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Fiona Hindmarsh, a successful middle-aged economist, likes to
live her life her way.
Beginning the love-of-her-life affair with
the gorgeous Laine Macready, a girl who wears a Hardie Aimes
shirt like no one else can, she
is interrupted by a phone call. Her sister, Gillian, brings her
the news that their mother, Muriel, had a heart attack at the
top of a plum tree she was pruning and died. Irritably Fi sets
off
on a night-time drive home to help Gillian organise the funeral.
What
precisely is home for Fi? Where her mother lived in Northern
New South Wales, among the tea-drinking relatives who, as Gillian
reminds her, made Fi what she is today? Is home the girl of
the
moment who happens to make her heart miss a beat? Or is home
merely one of the houses Fi has bought in Australia or leased
in Bali?
Fi is contrary, her head and her heart responding to
different music. And as a child, Fi was sensitive to the ghostly
spirits
of the Bundjalung who inhabited the land the Hindmarshes
and the Darks took over for dairy farms. How does she reconcile
the mutterings
and wailings and chantings she hears in her heart with the
classic cinema sound booming in her head and the skin-smarting
indignity
of betrayal?
A novel combining a love story with a perspective
on the farmers' settlement history of the Far North Coast of
New South Wales,
that grew with
new grass on old rainforest soil.
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