The Bascule Bridge: Memoir of an Unwary Pastoralist's Wife

Already in her forties in 1954 when she married Patrick Casey, a grazier from southern New South Wales, Pamela Swift came face-to-face with unanticipated realities of living in the Australian bush. More quickly than she may have liked, Pam learnt to adjust to an entirely new - for her - mode of existence. An existence which, over the course of nearly a quarter of a century, saw her come to terms with and then to be entranced by the joys and hardships of life on the land.With a sardonic sense of humour coupled with a keen sense of duty to her husband, the land and, in a broader sense, to Australia, Pam coped with the usual disasters - flood, fire and famine - as well as the myriad everyday annoyances - ramshackle houses, lack of domestic appliances, a laconic, sometimes uncommunicative husband, visitors invited and uninvited, and a shifting collection of workers and acquaintances. At the same time, she revelled in the environment, the landscape and the wildlife.All this and much more the author recalls with a sense of the absurd but also with affection albeit not through rose-tinted glasses. She is critical of what she came to consider the City/Country Divide, especially the lack of awareness and empathy she attributes to city-dwelling Australians. The 'adventures' here are ordinary rather than extraordinary but the author relates them with an authentic voice, with humour - occasionally self-deprecating - but always with a clear sense of love for her husband, for the land they struggled together to make productive, and for the creatures, domestic and wild, that were a constant presence in times good and bad.The Bascule Bridge is not only a memoir of an Australian life well lived but a paean to way of living largely lost.