Lucy Treloar’s book Salt Creek is one I have read several times, bought and given away and bought other copies to send to friends. When Wolfe Island was published, I waited and waited for the UK paperback to come out.
Three years later with no sign of it I asked the author why not. She told me that the British publishers thought climate change a hard sell especially at the beginning of the Covid pandemic. My reaction was one of amazement. Salt Creek had won awards – how hard a sell could it be? Although Ms Treloar offered to post me a copy from Australia, I decided that it was too much too ask so downloaded an Audible copy.
I am not fond of audio books, no that’s not quite true. I can’t do other things while listening to an audio book. I have to give it my full attention and listen at the pace of the narrator. In this case Abbe Holmes was a terrific narrator.
This book is set in the US in the future rather than South Australia almost two hundred years ago but there are similarities. In Salt Creek, it is the aboriginals who know how to use the riches of the coast and the white settlers who disturb the equilibrium. In Wolfe Island, Kitty, with her dog, Girl, is the last inhabitant of an island off the East coast of a family tracing its heritage back to the 1600s. She enjoys the solitude, hates the mainland and left her family to return to solitude rather than stay where she felt uncomfortable. Her family is bound up in this island and she feels unable to relinquish it and make a living from making artworks from what she scavenges from the shore.
Bit by bit, climate change is taking the land back to the sea, the consequence of man’s disturbance of the natural way of existence. In both books the author displays deep knowledge of the land, the sea and the seasons.
Kitty is disturbed by the arrival of her granddaughter, Cat, with Josh, Luis and a child, Allejandra who are on the run.
Over the course of the year, we find out Kitty’s story and her developing relationship with the newcomers but with a sense of foreboding of things not right and the encroaching end to Kitty’s way of life.
The second part is much darker as Kitty tries to save the lives of the runaways with the addition of her new great granddaughter, Treasure. It’s a dystopian world of fear, suspicion, danger and loss. The tension never drops until Kitty find her way back home, having completed her mission to the best of her ability. Her island is gone but she finds a way to live again, accepting the guilt of her actions.
Wow! What a book. The language is sheer poetry, the ideas are current. A post Trumpian world where migrants from the south are hunted, jailed and tortured. Where climate change is souring the land and bringing poverty, unemployment and hardship to those who live near the coast, where ways of life are ending without new beginnings being found.
This is a must read. British publishers, shame on you for not picking up this book. How very dare you.
Rosemary Noble - author page 