Rural romance is a bestseller in the heartlands

WHY rural romance may be our top-selling local fiction genre.

Rachael Treasure, who grew up in Tasmania, is a rural romance pioneer. Picture: Alastair Bett

WHEN Rachael Treasure does book signings, she is more likely to head to an agricultural show for heavy farm machinery than a city writers festival heaving with household names. For the publicity tour for her latest novel, Cleanskin Cowgirls, Treasure visited the Henty Machinery Field Days in southern NSW. Amid 50-tonne crop carriers and rough terrain forklifts, she sold 600 books over three days.

Treasure (yes, that’s her real name) has also sold hundreds of novels at the Tasmanian agriculture festival Agfest and at ute musters in Deniliquin, NSW. The rural journalist turned author says: “I can go to a Sydney Writers Festival and sit there and sign one novel, whereas in Deni I’m flat out for three days and my readers will even bring me a Bundy and Coke halfway through the day.’’

A 46-year-old single mum from country Tasmania, Treasure is the pioneer of one of Australian fiction’s fastest-growing genres — rural romance. It is also known as ru-ro, farm lit and, less respectfully, chook lit, and publishers say it may be the top-selling adult fiction genre from local writers. (Definitive sales statistics are hard to come by because rural romance is usually incorporated into the broader category of women’s fiction.)

Penguin commissioning editor Sarah Fairhall says it is highly likely Australia’s growing stable of rural romance writers — many of whom work or live on the land — collectively outsell local crime writers (crime writing is the highest-profile popular fiction genre, with the most critical cachet). “Rural romance is certainly one of the biggest-selling genres of recent years,’’ Fairhall says. “It has been very successful. I would certainly expect that it was outselling crime, if we’re talking about local authors. It is certainly one of the strongest — if not the strongest — Australian genre at the moment.’’

HarperCollins’s commercial fiction publisher Anna Valdinger agrees rural romance “may well be’’ Australian fiction’s biggest-selling adult genre, given “how many new authors are being published into that area. You just have to go into a bookshop. They’re pretty clearly branded — there’s a hat or a horse or the (cowboy) boots.’’

Raised in Hobart and rural Tasmania, Treasure is the country’s biggest-selling rural romance writer. She has sold more than 500,000 books in Australia since her bestselling debut novel, Jillaroo, was published in 2005, clearing a path for other rural fiction writers to follow.

Now based on a small plot of land near Richmond with her chooks, stock horses and children, she tells Review she learned to shoot and cook rabbits, set craypots and cut up a sheep in a killing shed “from a very early age. That’s fed a lot of my work.’’

Interestingly, Cleanskin Cowgirls partly unfolds in a grim and dysfunctional “abattoir house’’. An early scene features the two heroines as schoolgirls, messing around with freshly slaughtered, steaming sheep guts.

The novel is a sometimes gritty coming-of-age story about female friendship, environmentally sensitive farming, child abuse, fame and class tensions. It’s also laced with shots of syrupy romance.

BOOK EXTRACT: Read some of Cleanskin Cowgirls

But rural romance is not merely Mills & Boon with windmills, according to its advocates. While traditional romance novels follow familiar story arcs and are often published in e-book format only — worldwide, romance is the biggest e-book genre — most rural romances appear in print editions, explore the realities of life on the land and blur with broader categories of women’s and rural fiction.

Nevertheless, there are narrative formulas in farm lit — plots often turn on dramatic road or farm-shed accidents and long-buried family secrets. And while most ru-ro heroines have jobs or high-flying careers, they learn, the hard way, to be wary of the lady-killer with the flashy silver belt buckle. However, these heroines are neither confined to the homestead nor reincarnated Sex and the City types. They are more likely to wear Blundies than Manolo Blahniks, to covet a ute rather than a sportscar and to own a working mongrel rather than a designer dog with a hypo-allergenic coat.

“It’s where feminism meets farming,’’ says Treasure, who has written several novels, a guide to training working dogs and a racy collection of rural love stories, Fifty Bales of Hay — her response to the Fifty Shades of Grey phenomenon.

A pre-Christmas visit to a Kmart in Sydney’s north reflects the rise of this undeniably Australian genre. Prominently displayed among popular fiction’s heavy hitters (John Marsden, Nora Roberts, Clive Cussler) were the latest books by farm-lit authors such as Treasure, Nicole Alexander, Fiona Palmer, Barbara Hannay and Anna Romer. Like Treasure, many of these authors are living the lives they write about. Palmer is a mother of two from a flyspeck of a town, Pingaring (population 140), in eastern Western Australia. Fleur McDonald — whose debut novel, Red Dust, was the strongest-selling work by a first-time author in 2009 — lives on a vast pastoral station in the same state.

Already, the genre has spawned subcategories including ru-ro/mining and ru-ro/medical (cue a female intensive care unit nurse or GP who discovers her inner country girl — and a station owner with, ahem, many superior attributes — away from the city). Perth’s Loretta Hill drew on her experiences as an engineer in a male-dominated milieu in outback Western Australia, to craft a bestselling series of fly-in, fly-out romances. The final novel in the series, The Girl in the Yellow Vest, has been a No 1 bestseller on iTunes.

In an increasingly globalised culture, what is fuelling the popularity of these distinctively anti­podean stories? Valdinger says the genre’s strong sales reflect “an appetite for more and more stories set on the land, whether it’s a story of a city girl going out and finding a new life, or rural characters living their lives. I think there’s something incredibly relatable for those Australians who live out in the country, and there’s something quite aspirational or escapist for city dwellers who love the fantasy of going out and getting closer to nature and living on the land. There’s a romance to that idea, quite apart from the love stories within the books themselves.’’

Authenticity, she says, is crucial; rural romance writers must know their catching pens from their shearing sheds: “Country people can tell if someone is faking it; if someone is bunging it on. They pride themselves on a down-to-earth, no-nonsense attitude to things and if someone’s getting details wrong, it just won’t wash with them.

“Of the successful authors in this area, most of them are country girls themselves.’’

Interestingly, Treasure doesn’t see herself as a romance or women’s fiction writer, pointing out she has a broader readership than those categories imply. She says in a phone interview from her home, where the pony occasionally wanders in “to raid the fruit bowl and eat the rug’’: “In my signing queues I might have a teenage jackaroo or a grandpa. Also, a lot of the blokes who work big rigs on the mines or (drive) trucks long-haul, they’ll listen to audio and I think that’s because it’s not romance in that classic form. My books weave in my absolute passion for agriculture.’’

She is an advocate of regenerative agriculture, which focuses on soil health and regenerating depleted grasslands, and has worked with soil scientists and farmers in this area.

Cleanskin Cowgirls has a renewable energy subplot involving the sewage works of a broken-down, drought-afflicted, sometimes smelly country town. “I was so tired of being labelled an outback romance novelist that I’ve written about human crap in Cleanskins,’’ she says bluntly. “Human waste is a resource that’s not being utilised.’’

Her environmentally friendly philosophy seems to have put her at odds with her father, who is still farming the land, his way, at 80. The author also reveals she “invested all of my previous earnings in my farm and then lost everything in divorce. So I basically started again at 40.’’ She now lives on about 8ha, and she trials regenerative farming techniques on a small scale “without the old man saying, ‘Oh, you shouldn’t do that’ ”.

Rural writers such as Treasure, says Valdinger, “tackle a lot of really interesting rural issues, whether it’s to do with sustainable food production, the problem of depression and suicide in the bush, or issues of inheritance and girls inheriting the land as opposed to the boys. Rachael really kicked off that trend.’’

For all its market success, the broader romance genre, she says, still encounters “a lot of snobbery’’: “There’s been a dismissive attitude towards it. It’s just a romance; it’s just a Mills & Boon. It was seen as easy to write or just somehow for women.

“Therefore, you get that slightly sexist attitude towards it; it’s not serious fiction.’’

The publisher maintains “romance readers are a gift to publishers because they read a lot; they’re extremely engaged; they’re voracious readers, they’re willing to try new writers”. Given the rise of romance e-titles and the proliferation of rural romances in bookshops and department stores, she declares: “The robustness of the genre can no longer be ignored’’.

Read an extract from Cleanskin Cowgirls at theaustralian.com.au/review