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  AWARDS AND PRAISE FOR

  HOPE FARM

  Winner, 2016 Barbara Jefferis Award

  Shortlisted, 2016 Stella Prize

  Shortlisted, 2016 Miles Franklin Literary Award

  Longlisted, 2017 International Dublin Literary Award

  Longlisted, 2016 Indie Book Awards

  Longlisted, 2016 Australian Book Industry Awards—

  Fiction Book of the Year

  ‘Peggy Frew is an amazing writer and Hope Farm is a great novel that captures the pleasures and difficulties of being both a parent and of being a child. The complex story of Silver and Ishtar and their fraught relationship is beautifully written, acutely observed and, best of all, completely absorbing. I could almost feel the crisp Gippsland mornings, hear the birds warbling and smell the stale dope smoke. Hope Farm is elegant, tender and very wise.’ Chris Womersley, award-winning author of Bereft

  ‘Elegiac, storied … aligns itself with other novels in which children—out of rashness, anger or even ignorance—act out to terrible consequences. As with Briony in Ian McEwan’s Atonement or Leo in L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between, these decisions are usually compounded by circumstance … Frew does not want to pass judgement though. She understands that the sadness of childhood is to grow up in circumstances over which you have little or no control.’ Jessica Au, Sydney Morning Herald

  ‘Reading [Hope Farm] made me feel as though I’d lived it. So darn clever.’ Clare Bowditch

  ‘Frew’s deceptively slow-burn tale of a teenage girl—adrift, bewildered, seeking solidity—moves inexorably to its climax, laying bare a certain darkness at the heart of the alternative lifestyle. But it’s the tale of a survivor, too.’ Luke Davies, award-winning author of Candy

  ‘At this point it could be too early to call it, but I’m thinking this could end up on my top 10 books of the year list … Beautifully written, difficult to put down, hard not to feel the ache.’ Geelong Advertiser

  ‘In its exploration of maternal, sexual, unrequited and platonic relationships, Hope Farm is a finely calibrated study of love, loss and belonging.’ Thuy On, Sunday Age

  ‘[An] assured exploration of that awkward moment between childhood and the teenage years [as well as a] devastating critique of the treatment of unwed mothers in the ’70s.’ Margot Lloyd, Adelaide Advertiser

  ‘Frew is a gifted writer, evidenced here by finely balanced observations and atmospheric description … Silver is poised at the beginning of adult understanding and Frew handles the challenge with deftness. Silver’s insight and compassion are juxtaposed with naivety and the idealistic force of her first crushes.’ Ed Wright, Weekend Australian

  ‘Absorbing … A beautifully told story of courage and survival, Hope Farm is about growing up, belonging, and long-kept secrets.’ Carys Bray, author of A Song for Issy Bradley

  AWARDS AND PRAISE FOR

  HOUSE OF STICKS

  Winner, 2010 Victorian Premier’s Award for

  an Unpublished Manuscript

  Shortlisted, 2012 NSW Premier’s Glenda Adams Literary

  Award for New Writing

  ‘Frew’s House of Sticks may well be the standout debut Australian novel of 2011.’ Patrick Allington, Adelaide Advertiser

  ‘A fascinating debut novel.’ AFR Magazine

  ‘My debut Australian novel of the year is Peggy Frew’s terrific domestic/rock’n’roll tale, House of Sticks.’ Australian Book Review

  ‘In House of Sticks, Frew creates a penetrating study of the impact of parenthood on a modern couple.’ Big Issue

  ‘[Frew] shows real talent in her debut novel, which is sophisticated and extremely well written … Readers of all ages will enjoy Frew’s engaging prose.’ FOUR STARS, Bookseller & Publisher

  ‘House of Sticks affords an achingly lifelike glimpse into contemporary Australian domesticity. Frew’s style is colloquial, photorealistic, and yet in its knife-edge focus it is able to slip into a darker, hidden world of psychological fissure and urban dread.’ Canberra Times

  ‘Excellently unnerving … A tantalisingly strong debut.’ Melbourne Review

  ‘[House of Sticks is] the kind of tune that hovers in the air well after the last note has sounded.’ Sunday Age

  ‘An accomplished and compassionate portrait of contemporary family life in all its delights and drudgery.’ Sunday Tasmanian

  ‘Her [Frew’s] prose is deceptively powerful … House of Sticks is vivid and contemporary on the page.’ Weekend Australian

  ‘Peggy Frew’s crystalline eye observes the shoreline of domestic life … Helen Garner meets Henry James in this suburban gothic, where innocence can turn to menace in a moment, love to resentment, and trust to prickling suspicion.’ Kate Veitch

  Peggy Frew’s work has appeared in New Australian Stories 2, Kill Your Darlings, Meanjin and The Big Issue. She has published two other novels, House of Sticks and Hope Farm, and is also a member of the critically acclaimed, award-winning Melbourne band Art of Fighting.

  First published in 2019

  Copyright © Peggy Frew 2019

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  ISBN 978 1 76052 874 4

  eISBN 978 1 76087 073 7

  Internal design by Sandy Cull

  Set by Bookhouse, Sydney

  Cover design and photograph: Sandy Cull, gogoGingko

  FOR MICK,

  FOR CLAUDIA,

  AND FOR ROWAN

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  PART ONE: ISLAND STORIES

  SURF BEACH

  OPENINGS

  THE FIRE TRACK

  BOYS HOME ROAD

  RIDING

  CRAZY BIRDS

  RED ROCKS BEACH

  MOLLY

  LOIS

  APPLEY AVENUE

  PART TWO: IN TOWN

  PAINTINGS, 2005

  GOLD STREET

  AVOCA STREET

  BODIES

  AVOCA PARK

  PAINTINGS, 2008

  JOHN

  ANNAS

  CHRISTMASES

  THE BAD CAFE

  GRIMAUX

  PART THREE: HELEN

  PART FOUR: OTHER BEACHES

  SHELLY BEACH

  PAUL

  NOOSA

  PART FIVE: BELGRAVE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  You were a girl, thin and young, with veins that showed blue through your pale, pale skin, and your hair was reddish-gold and really you were still a kid when we saw you last.

  You were a girl and you were only fifteen, and you looked younger. Long legs, grey eyes.

  You were a girl, a sister and a daughter, and we knew you. At least, we thought we did.

  There was a house. In the city—town, we called it, but it was a city and still is, the city of Melbourne. There was a house with two storeys and a tall shaggy tree in front and wisteria looping behind. A house on a hill.

  There was a house on a hill in the city and it was full, of us. We were a family. A mother, a father, two daughters.

&nb
sp; There was a house on a hill in the city and it was full of us, our family, but then it began to empty. We fell out. We made a mess.

  We draped ourselves in blame and disappointment and lurched around, bumping into each other. Some of us wailed and shouted; some of us barely made a sound. None of us was listening, or paying attention. And in the middle of it all you, very quietly, were gone.

  And there was an island. Not too far from the city and the house on the hill—about two hours in the car. Since before you were a baby we went there for our holidays, and one of us goes there still.

  Ah, the island of your childhood. The beach is small, even at low tide. The rock pools are small and round and shallow. The dunes are mostly low, but they rise as they approach the point and the formations of red rock—soft, waxy-feeling, carved in places with laborious initials, love hearts, swearwords—that the beach is named for.

  In the high dunes there are silvery runner grasses, semi-buried, their sandy roots hidden, sturdy and enduring. There are squat mounds of a kind of succulent, its stems stubby and juicy, its pink summer flowers threadbare and brave.

  Between the beach and the houses, in the wide band of ti-tree, shadowy and dense and tunnelled through with soft paths, there are beige and grey branch-ceilinged rooms filled with dapples and bark and scatters of very small, dry, minty leaves. There are fat tongues of interwoven creepers, and papery thickets that smell of ants. There are tiny glades—carpets of unblemished sand, a log seat, magic circle of sky, squeaky-stemmed shoots, bright green, bearing tiny blue flowers, a sudden, miniature, mossy hill. Islands within the island, whole and private worlds.

  Here on the beach is where you were brought as a baby, were held and kissed and set down, the bodies of the adults like rocks at the corners of your eyes, their voices thinning away, the waves and the air and the sand all shimmying their infinite particles and you breathing, reaching.

  Here, up at the house, in the garden, is where you stood, a naked toddler in a tin tub, water escaping your fists, rolling silver down your pearly skin, your grandmother kneeling by you in the smell of lemons and earth.

  Here on the concrete porch in the white sun is where you lay, nine, ten, eleven years old, and read books and ate stone fruit, the juice dripping into the cracks.

  Here, back down and through the gate and over the fire track, are the morning glory vines, their spreading leaves a rich and European green, their violet blooms ready to darken and wilt almost as soon as they are picked. Here is where you crouched with a drooping flower behind your ear and watched through twisted grey branches your mother walk away along the beach.

  Here—on the beach, in the dunes, in the scrub, in the garden, in a dry, hot, inland paddock that you galloped across on a pony with a helmet fallen over your eyes—here is your island. Nobody else can know it.

  But there wasn’t only you.

  —Here on the beach on a grey day is where I walked heavily in dirt-coloured sand, by clouded unlovely waves, a thirty-six-year-old woman in the last year of my marriage.

  —Here is where I, the good son, the good husband, mowed the lawns and pruned the roses and got sweaty and sunburned and hot with fury because nobody ever noticed my efforts, my steadiness, my loyalty.

  —Here is where I crossed the lawn in my old bare brown feet, my secateurs held loosely at my thigh, the skin of my arms wrinkled and slack. Here by the gate is where I breathed the cottony sweetness of the blossoms on my lemon tree. And here on the path is where I cried, alone.

  —Here in the dim scrub is where I hid beside you with my own morning glory flower, and watched our mother, and awakened to something I did not want. And here is where I stood without you in the soupy water of a dam, my feet slimy and my chest full of sadness. Here is where, older now—an adult, a young woman—I walked one cold May afternoon, miserable and drunk, and started a conversation with a stranger. And here is where, even older, with children of my own, I stood in a windy night on the back porch of a house on the other side—the ocean side—of the island, and thought of you.

  Here, on the beach, in the dunes, in the scrub, in the garden, on wet black Settlement Road at first light, under rows of cypresses, and in spider webs and in waves and in the flights of birds, and in the silent inching open of the moon behind clouds and through clouds and alongside stars and in nights more blue than black, and in the sometimes low moon round and yellow over the innermost paddocks and the dams and chicory kilns and quietly grazing sheep and cows, and in waddling echidnas and shy nibbling wallabies—here is the island, over and over again.

  Here is your island, and here are ours—your mother’s and your father’s and your grandmother’s and your sister’s.

  Islands, towns, beaches, houses. Bedrooms, kitchens, parks at night. Mothers, fathers, mirrors, dinners. Christmases, bodies, paintings, horses.

  The world swarms, and this is just our world, the world of our family, the world of our own making. It exists in us, and in the places where we reach across to each other. The world swarms in every direction. The world swarms, and somewhere you are in it.

  SURF BEACH

  They arrive late. Straight away the kids run out the back, even though it’s cold. June and Paul carry in the bags, the boxes of food, the esky.

  Paul sweeps back the curtains and opens the windows and clean, damp air courses through the rooms.

  When their first child was a baby that slept all night and most of the day as well—the magic baby, they called her; they tiptoed, unbelieving, waiting for the spell to break—they rediscovered each other’s bodies in this house. It was summer and they drank beer on the front porch, wet-haired, the heat of the beach still in their skin. They made lazy meals: salads and cold meat, omelettes. They touched like they had only just met. Everything tasted fresh—nip of beer, cucumber, cheese, the briny flavour of the sea on their kissing mouths.

  A new life. Their life together. As if such a thing had never been done before. But what June feels now isn’t derision, or wistfulness, or the fond humility of an older woman looking back—because she’s not wiser; if anything, she feels less knowing, less sure of herself—what she feels now is wonder. At her own certainty, her boldness. She is staggered by it.

  In and out of the shrubbery the children pelt. The evening is wild, the sky loaded. June bends to the esky, reaches to the fridge. There is the smell of the vegetable crisper, earthy and stale.

  She thinks of the house that had been her grandmother’s, on the far side of the island, the bay side—the pantry with its scuffed and dented storage tins, its dustings of spilled flour, its ancient cans of beetroot slices and asparagus spears. The permanence of those things. Even after Nan died they stayed, untouched, while different people used the house, bringing their own food. June’s father, her uncle, aunt, cousins. Small or large groups—a cousin and her lover lying sticky-thighed in Nan’s bed; a family with small children whose footfalls drummed the worn carpets like echoes.

  She thinks of the week she spent there alone, in her twenties, during the exhausting and seemingly endless process of uncoupling from her first boyfriend. The black nights, the drinking. The phone calls.

  She thinks of Anna. Always Anna.

  Paul cooks pasta, and the children eat and fall into bed only halfway changed into pyjamas.

  June washes the dishes, her own face there in the window every time she looks up. The night swirls. She takes a coat and goes onto the back porch.

  From over the dunes comes the thump of waves. The beach of her childhood dazzles in her mind, sheltered in the bay, with its tumbles of red rocks that left a coating of colour on hands and feet and the seats of bathers. Afternoons that lay flat and baking. The half-light of the ti-tree tunnel that led back up to Nan’s, its silty path always cool.

  The fears that belonged there lay partway submerged, like the cold dark dirt that was under the sand of the path, if you dug down. They came out at night, with the raking of the leaves of the lemon-scented gum on the roof, the patter of seedpods, t
he voices of adults from the other room. They were soft-edged, tapering, and they shrank in the daytime almost to nothing.

  But this, now, is the coastline of her adult life. She is on the other side, booming and rough. Night and day this side whips with its raw wind, it hectors and shouts; it does not rest, nor let her rest.

  OPENINGS

  Midday, January 1988. The bay side of the island. Helen is walking along Red Rocks Beach. A dull day, dull colours, a close, grey sky. And windy—wind raking up the waves, sweeping sand against her legs in stinging rushes.

  From the scrub, in the murky light, grit under their fingernails, blue morning glory flowers wilting behind their ears, Helen’s two daughters watch their mother.

  Anna, who is nine, plunges her hands into the cool sand. She darts a finger into a nostril, then sucks it.

  Junie, who is eleven, knows what her sister wants. Junie knows that Anna wants to be close, to smell their mother’s hair, to sit in her lap. She knows that to Anna the loveliest thing in the world is the place at the side of their mother’s neck, a secret place you have to push back her hair to find. She knows that Anna doesn’t want Helen to walk away.

  Junie sees the thrust of Helen’s calf muscles, the flub of her buttocks, the embarrassment that is her old, faded hat. There is the voice of the girls’ father, overheard the night before, small with hurt: Jeez, Hel, you’re acting like you hate me. There is tenderness like the raw gap from a fallen-out tooth, there is sadness that feels ancient, there is helplessness and revulsion and desperate want, all at once, and when out of the corner of her eye Junie notices Anna’s nose-picking the slap she gives her sister surprises them both.

  Helen trudges on, around the point, past the red rocks and into the curve of the next little bay. She passes the place where a particular kind of seaweed collects in knee-high mounds, loose flat pieces like oversized tea-leaves, mottled brown and white. There is a woman, a local, who gathers this weed, who can sometimes be seen bending to scoop armloads of it into a garbage bag, releasing humid gusts of salty air and explosions of miniscule, colourless, itching mites.