A Darker Music, BY MARIS MORTON, SCRIBE, $32.95
To budding authors out there, it’s heartening to see that teacher and artist Maris Morton was 72 when she snatched the inaugural CAL Scribe Fiction Prize 2010 (awarded to an unpublished manuscript by an Australian writer over the age of 35).
Her novel is a “derring dip” into a male-dominated, old-style way of life on a rural WA merino sheep stud in fictional Downe. Set against a backdrop of the changing seasons in native bush and the contrasting gossamer-thread orchard around the homestead, Morton weaves the landscape into a gentle – and at times pedestrian – tale of generations of family intrigue.
A cast of characters, including no-nonsense agency housekeeper Mary Lanyon and dying lady of the house Clio Hazlitt, has their secrets laid bare during sheep-shearing season, as competent Mary feeds vital meals to the hungry shearers – pork “sangers” and cheese scones for morning smoko – while fighting advances from a beery shepherd. Morton’s UN peacekeeping soldier widow Mary manages to satisfyingly marshal the neglected property into orderly submission, all the while confronting archaic attitudes and unearthing diaries of lost dreams and bittersweet memories.
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