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THE  REPORTER
Summary, Background & Excerpt

The story is set in a fictional market town on the edge of Dartmoor. Abel Richards is the new reporter for the Mid Devon Post. He grew up on a sheep station in the Australian outback and is of indigenous descent.  

 

At his side is his Australian herding dog, Mrs Tinney, on his shoulder, a tattoo. The design is inherited from his mother Junie, a Wangkatja woman who married a white gun shearer called Pete Richards. Abel also carries with him a deep understanding of what it feels like to belong to a piece of land. 

 

When Abel’s editor asks him to report on the disappearance of widowed farmer Olive Gladfield, the mystery takes him into the heart of a long established and fiercely independent rural community. Here the hill farmers still move their livestock with horses and live by the seasons, but rural life is strained by low incomes and the Gladfield’s farm lies empty. In the old mill he meets Ivy Miles and catches snippets of radical talk of independence and of ancient trade routes. Meanwhile distant supermarket chains and property dealers closer to home are looking for land in Devon. They see pound signs in the face of climate change and impending food scarcity. They want the high ground. 

 

On a dark night, Abel is  taken to an island up north, where he will find out what really lies behind the Gladfield mystery. 

Background to The Reporter

Author Rachel Francis has previously lived and worked on north Dartmoor as pony trek leader and as part of a farming family. She’s also got creative bones, loves writing and is inspired by books such as: The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin, Cloud Howe by Lewis Grassic Gibbon, The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, The Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsun; and by the life and work of M.K. Gandhi.  

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In Gandhi’s plan for India, he envisaged wealth trickling up from the farms and villages … a decentralised India, with independence restored to every village across the Indian subcontinent. The spinning wheel at the centre of India’s flag represents self-reliance and self-rule, Swadeshi and Swaraj. This is an idea that inspired Rachel and has found its way into her writing.

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The story of THE REPORTER is written for people everywhere who still love to work outside and with the land, who love the seasons, who love to live their best life without a boss and to involve their children and to pass their way of life on. The story asks how do we save these valued ways of life in the modern world?

Excerpt 
It was still light, but the evening star hung in the sky. The lane was dusty, the gate beside a cattle grid hung at a tilt. Daffodils grew in splashes of yellow and green along the hedges and in a small field, wether lambs grazed the spring grass. A ginger cat sat on an old hay bob and watched the dog through slit eyes.
Every field was protected by strong, well-kept hedges, the pot-holes along the lane had recently been filled with gravel and a stiff breeze blew in from the moor. This was a working farm … a real old English hill farm. It was the England he had been looking for since he flew into London Heathrow, Terminal Three and hiked past the departure boards. It was the dream he had clung to on the Underground to Peckham and even when he walked out of the station in a blast of hot air and greasy pavements.
the green and pleasant land he had heard of existed. It was still here, in between places, welcoming the first swallows as they skimmed the field for flies in the evening sun. A wisp of blue smoke drifted up through a spinney of trees. He walked on down the lane and found a clearing, surrounded by thorn and oak... 

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