The Waterless Mile

About this book

When her father dies at a dry bore and a neighbour calls in a debt, Meg Corrigan has six weeks to save the family station: drive a mob of cattle across the waterless heart of Australia to the railhead. An outback survival saga of grit and hard-won love, set in 1975.

Six hundred miles of dead country. One woman. One impossible drove.

When her father dies at a dry bore and a smiling neighbour calls in a thirty-eight-thousand-pound note, Meg Corrigan has six weeks and one desperate chance to save Kalyndi Downs: walk a thousand head of cattle across the waterless heart of the Australian interior to the railhead at Nardoo, before the bank forecloses and the waters fail for good.

She cannot do it alone. Her crew is a dying old drover with a secret heart, a proud Aboriginal head stockman crossing his own stolen country, a hot-headed brother, and a quiet stranger who walks in off the north road with a false name and a killer on his trail. As the drought tightens and the mob thins, a hired gun paces them by road, waiting for the ground where the land itself will do his work.

Set in 1975, against the collapse of the old droving world and the dawn of Aboriginal land rights, THE WATERLESS MILE is a sweeping outback survival saga of grief and grit, buried debts and hard-won love, and the oldest question the country ever asks a person: whose land is this, and what will you give to hold it?

For readers of Wilbur Smith, Di Morrissey, and the great sagas of the Australian frontier. A story of the last great cattle drove, and the mile you cross on will alone.