Dust

Dust

Evocative and earthy...
From a powerful new Australian voice

Written by debut Australian author Christine Bongers, Dust, is a warm but tough-minded novel that glitters with a rare and subtle wit. It illuminates the shadows that hang over from childhood and finds beauty in unexpected places.

Christine Bongers is a former radio and television journalist whose childhood, growing up in Central Queensland's drought-stricken Callide Valley, helped inspire Dust. Set in the Biloela district in the early 1970s, Dust is an earthy and evocative tale that captures a time of ruthless innocence, when children were allowed to shoot real guns and certain things, dangerous things, were still unthinkable.

The motivation to write Dust came from something Christine's father said to her as he lay dying in hospital. Christine Bongers says 'Then, amidst the grim tangle of tubes and drips, bandages and blood, he gave me the final piece of advice: Don't die without doing what you were meant to do, without being what you were meant to be.

'After a couples of false starts I discovered I wasn't writing my Dad's story; I wasn't even writing my own. The bolshy little character, who became Ceclilia Maria, had her own story to tell: a story born of ignorance, railing a lingering regret.'

In Dust, twelve-year-old Cecilia Maria grows up in the heat of 1970s Queensland, where she battles six brothers on her side of the fence and the despised Kapernicky girls, lurking on the other side of the barbed wire. Decades later she must face old ghosts when she returns home with her own reluctant teenagers.

Christine Bongerswas born and bread in Biolela, Central Queensland. She left to attend university and has worked as a broadcast journalist in Brisbane and London, written two environmental television documentaries and run her own media consultancy. Her work was short-listed for the 2006 Varuna Manuscript Development Awards. She completed a Master of Arts in youth writing in 2008.

Christine shares her life in Brisbane with her husband and children. Dust is her first novel.

Dust
Woodshed Press
Author: Christine Bongers
ISBN: 9781741664461
Price: $17.95