Margaret Hickey’s Rural Dreams takes a look at life outside the big smoke, introducing us to the kind of characters you might expect in the country, as well as some you might not.
Funny, heartbreaking and true; the characters in Rural Dreams are the people we know and grew up with. Some of them might even be us. A girl finds strength in poetry, a football coach ponders obsession, a woman grapples with the fall-out of an affair and a mother can’t and won’t stop swearing. In ‘Binky’, the character asks, ‘who gets the farm?’ and in ‘Rescue’, a backpacker is pulled out of a crocodile swamp. Written through the lens of landscape, Rural Dreams highlights the richness of life on the land and showcases the beauty of lives lived outside city walls.
From stories of hardship and loss to homecomings and new beginnings, Hickey’s writing offers both comedy and tragedy, and a snapshot into how the lives of these characters intersect with the Australian landscape.