Unbelonging

A six-year-old child disappears in a dust storm in the Flinders Ranges. It’s a familiar literary trope about lost white children and reflects the anxiety in 19th century colonial Australia about the dangers of the wilderness. The same anxiety, unsurprisingly, did not accompany the Stolen Generations, forever lost to their families and cultures. In her latest novel of competing parallel narratives, The Sun Walks Down, Fiona McFarlane explores who belongs to the land and who are the interlopers.

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Jo Case is Editor, Books & Ideas at The Conversation. She has been associate publisher at Wakefield Press, deputy editor of Australian Book Review, books editor of The Big Issue and associate editor of Kill Your Darlings. A former program manager of Melbourne Writers Festival, Jo was a co-founder of the Feminist Writers Festival and a founding board member of the Stella Prize. Her first book, Boomer and Me: A memoir of motherhood, and Asperger’s, was shortlisted for the inaugural Russell Prize for Humour Writing. Her reviews have been published in The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, the Australian, Australian Book Review and The Monthly. She writes a regular books column and reviews for InReview.

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Unbelonging

Fiona McFarlane is the author of the novel The Night Guest, which was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award, and a collection of short stories, The High Places, which won the International Dylan Thomas Prize. Her new novel is The Sun Walks Down.

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Unbelonging

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