G’day! Bear with me if you can, while I shake off the last traces of my visit with my daughter, Abbie Plummer, in Australia. The language and literature alike will be with me for a long time, especially since I’m currently reading Jane Harper’s The Dry and plan to pick up Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood. Both authors have earned worldwide acclaim for their fascinating insights into the cultures and characters down under, as they reel under the effects of regional climates.

The Dry takes place in an outback town about a six-hour drive from Melbourne, and that’s Melbin to Australians. If they can drop the letter r they will, just like in Cairns, pronounced Cans. I suspect that’s a product of the laid-back, easygoing nature of the Australian people, but who knows? 

In The Dry, an apparent familial murder-suicide drags federal agent Aaron Falk back to his hometown, 20 years after he and his father were driven away after a suspicious suicide—or was it murder? The weather and economy of the outback farming town play a pivotal role in Harper’s debut novel, as the residents slowly come to realize what it was that caused Ellie’s sudden death 20 years before.

Eleanor Catton won the Man Booker Prize for her novel The Luminaries, a historical fiction saga about the New Zealand gold fields. Her new novel takes place in current time on New Zealand’s South Island, after a landslide has cut off access to the town of Thorndike. The Birnam Wood, a guerilla gardening collective, views a newly abandoned farm as a way for their community to finally make ends meet, while an American snatches up the property as his survival post.

Language in all its forms in Australia really undid me at times. At our third lunch at a Townsville eatery, the server looked at me and said, “Avocado, no egg, halloumi, and semi, raighht?” Yes, that would be avocado toast, no poached egg, fried halloumi cheese, and semi-dried tomatoes. Of course!  

Earlier, it had taken me a full two minutes to understand one of Abbie’s colleagues who hailed from South Australia, hey? That hey can be appended to statement and question alike, by the way. Finally, after we left lunch one day and meandered toward a bookstore among afternoon shoppers, Abbie asked me something I couldn’t answer because my brain was tongue-tied. 

With Australia-speak all around me and American in my lexicon, I was completely flummoxed. Right, hey!