A Far-flung Life book club questions

1. The novel begins, ‘Out here, it’s red earth for as far as the eye can see. Overhead, the sun ploughs an unending blue sky’. Stedman has said the Western Australian landscape is ‘a character in its own right’. How would you describe that character? What role does it play in the story of the MacBrides, and the other people of Wanderrie Creek?

2. Phil and Lorna have a very solid, happy marriage, but several of the book’s characters aren’t allowed publicly to love the people they love. Which of them would have different lives today, and who would still face the same obstacles as they did in the nineteen fifties?

3. Humpty Dumpton tells Matt: ‘When you think about it, everyone’s life’s a prison – of days, sort of. The trick is to get comfortable in it, I reckon. Find your freedom inside whatever your prison is.’ What do you think he means by this, and do you agree with his philosophy?

4. Various characters in the book have secrets: to what extent does keeping their secret make their particular life happier or unhappier? And, thinking of the people from whom the secrets in this book are kept, to what extent does ignorance of the truth make their lives happier or unhappier?

5. In your view, who has the right to keep secrets, and who has the duty to keep them? Do spouses/partners have a right to keep secrets from each other? If so, when and why? If not, why not? What about parents keeping secrets from their children and vice-versa?

6. Today, it’s easier than ever to access information. Just because we can know something, does it automatically mean we should?

7. Is it always a good thing to know everything about yourself and your family history? Is the answer to that different now to how it was, say, fifty years ago?

8. The setting of the book is extremely remote. What role do you think isolation plays in perceptions of right and wrong?

9. In Sergeant Wisheart and Sergeant Rundle, we see two very different approaches to justice and the application of rules. If you had to choose one approach or the other, which would it be, and why?

10. Do you think there can be such a thing as innocent guilt?

11. Can redemption be a private, rather than a public, process?

12. What do you think the significance is of the title ‘A FAR-FLUNG LIFE’?

13. The MacBride family is ‘garlanded with death’, but they are not the only characters in the book to endure grief of one kind or another. Consider who has suffered loss, and how they cope with it.

14. Matt says, ‘[…] sometimes our secrets aren’t ours to tell. Saying them will just hurt the people they’re about, and it’ll do bugger all good to anyone else.’ (p.391) Do you agree? Is it ever wrong to speak the truth about yourself if it would harm an innocent third party?

15. If you were Matt, what would you have told Andy and when? And what would you have told Bonnie, and when? What would you have told Lorna, and when? If you were Andy, would you want to know the truth about your parents, no matter what it was? Would your answer have been different fifty years ago? Twenty?

16. ‘In the end, we’re all looking for a place to ride out the storm of life.’ (p.65)

Stedman has said that the theme of ‘belonging’ is important to the story. Which characters are ‘outsiders’? Does that change as the novel goes on? Where do you think Andy belongs?

17. Andy says, ‘If the thing you remember is called a memory, what’s the word for a thing you forget? […] I reckon there should be a word. Forgetment, say. A forgetment is the opposite of a memory.’ When is it good for things to become ‘forgetments’? In English we have the phrase ‘forgive and forget’. What role do you think forgetting plays in the process of forgiving? Does technology mean we’re losing the ability to forget? If so, how do you think that will affect society?

18. Old Wally ticks away the minutes at Meredith Downs, ‘civilising’ time, according to Matilda MacBride. From ‘a handful of muddled seconds’ to the time it takes for ‘oceans to turn to desert and desert to turn to glaciers’, consider the role of time in the story, and how it impacts the lives of the characters and the society in which they live.

19. Myrtle Eedle and Sergeant Rundle mostly appear in their own chapters, and, with the exception of Myrtle selling Andy stamps, we never see them directly interacting with the MacBrides. Why do you think the author chose to tell the story this way? How do these chapters affect the rhythm of the novel?

20. Lorna makes the Family Fruit Crates to hold her family’s treasured memorabilia. What items would you put in your own Fruit Crate and why?

21. The book uses a lot of phrases or expressions that are particular to Australia or Western Australia at the time. To what extent is Australian language becoming more standardised or more aligned with international English? Is that good or bad? Are there favourite old phrases you’d like to preserve or see revived?