Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

When Colts Ran by Roger McDonald

by
November 2010, no. 326

When Colts Ran by Roger McDonald

Vintage, $32.95 pb, 352 pp, 9781864710410

When Colts Ran by Roger McDonald

by
November 2010, no. 326
Between the wars, the dominant mode of Australian fiction was the saga: tales of land-taking and nation-building, melodramas within families across generations, characters shaped by loneliness and obsession, struggles against fire, flood, and drought, and the anguish of married life. In the fiction of Eleanor Dark, ‘M. Barnard Eldershaw’, Xavier Herbert, ‘Louis Kaye’, and Brian Penton among others, Australia’s history was written (this before the professionalisation of the academic discipline of History). It was the saga tradition that Patrick White reworked in The Tree of Man (1955), as did Colleen McCullough in The Thornbirds (1977). In recent decades, this territory has been ceded to the television miniseries, with some notable exceptions: Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria (2006) and now the triumph of Roger McDonald’s When Colts Ran, whose cast acts against the backdrop of the national story from the early 1930s to the near present.

From the New Issue

You May Also Like

Leave a comment

If you are an ABR subscriber, you will need to sign in to post a comment.

If you have forgotten your sign in details, or if you receive an error message when trying to submit your comment, please email your comment (and the name of the article to which it relates) to ABR Comments. We will review your comment and, subject to approval, we will post it under your name.

Please note that all comments must be approved by ABR and comply with our Terms & Conditions.