Young Country

This book is a collection of poetry by 21st-century writer Kerry Hines, alongside images by 19th-century photographer William Williams. The wry, plainspoken but haunting poems sit alongside evocative photographs of settlement: landscapes, streetscapes, skyscapes; the escapades of a trio of flatmates; portraits of family and friends; burned bush and rising buildings. The book features many figures: Williams and his housemates Tom and Alex; ethnographer Elsdon Best; notorious criminals and the judges who sentenced them; the mythic creature Shellycoat who accompanied the Scottish settlers; wives, prostitutes, and “hallelujah lassies”; and visiting professor Robert Wallace, who cast an outsider view on this new society. Together, the stunning photographs and poems ofYoung Country offer a meditation on how we capture the present and re-present the past, on the parallels between building a community and authoring a text, and on the possibilities that expansive fiction offers to documented truth.