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‘The Bread with Seven Crusts’ is a novel set during World War II. It tells of an Italian prisoner of war who is sent to work on a farm in the Eastern Wheatbelt of Western Australia. The prisoner, the young farmer, his sister the army nurse and their mother, are all changed by the friendships and conflicts that result.
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Susan Temby was inspired to write the ‘The Bread with Seven Crusts’ as a tribute to the place in which she grew up and the people who lived and worked in this hard place. The novel was published by HarperCollins Australia in April 2002 and is available at most bookstores.
Except for short holidays, Susan has lived away from the Eastern Wheatbelt of Western Australia since she was ten years old. Whenever she returns she is struck by its contradictory fragility and harshness and how this affects the lives of those who try to make a living from it. The area was first settled for gold mining. It is a place beyond the rabbit proof fence and until the early 1920s was used only for grazing. Soldier settler blocks were given out after the First World War but by the mid thirties people were walking off. Gradually people brought in sheep to compliment the wheat growing and started to make a living. At the beginning of World War II the government was trying to discourage farming in this place that they had subsidised only twenty years earlier. Then in the fifties the wool boom established it as a solid farming area. The average rainfall of the area is about twelve inches (320mls). It is marginal farming land that is now facing salt problems caused by the clearing of trees. Rationalisation and consolidation is depleting the population. Modern communication makes life almost suburban but contact with people is becoming more and more limited. The place no longer exists in the form in which it is described in the book.
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Author of The Bread with Seven Crusts