Ironically, the story of this novel is the abandonment of children and it is peculiarly, and finally, a woman’s story. Amy Fowler, a young girl from Digger’s Rest, is pregnant at seventeen and the shotgun wedding proceeds as was normal in rural Australia in the early thirties. The opening sentences set the tone:

Ted Fowler left his wife Amy and the children when the youngest, another girl, was a few weeks old.

The infant was sickly. The Great Depression was in a much more robust state. Ted told Amy he was going to walk South to Eden where there was reported to be work on fishing boats.

Amy had borne three daughters in three years and she and Ted lived with her parents May and Gus. Gus refused to attend the wedding and when the guests came back to the house he was ‘digging a new garden by the back fence, visible to the guests through the grape-vines’.

Masters proceeds in this way, by restraint and undertone. Her prose is simplicity itself, a kind of clipped reportage, something the long-legged fly might write. It is also accurate and clean edged, giving us just the amount of detail we need and no more, leaving us to imagine and feel the rest.

Amy is eventually forced to leave her children with her parents to seek work, first as chambermaid in a pub hundreds of miles away, and then in Sydney. The account of her leaving home and her children, Kathleen and Patricia, shows Masters at her best:

Amy set off for the gate, bent sideways with the weight of her case. [Her brother] Fred saw, and ran to catch her up and take it, while she ran ahead to stop the car, wobbling down the track in her high heels ... Only once did she lift her head to see Fred’s round hungry face under his round felt hat, and beyond him Patricia running screaming towards the road (she couldn’t hear the screaming but she saw it) and Kathleen standing stiff like a small stone statue, and May with her fist raised shaking it in the air.

The stoicism, fatalism perhaps, of country women of those years is part of our mythology. Masters makes us feel it and shudder. Amy never complains, never even questions her fate. If anything, she is eternally optimistic and grateful for the very small crumbs she receives. On the little bus that takes her from her home and children she sees a man staring at her and is astonished to note that his eyebrows grow in a sandy little tuft near the bridge of his nose and don’t go any further:

Oh my goodness, she thought, up till now I’ve only seen one kind of eyebrows. There must be a lot of things I haven’t seen. An excitement crept in faint shivers from her thighs upwards to pump her heart harder. I’ll see things, I’ll do things!

One of the most difficult feats of art is to conceal art and it takes a rare, sophisticated imagination to recreate the totally unsophisticated. Masters had an extraordinary feel for, and deep love of, the naive country women of that era, their self-subjugation, their immense gratitude for no favours, their poor lopped-off lives.

When Amy finally arrives in Sydney she still remains the essential country girl. She stays with her Aunt Daphne for some weeks until she gets a job, and notes the constant hostility of her Uncle Dudley. At the first sign of trouble or domestic warfare Dudley walks away:

Dudley got up from the table. Men always walk away, Amy thought. Ted did, Gus does and here is Dudley going.

Dudley goes off to listen to the cricket.

Masters works constantly in this way, reporting the action, a brief comment or moment of reflection, and then she slips us into the next scenario. She refuses to allow us the indulgence of conscious emotion or passion, because her characters cannot allow it for themselves. She understands that the stoicism of the women about whom she writes was less a matter of myth than a constant exercise in self-repression as a necessary means of survival. Amy cannot allow herself to feel about the children she has left behind, because, were she to do so, she could not function. She contains herself in a straightjacket of stoicism, because to do otherwise would be to release passion and pain of such intensity that the whole purpose of her decisions would be destroyed. So she maintains herself by illusions of the future: she will work to rent her own house, take in tenants, and perhaps one day will have enough to bring her children to live with her. Meanwhile, she will dig a garden along the back fence of Aunt Daphne’s house.

Amy does eventually find a house, does rent the top half to two spinster ladies from the country, but when unexpectedly her daughter Kathleen arrives from the country, she finds herself angry and resentful at the intrusion: her daughter has come to spoil her settled, amicable life.

Masters has captured in this novel the tragedy of an era. Like the great tragedies, this one draws its force from impersonality and objectivity. Masters does not permit railing against, or even criticism of, the sad, desperate society she portrays. The men, for all the dominance in this strictly man’s world, are as hopeless and as hidebound as the women. The only wisp of hope is in Amy’s children. Kathleen is clever and tough: she has had naivete torn out of her at an early age, and she learns from pain. She will not meekly accept the world, she will shape it to her needs.

While reading this novel and marvelling at Masters’ powers in recreating this past of ours, I wondered, too, how such a narrative, classical in its style, could so easily engage and enrage. Like all good storytellers, Masters leaves the reader to do the imagining and the feeling. Not for her the moralising, the exploration of psychology, the elucidation of feeling. For her the story is what it represents, no less, but a great deal more. I am sad at her passing, but her books will remain. I only wish I had met her.