Coolamon Girl

Wryly humorous and scarifyingly honest, Coolamon Girl is a beautifully crafted memoir of a daughter terrified of her mother. Scarred by her mother’s conservatism and palpable dislike of her body and her sexuality, Di escapes her fraught home life and the stultifying narrowness of her 1950s and 60s small country town. Feeling lost in the big outside world, she travels the bumpy journey into adulthood full of adolescent doubts and fears - how she looks, how others see her, how to navigate sex and love. And finally, she discovers what she values as a woman.

Told with clarity and poignancy, painful scenes are rendered unflinchingly, yet the whole is suffused with humour and compassion. Di’s coming-of-age is a triumph of recovery from betrayal and Coolamon Girl captures the glory of reaching for a bigger life and the power of the universal within the particular, as relevant today as when she lived it.

• Winner - ACT Notable Awards Nonfiction Award (Small Press), 2021

About the Author

Dianne Lucas is a Coolamon girl, born and raised, though she left home for Canberra at the age of seventeen. Except for a couple of years overseas, Canberra has been her home. In the 1970s Canberra was big enough for me, and not too far from Coolamon. I haven’t lived there for almost fifty years, but I’ve always been a Coolamon girl, always will be, and thank goodness for that. - Dianne