The Pea-pickers is biographical fiction, written in the forties by the passionate, uncompromising Australian poet, Eve Langley. The book is set in the twenties, when Eve and her sister June travelled around Victoria dressed as men, using the men's names Steve and Blue, barely supporting themselves by working as itinerant pickers. Women wearing trousers were rare back then, so the police in the wine country of Rutherglen moved the girls on, warning them not to return. In other towns people were more tolerant, so Steve and Blue picked peas in Metung and hops in the Victorian Alps, somewhere between Myrtleford and Porepunkah. They lived in the pickers' huts supplied by the farmers and subsisted on oats, honey and any other food they could scrounge.

I was fascinated by the descriptions of the girls' lives, the people, and how the places I know now were then. Just as well, because while sometimes Langley captures something so idiosyncratically and succinctly that I stopped to re-read and admire, there is a lot of overblown poetic drama that can be a chore to read, even though it is in character.

This is a real oddity of a book. With a few reservations, I enjoyed it. Its impression lingers. ( )