Over 40 in Broken Hill: Unusual Encounters in the Australian Outback

Susan Patrick is a librarian at the Ryerson Polytechnical Institute.

Despite the inference of decrepitude in the title (over 40 actually
refers to Celsius temperature, not age), this book tells of a
“boy’s-own” adventure of two middle-aged men driving thousands of
kilometres across the Australian outback in a temperamental old car.
Canadian novelist Hodgins describes his “unusual (and very humorous)
encounters” when he accompanies his friend, Australian novelist Roger
McDonald, on a fact-finding tour of outback sheep-shearing stations.

Hodgins, having read and admired so many Australian novels, was drawn
to Australia by a “powerful lust of a literary nature,” and longed
to live an Australian yarn. His book is not just a description of
landscapes and nature and the colorful characters met along the road; it
is also full of keen and humorous personal observations and reflections
on Australia’s unique life, language, literature, culture, and
geography, written in the rather self-deprecating style of one who can
laugh at his own foibles.

This innocent abroad in the land of tough Aussies, floods, droughts,
red mud, prickly pears, and other assorted local color also finds his
novelist’s creative imagination impossible to suppress. He is
accompanied by fictitious presences (an estranged Canadian couple who
come to grief in the settings Hodgins is visiting), “taking from the
journey what they wanted, commenting upon it in their own way, making
sure [he] was never tempted to forget that there was more than one way
of responding to what was going on.”

As one who has lived in Australia, I thoroughly enjoyed Hodgins’s
description of a Canadian’s wide-eyed wonder at the strangeness of
Australia, and know it to be no exaggeration.