MARYROSE CUSKELLY is the bestselling author of The Cane.
Her new book The Campers is an exploration of privilege, hypocrisy and justice.
Dip into the first few paragraphs to give you a taste of what’s to come.
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It was Snow White. Leah recognised the buttercup-yellow skirt, fitted blue bodice and red-paned sleeves from the animated Disney version she’d watched with her sister Niamh when they were kids. She couldn’t remember who’d given the DVD to them. It wasn’t something Geraldine would’ve ever thought to buy for her daughters.
This version of the fairest-of-them-all was a far cry from the creamy cartoon girl that Leah and Niamh had wept over as she lay in her pristine glass coffin. This was fairytale-princess- turned-feral. Black dreadlocks hung to their shoulders, chest hair erupted from the bodice’s neckline, muscular legs and arms propelled them forward. The torn sleeves of the dress flapped about the swell of their biceps. Leah could tell that, even from behind the large plate-glass window looking out onto Gideon’s Paddock on the opposite side of the road.
It was barely light outside, the tops of the tallest eucalypts in the park only just illuminated by the sun’s rays, but Leah could now see other bodies resolving out of the shadows. A sparse, ragtag crew of three trailed behind Snow White. One of them, in more or less conventional dress, pushed a supermarket shopping trolley. Its wheels bumped across every rock and root jutting above the desiccated grass, setting to clatter whatever was in the trolley, trash or treasure.
Two distorted animal shapes brought up the rear. There was a sauntering rabbit, or at least someone in a rabbit onesie. The hood of the garment was pulled low over its face, ears sagging in skewed hooks. Behind the rabbit capered a slight figure wearing a skirt that reached her ankles and a singlet top that barely covered her breasts. An oversized bird’s head, possibly papier-mâché, with a hooked beak and a smattering of feathers, swayed atop her neck. The bird-woman staggered, her arms held out at her sides. Drunk, Leah thought, or maybe she was simply trying to balance the awkward construction on her shoulders. Was Leah watching a procession? A performance? The strangeness of the spectacle made her anxious. She couldn’t wrestle it into logic.
Perhaps she was getting a migraine. Her unease was like that which arrived along with the fractured vision foreshadowing a headache. But she wasn’t premenstrual, the time in her cycle when she was most prone to them.
It had only been seconds since the troupe’s appearance, but it was enough time for Harley, nestled beside her on the couch, to notice that her attention had shifted. Leaving his sippy cup to leak milk onto the leather couch and his board book to slide onto the floor, he grabbed handfuls of the oversized T-shirt she slept in and hauled himself upright. Balanced on her thighs, one fist clutching the hair at her crown, he followed the direction of her gaze. •
Read the first few pages of The Cane.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Maryrose Cuskelly is a writer of fiction and non-fiction.
In 2019, her book Wedderburn: A True Tale of Blood and Dust (Allen & Unwin, 2018), was longlisted for Best Debut and Best True Crime in the 2019 Davitt Awards.
In 2016, she was awarded the New England Thunderbolt Prize for Crime Writing (non-fiction) for her essay on the 1972 abduction and murder of Marilyn Wallman.
She is the author of Original Skin: Exploring the Marvels of the Human Hide (Scribe 2010) and The End of Charity: Time for Social Enterprise (Allen & Unwin 2008) co-written with Nic Frances, and winner of the Iremonger Award for Writing on Public Issues.
Her essays and articles have been published in a range of magazines, journals, and newspapers, including Crikey, The Age, The Australian and The Melbourne Magazine.
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