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A Visitor's Guide to Elegant Ridge

 

The stories and poems of O. Spaniel Murray are often set in a nostalgic semi-fictitious rendering of a southern Australian rural landscape. This landscape is characterized by farming and mining, especially gold mining, and is based around several rivers. In a truncated version of central and northern Victorian topography, the Murray River has disappeared (it has been replaced by the author of the same name) and only the Murumbigee and Darling Rivers remain. 

 

Although quaint and rustic, this is nevertheless a world touched by wider cultural trends. It is populated with eccentric people with funny names. Most stories take 

 

 

 

 

 

 

place in the present but are rooted in a sometimes steampunkish nineteenth century British-Australian reality, albeit one with an unusually large number of unexplained points of contact with an Orientalistic classical Islam.

 

At the centre of this world is the town of Elegant Ridge (home of the famous Elegant Ridge Bridge), Mr Murray's home town.  There is also the major town of Banghem Bridges, further up the river. Many stories relate or allude to former times when paddle steamers plied the rivers, carrying a great trade of people and produce in wild days of yore.

 

In truth, Elegant Ridge is very loosely based on the real city of Mildura and the area around it is loosely based on Sunraysia. Banghem Bridges is very loosely based on Echuca. Other areas are landscapes imported, if incongruously, from areas of eastern Gippsland or other parts of southern mainland Australia. 

 

Other parallels: Barrimore is based on Shepparton. Restless Pleasure is based on Daylesford. Ugly Reef is based on Trentham. Bixly Downs is based a bit on Maldon. Ivy's Rump is a depiction of and is also known as Bendigo. Musk is Musk. Guildford is Guildford. 

 

Murray writes in a distinctive style that is influenced by the odd dialect and idiom typical of the region. Both the style and the dialectic are sometimes called "saucy meander" because of the local Cornish lilt - which is saucy - and its tendency to ramble with an earnest meandering. 

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