Shearers' Motel

Description

Roger McDonald uses language with the precision of a diamond cutter.' Publishers Weekly Another shed coming up on the horizon...a low, wide roof of galvanised iron the only landmark in a million square miles of flatness and glare...The sun blazed overhead like a nuclear pile. His hat smelt like a dirty sock. His body was sticky, itchy, tired. The tyres of his old yellow truck, sunk into the sand, gave out a hot, desolate, perished rubber odour, heatwaves ballooning from the bodywork. The impression he had, glancing back towards the vehicle, was of disintegrating material only just holding together. A split in his hat admitted a hot bar of sunlight onto his scalp. His eyeballs felt like pinpoint charred coals and he wanted to slide down into what shade there was...Yesterday morning he had left a tin-roofed farmhouse far to the south of here - Sharon, his wife, and his three daughters hardly stirring in their sleep as they said goodbye. Then while he was out at the truck tying down the last of his load they woke up more, stumbled from bed and huddled in jumpers, stamping their feet in the chill, hugging themselves in the greyness of first light. Sharon brought him a mug of

ROGER MCDONALD is the author of six novels: 1915, SLIPSTREAM, ROUGH WALLABY, WATER MAN, THE SLAP, and MR DARWIN'S SHOOTER. His account of travels with New Zealand shearers in the Australian outback, SHEARER'S MOTEL won the 1993 National Book Council Banjo award for non-fiction. The internationally acclaimed besteller MR DARWIN'S SHOOTER was awarded the New South Wales, Victorian, and South Australian Premiers' Literary Awards, and won the National Fiction Award at the 2000 Adelaide Writers' Week. THE BALLAD OF DESMOND KALE won the 2006 Miles Franklin Award and South Australian Festival Prize for Fiction.