Love Between the Pages: The Burnt Country

A scandalous secret. A deadly fire. An agonizing choice.

Australia 1948. As a young woman running Amiens, a sizeable sheep station in New South Wales, Kate Dowd knows she's expected to fail. And her grazier neighbour is doing his best to ensure she does, attacking her method of burning off to repel a bushfire.

But fire risk is just one of her problems. Kate cannot lose Amiens, or give in to her estranged husband Jack's demands to sell: the farm is her livelihood and the only protection she can offer her half-sister Pearl, as the Aborigines Welfare Board threatens to take her away.

Ostracised by the local community for even acknowledging Pearl, Kate cannot risk another scandal. Which means turning her back on her wartime lover, Luca Canali...

Then Jack drops a bombshell. He wants a divorce. He'll protect what's left of Kate's reputation, and keep Luca out of it – but for an extortionate price.

Soon Kate is putting out fires on all fronts to save her farm, keep her family together and protect the man she loves. Then a catastrophic real fire threatens everything...


Joy Rhoades was born in Roma in western Queensland, with an early memory of flat country and a broad sky. Growing up, she loved two things best: reading and the bush, whether playing in creek beds and paddocks, or climbing a tree to sit with a book. Her family would visit her grandmother, a fifth generation grazier and a gentle teller of stories of her life on her family's sheep farm.

At 13, Joy left Roma for Brisbane, first for school and then to study law at university. After graduating, she worked all over: first Sydney, then London, Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo and New York. It was in New York that she completed a Masters in Creative Writing at the New School University, and wrote much of The Woolgrower's Companion, a novel inspired in part by snippets of her grandmother's life and times.

She now lives in London with her husband and their two young children, but she misses the Australian sky.

The Burnt Country
Bantam Australia
Author: Joy Rhoades
ISBN: 9780143793724
RRP: $32.99

Interview with Joy Rhoades

Question: What inspired the idea for The Burnt Country?

Joy Rhoades: It's a terrible thing but as a writer, I want to put my main character, Kate, through hell. And bushfire is very much 'life and death' decision-making in a very short time frame. As those long lush pastures dry out, the fire risk grows and grows as does the pressure on graziers like Kate. So when I realised that there was a run of good seasons in the late 1940s, meaning good rains year after year, I had the idea to shape this novel round fire.


Question: How much of your inspiration came from a real story?

Joy Rhoades: Kate is modelled very loosely on my grandmother. She lived much of 103 years on a sheep place on the northern tablelands in New South Wales, and was a fifth generation grazier. She was also a great story teller, with funny and sometimes tragic stories of life on the land. It's her stories that creep into my own. And the difficult neighbour, the self-important grocer? They spring from memories of my own childhood in a small town in the bush.


Question: What was the best part about creating the character of Kate?

Joy Rhoades: It's great fun to 'write' Kate as she's very relatable. So while she strives and hopes and works like a dog, life often conspires to thwart her. But after a few tears, she has to get back up and go on. And she often gets her own back, too. I love that theme of resilient women. I think it's a woman thing, actually.


Question: What was the most difficult part about writing a story set in 1948?

Joy Rhoades: The most confronting part for me was my research into the Aboriginal aspects of the book. This is really very recent history and to learn about the draconian, almost brutal, policies of each state's Aborigines Welfare Board was shocking to me. I was so fortunate to be guided by Aunty Judi Wickes, an Elder and academic, who so generously shared her research into her own family, and the impact on the generations of 'certificates of exemption' which exempted certain Aboriginal people from the Board's laws but at enormous cost, splitting families.


Question: There are several issues raised in this book. Was this deliberate or did the story evolve this way?

Joy Rhoades: Life is complex, anywhere, anytime and I try hard to show not just my main character, but her world and all the forces that prey upon it. Because it's realistic that Kate, as a grazier, would have had to have known about bush fire risk minimisation, even in 1948. She also had to know about managing men, as well as mothering the children in her household. She had multiple roles, as all women do. I try to show that.

Interview by Brooke Hunter

The Burnt Country 
Bantam Australia
Author: Joy Rhoades
ISBN: 9780143793724 
RRP: $32.99