Salt Creek by Lucy Treloar - atmospheric, historical, wonderful.

My Review

As soon as I saw this book on a friends tbr pile I knew it was exactly my kind of read. Historical literary fiction set in a bleak and harsh alien wilderness with its attendant dangers, brings the opportunity to step back in time and slip into someone else’s shoes and I wasn’t disappointed with the time travel experience this beautifully written, wonderful, haunting novel presented.

Salt Creek begins in England in the 1870s where Hetty is reminiscing about the years she spent living in the Coorong Australia with her parents and siblings. Coorong is the absolute back of beyond and Salt creek is its armpit! A harsh, bleak and very lonely place, yet it haunts her very existence.

Her intractable Papa is a feckless and reckless soul who never quite manages to make a success of any venture he tries yet he is full of big ideas and will never admit defeat. So in 1955 when his life in Adelaide begins to crumble he drags his unwilling family across the plains of Australia to live in a wooden shack he has built with his bare hands, at the edge of a dry country near a coastal inlet where the nearest neighbours are far below the families previous social status, even these Innkeepers, live over 10 miles away running a hotel which caters for the odd passing traveller.

15 year old Hester Finch (Hetty) is appalled when she realises how far they have fallen from the polite society they used to belong to and which now rejects them. A simmering resentment of having to do what her father dictates, together with watching her formerly bright and pretty mother become a nervous drudge, builds and she vows she will never be beholden to a man. She also worries what will become of her younger sister Addy, a sweet, flirty, flighty young miss, prone to tantrums and the apple of her fathers eye.

Life in this totally isolated and relentless spot takes its inevitable toll on the family and all the time Papa’s great ideas falter and fail. The cattle he planned to raise starve in the barren heat, so he exchanges them for sheep, to find they fare no better. He ends up working himself and his sons almost to death with little success and always his misplaced pride stops him asking for help from family and making bad decision after worse – a trait which will have disastrous consequences.

Meanwhile Hetty tries to make the most of their lot. They are a large family and her older and younger brothers plus 2 younger sisters provide companionship and the inevitable sibling rivalries. The odd visitor who occasionally passes their way, some travelling musicians, an artist and his father, provide a little relief from the isolation and an aboriginal boy called Tull whom Papa tries to educate and civilise as part of a pointless anthropological experiment, becomes a pivotal part of the family as his education distances him from his own kin yet his black skin and cultural beliefs prevent him from ever really being part of the Finch family even though he lives as part of the household. His inclusion into the family causes Hetty to wonder just what civilization actually means.

The family have to live beside the natives who have lived off the land around for centuries and who have legends and myths deeply ingrained in the salty sand, but the Finch families intervention changes and damages the land and contaminates the water sucks where the natives get their water from therefore has an adverse effect on the aboriginal folks lives and a resentful truce is difficult to maintain.

I just slid into Hetties skin as though I was born in it, I felt and smelt and lived every second of her difficult life and devoured this deeply affecting and completely wonderful novel, drinking every drop of descriptive storytelling from the bottom of the mug and exhaling a satisfied Aahhh at the end of it.

It is one of those books you wish you’d never come to the end of, yet you can’t wait to get there to discover the outcome. It’s a book to savour, to enjoy and definitely to make you think.

My copy has some reading group notes at the back and I agree this will make a wonderful read for groups of enthusiastic readers who love to discuss and dissimilate every nuance of a story.

The Blurb

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, an 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?