The Battlers

The flowers flared up from the ground unconquerable. The unrepentant gaiety of the weed, the burning blues and crimsons, set the hills glowing.

'It's a plant that's struck it lucky,' the Stray said thoughtfully. 'It hasn't got no right, but it's there.'

The Battlers is the story of Snow, a drifter and wanderer, the waiflike Dancy the Stray, from the slums of Sydney, and the other outcasts who accompany them as they travel the country roads looking for work. Like the weed Patterson's Curse, they 'haven't got no right', but they are there. Based on her own experiences of life on the roads in the 1930s, Tennant tells the story of the motley crowd of travellers with compassion and humour. First published in 1941, The Battlers was awarded the Gold Medal of the Australian Literature Society and shared the S. H. Prior Memorial Prize. More than seventy years later, the book's message of survival against the odds is as relevant today as it was then.

About the Author

Kylie Tennant was born in Manly, NSW, in 1912. In the course of her working life she was employed as a journalist, barmaid, publicity officer for the ABC, church sister, reviewer and lecturer. She considered it important to gain first-hand knowledge of the social worlds which figure in her novels. In the interests of authenticity she took to the roads with the unemployed during the Great Depression, lived in the slums of Sydney and with Aboriginal communities, travelled with itinerant bee-keepers and went so far as to spend week in gaol. Kylie Tennant wrote a number of fiction and non-fiction works, including numerous novels, an autobiography, several works for children and a biography of the former Labor leader, H.V. Evatt. She was awarded the Order of Australia in 1980 and died in 1988.