Shearer’s Motel

Into the hard-living world of travelling shearers in the Australian outback comes internationally acclaimed writer Roger McDonald, driving an old truck rattling with cooking gear. He has abandoned writing for a time and found work as a cook for a team of New Zealand shearers working through New South Wales, South Australia and Victoria. He is determined to find a sense of belonging: somehow to join his life with the landscape, the places and the people he meets along the way; somehow to fill the inexpressible yearning he feels.Shearers' Motel is the story of that quest, of its triumphs and its failures - a story told with a heartfelt sense of of the profundity of ordinary lives. Written with an insider's affection and familiarity sharpened by an outsider's perception, this moving account of working life in a classic Australian industry gives a new twist to a long tradition of outback travel writing.It confirms Roger McDonald as one of our finest and most lyrical chroniclers of the land - and of the human heart.Winner of the National Book Council Banjo Award for Non-Fiction. 'Roger McDonald uses language with the precision of a diamond cutter.'   Publishers Weekly 'Shearers' Motel is not like any other Australian book, either in form or in content. McDonald has taken great risks in achieving it, both as a man and as a writer. He has been valiantly successful.'   Geoffrey Dutton, Australian Book Review