Pioneers

The first internationally successful novel by an Australian woman, Pioneers captures the brutal poetry of making a life in the Australian bush at the turn of the twentieth century. Katharine Prichard writes with unsentimental clarity about what it costs to tame wilderness: the backbreaking labor, the isolation, the small violences done in the name of survival. Mary Cameron and her husband Donald build their homestead in Gippsland's untamed hills, raising cattle and children while escaped convicts prowl the margins and bushfire threatens everything. When their son Davey comes of age, he finds himself trapped between his father's iron will and his own hunger for independence. A romantic rivalry with the local hotel owner further complicates his path to adulthood. This is a novel about the land and the people who try to possess it, and the quiet rebellions that shape a family.