Sewerage ghost towns. They exist.
Just ask Sorrowing Father, Dear Daughter and Blackened boy, and Yankee doodle dandy that smiles with the eyes and his shadowy mate. They and other colourful characters tell the unique and untold story of the community once living alongside sewage lagoons and paddocks watered 24 hours a day with Melbourne’s sewage.
A story like no other that combines fact, memory and legendary tale, told by the ghosts of the past through a timeless reality.
A must-read literary nonfiction about the families that built and maintained the Metropolitan Sewerage Farm: from early workers and their families camping on the foreshore in the 1890s, living and working through the Great Depression, both world wars and boom times of the 1950s, to ultimately abandon homes in the 1980s to leave a sewerage ghost town.
A captivating and beautifully written book … Jo Galea
A remarkable achievement that captures in riveting detail a century of ordinary people living extraordinary lives in a little-known corner of rural Australia that’s now vanished … Noel Murphy
A brilliantly told story… I was a wreck… I cried my eyes out… it finally got me, all the sadness, emotion, loss, pain of endless change, the desperate ache for what Was … WOW! Thank you!
Who would have dreamt that a tale of such grandeur could come from a load of old sewage?
Monika did, and the Magic of her words create a Time Machine that takes us back to glimpse moments in the lives of a multitude of colourful characters. She puts flesh back on the bones of the ghosts of the past. We experience the lives, loves, losses and tragedies of pioneers, heroes and the occasional villains. We see a thriving community sadly reduced to a land mainly inhabited only by ghosts.
Monika has woven the twists and turns of Life and Afterlife over Time and Tide to share the power of the relationship of the People and the Land. You turn a corner and are caught unaware by another powerful moment of emotion on this path that gently tears away the veil between What now Is, and What once Was. … Michael Young
A fascinating read and thought provoking, descriptions and pictures painted are breathtaking … Pam Thompson (nee Sadler)
Both brilliant and beautiful, a celebration of childhood and the power of a unique place that gives readers an intimate look at a piece of Melbourne’s history … Dr Lynette Hinings-Marshall
The ghost narrators are surely as lively and intriguing as characters as the living members of the community … Associate Professor Chris Prentice
AVAILABLE NOW! Hardback | Paperback | eBook | Audiobook
From Monika’s Webshop: https://www.monikaschott.com/monika-schott
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com.au/faraway-land-house-two-cows/
Lulu: https://www.lulu.com/DrMonikaSchott
Many other bookstores including:
Booktopia | Dymocks | Barnes & Noble | Angus & Robertson | Collins Booksellers | Better World Books | Mighty Ape | Audible |
AVA ORION Media 
Reblogged this on Monika Schott PhD.
LikeLike