Shirley Hazzard accepted the 2004 Miles Franklin for her novel The Great Fire with calculated bemusement. The remarks made by the Australian-born, New York-based writer at the time suggested it was pleasant but somewhat odd to be feted and claimed by a country she had fled with relief half a century before.

I do not think that the winner of this year's award, English-born, London-based Evie Wyld would claim even such close affiliation with Australia as Hazzard, though she has done her time on these shores as a child and still has family here. And, I suspect, she likes the place more than the redoubtable Hazzard ever will.



And Wyld's winning book, All the Birds, Singing, is clearly the work of a tourist, not a local, by which I mean all those aspects of daily existence down under, the micro-phenomena of local culture so ubiquitous as to be invisible to the rest of us, are bright objects for her magpie imagination to collect. These include daytime television, soft drinks, chocolates and cigarette brands, and in particular 1980s slang. She is a sort of dinkum Proust – in love with all the vulgar gewgaws and gimcracks of Australian life, rather than its fancy bits.

Mostly, though, she is intensely conscious of Australian masculinity, particularly its raw, wounded, dangerous edge, and fascinated by how female experience might be shaped though its gravitational pull. This is her second novel and it's brutal in its outline. It describes a young woman’s descent into prostitution and sexual slavery in Australia’s top end, as though John Fowles's The Collector had been moved from England’s home counties to the Pilbara. That these events should be recalled long after the fact by that same woman, now living in determined solitude on a British offshore island, grants both past and present settings a sense of irreality.

The character who links these settings is named Jake. She lives on a smallholding purchased from a local farmer, and keeps a mob of sheep, over whom she keeps a weirdly obsessive watch. She lives alone, apart from a dog called Dog, indicating a powerful resistance on her part to attachment, nominal or otherwise. The island too is unnamed, unplaced, and could be anywhere from Jersey to the Outer Hebrides. Unlike the relative specificity of the Australian portions of the narrative, this island is a metaphysical as much as a physical place. It is isolation made from turf and stone.

Sporting a self-cut fringe and invariably dressed in gender-neutral dungarees, Jake is situated in a sexual interzone. Readers are informed on more than one occasion of the blokey width of her shoulders. In the Australian portions of the novel men reflexively call her "mate". The reasons why are investigated retrospectively, via memories that curl backward in time in such luxuriant profusion that a certain perplexity becomes the norm. What follows is a whodunit in reverse. We know the victim, and we know the perpetrators, too. What we don’t understand is what happened after the crimes occurred.

Jake once worked as a rouseabout and shearer in rural Western Australia. She is strong and adept at the work, and has earned the respect of her male peers, as well as the comforting presence of a kindly boyfriend, Greg. Then an older workmate, Clare, insinuates that he knows something of her past. The knowledge provokes an outsized distress in the woman and, before we have grasped the rudiments of the situation, Wyld shunts us further back in time. Instead of this rural idyll we are made privy to the events that first led her to escape her past.

Back on the island, Jake happens across one of her sheep, eviscerated. She imagines the presence of some malign creature stalking her flock, and the thought knocks her backwards and forwards in time, from the roots of her distress to her present and growing madness. Nature writer Philip Hoare calls the condition Jake exhibits zooscopy –when the affected mind sees imaginary animals. This delusion, however, turns out to have legitimate triggers.

This confusion of animal and man goes to the heart of All the Birds, Singing. The violence of male sexuality shades here into something literally bestial. Only by returning to Kenneth Cook’s Wake in Fright can we find a work that so unblinkingly records the dark side of Australian masculinity.