A rather dark tale of a convict woman in Tasmania in the 1820s, quite landscape driven and impressionistic. It feels like an accurate portrayal of the frontier times, politics and personalities. ( )

One of the wonderful things about reviewing books which I haven’t personally chosen, is that I often get to read material that is outside of my usual genre collection. “Bridget Crack” by Rachel Leary is such a book.

“Bridget Crack” examines the physical and physiological journey of a convict on-the-run in the wilds of Tasmania. Like most women of the time, the course of Bridget’s life is heavily influenced by the men she encounters. Ms Crack has the added challenge of trying to exist in the savage and foreign environment of the Tasmanian wilderness. The story touches on the early-colonisation Tasmanian society, the roles of convicts and free settlers in its development, the scourge of bushrangers, and the involvement/disregard of the indigenous people

The book is well researched and beautifully written with believable characters and captivating descriptions. This bleak tale keeps you riveted from start to finish. I recommend this book for lovers of historical fiction, women’s fictions and Australian History.

I received a copy of this book from Sisters in Crime, Australia in exchange for a fair and honest review. ( )

A female convict on the run in the Tasmanian wilderness in 1826? It doesn’t sound very likely, does it? But debut novelist Rachel Leary has managed to create a wholly convincing novel out of this inversion of the Intransigent Convict trope, and it’s breath-taking reading.
It’s historical fiction, but not as we might know it. While her style is different, in impact Bridget Crack is more like Rohan Wilson’s disconcertingly powerful duo The Roving Party and To Name Those Lost, also set in colonial Van Diemen’s Land when the new society being created is confronting both the hostile forces of the Indigenous owners of the land and the harsh environment. As in Wilson’s novels, the moral choices of Leary’s novel are trapped by pragmatism.
Everything is against Bridget. The pugnacious landscape, the cruel weather, the entire apparatus of the convict system – and her gender, which makes her doubly vulnerable because of the attentions of men in a society where women are scarce and mostly there for the taking. Psychologically, she’s ill-equipped for survival in a place where she is dependent on others for fundamentals like food and shelter: she’s impatient, impulsive and intolerant. She’s also poignantly naïve. Her initial placement is as an indentured servant in a comparatively benign Hobart residence, but – not knowing what to expect and having no idea about the realities of this crude, violent society – she finds it intolerable. It’s her own intransigence that lands her in a Hobart gaol for insubordination and thereafter on assignment to the interior far from any kind of rescue. Faced with a horrible man who lied to the authorities about having a wife so that he could be assigned a female servant, and who lets his other servant die without a qualm, Bridget runs away into the bush. Her naïveté shows in the theft of the items she takes with her: she takes no provision for water.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/10/30/bridget-crack-by-rachel-leary/ ( )

Stark, cutting depiction of a young woman's disintegration when thrown into a wild, lawless environment. Bridget Crack is sentenced to penal servitude in Tasmania and assigned to the service of a soldier and his wife. She finds sympathy from the soldier's sister, vague attraction form the soldier, and intense dislike from his wife, who forces her into rebellion and subsequent banishment to the Interior, the wild undeveloped fringes of European civilization. Escaping from her brutal master, she faces death in the alien bush until found by a bushranger gang, led by the brooding Matt Sheedy, who she becomes mistress to. Inadvertently witnessing one of their crimes she becomes a wanted person herself. When the bushrangers are inevitably killed or captured, she remains on the run herself, her gradual disintegration into little more than a hunted animal is mirrored by the increasing spareness and fragmentation of the already terse prose. The ending is predictable but no less tragic for that. Superbly written, incredibly bleak story, that grips the mind and the soul. ( )