Ash Road

by Ivan Southall, Maurice Saxby (Introduction)

Winner of the New York Times Book Review Children's Book of the Year, 1966. Commended title, American Library Association, 1966. 'The author has the power to get inside his characters.'— The New York Times
'Conveys with insight the reactions, fears, perplexities, ignorances and behavior of children in a real adult world.' Washington Post

‘The novel is a chronicle of fire and panic, of intense and remarkable perception, and of almost inexhaustibly vivid descriptive language… unforgettable.’ Wall St Journal

‘The description of the fire and the atmosphere of the day are so vividly described…deservedly classic story.’ ReadPlus

It's hot and dry on Ash Road, where three boys taste their first independence, camping without adults. When they accidentally light a bushfire, none could guess how far it would go. They are forced to face the consequences with only each other to depend on.
Ivan Southall was Australia's first recipient of the Carnergie Medal. An icon of children's literature, he wrote over sixty books. He died in 2008.

Genres: Fiction, Young Adult, Australia, Adventure, Childrens, Classics, 20th Century

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1965

About the author

Ivan Southall was an award-winning Australian writer of young-adult fiction and non-fiction. He was the first and still the only Australian to win the Carnegie Medal for children's literature. His books include Hills End, Ash Road, Josh, and Let the Balloon Go. Also notable is Fly West, a book of true stories based on his experiences flying in Short Sunderland flying boats during the Second World War.

Winner of the Dromkeen Medal (2003).

Reviews

[Daisy May Johnson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Written in 1965, and winning several awards and being reprinted in a lovely edition by Text Classics, Ash Road is a visceral and brutally evocative story of the impact of an Australian bush fire on its rural community.

It starts with a group of boys on holiday from school, camping out in the bush, on their way to visit a friend. A fire is lit one night and in the bone dry landscape, it swiftly gets out of control. We then follow the impact and the route of the fire, switching from viewpoint to viewpoint, as the fire rolls over the rural landscape.

This is a fascinating and intensely evocative book. Southall writes fire and the impact of that fire with a brutal unrelenting skill. There are pages and pages of breathless, intense prose and there are moments when you can almost feel the pages warming up in your hand.

I can see why this is being reprinted. It is so hugely of its space and place that it's almost like opening a window to 1960s Australia. Snakes swim the creek, sweat beads the brow, and people eke out their existence in a bitterly hard and turning landscape.

It's also fascinating in how Southall uses the fire as a coming of age device for his characters. There are some who have dated a little bit, as is often with a text of this nature, but there are others which feel so fresh that I was desperate to find out what happened to them. The grandfather, in particular, and the well - I won't spoil it, but lord I found that a powerful moment.

Ash Road is a book that I genuinely hadn't heard of, but as I'm trying to diversify into reading a lot more overseas children's literature, I was pleased to accept a review copy of it - Text Classics. It's a book that will, particularly for an audience who may not have any idea of the impact and terror of a bush fire, open many eyes and also act as a starter for many cross-curriculum topics. I could see passages of this being studied alongside discussions of climate and ecology - there's a lot in it that could be used.

It's a powerful book this Ash Road, and one that's made me want to read more Australian children's literature. There's a part of me that also wants to describe it as almost Kerouacian, but I'm not at all sure about that. I might come back to this after a reread of On the Road and see what I think.

[Deb (Readerbuzz) Nance · Rating 4 out of 5]

The boys never meant to cause trouble. They’d planned to go camping, but somehow the fire got started and soon all the lives and possessions of everyone along Ash Road were in jeopardy.


An amazing story of adventure and survival as a wildfire sweeps through the countryside.


To share the language of the book, here’s a little excerpt:


“(The fire) came upon (Grandpa’s) vision as something living and evil, shapeless and formless, constantly changing, huge beyond comprehension: an insane creature of immense greed consuming everything around it whether the taste pleased it or revolted it, rejecting what it did not care for only after it had mauled and savaged it, then pitching it aside or spitting it into the heavens.”

[Christina Packard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ivan Southall sure knows how to write a story! Every page and every line took me further on and on wanting to know how will it end. He characters create every emotion which wore me out. It was all very real to me. Almost everything was told by the end as to what happened to each individual. I am looking up other books my Southall... this is what an entertaining book should be.

[Heather · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a powerful, exceptionally written and suspenseful story of the impact of a bush fire in the Australian outback accidentally started by three boys on a camping holiday. Perfect for teens and young adults.

[Heather · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such descriptive language! You can feel, hear and smell the fire. Gripping last few chapters; perfect last line.

[Janeane Baker · Rating 4 out of 5]

An Australian classic. Great book. Great. If you read it as an adult (aimed at the teenage market) you may be like me and read it with a lump in your throat the whole time, the descriptions of fire are amazing and terrifying. I feel this was written as some kind of 'coming of age book' but it is so much more than that. With what we now know about the trauma experienced by those affected by bushfire, I read this feeling sick to the stomach about the trauma all the characters were facing and would carry with them for ever. Absolutely recommend this book.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of the first books, I remember reading on my own. It kindled in me an attraction to Australia, which I finally visited in my twenties. I can still smell the eucalyptus burning.

[Louise · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ash Road is a fabulous read, a somewhat neglected Australian classic, although happily recently rereleased as part of the Text Classics series. Three boys go camping in the searing heat of an Australian summer and accidentally start a monstrous bushfire. As relevant and approachable to modern readers as it was in the 60s. I'm very glad to have read Ivan Southall, who is still the only Australian ever to win the Carnegie Medal- for Josh in 1971, which of course I am now keen to read.

http://astrongbeliefinwicker.blogspot...

[Jane · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read for Just Read readathon - sponsored by Dani Valent.
Utterly terrifying - I was in a state of high anxiety from start to finish. Southall is particularly great, and accurate, on how logic shuts down in panic situations; excellent research (or lived experience). The style is pretty archaic and stiff, which I found alienating.

[Louise · Rating 4 out of 5]

Three boys go camping and accidentally start a bush fire, the effects on the community and the boys are life changing.

[Jenny · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully crafted description, particularly the descriptions of the fire. My favourite page was the last one!

[Lucy · Rating 5 out of 5]

The littest book (literally)

[Paula Vince · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was first published in 1966, and won the Australian Children's Book of the Year Award for Older Readers in 1966. It is one of those stories that just covers one single day.

Three fifteen-year-olds, Harry, Graham, and Wallace, are delighted to be camping unattended in the Aussie bush. They're a bit annoyed when they're forbidden to light campfires, since they'd been looking forward to their own cooking, but the north wind is hot and hard, and the scrub as dry as tinder. The locals know that a tiny flame may quickly become a monster. During the early hours of the morning, the boys accidentally start a raging blaze anyway, when Graham knocks over their bottle of methylated spirits near their faulty heater.

Consequences are catastrophic. Many properties are burned to the ground, livestock and wildlife are lost, and human lives seriously endangered. As well as the culpable trio, the story focuses on several residents who live along Ash Road and mistakenly assume their location will remain well out of the raging fire's path. While able-bodied adults head off to assist with relief efforts, the children and elderly folk left to hold down the fort are terrified to find the fire closing in on them.

Five-year-old Julie Buckingham unwittingly overflows the bathtub and depletes the family's rainwater stores; Grandpa Tanner remembers an identical blaze around 1913, Peter Fairhall feels frustrated by his grandparents' protective initiative to send him away, and the George family are trying to protect their perishing raspberry crop. The day doesn't unfold the way anyone expects.

It was a contemporary tale of its time, but Australia was on the brink of a total change. Currency is still pounds sterling, temperature is measured in Fahrenheit, and distance in miles. Only fairly senior citizens would remember this now. (Not me! I wasn't born yet.) Therefore it's an interesting snapshot from the not-so-distant past. I once updated all my technology details for the second printing of a contemporary novel, but this example suggests it may be more interesting to let novels age like fine wine. I would never change things again.

Under Southall's skillful pen, the fire becomes the main antagonist it deserves to be.

'The smoke cloud was a pale brown overcast with billows of white and curious areas of mahogany and streaks of sulphurous-looking yellow. The sun shone through like a white plate in a bowl full of dye... There was ash on the road too, unnumbered flakes of it lying in the gravel and in the grass at the edges and caught up like black flowers in twigs and foliage... It was like a black and white photograph of enormous proportions, in the midst of which candles burned mysteriously.'
And how about this excellent description of the vile temper of the day itself.

'It was an angry day; not just wild or rough but savage in itself, actively angry against every living thing. It hated plants and trees and birds and animals, and they wilted from its hatred or withered up and died or panted in distress in shady places.'
In spite of his evocative descriptions (which I believe helped win him that award), I find the fleeting time span covered doesn't really do justice to the extensive cast of characters. The plot has unpredictable moments when it draws complete strangers together, but it is ultimately one day in their lives. An extremely traumatic day, I grant you that, but I prefer longer time spans in stories to really get to know people. And the untimely death of one character who couldn't ever win a trick saddens me enough to knock off a couple of stars.

Still, if part of Southall's goal was to warn people about the potential terror of bushfires, and subsequent need to take extreme caution, he surely succeeded.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've only experienced a bushfire up close and personal once, way back forty years ago, and whilst I wasn't ever really threatened by what happened my impressions and memory are dominated by how fast and how ominous the blaze moved. In Ash Road by Ivan Southall the author captures this elemental aspect of such a disaster, but amplifies and deepens the experience through his considerable authorial skill. Furthermore, considering the traumatic fires that have swept through country Australia since the novel's orginal publication in 1965, including the infamous Ash Wednesday (1983), Black Saturday (2009) and Black Summer fires of 2019-20, Southall's text is even more pertinent, more evocative today. With its focus on a disparate group of children Ash Road is a paradoxically frightening yet exciting read that provides some fascinating literary insights into the relationship between the Australian bush and how one comes of age.

The key characters in the novel are a disparate group of (mostly) teenagers, each with their own childish fixations. Peter Fairhall is somewhat of a loner who has an unspoken love for Pippa Buckingham, a neighbour who is vexed somewhat by her toddler sister Julie and her younger brother Stevie. Lorna George is a young girl who has been thrust unwillingly into a more maternal role for her family, whilst Harry. Wallace and Graham are three lads on a bush excursion that leads to calamity. Thrown together through disaster, struggling to help themselves and adults in the absence of parents, they form a bond that goes beyond more immature connections. The bushfire accelerates and reinforces their transition from being kids into young adults, and whilst it is traumatising it is also redemptive. Whilst Southall doesn't have one protagonist it is readily apparent that it is through Peter, Lorna and Pippa particularly that he guides the reader through his contemplation of growing up. Their actions and inner lives illuminate the narrative and are at times most affecting. Lorna's continued efforts to help her somewhat tyrannical father are tragically beautiful and self-sacrificing, whereas Pippa and Peter's feelings for each other are nearly as complicated as those held by older lovers might be. Southall's writing ensures that the reader cares for the chidlren, is invested in their lives and how they interact with each other, and this is crucial to the success of the book.

Southall could be accused of providing his young characters with an emotional complexity that goes beyond their nominal ages, and he is not frightened of developing this through how he constructs his narrative. For example:

"But there were things more important to Peter than the bewildering adult standards of conduct his parents and grandparents talked about and tried to impose upon him. Nothing was more important to Peter than Pippa’s goodwill. He had never had a real fight with her before. It was a disastrous thing, as if he had been caught in a sinking ship and was powerless to save himself. It seemed that the only way to get back into a happy frame of mind was to be close to her when her humour changed; for surely her anger had to run out. This half-haughty, half-frightened girl in front of him was not like Pippa at all."

It's hard to conceive of a teenage boy responding in this manner as described by Southall. However, and this is important when understanding and appreciating Southall's work that the emotional truthfulness is all there, perhaps barely obscured by his writing style. The nascent love Peter feels for Pippa is crushed in this moment and it 'feels' right that he responds as he does. Southall makes sure that the reader will connect with what is being experienced in the hearts and minds of his characters because he knows that (perhaps) they are not that different to us.

Southall's novel is singularly effective in how it depicts the Australian bush. There is no doubt whatsoever that he knows how confronting, how raw, how beautiful, how inherently alien it can be, and when it becomes hostile through bushfire, it truly is terrifying. There is a beauty in much of what Southall writes when describing the tracks and scrub and hills in Ash Road, and hopefully this will form another means for readers to connect with the author's work. There might be issues in terms of how well acquainted contemporary younger readers may be with the bush, but hopefully the power of Southall's writing, his evocation of the Australian environment will surpass ignorance.

One final point of commendation that needs to be stated is that Southall maintains a relatively fast pace with his plot, and the potential for disaster impacting the community of Ash Road grows more and more imposing as the story progresses. It becomes incredibly hard to put down Ash Road in the final few chapters, as the bush fire gets nearer and nearer to causing real physical harm one wants to make sure that Peter, Pip, Lorna and the others don't suffer. I won't reveal the end, but Southall delivers a mostly appropriate conclusion for what he set out to do.

All up Ash Road is a very enjoyable and meaningful Australian novel that might have been written for younger readers back in the Sixties, but will now really appeal to adults. I would like to think that Australian teenagers could enjoy Southall's novel, however I am not sure it fits the cultural framework within which that audience, publishers and teachers operate today. I'm glad I read the book and will recommend to friends and colleagues, and I hope it can still find an appreciative audience 60 years since its first release.

[Jill Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very Australian story. Ash Road had been named after a terrible fire in 1913. No one ever believed it would happen again.

The children are a huge part of this story. Lorna George, always helps her father and brother John pick the strawberries. John hears the fire warning siren, he jumps his motorbike to go to fight the fire. Buckinghams and Fairalls were neighbouring farms. Pippa Buckingham was friends with Peter Fairall. Little Stevie is slow with his thinking and often annoyed his big sister Pippa. Julie likes Lorna but has never been really close. When she discovers Lorna's father had a stroke, she wants to help. No adults are around. The wind is picking up and the sky turns a hazy dark colour. The children are on their own, in different places. Three weary boys walk out along Ash Road, Graham, Harry, and Wallace had been on a camping holiday. It was supposed to be a free week from adults, school, and parents. Now they were running away from the guilt of having started the fire.

The description of the intense heat, and the roaring sound of the fire that grew from a small spark on that hot dry windy day, vividly sets the scene of massive destruction. How could these children survive? Would the adults who'd left them return? They'd left, believing they would be back quickly. Broken down cars and mass evacuation of the towns they all knew were against them.

I can see why this is a classic book, one I'm sure should be read by children everywhere.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every Australian should do themselves a favour and read Ash Road.

Southall’s novel successfully conveys the sheer ferocity of Australian bushfires and the emotional turmoil that hits communities staring down the barrel of destruction. The 2019-20 bushfire season in Australia captured the world’s attention and it drove home the point that we remain at the mercy of Mother Nature when things are at their worst. Ash Road should serve as a timely reminder to all Australians that we must be ready for the next bushfire disaster around the corner.

Ash Road is a classic that remains just as salient now as it was when it was published back in 1965. It’s a must-read.

[Neil · Rating 5 out of 5]

I dimly recalled having read this book as a child in the 60s and picked it up as a reprint to revisit 50 years later.

As one of my great nephews, a 12-year-old, was staying with us I handed it to him to sample. Not long afterwards he handed it back to me with a smile on his face. « I finished the first chapter. It’s great! ».

After he left I picked it up myself and couldn’t put it down till I’d finished.

This is a book that was acclaimed locally and abroad when it was published in 1966. It’s lost none of its verve and power, the gigantic fire drawing the children into it’s terrible vortex while at the same time, propelling them into adulthood.

Great literature doesn’t age.

[Amber Scaife · Rating 2 out of 5]

Three boys go camping for a week on their own and accidentally start a fire that sweeps through the dangerously dry outback. The story follows the actions of several families living along Ash Road, how the adults seem to bungle through their instincts to help, and how a handful of children are left alone and possibly trapped by the oncoming flames. A YA thriller, I suppose, but without much in the way of thrilling bits. The writing needed to be more immediate and intense, I think, to pull it off. I love a good disaster/thriller story, but this one lacked the seat-edgy excitement.

[Vireya · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first read this when I was about 11 or 12, and found it absolutely gripping. I was a bit nervous about re-reading it as an adult, in case it didn't live up to my memory of it. But having lived through Ash Wednesday in 1983, Black Saturday in 2009, and the Black Summer of 2020, some parts of the book were more real and terrifying to me as an adult than they were then.

The book title makes more sense to me as an adult. The road was not named for a fire that hadn't yet happened. It was named for the mountain ash trees, Eucalyptus regnans, that cover the area where the story is set.

[Sean Harding · Rating 3 out of 5]

Southall #1
This was one of those books that I have seen on the family bookcase for many years, but never really had a look at, anyway I decided to have a read.
It apparently won the Children's book award for 1966, and involved three young people and a bushfire.
It was OK, it never really grabbed my attention, but it wasn't terrible.
As I was reading it, the edition I had completely fell apart and so I was the last person to read that copy anyway as it has now gone to the great recycle bin!

[Anne Cheal · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read it first as a 9/10 year old, and re-read several decades later. Loved it then and it still stacks up.

[Sam Anly · Rating 5 out of 5]

🤗

[Arthur Banos · Rating 2 out of 5]

a little boring

[Javier Campos · Rating 4 out of 5]

Es la tercera vez que lonleo y ko deja de emocionarme

[Angie Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a really hard and devastating book, but so very powerful and well written!

I recommend this hands down to anyone wanting to understand the impact of bush fires, it really helps you to see the truth of fires in bush towns.

[Mmeg16]

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