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‘Listen, deeply now’

Sounds of the Wimmera
by
July 2024, no. 466

The Desert Knows Her Name by Lia Hills

Affirm Press, $34.99 pb, 288 pp

‘Listen, deeply now’

Sounds of the Wimmera
by
July 2024, no. 466

In scene-setting a discussion of Lia Hills’s The Desert Knows Her Name, it is difficult to avoid going straight to the matter of genre. What we have is postcolonial, outback-noir eco-fiction. This genre mash-up isn’t new and is arguably a defining fictional mode of post-settlement Australia’s third century. As a form, it provides a meeting place where authors, both Indigenous (Melissa Lucashenko, Julie Janson) and non-Indigenous (Alex Miller, Tim Winton, and Gail Jones), meet to worry through complexly entangled fears around colonialism’s dark legacy, personal trauma, social dysfunction, and environmental degradation. And it isn’t territory new to Hills, as readers familiar with her previous (second) novel, The Crying Place (2017), will be aware.

The Desert Knows Her Name

The Desert Knows Her Name

by Lia Hills

Affirm Press, $34.99 pb, 288 pp

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