Unsettled

by Gay Lynch

The unsettled South Australian frontier near Mount Gambier is a strange and difficult place for a Galway family trying to make sense of their new world. Rosanna and brother Skelly long to escape. Their older brother Edwin races against poets in steeplechases and schemes over cattle, carts and cards to get ahead. They are all half in love with a visiting priest and a disturbing Irish play about their ancestors. When she goes to work at a nearby station, Rosanna is caught up in a string of events—throwing a horserace, the allure of a visiting actor, violent threats to her Boandik friends, and the wreck of the Admella—that lead to a reckoning with the land, its histories, its religions and its ancient and recent cultures. Unsettled is fearless and exuberant, playful and erudite, an Australian classic in the making. “Passionate and uncompromising … brilliantly evoking the complexities of early Australian settlement.” — Danielle Clode “Spellbinding historical fiction, offering fresh insight into a 19th-century past, which unsettles our present.” — Laura Bloom

Genres: Historical Fiction

411 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2019

About the author

Gay Lynch is a writer, editor and teacher of English and creative writing at Flinders University. She has published Apocryphal and Literary Influences on Galway Diasporic History (2010), Cleanskin (2006), an adult psycho-fem-thriller, short stories, educational children’s texts and academic papers. She is currently working on a historical novel.

Reviews

[Sue · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unsettled is set primarily in South Australia’s Gambierton (later Mt Gambier) from the 1859 to 1880, with most of the action taking place in the 1860s. It’s the story of an Irish family, the Lynches, who migrated to Australia in 1848. The Lynches, as you might have guessed from the author’s name, are based on her husband’s family. Unsettled explores their story primarily through two fictional characters, Rosanna and her younger brother Skelly. ... In the end, all of this has one goal, to serve the real point of Lynch’s story, the complicated politics of settlement, oppression and dispossession, the injustices of colonialism. As Rosanna becomes aware, during an interaction with her employer Mrs Ashby, “living on the edge of civilisation unsettles everyone”. Gay Lynch’s book does the same – and that, I’m sure, was her intent. For my full review, please check my blog: https://whisperinggums.com/2020/10/18...

[Danielle Clode · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the fine tradition of Kate Grenville’s Secret River and Lucy Treloar’s Salt Creek, Gay Lynch’s Unsettled explores the uncomfortable terrain of Australia’s colonial and settlement history. Inspired by the life of horse-trainer Rosanna Lynch, Unsettled skilfully subverts the dominant hegemonies of the Australian frontier of popular imagination. This is no tale of heroic English manliness or laconic tight-lipped battlers. Unsettled is a passionate and uncompromising exploration of the Irish, the feminine, the indigenous, the nonconformist and the rebellious in our history. Lynch seamlessly weaves art, culture, literature and science through the fabric of her story, brilliantly evoking the complexities of early Australian settlement with its crude harsh realities and its finely wrought artistic and cultural aspirations.

[Heather Taylor-Johnson · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a vast book! This story of Irish settlement in South Australia is one of the Lynch family, whose members make common, however life-changing, mistakes. Paedophilia within the church, native disenfranchisement and white guilt, feminism - these discussions we have now and frequently are explored here, in a story taken place over 100 years ago, and that, for me, is the book's winning ticket. The author has taken her own family history and given it new characters to further personalise it, crossing that interesting boundary between fact and fiction.