A reader needs to be a bit patient with this novel, the eighth from the prolific Kylie Tennant (1912-1988) but not IMO in the same league as the more well-known The Battlers (1941) and Ride on Stranger (1943). The first part of the book is taken up with explaining more than most of us want to know about the mechanics of bee-keeping by itinerant apiarists out in the Australian bush.

But once that’s out of the way, the novel settles down to what Tennant does best: quirky characters and a central female character who doesn’t fit the mould. Mallee, so named because that’s where she was born, is a tetchy loner who yearns to be a writer but instead has to keep the family afloat by writing drivel for a radio serial (not unlike Blue Hills, by the sound of it). And she wants to be a ‘boss’ bee-keeper among the entirely male company of migratory bee-keepers who travel about following the moving feast of blossom of the great eucalypt forests. She drives a truck called The Roaring Ruin, and for preference she sleeps on the ground in a sleeping bag, despite the protests of the occasional women she meets, who offer her a bed and a bath—and symbolically, a return to a ‘normal’ woman’s life.

Tennant was known for the authenticity of her writing. As Wikipedia says:

Her work was known for its well-researched, realistic, yet positive portrayals of the lives of the underprivileged in Australia. In a video interview filmed in 1986, three years before her death for the Australia Council’s Archival Film Series, Tennant told how she lived as the people she wrote about, travelling as an unemployed itinerant worker during the Depression years, living in Aboriginal communities and spending a short time in prison for research. (Wikipedia, viewed 3/11/18)

It’s common practice now to research for a book online, but IMO nothing replaces being there in order to write prose like this:

Of course when we settled down to extract, we fell naturally into two opposing parties, me and Joe in the extracting house, and Big Mike and Blaze out in the yard, working against each other for dear life. Having Big Mike instead of Mongo must have been sheer delight to Blaze, for Mike was a man who could work as smoothly and as well as he did, a man who never dropped the super on his hands as Mongo did, or trod on bees, or fell over Blaze’s feet. They shared their own jokes and catchwords and they kidded Joe to death. But the honey was coming off, and we were doing better than three tins to the hive, so the feeling of exultation and the pace of the work carried us headlong over any slight discords.
Besides, it was that gentle weather, with a bloom on it like a grape, the stillness of perfection when the year surveys its handiwork. We would drive out in the morning with the dew or the tender vapours of mist, and eat at noon in some sun-warmed hollow of old gold-diggings, with a screaming, plunging surf of bees about us and the smell of wild roses in the short grass the sheep had nibbled. Long after dark, tired and dirty, we would come home, singing, to eat steak and boil our overalls. (p. 141)

Tennant was never a city girl at heart. Her characters are working in the area about to be dammed by the Snowy Mountain Hydro and the engineer Lee Stollin is proud of it as a symbol of Australian progress. But Mallee isn’t impressed:

But what kind of country was he making self-supporting? A country where three-quarters of the people—more than three-quarters—lived in cities and worked in offices and factories, filling up sheets of paper or transporting other workers to their various jobs. What a life! (p. 119)

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2018/11/04/the-honey-flow-by-kylie-tennant-bookreview/ ( )