The Last Dry Creek

Book excerpt: Marie Mahood lived and worked on Mongrel Downs cattle station in the Tanami Desert with her family in the 1960s. Time/Life Magazine featured Mongrel Downs as the world’s most remote cattle station. Her best-selling life story, Icing on the Damper, has its roots in this country. She also wrote Legends of the Outback and Still Bleating about the Bush. The Last Dry Creek is the third book in her Serendipity trilogy. It is the sequel to A Bunch of Strays and Crocodile Dreaming. Set in the Northern Territory of the 1970s, it is a fictional saga which borrows strongly from factual events and might well be considered a social comment on Territory history of the time. The story continues the fortunes of the two families of rural battlers, one white and one aboriginal. Their children have grown to be adults and they must now cross the last dry creek. This is Marie Mahood’s metaphor for the calamitous Beef Depression of the seventies. Well-known author, Tom Ronan, once said “It’s a tough country, where only the best of us come out even.” Marie’s two families of battlers, the Hardys and the Nelsons, come out even.