Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living

In the 1930s the state of Victoria sends a Better-Farming Train around the countryside, its carriages full of specialists who lecture rural families on how to farm and live. Jean Cunningham, inquisitive and stubborn, gives sewing lessons in the women's carriage and claims to have no interest in romance. Then she meets Robert Pettergree, who can tell where soil was dug just by tasting it and who follows a creed of his own, the Rules for Scientific Living. They marry and buy land in the Mallee, a struggling wheat district, determined to turn it into a model farm. Drought, swarms of mice, hard times and then war put their belief in science, and in each other, to the test, and an unlikely pair, a Japanese poultry sexer and a Viennese choirmaster, become part of their lives.

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About the book

Form

Novel

Genres

Historical, Love (assigned by AI)

Set in

Australia, 1930s

First published

2005

Author's age

40 when first published

ISBN

9780330421911 (Picador, Australia)

9780743286374 (Scribner, United States)

9780743286381 (Scribner, United States)

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