Salt story

Sarah Drummond’s début is a poetic memoir of life among the fishermen and women on the southern extremities of Western Australia.

The story of ‘Salt’, her mentor and fishing companion, is structured as a series of vignettes around life on the water in the bays, inlets, and fishing channels in this rugged part of Australia, which is at once foreign and familiar. The characters are quirky and likeable, and the traditions of the fishing communities echo ways of living in many isolated areas of Australia. There is something romantic about the harsh locations, the visceral descriptions, and the barnacled anglers who understand no other way of life, as Drummond says of the ‘Hemingwayesque’ nature of their work, it is a ‘beautiful interplay of art and labour, the cerebral marrying of the physical’.