The Sun Walks Down

"Yes. The thing I love most about this book is just how wonderfully, beautifully, cleverly it’s written. The author shifts between characters in a way that doesn’t feel like she’s omniscient. She dives into the perspective of each character. And it’s so cleverly done. I keep reading it as a writer, wanting to analyse how she is doing it, but then I forget and suddenly I’m with someone else. It feels very natural! It’s a wonderful book. It centres on a missing boy, a missing white boy called Denny. He’s six years old and has sort of created his own mythology, which is perhaps what leads him to get lost in this dust storm. “Australia, like any country colonised by the British, has white supremacy as a founding principle” The motif of the lost white child is very important to Australian literature. It recurs in everything—novels, children’s fiction, movies. We see it again and again. I think it reflects what we have valued as a society; it’s juxtaposed with the lost Aboriginal children of the Stolen Generations , who were lost to their families, taken permanently away as a matter of routine. In The Sun Walks Down , the town is squatting on dust. They are trying to plant wheat and it keeps failing. They have this faith that ‘the rain follows the plough.’ They think: if we plant wheat, the rain will come. So it’s showing this fundamental misalignment, this transposing of values from one place into another entirely different place."