Hilda Hinton

And the whole flock is affected by that, as the family are, by their grief.

So they really all go down together, the whole farm, the family, the cows.

He is.

At the same time, I think there's more tenderness in the father character than anyone in the book.

I felt more warm towards him than anybody else.

I was a bit detached from everybody else.

And I think he's always trying, but he just can't quite get there.

Yeah, well, she does become terribly constipated, but it's also the only thing she's getting attention for from her parents after the death of the brother.

So she almost doesn't want to be cured.

There's a scene where the dad's got the girl in the lounge room with her bum up in the air and he's flaking off bits of soap, off a cake of soap, and literally sticking them in her bum.

And it's going to solve the constipation.

And while he's doing that, mum's sitting nearby.

counting the cows' ear tags and sort of reconciling the dead cows with the ear tag numbers, as though this is not happening in front of them at all.

So it's confronting in certain parts, but that scene is one of the scenes that really stayed with me, with Yaz face down in a pillow sort of crying silently.

trying to have her constipation cured by her father who's treating her like a cow.

Yeah, I think that's the first time she cried since he died and she felt a bit bad about it because she wasn't really crying for him and she didn't, you know, she felt guilty about crying for herself.

when she can't cry for him.

Oh, yeah, I was deeply impacted by it.

And I think the darker it got, the more I sort of appreciated their turn of phrase.

It was one of those books where every page has a special sort of heart-wrenching or beautiful sentence.