M.L Stedman’s achingly human epic is like an Australian Gone With The Wind

FICTION
A Far-Flung Life
M.L. Stedman
Penguin, $34.99

It’s been 14 years since M.L. Stedman made her striking debut with The Light Between Oceans, a novel subsequently adapted for the big screen by Derek Cianfrance. Beautifully written and deeply moving, A Far-Flung Life is cut from a similar cloth.

Both are family sagas that unfold in remote locations: in the first, it’s an island nearly half a day’s journey off the West Australian coast; here it’s Meredith Downs, a sheep station constituting a million acres in the middle of nowhere, hundreds of miles from Perth. In both books, these settings are evocatively deployed to provide metaphors for the characters’ place in the wider scheme of life on earth. In the first chapter of A Far-Flung Life, Stedman identifies them as “no more than a grain of living sand in the landscape”.

Both also feature an abandoned child whose parentage becomes critical to the moral quandary at the heart of the story. You’ll read no more about the one in A Far-Flung Life here: one of the many pleasures that Stedman’s latest has to offer is the way readers are suddenly confronted by the conundrum and then have to find how best to come to terms with it. But the quotation from the Islamic mystic Rumi with which the book introduces itself offers a hint of what’s in store: “Out beyond the ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”

The epic plot pivots on the MacBride family, pastoralists who’ve managed their vast property, leased from the government, for generations. Think of Tara, the O’Hara plantation in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind (or the film adaptation of it), and you’ll get a sense of the kind of grandeur and history that Stedman bestows on the family and the place they’ve come to know as home.

Beginning in 1958, but constantly pointing to the ways in which events from the past – including “the coming of the whitefella” – have laid the foundations for the present, the novel entwines the course of the MacBrides’ lives and the changes that besiege Meredith Downs over the years. It opens with a traumatic incident whose ramifications reverberate through everything that follows.

And then, with the passage of time measured by the steady ticking of Old Wally, the grandfather clock in the MacBrides’ foyer, Stedman introduces us to her characters. In the foreground are Lorna, the family matriarch, her youngest, Matt, and his sister, Rose, their destinies intricately tied to the future of the property in ways they could scarcely imagine when the novel begins.

Key figures also emerge from the neighbouring community: Pete Peachey, the ’roo shooter; “Sneaky” Snook, the mail contractor; Miles Beaumont, the English aristocrat “learning the ropes” on the station; Myrtle Eedle, the gossip who works at the post office in the nearby town and sergeants Wisehart and Rundle, the local policemen who take very different approaches to maintaining law and order.

Not all of them directly cross paths with the MacBrides, but Stedman brings them and their circumstances to life with an eloquent and empathetic clarity. And they’re central to the themes that pervade her novel, to do with the appreciation that everyone has a history that has shaped who they’ve become, and with the notion that humanity is forever reflecting the natural order all around it.

As young Andy MacBride – the lost child at the heart of the story – learns about life, Stedman likens his developing social skills to the ways in which one of the creatures populating the surrounding terrain negotiates its world. “If you watch a bungarra, those huge, muscly lizards that can give a racehorse a run for its money, you’ll notice how they take in their surroundings. They don’t just sense and hear: they taste the air around them, slithery pink tongue venturing to test the atmospheric pressure, sensing for danger. Andy MacBride develops a similar skill. Without being aware of it, the little boy learns to sense the difference between those things it’s ‘safe’ to talk about, and those it’s not.”

Stedman’s descriptively rich prose is forever working along these lines to evoke the ways in which the life of the land and of the generations who’ve passed across it or been taken by it have much in common. The dilapidated sign on a deserted mineshaft on the property that warns “Danger. Keep Out” might also serve as alert to those members of the MacBride family grappling with the hand that fate and their flawed humanity has dealt them.

And just as the then-unknown dangers of the asbestos unearthed by miners drilling for minerals on the property illustrates how “some things are best left undisturbed” so do the secrets that plague the lives of the family and others around them. A number of these are revealed during the course of the novel: in some cases, they’re confessed, in others, they’re stumbled across. Those that don’t see the light of day are, in the term coined by young Andy, “forgetments”, the parts of people’s histories that for various reasons have been edited out along the way. Their revelation, or their repression, is what makes this very Australian novel so compelling.

Few will read it without glimpsing something of their own circumstances in what its characters have to grapple with: how our imperfect personalities accommodate the things that plague us, wish them away, turn them into “forgetments”, or find a way to live with them … or not.

The life created so vividly in Stedman’s masterful novel might be “far-flung”, but it’s also terribly familiar and achingly human.

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