The Fine Colour of Rust is Loretta Boskovic’s story. The single mother is irreverent and wholly likeable for it. She fantasises about sending her children to an orphanage, even as she bloody-mindedly fights the lonely, uphill battle to keep the failing local primary school afloat. In the face of languishing rural prospects and encroaching urban pressures, Loretta attempts to hold her town together with occasional committee meetings and sheer willpower. This is a woman of true grit, whose sardonic inner life, a saving grace, permits her to survive the trials of small-town life, single motherhood, and the questionable corporate development of the bushland she loves.

What O’Reilly has created in The Fine Colour of Rust is a rollicking narrative of life in rural Australia that, while warmly drawing upon the familiar terrains, troubles, and tropes of that landscape, simultaneously presents an arresting picture of the nation, as seen through the eyes of a savvy mother who, immersed in the day-to-day grind of merely getting by, dares also to love, to dream, and to crack a good, self-deprecating joke.