Book Review: Salt Creek by Lucy Treloar

Review by John Purcell:

I asked Twitter recently whether I can claim to have read a book if I have listened to the audio book. Writer Charlotte Wood and journalist Anton Enus both replied with an emphatic, No!

I defer to their judgement and declare that in preparation for The Sydney Writer’s Festival I listened to Salt Creek by Lucy Treloar in the car as I drove to and from work. An hour in the morning and an hour in the evening. In this way my experience of the novel was stretched out over weeks, whereas, had I picked up the paperback I would have finished it in a matter of days.

That drawn-out experience of Salt Creek allowed me to enter further than I might have into the world of narrator Hester Finch, who, as a girl of fifteen in 1855, must live with her family in near complete isolation in the Coorong, South Australia. By loitering so long with her, I felt in some small way that I was shouldering some of her great burdens.

Salt Creek, though told in a fairly straightforward manner, is a well-crafted novel tackling very complex issues – isolation, ownership of land, destruction of indigenous culture, identity in the face of change from youth to adulthood, from wealth to poverty, from moral ascendency to abasement, plus murder, sex, religion, and much more. It is for very good reasons that author Lucy Treloar has found herself on the Miles Franklin Shortlist this year (it wouldn’t surprise me at all if she was to win the prize).

Granted, at times, narrator Hester Finch is infuriating. Some of her conclusions are abhorrent to modern thinking. But this just reinforces our trust in her narrative. When she explores the motivations of her siblings or parents, or fails to understand the motives of the family’s adopted son –  the Aboriginal boy, Tull –  we believe her and that belief allows us to take a seat at the family table with few reservations.

At times Salt Creek is heart-breaking but never quite hopeless. And though it is a literary novel, it has – like the best of the great nineteenth century novels – popular elements: high drama, suspense, romance and even some laughs.

In Salt Creek, Lucy Treloar has given readers the best of both worlds – an intelligent, thoughtful work, which is thoroughly engrossing. Highly recommended.

Listen to Salt Creek on MP3

Listen to Salt Creek on CD

Salt Creek

by Lucy Treloar

Salt Creek, 1855, lies at the far reaches of the remote, beautiful and inhospitable coastal region, the Coorong, in the new province of South Australia. The area, just opened to graziers willing to chance their luck, becomes home to Stanton Finch and his large family, including fifteen-year-old Hester Finch.

Once wealth political activists, the Finch family has fallen on hard times. Cut adrift from the polite society they were raised to be part of, Hester and her siblings make connections where they can: with the few travellers that pass along the nearby stock route - among them a young artist, Charles - and the Ngarrindjeri people they have dispossessed. Over the years that pass, and Aboriginal boy, Tully, at first a friend, becomes part of the family...

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About the Contributor

John Purcell

While still in his twenties, John Purcell opened a second-hand bookshop in Mosman, Sydney, in which he sat for ten years reading, ranting and writing. Since then he has written, under a pseudonym, a series of very successful novels, interviewed hundreds of writers about their work, appeared at writers’ festivals, on TV (most bizarrely in comedian Luke McGregor’s documentary Luke Warm Sex) and has been featured in prominent newspapers and magazines. ​Now, as the Director of Books at booktopia.com.au, Australia’s largest online bookseller, he supports Australian writing in all its forms. He lives in Sydney with his wife, two children, three dogs, five cats, unnumbered gold fish and his overlarge book collection. His novel, The Girl on the Page, was published by HarperCollins Australia in October, 2018.

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