Скачать или смотреть The Sawmiller’s Daughter — What Survival Cost Families in Australia’s Timber Industry

Set on the Eastern Dorrigo Plateau in early–mid 20th-century Australia, this interview with Sarah Smith, author of The Sawmiller’s Daughter, examines the human cost of Australia’s bush sawmilling industry — beyond nostalgia, beyond myth.

At the centre of the novel is Mags McClement, a young woman raised in a world where timber work shapes identity, family loyalty, and survival. Sawmilling is not just an occupation here; it is pressure — economic, physical, and emotional — passed down through generations.

This conversation explores:

life in Australia’s early timber and sawmilling communities

women’s lives and constrained choices in rural Australia

how labour, landscape, and family obligation define belonging

what is inherited when hardship is never spoken about

Rather than romanticising the bush, this episode asks harder questions about endurance, silence, and the quiet moral weight history leaves behind.

Down Under Interviews treats history as lived experience — focusing on the people who carry its consequences long after the work is done.