Red Dust & Ink

Red Dust & Ink is a rich, deeply romantic and saucy Australian Outback novel set against the wild, ancient drama of the Northern Territory's Top End. When Sydney political journalist Maya Chen accepts what she suspects is a punishment assignment, six weeks at a remote cattle station outside Katherine, she arrives with new boots, a city wardrobe, and absolutely no idea what the Territory is about to do to her. Dungarra Station is a million acres of Katherine River country run by Owen Hargrove, a third-generation station owner who is direct to the point of bluntness, quiet to the point of mystery, and completely unlike anyone Maya has ever interviewed. She thinks he is arrogant. She is wrong. What she mistakes for arrogance is precision, the specific quality of a man who has spent forty-three years learning to say exactly the right thing because in a place this large, anything that isn't direct gets lost in the space. What begins as a journalist-subject relationship becomes, across six weeks of build-up storms and wet season rains and verandah evenings and a kiss in a workshop in the rain, something neither of them planned and both of them needed. But Maya has a Sydney career and a corner office and a life that exists in a city that is four hours and an entirely different world away. And Owen cannot leave. He is Dungarra. Dungarra is him. The story of what they build from the space between those two facts, a return ticket, a cottage with fixed louvres, a marriage under the mango trees, a daughter with grey eyes who catalogues the red finches, is the story of what happens when a journalist who came to write about a place decides, with full and considered honesty, to become part of it instead. Spanning six years from the original assignment to a life fully planted in the Territory's red earth, Red Dust & Ink is a celebration of place, precision, the saucy slow-burn chemistry of two direct people who refuse to be anything except exactly themselves, and the extraordinary love that grows when you finally stop writing about the right thing and start being in it.