AustLit

'Leni Shilton’s Walking with Camels: The Story of Bertha Strehlowis as packed with meaning as the desert landscapes she depicts are teeming with life. This beautifully-realised verse novel tells the story of Strehlow’s life, from meeting and marrying her husband, an explorer and amateur anthropologist and linguist, to their trek through central Australia, to her later life as a teacher.' (Introduction)

'Alison Whittaker’s début collection, Lemons in the Chicken Wire (2015), introduced a genuinely new voice to Australian poetry: that of a Gomeroi woman, a Fulbright scholar, and a poet who can bend and blend forms with the best of them. Her second collection of poems, Blakwork, places her firmly in both the broad community of celebrated Australian poets and the celebrated Aboriginal writers in Magabala’s lists.'  (Introduction)

'In a photograph in the opening pages of Leni Shilton's debut verse novel, Walking with Camels, Bertha Strehlow appears against a range somewhere between Hermannsburg and Horseshoe Bend Station in her skirt and cardigan, gazing past the camera, a joey held in against her body.' (Introduction)

'Walking with Camels – The Story of Bertha Strehlow by Leni Shilton is a gorgeous, subtle rendering of the both brutal and starkly beautiful Australian desert, and those relationships that exist and are formed within this landscape. Shilton’s verse novel charts Bertha Strehlow’s transformation from a naïve and shaking girl, determined to follow the man she loves into unknown territory against the advice of loved ones, into a woman possessed, damaged and strengthened by the desert. Shilton’s rigorous research, bolstered by found poems and historical and biographical notes, grounds the poems in a moving reality, filled equally with suffering and joy.' (Introduction)