to recapture the naturalness of feeling of his childhood, and to seek renewal, Hughie leaves his family for the outback. What began as a tentative adventure has the power to change him in ways that are unforeseen, profound, and ultimately irrevocable.
Epigraph:
Shed
To separate, divide
Throw off, repel, scatter
Shed
To shelter
Shed
To pour out, let flow
Send forth as an emanation
Shed (Aust. & N.Z.)
A shearing shed
Epigraph:
‘An old Maori lady once said, “Never
touch the handpiece. If you once touch
the handpiece, then you’re gone.’
Postcolonial Heritage and Settler Well-Being : The Historical Fictions of Roger McDonald
Amherst
:
Cambria Press
,
2018
15395794
2018
multi chapter work
criticism
'The Australian writer Roger McDonald is the author of ten novels, two novelisations from and for film scripts, two television scripts, one semi-fictionalised memoir, a collection of essays, and two volumes of poetry. His publication record spans half a century from the late 1960s up until the late teens with his tenth novel, A Sea Chase, published in 2017. His books have achieved a significant record in the Australian list of literary awards and he has gone close to breaking into the major international prizes that distinguish the transnational careers of other contemporary Australian writers such as Thomas Keneally, Peter Carey, David Malouf, and, more recently, Kate Grenville. McDonald’s work has been published in London and New York as well as in the key metropolitan markets of his native Australia, and it has been translated into Spanish, German, and Swedish. 1915, his first novel, was adapted into an Australian Broadcasting Commission television series, which was shown on Australian screens in the early 1980s and distributed internationally.
'McDonald writes about ordinary characters whose lives have often been overtaken by historical forces they do not understand and cannot control. These men and women are commonly defined by whom they know and what they do rather than through the display of extraordinary qualities of mind, sensibility, or virtue. McDonald often situates his characters’ within foundational Australian historical periods such as the convict period, frontier settlement, the development of the pastoral industry, the Great War, the Golden Age of Aviation, and the Second World War and its aftermath. This later post-war period saw the transformation of Anglo-Celtic Australia by waves of initially southern and eastern European migration, followed by Asian and indeed wider international migration. The emerging multicultural character of the country coincided with the decline of rural Australia and the pastoral industry as the preferred locations for representative Australian types and values. These events or periods are well entrenched within the public memory of a White Australia and that enables McDonald to explore his characters’ search for purpose and fulfillment within the mythological registers of his nation’s postcolonial history.
'This study focuses on the books (five novels and the fictionalised memoir) in which McDonald has decided to situate his characters’ search for purpose and well-being within the mythological registers of colonial history. It explores McDonald’s investments in story and his developments in idiom and literary form, as endeavors to engage a wider public in the problem of postcolonial settlement. The common narrative problem is the elusiveness of a condition of Being that is well settled in the web of social, cultural, and environmental connections that are necessary for dwelling. McDonald pursues the possibilities for a wider more satisfying sense of human connection but his representations of the common man under the conditions of postcolonial modernity never allow that to come easily.'
Source: Abstract.
