Babies, books and the bush
“Good luck, good management and a good husband.” Midwife and novelist Fiona McArthur doesn’t hesitate when she’s asked about the secret to success in her writing and long career delivering babies in a rural community. Fiona has just had her eighth “big” book, The Farmers Friend, published by Penguin. With her signature empathy, good humour and insight into the Australian rural experience, she’s written a gripping story of life in a small town during the devastation of the Black Summer bushfires. She brings a complex array of characters together in the fictitious town of Featherwood, a community that could be Ebor, or Wollomombi, Deepwater, Willawarrin, or Bellbrook. Or an amalgam of a host of other northern tablelands villages not a million miles from where Fiona lives close to the coast with her husband, Ian, on a small farm in the Macleay Valley. Of course, she’s a midwife, so there’s a birth in the book, but her work is multigenerational and manages to bring some complex issues to
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