Salt Creek review: Lucy Treloar’s novel on a colonial family struggle

A feckless father moves his family to the marginal farming land of colonial South Australia.

Lucy Treloar, author of Salt Creek.

The sardonic epigraphs of Lucy Treloar’s brilliant first novel, Salt Creek, reprint official documents that proclaim (in fact “erect”) the colony of South Australia in 1834, then fix its boundaries and guarantee the rights of Abor­igines two years later.

Treloar’s story takes us into the marginal farming land of the Coorong, where the Finches, a Quaker family, have been forced to remove from their capacious home in Adelaide (“two storeys and a cellar”) because of the father’s fecklessness. His whaling station has failed. His consignment of sheep from Van Diemen’s Land has been lost to shipwreck.

Now he finds himself — and those he brings with him, ailing wife and surviving children — “pitted … against the land, yet it was impervious to all his learning and efforts and incantatory prayers”. This resigned yet sympathetic judgment is that of his eldest daughter, Hester. She is the complex moral and emotional centre of the novel. For all the harm that her father wreaks, she says, “He has spent most of his life hoping, I think.”

The novel begins in 1874. Hester and her son Joss are in possession of her grandmother’s house in Chichester, back in England.

The colonial misadventure has been redeemed by the legacy that allows them to return whence her family came. Nevertheless she is keenly nostalgic for the Coorong — “I never felt so alive as then, when we had so little” — and for the family property “which stretched as far as a person could ride across in a day”. Now she must adapt to the strictures as well as the comforts of English life.

Yet her first impressions of Salt Creek had been dark: “the journey to that place was like moving knowingly, dutifully, towards death”. There the Finches had to establish themselves, build a home partly of driftwood, tend to a mother who “had so little of insistence left in her”, seldom encounter visitors, be bound to the drudgery of seemingly hopeless work. This is the antidote to Australian novels of pioneering as triumphs of will over malign natural forces, and domestic discord.

On arrival at Salt Creek, the Finches “boiled over the edge of the dray”. Among Hester’s siblings are the wilful Addie, named for the almost city the family had to abandon, Fred — who would be an artist — and his hulking brothers Hugh and Stanton. Boldly and without strain Treloar introduces into this mix the Aboriginal youth Tully, who “existed in two worlds”. Named for his Irish father, his mother is the implacable Rimmilli, of whom Hester reckons that “anger was the essence of her, deeper than bone”.

What particular grievance Rimmilli may hold, or what is Hester’s father’s part, is one of several crucial matters Treloar dares to leave undecid­able. The usual momentum of pioneering fiction is undone by backtracking, indeterminacy. A more complex narrative of adaptation and failure is offered instead. Treloar is also attuned to the want of dramatic incident of an outback life in which “there are years that pass in which nothing at all seems to happen”.

There is news of the wider world: the American Civil War, and before that the Victorian gold rush. Attracted are not only “the Celestials”, Chinese diggers, but Hester’s older brothers. When they decamp, she is moved to wonder, with her usual acuity, “what it would be like to be a man … they are solitary creatures for all they work in each other’s company”.

Among much else, Salt Creek is a subtle study in masculinity. For all his biblical sternness, the patriarch may have corrupted his sons. Given the chance, Fred — like Hester — escapes to England, realising his vocation and there able to express his homosexual desires. Mr Bagshott, touring the district to make records for the colonial government, may have been acquainted with the Brontes back in Yorkshire, but reprehends the education of women and Aborigines, opinions unthinkingly bolstered by scripture. His son Charles seems the morally fine as well as romantically apt person to lead Hester out of her durance and such prejudice, but Treloar admits no simple or painless resolutions.

In its larger compass, Salt Creek refigures the historical novel in Australia, compelling us to unfix assumptions about frontier life, domestic and economic, relations between men and women, and generations, European and indigenous people.

Line after line of Treloar’s book has an arresting stylistic felicity. Here, for instance, two of the Finch children are feeding chickens: “From this distance, it was as if they were wandering through blossoms.” Or this of a sexual encounter: “It was everything, not only pleasure, and shocking.”

Salt Creek introduces a capacious talent that is distinguished by a sceptical intelligence about historical sources and how casually they have been used, an incisive ear for dialogue and the ambition to broaden — into elegy and regret rather than celebration perhaps — the boundaries of historical fiction in this country.

Peter Pierce edited the Cambridge History of Australian Literature.

Salt Creek

By Lucy Treloar

Picador, 416pp, $29.99