ML Stedman’s A Far-Flung Life is a big, serious, emotionally bruising Australian family saga set on the vast sheep station of Meredith Downs in Western Australia, where an accident in January 1958 sends shockwaves through generations of the MacBride family.
It’s a story about the long afterlife of catastrophe. Phil MacBride, “able to drive since he was seven years old”, swerves to avoid a six-foot red kangaroo buck and ploughs into a gravel shoulder, the truck “twisted onto its side in a snarl of metal and force”. Phil only just manages to pull his eldest son Warren from the cab, but they both die. Younger son Matt is flung through the windscreen, landing far from the truck, head bleeding, limbs sprawled.
Matt survives the crash, but with a brain injury that disrupts his sense of self and his relationship to the past, “shaped as much by conscious knowing as by unknowing”. Stedman is interested in what happens when memory is damaged or untrustworthy. She devises the idea of “forgetment” — a thing forgotten, buried — to describe the moral and emotional gaps people live with in their own stories because of trauma, injury, shame, or because some truths are too painful to face head-on. This is not memory as nostalgia. It is memory as injury, memory as missing evidence, memory as a force that can both anchor and unmake a person. At one point, time itself seems to lose its shape: “one minute didn’t have the same length as another”.
Meredith Downs still has to keep going, despite the aftermath of the crash. Sheep still have to be mustered, fences repaired and droughts endured. That daily work anchors the story and stops it from becoming sentimental. Lorna manages the running of the station while trying to restore some sense of order to a family torn apart.
The novel has the breadth of a family epic but also the precision of something more intimate, attentive to the moments that alter its characters’ lives forever.
Much of the novel turns on Matt’s shaken sense of self and on how he learns to live within a damaged mind and body. Rosie, his fierce, volatile sister, battles against the limits of station life, leaves Meredith Downs after a shocking event in the night and later returns with a baby and more trouble in tow. Pete Peachey, the ’roo shooter and former prisoner of war, brings a hard-earned steadiness to the story. “‘Us’ is an ever-changing thing”, he says. Miles Beaumont, the elegant English outsider learning the ropes on the station, is drawn into the family’s orbit until he too has to leave.
The omnipotent landscape matters here enormously. It’s a silent, indifferent observer. “This land has seen improbable things: the evolution of marsupials and monotremes; of flightless birds and animals that fly,” writes Stedman. “It’s seen continents split and islands arise. It’s seen oceans turn to desert and desert turn to glaciers. And it’s watched people drag their little lives across its surface, flat and unforgiving.”
Human beings commit terrible damage, endure terrible losses, keep going anyway, and the land remains. What stops the novel from collapsing under the weight of all that suffering is Stedman’s belief in endurance. There are no easy absolutions here. Resilience is hard won. A Far-Flung Life is much more interested in the long, grubby, unspectacular work of carrying on, even though “some gates close off every other path you could possibly take”.
The likelihood is that what holds a family together, Stedman suggests, is not blood or virtue, but the daily decision not to let go.
By the end, I was deeply moved by A Far-Flung Life, not just by the scale of the grief, but by the control with which Stedman handles it. The novel has the breadth of a family epic but also the precision of something more intimate, attentive to the moments that alter its characters’ lives forever.
In the tradition of Jonathan Franzen’s most substantial family novels, Stedman uses the fortunes of one family to examine larger questions of identity and belonging. There’s also a sense, throughout, of a writer working on home ground. Born and raised in Western Australia, Stedman writes the landscape with exactness and deep familiarity. After the huge international success of The Light Between Oceans, this feels like another profoundly accomplished novel, beautifully written and deeply powerful in all the right ways. It has the weight and authority of a future Australian classic.
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