Edge of the Dreaming: An Australian Memoir

Suzy Kruhse’s evocative description of a young female growing up in Australia’s Northern Territory is both revealing and powerful. The book’s landscape is the huge wilderness at the top end of the continent where European settlers, Asians, and other races as well as the indigenous people of the country mingle uneasily together in this last frontier of Australia. She describes with brutal honesty her torrid upbringing with parents who often abandoned her, the methods she used to survive the physical and psychological pressures she was subjected to and a sexual awakening that was far from conventional. Edge of the Dreaming though full of pathos and heartbreak is far from depressing. Her story tells us a great deal about how family and significant others dictate the life path of young women growing up in a brash and sometimes violent country. Sexual and other intimate relationships are explored with withering honesty typified by the anguish of trying to find out what intimacy and love really mean.