After months of shaping chapters, adjusting timelines, and deciding what this story needed to say, I can finally write the sentence I’ve been waiting for. The book now has a prologue, an epilogue and a complete story between them.
The last month has been the busiest part of the whole process. This is when all the questions surface. Which characters belong at the heart of the story. Who faces the hardest moments. Who gets the chance to rise. Who falls short. Who finds love. Who heads off to war. Who turns out to be the hero, and who does not.
And yes, the villain works for Council. I enjoyed that creative decision more than I should admit.
My book is a literary historical novel set in an Australian dairy valley at the turn of the twentieth century, where reputation is currency and silence is a form of survival. When a young woman arrives from elsewhere and makes a life that does not follow the town’s rules, the community begins to decide who she is allowed to be. The novel explores how judgement forms, how power circulates in small places, and how women learn to live inside expectations they did not create. This is a novel about how towns remember, how they punish, and what it costs to live without apology when belonging is conditional.
At its heart, the book asks what happens when a woman’s worth is decided by a town rather than her actions
It asks what kind of courage it takes to live outside the towns’ permission when the cost of doing so is silence, reputation, or belonging.
My family has lived in this region since 1831, but I only became a permanent resident in 1977 when our village had around 800 people. It is closer to 2000 now, yet somehow we have held onto that small village feel where people care deeply about one another and keep a close eye on the stories unfolding around them. It is also a very proudly a place where Stuff happens
Dear Family You will be very pleased to hear. None of you appear in this book. Not one. This is fiction. I have not followed our dairy history and I have not recreated any family members. The only real connection to the past is the way women were treated. Their work, their limitations, their expectations. That theme deserved attention and it certainly gets it in these pages.
Since mentioning the book’s completion, a couple of long-time families from where I grew up in Cowra have already reached out. They have stories of their own, especially about the women who shaped their communities in ways history often forgets. I will be catching up with them soon so we can capture some of those reflections together.
The manuscript is finished. The conversations that follow will be something else entirely.
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