The Rust Red Land is about life and death on the land in Australia. The first chapter, in fact, shows how the death of her baby sister is seen by the child Matilda. The author has based this, her second novel, on the life of her grandmother, Matilda Crawford.

While telling the simple story of a family living on the land, particularly around Narrandera in New South Wales, it does not flinch from describing how the mother took to her bed regularly after the births of her many children, nor the stern presence of the father. Nowadays, the mother would have been diagnosed with post-natal depression, but until 1907, when she had her last baby, she just went to bed.

Matilda is a bright girl, always asking questions, but as the eldest of a big family, she was not allowed to continue school but had to leave to help her mother.

Bishop has painted a word picture of the social norms of the time; drought, war, and its effects. As in all big families, siblings differed from each other. Some flourished, some died, while others hankered for something other than the farm. Matilda’s marriage to a farmer develops into the physical bonding she had imagined, but still affronted by her husband buying a house without her knowledge.

That theme of a woman coping with family demands and suppressing her own desires, continues into Matilda’s old age, when she finally achieves independence and a career of sorts.

Reviewed by Jennifer Somerville

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Robyn Bishop is a Melbourne-based author and playwright. Her love for theatre led her to study Drama at Rusden State College. On completion of her teaching degree, she was employed as a member of the Bouverie St theatre-in-education team before working as a drama teacher at Strathmore Secondary College for more than two decades.

During this time, she devised countless performances with students and also wrote three of her own plays, inspired by women’s stories, that were performed at The Carlton Courthouse under the umbrella of La Mama. Only the End was published by Currency Press in 2005 and The Show Must Go On was published by the Australian Script Centre in 2020.

Her short story, ‘The Lonely Road’, appeared in the Spinifex Press anthology of feminist fiction and poetry, It’s All Connected, in 2022. Her novel The Girl in the Bath, inspired by a painting Robyn saw while attending the Melbourne Writers Festival, was published in 2014. The Rust Red Land is her second novel and is based on the life of her grandmother.

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