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The Alone Man draws on the concept of ‘dreamtime’, the Australian aboriginal mythology of the land. It is a ‘double love story’ about a man’s love for his wife and family and his love of the land and nature. Set in outback Australia around 100 years ago, the story is of a simple man in a simpler time, creating a micro-world - as many pioneers did. Although he doesn’t realise it, his life is a kind of poetry, with the beauty of love, nature, and sorrow as the themes - a ‘prose poem’, poetic about something as ordinary (or common) as building a life – marriage, birth, death, livelihood. The style is gentle and evocative, and the story is, at the same time, humorous and sad, touching and poignant, affirming and happy, dreamy and warm. The Alone Man is a simple story full of understated insights that will have deep emotional resonance with readers all over the world.
The Alone Man - 1 He was old. Not very old, or as old as some people. But he was old.
Once it had been different. He'd lived there on the edge of the great red gum forest, well out of town, with his farm stretching out and down in front of him, to the river. Fences — post—and—rail — kept the sheep in one great paddock or another, while windmills clacked up water for the paddocks away from the river, up the hill. It'd taken years, clearing trees and scrub, burning off, ploughing through tangled roots with the old horse plodding round the stumps, and then sowing the seed. All year round the sun shone, burning his skin first red, then brown, then like the tough skin of the ironbark tree. And the sun burnt the grass and the wheat, and the backs of the tough little sheep after they'd been shorn. And the chooks scratched around in the dry dust, beaks open, wings stretched out a little to trap a piece or two of dry air to cool their bodies for a second. He'd camped in a tent. Stringybark poles held it up, and his great enamel mug hung from a nail driven into the front pole — his front door — when it wasn't filled with steaming black tea. Slowly, slowly, the bush turned into a farm. He built his first dam, between two sloping hills over near the road, and it half filled that winter when it hardly rained anywhere else, and overflowed in the three—day storm the next summer. Sitting in front of his tent, in the canvas chair, watching the shadows slip up the hill towards him, he knew he was happy. ***
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