The Desert Knows Her Name

02 August 2024

The Desert Knows Her Name by Lia Hill, Affirm Press. One reason for reading fiction is the pleasure we get from immersing ourselves in a different and often unfamiliar world. But the reverse was true while I was reading The Desert Knows Her Name, by New Zealand-born Lia Hills, a versatile novelist, poet, translator and curator. This is her third novel; her first two were much praised and were listed for several awards. The novel is set in the Wimmera, the north-western part of Victoria where I spent several years of my childhood — formative years, I have always thought. The township where the novel’s action takes place (Gatyekarr) is the author’s invention, but the other places she mentions are all familiar to me, and we lived about ten miles from the Little Desert, a location that figures prominently in the novel. The salt lakes and the Wimmera River also feature. The novel, in many of its literary references, takes me back a long way. How well I remember Snugglepot and Cuddlepie, The Hobyahs, and the account of the three missing Duff children. They were despaired of but were eventually found by black trackers at the end of eight long days. This true story was in one of our readers, and the whole incident had taken place not too far away. We were learning, while not really knowing or understanding, that the trope of the lost child is a common one in Australian art and literature.

I returned to the township after a gap of 50 years, and a sobering experience the visit was, a peculiar form of homesickness for a life that has gone and was bound to go. Some buildings had disappeared, while traces of others were barely discernible. I found our old house, but the block was now occupied by two other houses as well as the one we had lived in. I was made aware of the power of time and of the passing of my own small history. This passage of personal history is one of Hills’ concerns in The Desert Knows Her Name. I left my long-ago place and have not returned except for that one visit. The narrators in Hills’ novel, however, have both returned to their original places, but only after many wanderings and much loss.

Writing in the Australian Book Review, professor and critic Paul Genoni touches on the matter of a genre that is not

ARTS AND CULTURE

The Desert Knows Her Name

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