People are much more open these days about their mental health. We have all learnt that it is just as important to safeguard our mental health as it is our physical health. So it is refreshing to read this account by Morton of how he worked on making his mental health better. Not fixed, or cured, just better. He is a superb writer who has been an award-winning journalist in Australia, and whose memoir about his family, One Hundred Years of Dirt, has been a bestseller.

In 2019 he was finally diagnosed, after years of self-destructive behaviour and numerous breakdowns, with complex post-traumatic stress disorder. As he says, that is just a fancy way of saying that one of the people who should have loved him the most during childhood did not.

He is caustically, heartbreakingly candid about the terror and loneliness that he felt, as a seven-year-old, after his brother was severely burned in an accident and was flown to hospital 14 hours away, along with his mother and baby sister, leaving Morton on a huge Queensland cattle station with just his father, who was having an affair with the children’s governess. That little boy shut down and, under stressful conditions as an adult, he did not just recall the horror of those times, he became that seven-year-old again.

This book is about how Morton rediscovered love, not just among people, but in the wondrous things in this world. He had to learn how to live vulnerably, something he had refused to do for many years.

Some of his writing is laugh-out-loud funny. Other chapters, dealing with the importance of touch, forgiveness, beauty, masculinity, even animals, are laced with realisations he has reached. And yet, as he is quick to point out, his words are not to be treated as a cure-all for everyone. One of his most powerful chapters deals with doubt, starting with that he developed about religion.

This book is one of the best-written, deeply personal, yet with an Everyman appeal, that I have read this year. It bears re-reading as a reminder to us all how important is that thing called Love.

Reviewed by Jennifer Somerville

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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Rick Morton is an award-winning journalist and the author of three non-fiction books. My Year of Living Vulnerably launched on 17 March, 2021.

Morton is also the author of One Hundred Years of Dirt (MUP, 2018) and the extended essay On Money (Hachette, 2020).

Dirt is part family memoir, part book of essays about growing up on the outside in Australia. It explores intergenerational trauma, poverty, addiction and mental health and the role of a mother who tried to love enough for the failures of everyone else around her. He is the Senior Reporter for The Saturday Paper. Originally from Queensland, Rick worked in Sydney, Hobart, Melbourne and Canberra as the social affairs writer for The Australian with a particular focus on social policy including the National Disability Insurance Scheme, aged care, the welfare system, religion and employment services. Rick is the winner of the 2013 Kennedy Award for Young Journalist of the Year and the 2017 Kennedy Award for Outstanding Columnist. He appears regularly on television, radio and panels discussing politics, the media, writing and social policy.

One Hundred Years of Dirt was shortlisted for the 2019 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, longlisted for the 2018 Walkley Book of the Year, and longlisted for both Biography Book of the Year and the Matt Richell Award for New Writer of the Year for the 2019 ABIA Awards. Dirt was also shortlisted for the National Biography Award.