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The Sundowners by Jon Cleary: book review


 


The Sundowners (1953) is set in rural Australia in the 1920s. In 1960,  the movie was released starring Deborah Kerr, Robert Mitchum, Chips Rafferty, and Peter Ustinov.

 

Paddy Carmody is an itinerant sheep shearer and drover, wandering from town to town to find work – he likes the newness of each town. He doesn’t care that the towns are not on any map. It seems to him that the whole countryside is his own backyard. ‘All he wanted was Ida and the boy, and to keep moving’ – and to keep pitching a tent when the sun goes down.

 

His wife Ida, and their 14-year old son, Sean, are tired of the nomadic life. At first it was different, exciting, but now they want to settle down. Make a home, make a life. Ida left England 30 years ago – the last place she called home. Ida and Sean strike up a friendship, and communicate through letters, with Mac, who owns a farm that they like. Of course, they can’t afford to buy it, but it’s nice to have a dream.

 

The work is hard in the Australian outback – with wild fires, storms, and danger – but it is also rewarding, thanks to the many interesting characters they meet along the way. 

 

Nevertheless, Sean is growing up, and wants more in life. More books. He wants more company too, not merely that of his parents, property owners, and itinerant workers. 

 

The Carmody’s are battlers, and Paddy is the eternal optimist against all odds. It is Ida and Sean that keep the family as stable as they can; a ballast against the irresponsible Paddy. 

 

Although dated now, the story was initially ground-breaking at the time, telling a tale of the hard life and hard luck of an itinerant family, almost as it really was, without too much gloss and romanticism. There’s still something about this book that makes me want to read it again from time to time. 














 

 

 

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MARTINA NICOLLS  is an international human rights-based consultant in education, healing and wellbeing, peace and stabilization, foreign aid audits and evaluations, and the author  of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce  (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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