THE RUGGED LONER
The first romances I recall reading
were Lucy Walker’s stories set
in the Australian outback. I loved those
books (A Man Called Masters was my favorite!)
and whiled away many a summer’s
hour daydreaming about flying into that
great, vast, unknown land and being swept
off my feet by one of Walker’s
tall, dark, enigmatic boss-heroes.
I grew up, I moved on, but I never lost
my fascination for the outback. From Mary
Durack’s Kings in Grass
Castles to Terry
Underwood’s In the Middle
of Nowhere, from We of
the Never-Never to A Town Like Alice
to Paperback Hero -- I loved
them all. And when I rediscovered my
love of romance novels, I immediately
glommed every one of Emma Darcy’s
outback-set M&B’s. My favorite?
Hmm, To Tame A Wild Heart,
I think.
Once I started writing my own romances,
many years later, it was only a matter
of time before I chose an outback setting.
And what a perfect excuse for a research
trip. Last August my husband and I joined
an Outback Track Tour visiting cattle
stations across the Northern Territory
and from that trip I created the fictional
Kameruka Downs station, home to the Carlisle
family. (See map below for an approximate
location.)
It’s only fair to tell you that,
despite the research trip, I have taken
some liberties in writing The
Rugged Loner, the first of my “Princes
of the Outback” series. The biggest
is in “granting” the Carlisles
ownership of such a vast pastoral empire.
That is stuff of the past, when pioneering
risk-takers made speculative grabs of
huge acreages of wilderness country and
created dynasties.
Today the biggest cattle operations
are company owned. AACo,
Australia’s biggest beef company,
operates 24 cattle stations on 7.9 million
hectares (about the same area as the
state of South Carolina) and owns more
than half a million cattle. Consolidated
Pastoral owns 17 properties totaling
5 million hectares (that’s Maryland
plus Massachusetts.)
So, I have not exaggerated the scale
of operations in The Rugged Loner.
Station planes are used as a matter of
course, to muster cattle, to check water,
to visit neighbors and travel to picnic
race meetings or campdrafts. The mail
comes in by plane. Medical services are
provided by the Royal
Flying Doctor Service
(yup, doctors in planes!) and the weekly
grocery order is likely to arrive by
pallet on the back on a semi-trailer
that’s driven eight hours from
Mt Isa or Darwin or the Alice. Young
mothers drive three and a half hours
each way so their toddlers can play with
children their own age.
As Terry
Underwood suggested in her book
title: it is the middle of nowhere
... although those who love this northern
outback see that as an advantage, especially
since the satellite dish brought them
instant communication with the wider
world!
This is a place of contrast typified
by the two seasons: the wet and the dry.
It’s a land of dust and of flood,
of treeless plains and sandstone cliffs,
of billabongs and mirror-smooth waterholes,
of tea-tree scrub and lush pandanus grass,
of brolgas and black cockatoos and galahs,
and a sky that stretches on and on in
remarkable blue. I hope you enjoy your
tiny glimpse through the pages of The
Rugged Loner.
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