
True North: The Story of Mary and Elizabeth Durack by Brenda Niall, (Text Publishing: Melbourne, 2012).
I lost my carparking ticket so I bought a book. The person at the shopping centre information desk informed me that I could either pay $40 to get out of the car park or $10 if I bought something from the shops at the centre. It made sense to buy something but what? I was uninspired and just wanted to get out of the soulless place as soon as possible. I spotted a bookshop and decided to purchase a book.
It was one of those chain book shops with plenty of books but nothing that excited me enough to purchase. To be fair, my lack of enthusiasm was probably more due to my lack of time and annoyance at myself for losing the carparking ticket. I had just been to the library and had heaps of reading waiting for me in the car and home. I did not need to add more to my reading list!
After quickly browsing the shelves of history books and biographies I decided to save time by going to the counter and asking if they stocked some particular titles I was interested in. I named three authors but not one title I wanted was in stock. The queue at the checkout grew longer. All I wanted to do was to purchase a book and go home. I grabbed the latest Brenda Niall biography from the new releases stand near the counter and bought it.
This is not a good start for a book that I hoped to enjoy. Brenda Niall deserves better than this. Niall is a sensitive and fastidious biographer. There are no short cuts in her research and I thoroughly enjoyed other books she has written: the biography of the Boyd family, The Boyds: A Family Biography, and an autobiography, Life Class.
True North: The Story of Mary and Elizabeth Durack is a biography of two sisters, one an artist, the other a writer. They were members of the famous Durack family that were pastoralists in the Kimberley, Western Australia. They grew up in Perth while their father lived on the station hundreds of miles away. After they left school in the early 1930s they lived and worked on the family holdings in order to save money for a trip to Europe. It was during this period in the north as young adults that they developed a bond with the land and its people who dominated the rest of their lives. Niall observes, “their time in the Kimberley was far more important for the sisters than the overseas travel that followed”. Continue reading →
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