Shannon Hicks comes from a highly disputatious family in a country town near the sea, in the south of New South Wales. She's been accustomed from birth to rough and tumble, but that doesn't mean that her dreams aren't of a life with something wider and better.
As she comes of age she goes to live with an aunt in Sydney, and begins to see that it's more than just her family who are always in the wars. For a start, it is the 1930s, so the Great Depression has all working people scrapping and struggling, survival the aim. Then there are others who prey on them, or use them cannily for their own ulterior motives, even a few who genuinely care. Shannon slowly comes to understand that her particular brand of determination and skill is a special characteristic that will help her negotiate the struggle.
In a rolling sequence of new occupations, of basic work grabbed when she can, and then positions offered as her talents come to be recognised by the world at large, Shannon discovers what makes the world go round, politics both public and private, and how to manage it. At the same time, in her personal life, she learns how people love, defend their weaknesses, and grab little pieces of happiness as they arise. She watches all these developments with the eyes of a stranger, sometimes arousing fascination in others, sometimes wariness of her strength, but as yet almost always in herself with a sense of detachment, and a restless wish to move on.
Only as war comes in 1939 does she finally achieve one greater connection. It is accompanied by an enormous emotional cost, but, true to her native spirit, Shannon finds solace in work, sardonic resignation, and the maintenance of what is now a deep heart of wise experience.
This genial, tough, picaresque novel traces the vicissitudes of a survivor who encounters the endearing, the manipulative, the obsessed, the rancorous and the salt of the earth, learning not only how the other half lives, but her own half as well. In a broad and comic group of vignettes of life when the chips are down, of rollicking humour and wry and dry wit, Kylie Tennant essays a character very much like herself, with extraordinary success. Ride on Stranger was first published in 1943.
