Christina Houen

This Place You Know Christina Houen

Hay, New South Wales, 1923. Martha, a classics scholar from the coast, comes to teach in a man's town in the outback. She falls in love with Henry, a local man, and they find their dream place on the river where they raise a family and breed a flock of sheep with fine wool. The unforgiving climate erodes their dreams. When Henry leaves, Martha takes on the outside work and learns to drive. Seven-year-old Anna is her main helper and confidante. Sustained by their shared love of this stark and beautiful country with its endless skies, red plains and silvery saltbush, mother and daughter strive - against all odds - to look after livestock and land and keep the farm going. But when Anna is away at boarding school, the place is lost forever.

'I ache for these women. They endure so much and still, through their determination and resilience, they triumph.' - Elisabeth Hanscombe, author of The Art of Disappearing

'Remarkable for the way it portrays human lives as embedded in and deeply shaped by place, and places as indelibly marked, for good and ill, by people.' - Mary Besemeres, author of Translating One's Self: Language and Selfhood in Cross-Cultural Autobiography