Shearers' Motel

By: Roger McDonald

Narrated by: John Derum

Length: 9 hrs and 7 mins

Publisher's summary

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.

©1992 Roger McDonald (P)2002 Australian Broadcasting Corporation

Critic reviews

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)