The Last Backyard

By Vienna Leary

What does it mean to own your home when someone else can decide what happens to it?

Ruth Bell has a home, a family and a life shaped by the ordinary commitments of rural Australia. Then plans for new electricity infrastructure arrive, bringing surveyors, official notices and decisions made far beyond her property boundary.

What begins as a dispute over access becomes something much larger.

There are questions of compensation, community responsibility and the urgent need to change how Australia produces and distributes electricity. There are neighbours who disagree, institutions that speak confidently of consultation, and families who must live with the consequences.

Ruth is not opposed to progress. But she wants to know why the people expected to make sacrifices have so little power to influence the decisions.

As the dispute moves through government offices, public arguments and legal processes, relationships are tested, loyalties reconsidered and the meaning of ownership becomes increasingly uncertain.

Written with warmth, dry humour and an attentive eye for ordinary Australian life, The Last Backyard explores the distance between having rights and being able to exercise them.

A contemporary Australian literary novel about land, democracy, family and the difficult business of making change fairly.

A standalone novel by Vienna Leary.

Digital edition: one EPUB file. No physical book will be posted.