“I did not believe any crop would grow on it or any livestock thrive. Everywhere were rolling grey shrubs and here and there a tree grown slantwise in the wind, I supposed, though it was still enough that day. If the land was an ill-patterned plate, the sky was a vast bowl that curved to meet the ground a very great distance from us in any direction we cared to look. There was no going beyond its rim.”

Salt Creek is the first novel by award-winning Australian author, Lucy Treloar. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century Hester Finch reflects on her early years spent in the Coorong in South Australia. Having failed with a whaling station and lost a shipment of sheep at sea, stubborn pride prevents Stanton Finch from accepting financial help from his in-laws.

He cuts his losses in Adelaide and takes his dairy herd to Salt Creek, then brings his wife and seven children from their city mansion to a basic home that is barely more than a large shed. There, they attempt, with little success, to make a living. He is no businessman, and even when this ill-advised venture turns out to be much to the detriment of his family’s welfare, Finch’s obstinacy does not falter.

Initially, their encounters with the natives are few, but one young man becomes a regular visitor: the Finches eventually refer to Tully as a friend, almost considering him family. “He was the most alert, conscious person I had ever met, poised for anything: flight, danger, contests of strength or will, and to learn more - always that.”

Finch’s philosophy towards the native population (the “poor wretches”) is one of tolerance and charity: he hopes to co-exist peacefully. But he does not recognise that the Coorong is quite unsuitable to his farming methods, and he fails to see the damage it does to the resources the indigenous people have managed for centuries. Instead, he believes he is selflessly bestowing upon these “savages” the great privilege of European civilisation. That very European perspective of the time is blind to the sophisticated civilisation that already exists there.

Things inevitably go wrong. Tully and his people could see it coming: “We knew that you, grinkari would come with muskets. The ancestors knew about you… We knew it would happen. Some people say we will be cursed if we don’t help you and that’s why people get sick and die, as they did before in other places. It makes no difference if we hate you or don’t hate you. We must live with you; you must live with us.”

Treloar’s plot is easily believable, with some incidents based on historical fact. Her characters are equally credible and their dialogue feels authentic. Hester’s father definitely bears some resemblance to the Poisonwood Bible’s Nathan Price: the best of intentions, but culturally insensitive. Her descriptive prose is often exquisite: “…the space they lived in was vast and the sky without limit. They flowed through it as sure and inevitable as gravity, as if the space itself were a living thing and part of them and they part of it.”

Treloar hints at some of the many amazing facts, revealed in Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu, about Australia’s indigenous population at the time of colonisation. With this truly fine piece of Australian historical fiction, Treloar sets the bar high, not just for her own subsequent works, but for other authors of this genre. A brilliant debut novel.