Two Stations One Everything

Two Stations One Everything is a richly romantic, deeply saucy and emotionally intelligent Australian Outback novel set against the breathtaking remoteness of the Channel Country near Birdsville in far southwest Queensland, one of the most dramatic and least-visited landscapes in Australia. When Brisbane agribusiness consultant Josephine Adler buys six thousand acres of rundown cattle station from a property listing without ever having seen it, she arrives in the Channel Country with two infrastructure assessment reports, an independent survey commission, and absolutely no intention of being impressed by her neighbour. Ned Callahan has been running Nardoo Station, a hundred thousand acres of Channel Country, for four generations of accumulated family knowledge, and he is charming and overconfident and entirely accustomed to being the most capable person in any conversation. He brings her a casserole on the first night and fully expects to be both helpful and irresistible. He is about to meet his match. Josephine finds him overconfident. She is not wrong about this. She is also substantially wrong about what the confidence is built on, and the process of discovering the substance underneath the charm, through channel water agreements and boundary surveys and the extraordinary spectacle of the Diamantina running and the Mitchell grass coming in behind it, is the most interesting thing that has happened to either of them in years. What grows between them has the specific quality of the Channel Country's production cycle, it comes in abundance when the conditions are right, and the conditions become righter every season. Spanning three years of wet seasons and dry seasons, a boundary fence that starts everything, a scientific paper that changes an industry, a combined station operation that exceeds every projection, and the specific and complete love of two equally matched, equally rigorous, equally direct people who were always going to find each other, Two Stations One Everything, is a celebration of the most remote and extraordinary country in Australia, the specific pleasure of being comprehensively brought down a peg by someone who is entirely your equal, and the love that grows when you stop managing the categories and let the exchange be complete.