![]() ![]() We have ‘The Drover’s Wife’ by Henry Lawson and ‘The Chosen Vessel’ by Barbara Baynton depicting the terrors of women alone in the late nineteenth-century bush. We have books about prisons and prisoners, including a whole literature on convict women, those poor souls maligned as ‘damned whores’ by Lieutenant Ralph Clark of the First Fleet. ![]() There is nothing like it in our literary past. It is not a place, or a literature, that we have encountered before. The women in Charlotte Wood’s powerful and distinctive novel are prisoners in an imaginative landscape that we know only as a remote location somewhere in inland Australia. ![]() Can this be happening? In twenty-first-century Australia? This is the world into which you step when you open The Natural Way of Things. IT IS ALMOST impossible to believe: ten young women, all of them aged under twenty-five, held captive because of their past sexual transgressions. ![]()
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