Now for the first time I was going to live in and off the bush. Hard physical gut-busting work and stealing sheep and flocks of galahs overhead and clear hot days and keeping the fires stoked at night. We slept in the car. There was Gordon and me and the four children, and when it rained we locked ourselves in the car till it stopped. I helped him in the night stoking fires.
Nearly twenty years ago, Ruby Langford Ginibi’s remarkable talent for storytelling grabbed the attention of both white and black Australians when she released Don’t Take Your Love to Town, which has gone on to become a bestseller and is now a seminal work of Indigenous memoir.
Don’t Take Your Love to Town is a story of courage in the face of poverty and tragedy. Ruby recounts losing her mother when she was six, growing up in a mission in northern New South Wales and leaving home when she was fifteen. She lived in tin huts and tents in the bush and picked up work on the land while raising nine children virtually single-handedly. Later she struggled to make ends meet in the Koori areas of Sydney. Ruby is an amazing woman whose sense of humour has endured through all the hardships she has experienced.
Part of the Black Australian Writing series.
