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Salt Creek

Salt Creek 1

by Lucy Treloar
Publication Date: 01/08/2015
4/5 Rating 1 Review

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Some things collapse slow, and cannot always be rebuilt, and even if a thing can be remade it will never be as it was.

Salt Creek, 1855, lies at the far reaches of the remote, beautiful and inhospitable coastal region, the Coorong, in the new province of South Australia. The area, just opened to graziers willing to chance their luck, becomes home to Stanton Finch and his large family, including fifteen-year-old Hester Finch.

Once wealthy political activists, the Finch family has fallen on hard times. Cut adrift from the polite society they were raised to be part of, Hester and her siblings make connections where they can: with the few travellers that pass along the nearby stock route - among them a young artist, Charles - and the Ngarrindjeri people they have dispossessed. Over the years that pass, and Aboriginal boy, Tully, at first a friend, becomes part of the family.

Stanton's attempts to tame the harsh landscape bring ruin to the Ngarrindjeri people's homes and livelihoods, and unleash a chain of events that will tear the family asunder. As Hester witnesses the destruction of the Ngarrindjeri's subtle culture and the ideals that her family once held so close, she begins to wonder what civilization is. Was it for this life and this world that she was educated?

Shortlisted for the 2016 Miles Franklin Literary Award
Winner of the 2016 Dobbie Literary Award 

"Salt Creek introduces a capacious talent" The Australian

"... written with a profound respect for history: with an understanding that beyond a certain point, the past and its people are unknowable." Sydney Morning Herald

About the Author
Lucy Treloar was born in Malaysia and educated in Melbourne, England and Sweden. A graduate of the University of Melbourne and RMIT, Lucy is a writer and editor and has plied her trades both in Australia and in Cambodia, where she lived for a number of years. She has an abiding love for Southeast Asia, a region she retains links with through her editing work, which focuses on English language translations of a diverse range of material including folk tales and modern narrative forms.

Lucy is the 2014 Regional Winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. In 2012 she won the Writing Australia Unpublished Manuscript Award for her first novel, The Things We Tell Ourselves, and went on to be awarded a Varuna Publisher Fellowship for the same work in 2013. In 2011 Lucy was the recipient of a mentorship through the Australian Society of Authors as well as an Asialink Writer's Residency to Cambodia. Her short fiction has appeared in Sleepers, Overland, Seizure, and Best Australian Stories 2013.

ISBN:
9781743533192
9781743533192
Category:
Contemporary fiction
Publication Date:
01-08-2015
Publisher:
Pan Macmillan Australia
Pages:
416
Dimensions (mm):
232x156x31mm
Weight:
0.55kg

Right now I’m reading... Ali Smith’s wonderful How to be Both, about a renaissance artist of the 1460s and  ‘a child of a child of the 1960s’. I thought it would be hard work because it’s unconventional in style, but I quickly fell into it and am loving it. There are two narratives, an inventive structure and style, and a wonderful exuberance to the whole of it.

My favourite book growing up… Bilgewater by Jane Gardam. Bilgewater herself, aka Daisy Marigold Green is the most startling and original character. 

My all time favourite book is… I really can’t do this. I couldn’t even narrow it down to ten. But I always adore Barbara Trapido’s Brother of the More Famous Jack. You can’t help falling in love with her vivid characters or the Goldman family. It’s as if the book’s covers can barely contain them. 

The book I would recommend everyone to read… Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead – sublime (an overused word, but true in this case) and restrained. Written in the voice of an old man writing to his son, it is full of grace and demands quiet attention, which it repays more than you could imagine possible. A companion novel, Home, is also wonderful, but differently so. One review called it ‘the saddest book I have ever loved.’ So true.

My book is... going to make readers sad and hopeful and satisfied and curious. What I really want to write about is what I’ve written about. I can’t write about things I don’t care about.

I’ll never forget... sitting, five years old, on a high stone wall in an English wood and my father reaching up to give me a slice of bread and honey, which I ate in a patch of sun. It was perilous and wonderful.

My favourite place is... a beach in South Australia. 

The most dangerous thing I have ever done is... riding on a ghost train at the Royal Melbourne Show. I thought there was a good chance that the skeleton would grab me and couldn’t understand my parents’ cavalier attitude to their children’s safety. 

The first time I... was in childbirth I couldn’t believe how boring it was. I was in too much pain to read and there was nothing else to do but be in that moment. I have a horror of being bored.

I regret... following so much advice and not doing what I wanted to in the first place. It would have saved so much time and misery.

I remember... finding a whale tooth on a beach, though we didn’t know what animal it came from at first. It still seems mysterious, as if it’s full of untold stories.

The one piece of advice I should have listened to but didn’t… doesn’t apply. I only regret following advice.

I love... my family and yum cha and standing at the top of Primrose Hill in London, and the Coorong region of South Australia.

I hate... grapefruit. I just don’t understand it at all. 

I wish... the ringtail possums in our garden didn’t love our vegetable patch so much.

I can’t say no to... the chance of a good single malt whisky, a favourite book and an open fire.

Yesterday, I... sent my manuscript to the publisher and had lunch with my dear mother and sister.

Lucy Treloar

Lucy Treloar is the author of the novel Salt Creek (2015), which won the Indie Award for Best Debut, the ABIA Matt Richell Award and the Dobbie Award, and was shortlisted for prizes including the Miles Franklin Literary Award and the UK's Walter Scott Prize. Lucy has also been a recipient of the 2014 Commonwealth Short Story Prize (Pacific Region) and the 2013 Writing Australia Unpublished Manuscript Award.

Her short fiction has been published in Sleepers, Overland, Seizure and Best Australian Stories, and her non-fiction in newspapers and magazines including The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, and Womankind. A graduate of the University of Melbourne and RMIT, Lucy works as a writer and editor, and plies her trades in Australia as well as Cambodia, where she lived for a number of years. In between writing, Lucy finds the time to teach creative writing at RMIT and Writers Victoria. She lives in inner Melbourne with her family.

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1 Review

There are some books that surprise you with their unexpected intensity. They come out of nowhere to hit you so deeply to the core and draw you in to their world so completely that you feel as if you have become a part of it yourself. SALT CREEK is one such book. It's a fantastic novel of longing, mistakes, greed, dispossession, and, of course, love.

Characters are the heart of any novel, and SALT CREEK is no different. The characters and their relationships with one another were a delight to experience. Some were so detestable that I would grimace or almost shout with frustration, and there were equally evocative moments of pure delight and happiness. These moments demonstrated Treloar's great skill as a writer.

The background to the main act of the Finch family at Salt Creek is the slow but inevitable act of Indigenous dispossession. Treloar rarely makes this issue front and centre to the reader, but never lets it disappear entirely from the reader's mind. She presents the subject almost without judgement, inviting the reader to see the issue as it is. I think this has a greater chance of having an impact on the reader than straight moralising would. The reader witnesses the devastating impact of colonisation and ethnocentrism, knowing the end result, and must come to their own conclusion.

While it can be a bit difficult to get through the first quarter or so of the book, I think it's worth it for the reader to persevere. Here is a very poignant, very real account of the disintegration of a family, and the destruction of a people. It's a very good book, and I hope that a lot of people read and appreciate it.

Contains Spoilers No
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