Fleeing a failed romance in 1950s Sydney, Eleanor believes a return to River Run will help her recollect her thoughts and get her life back on track. But when she arrives, her mother and stepfather have their hands full with an ambitious new overseer, the visiting Winslows, and her rebellious little brother Robbie, who believes the Communists may attack their lands at any time. When Robbie takes his duties to protect the homestead too far and a stranger is injured on the property, tensions across River Run are even more strained, as class divides and a police investigation begin to spill over into the shearing season.
To say I was a little reluctant to read River Run wouldn’t be that much of an understatement. Nicole Alexander’s work is best known for its deep connection to rural Australia and, from a farming family herself, she writes with a sense of authenticity and a love of the land that I thought might not reach a city kid (an English city kid, to boot!) like me. Despite my reservations, however, I really did enjoy the book. Here’s why.
Firstly, it was due to Eleanor.
All of Alexander’s characters, from the men in the shearing shed, to pre-teen terror Robbie, to the Martini-chugging Margaret Winslow, are beautifully put together. Every character has, well, character, and form part of a very rich tapestry. But it’s Eleanor who pulls it all together, straddling both lines of the class divide that moves through the heart of this novel.
Essentially, Eleanor comes into the story very much as an outsider, returning to a world she thinks she has no real place in. Eleanor is a writer, though her work in comic books and pulp fiction doesn’t sit well with the family. She keeps her failed relationship a secret because it was not only out of wedlock, but also with an Italian – a country that had been on the other side in World War Two. She doesn’t condone the relationship between her mother and her stepfather Colin, her deceased father’s brother, and tries to see Robbie’s troublesome nature as a product of his environment, rather than dismissing him as just a bad kid.
As a woman rather ahead of her time, or at least ahead of her class, Eleanor forms the perfect bridge for the reader to enter the story. Throughout, I found myself nodding along with her, considering her judgement to be the right one, getting frustrated and rolling my eyes whenever she got frustrated and rolled her eyes. So when it turned out that Eleanor didn’t know best, or that she misread a situation, or that River Run is not how she thought it would be, I found myself just as shocked as she did. Eleanor is relatable and interesting, and provides an accessible lens to cross, what was for me, a fairly unfamiliar terrain.
Secondly, it comes down to the real star of River Run – the land. Drawing on heavy research, as well as her own experiences, Alexander is more than capable of making the landscape really come to life, describing storms, labour practices, and even how a man might decide the best sheep in a flock, in such a way that they’re easy to visualise and to understand – which is absolutely key if your audience isn’t exactly familiar with shearing sheep! Alexander clearly loves the Australian landscape, and the rural occupations that go along with it, and it’s hard not to get swept up in all of that. I was reminded of the Yorkshire moors in Victorian novels, and how these places full of dangers for the unwitting and unwary can be imbued with a sense of romance and mystery.
River Run allows its author to do what she does best – make the outback accessible for those of us who think the suburbs are wild enough, thank you very much. And while I’m not about to roll this novel up in my sleeping bag and head out for a night under more rural stars, I’d certainly recommend it for a beach read as spring and summer start to turn up the heat.
River Run is published by Penguin Random House Australia and is available now.
Check out our review with Nicole Alexander here.
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