The Honey Flow

by Kylie Tennant

The Honey Flow is the story of Mallee Herrick, a young woman who sets out to become 'boss' bee keeper. Her mind is on bees, but the minds of the men with whom she works often turn in other directions - notably to romance.

Genres: Historical Fiction, Fiction, Australia

348 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1956

About the author

Kylie Tennant was born in Manly, NSW, in 1912. In 1932, she married Lewis Charles Rodd. Her first novel, Tiburon, won the S. H. Prior Memorial Prize in 1935. and further novels saw her develop her social-realist style. However, her work is much more complex than suggested by the term social realism, although she conducted first-hand research to give her novels authenticity, once even spending a week in gaol. Her best known novel is The Battlers (1941) which won the S.H. Prior Memorial Prize in 1940 and the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal in 1941. Other of her works embrace travel, biography, work for children and dramatic works. In 1980 Kylie Tennant was made AO. She died in 1988.
Awards

1935: S. H. Prior Memorial Prize awarded by The Bulletin magazine, for Tiburon[5]
1940: S. H. Prior Memorial Prize (run by the Bulletin), for The Battlers, shared with Eve Langley, The Pea-Pickers, and Malcolm Henry Ellis's "John Murtagh Macrossan lectures".
1942: Australian Literature Society Gold Medal for The Battlers
1960: Children’s Book Council Book Award for All the Proud Tribesmen
1980: Officer of the Order of Australia for services to literature[6]

Reviews

[Laura Rittenhouse · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. It never fell back on cliches, all the characters in it were real, the Australian bush was almost a character itself and those bees... gotta love 'em. (Disclosure: I'm a beekeeper so maybe that bit touched me more than it would others.)

This book follows a young woman dreaming of being a migratory bee-keeper in a time when this was definitely a man's world (isn't it still?) and a place where nature was a harsh mistress (isn't she still?). Through all the obvious hardships, our heroine keeps her spirits up, her dreams alive and her sanity intact. I've no idea how she did it but it was great to go along with her for the ride.

A good story, well written, a bit of humour, a bit of drama with some pleasant insight into a fascinating place and time (1950s rural Australia). I'm not sure who wouldn't enjoy this book - it's great!

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

A reader needs to be a bit patient with this novel, the eighth from the prolific Kylie Tennant (1912-1988) but not IMO in the same league as the more well-known The Battlers (1941) and Ride on Stranger (1943). The first part of the book is taken up with explaining more than most of us want to know about the mechanics of bee-keeping by itinerant apiarists out in the Australian bush.

But once that’s out of the way, the novel settles down to what Tennant does best: quirky characters and a central female character who doesn’t fit the mould. Mallee, so named because that’s where she was born, is a tetchy loner who yearns to be a writer but instead has to keep the family afloat by writing drivel for a radio serial (not unlike Blue Hills, by the sound of it). And she wants to be a ‘boss’ bee-keeper among the entirely male company of migratory bee-keepers who travel about following the moving feast of blossom of the great eucalypt forests. She drives a truck called The Roaring Ruin, and for preference she sleeps on the ground in a sleeping bag, despite the protests of the occasional women she meets, who offer her a bed and a bath—and symbolically, a return to a ‘normal’ woman’s life.

Tennant was known for the authenticity of her writing. As Wikipedia says:

Her work was known for its well-researched, realistic, yet positive portrayals of the lives of the underprivileged in Australia. In a video interview filmed in 1986, three years before her death for the Australia Council’s Archival Film Series, Tennant told how she lived as the people she wrote about, travelling as an unemployed itinerant worker during the Depression years, living in Aboriginal communities and spending a short time in prison for research. (Wikipedia, viewed 3/11/18)

It’s common practice now to research for a book online, but IMO nothing replaces being there in order to write prose like this:

Of course when we settled down to extract, we fell naturally into two opposing parties, me and Joe in the extracting house, and Big Mike and Blaze out in the yard, working against each other for dear life. Having Big Mike instead of Mongo must have been sheer delight to Blaze, for Mike was a man who could work as smoothly and as well as he did, a man who never dropped the super on his hands as Mongo did, or trod on bees, or fell over Blaze’s feet. They shared their own jokes and catchwords and they kidded Joe to death. But the honey was coming off, and we were doing better than three tins to the hive, so the feeling of exultation and the pace of the work carried us headlong over any slight discords.
Besides, it was that gentle weather, with a bloom on it like a grape, the stillness of perfection when the year surveys its handiwork. We would drive out in the morning with the dew or the tender vapours of mist, and eat at noon in some sun-warmed hollow of old gold-diggings, with a screaming, plunging surf of bees about us and the smell of wild roses in the short grass the sheep had nibbled. Long after dark, tired and dirty, we would come home, singing, to eat steak and boil our overalls. (p. 141)

Tennant was never a city girl at heart. Her characters are working in the area about to be dammed by the Snowy Mountain Hydro and the engineer Lee Stollin is proud of it as a symbol of Australian progress. But Mallee isn’t impressed:

But what kind of country was he making self-supporting? A country where three-quarters of the people—more than three-quarters—lived in cities and worked in offices and factories, filling up sheets of paper or transporting other workers to their various jobs. What a life! (p. 119)

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2018/11/04/t...

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great book. Kylie Tennant is one of my favorite Australian authors. I highly recommend her books.

[Virginia Hey]

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