Red Dust Dreams

Living in the Outback

Non-Fiction - General
520 Pages
Reviewed on 07/27/2017
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    Book Review

Reviewed by Gisela Dixon for Readers' Favorite

Red Dust Dreams: Living in the Outback by Lannah Sawers-Diggins is a non-fiction memoir that details various experiences of living in the Australian Outback. Red Dust Dreams starts off with an introduction to Lannah herself and her own roots in the Outback where she grew up. The book then mostly explores the major homesteads in the Outback today and the daily life and experiences of the inhabitants there. As a result, the book is more a collection of memoirs from different people that Lannah has interviewed and consolidated in this book. These stations and people come from everywhere in Australia and even beyond, and include descriptions of New South Wales, Victoria, South and Western Australia, and more. There are photographs of the homesteads, as well as the families who live there, scattered throughout the book as each family talks about their own personal experiences with food, survival, education, water and electricity, transportation, etc.

I found Red Dust Dreams: Living in the Outback to be an extremely interesting book. The contents include not only her interviews and lodging experiences with the homesteaders, but also recipes, poetry, pictures, short backpacking traveler memoirs and travel tips, and her own experience with travel. All of this is perhaps a bit too much and could be better organized, although I did find some of the content to be interesting glimpses into life in the Outback. I also wish that some experiences living or interacting with the aborigines had been included since they are an integral part of the Outback. Overall, this is an interesting subject matter and the landscape it is set in makes it an enjoyable read.