Audrey of the Outback (Christine Harris, Little Hare, $14.99 pb, ISBN 9781921272189, March) ***

Audrey lives in the sandy scrubby outback, with her mother, two brothers, and an imaginary friend named Stumpy. Her dad is away most of the time, riding camels and selling dingo scalps to the government. He’s trying to earn enough money to put glass in the windows of their dirt-floor house. There are few luxuries—this is the 1930s Depression after all—and Audrey’s life is a hard and lonely one. But she’s a funny, lively and imaginative child. She befriends a passing swagman, dreams about what she’ll be when she grows up, and has other ill-fated adventures, like accidentally blowing up the backyard dunny. Written in simple prose by Christine Harris (the Spy Girl series), Audrey of the Outback paints a meandering picture of life far from the city, only gaining momentum towards its conclusion. The story is sprinkled with the classic lingo of a bygone bush life. Words like ‘ning nong’, ‘quandong’ and
‘swag’ are explained in a useful glossary at the back of the book. The first in a series, this story will appeal to readers aged 7 to 10 who can look forward to the further adventures of its spirited and quirky young heroine.

Rochelle Siemienowicz is a Melbourne writer and reviewer

This review from Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2008, Thorpe-Bowker