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The Battlers
Snow was one of the drifters and wanderers of Australia in the '30s whose home was the open road; Dancy, a hard-bitten young woman, had been deserted on the track. Their story, and that of the motley crowd of battlers that travelled the roads looking for work or avoiding it, is told with compassion and humour in this rich, human tale of life in the raw.
374 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1941
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143 people want to read
About the author
Kylie Tennant
30 books11 followersKylie 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]
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]
Ratings & Reviews
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Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
September 5, 2014
This classic of Australian literature was written in 1941 during WWII but it was based on Kylie Tennant’s extraordinary research during the Depression. In the introduction she explains how she wrote this novel: joining unemployed itinerant workers on the road and living as they did, sharing the same awful living conditions, poor food, and prejudice from respectable people in towns. It’s a remarkable piece of reportage and a novel which despite its flaws can stand the test of time.
To read the rest of my review please visit http://anzlitlovers.com/2012/02/02/th...
To read the rest of my review please visit http://anzlitlovers.com/2012/02/02/th...
January 1, 2026
This Australian classic has been sitting on my shelves for years waiting to be read. Finally got round to it.
It's a lively story of travellers, swaggies or battlers, call them what you will, living a nomadic life in New South Wales during the Depression. Life is tough, food and money are scarce, as the cast of likeable (and sometimes roguish) characters wander the countryside, making a living through seasonal work, making a few trinkets to sell, busking, and the occasional pilfering and rustling on the side.
The author is sympathetic to the characters and their predicaments, and issues like unions, wealth disparity, sexism, and white racism towards Aboriginal people, are all woven into the story.
A rich vocabulary, vivid descriptions, and authentic sounding dialogue really bring this story to life.
It's a lively story of travellers, swaggies or battlers, call them what you will, living a nomadic life in New South Wales during the Depression. Life is tough, food and money are scarce, as the cast of likeable (and sometimes roguish) characters wander the countryside, making a living through seasonal work, making a few trinkets to sell, busking, and the occasional pilfering and rustling on the side.
The author is sympathetic to the characters and their predicaments, and issues like unions, wealth disparity, sexism, and white racism towards Aboriginal people, are all woven into the story.
A rich vocabulary, vivid descriptions, and authentic sounding dialogue really bring this story to life.
April 15, 2020
Lovely to read a book set in North West NSW, growing up in Moree and never knowing this book existed or having had the chance to read it in school seems as if I've missed out. While not exactly romanticising the landscape Tennant certainly does a great job of portraying the harshness of the environment as experienced by the various strong and authentic characters as they journey and battle on through tough times.
February 11, 2025
When a good-looking paperback falls off the shelf and onto your foot at a used bookstore, pay your dollar and a half and read it. The Battlers is as precious a novel as I've ever read with a tight plot, meandering characters well worth knowing and lilting Australian language that sings off the page. An absolutely wonderful read, The Battlers is a little bit Steinbeck, an unintended travel guide, a and a wee bit social science textbook.
March 24, 2015
Wonderful. I would have been impatient with this book as a teenager, so I'm glad I've read it now. Tennant writes from her time, from the 1930s when Australia was in the grip of the worst financial depression it had ever seen, along with the rest of the world. Men who could not find work in the cities took to the roads, often with their families, trying to earn money fruit picking, labouring, selling handmade things to the farmers and the rural townsfolk, collecting their dole money from the police stations, and being moved on after a designated time. Tennant went on the road herself for several months to experience it firsthand and she brings the country and the people on the road vividly to life.
At first it seems bleak and depressing, full of characters with few redeeming features. The land is in the grip of drought, then flood strikes, people are suspicious and surly, poor and desperate. But gradually the characters fill out, and you find the gems and the humour in them. Tennant's depiction of the land is the same - beneath the burden of interminable dust and heat, or the desperate cold, the beauty glows through. It's reminiscent of Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath", but less bleak, and delivering a little more hope.
Recommended as a great Australian novel.
At first it seems bleak and depressing, full of characters with few redeeming features. The land is in the grip of drought, then flood strikes, people are suspicious and surly, poor and desperate. But gradually the characters fill out, and you find the gems and the humour in them. Tennant's depiction of the land is the same - beneath the burden of interminable dust and heat, or the desperate cold, the beauty glows through. It's reminiscent of Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath", but less bleak, and delivering a little more hope.
Recommended as a great Australian novel.
April 17, 2023
A well written novel which gives you a good idea of what life was like for the thousands of drifters who wandered around Australia in the 1930s trying to find work or trying to avoid it, on the "track".
July 30, 2018
At the height of the Great Depression of the 1930s it is estimated that 30,000 unemployed Australian men took to the road in search of work, often leaving their wives and children to struggle on in the cities and towns. A few women did the same. They took whatever work came their way, fruitpicking, laboring, selling items they had made, often exploited by farmers, viewed with suspicion by locals who were struggling themselves, and moved on by police. On occasions they worked for food alone.
The Battlers by Kylie Tennant (published 1941) follows the journeys of a group travellers on the track in country New South Wales. The main characters are Snow and Dancy, called ‘The Stray’ by Snow. Snow, a loner, has left his wife and children behind in the search for work. Dancy, from the slums of Sydney, prematurely aged at only 19, has been deserted by her husband on the road. When Snow discovers Dancy trying to rob him, they form an unlikely partnership. They are joined in their travels by other battlers in similar straits – ‘The Busker’, Harley Duke a young man with aspirations as a singer; Dora Phipps, a genteel educated woman fallen on hard times, moralizing but always with an eye out for her own benefit. The story follows their travels as they struggle to survive, dreaming of better things (in Dancey’s case, initially, a set of false teeth), make pragmatic partnerships and surprising friendships.
The narrative realistically presents the bleakness and hardship of life on the road, not only the treatment of the travelers by townspeople and farmers but life in the camps outside towns with their own rules and hierarchies. All the characters are strongly and compassionately drawn, showing the humanity of even the more dubious characters. Tenant’s prose is understated and carries the flavor of the language of the ordinary Australian of that period with the black humour that got people through the worst of times. The harshness of the Australian landscape is vividly brought to life from the heat and dust to the cold rain and floods, yet there are also moments of beauty. Tenant’s political philosophy shows through on occasions, but as most people of the time had views on what was fair and just and what had got the world into the state it was, no realistic novel could avoid considering politics in some form.
The Battlers is based on Kylie Tennant’s own experiences when she went on the road herself for several months to experience first hand the life of the itinerant unemployed workers she intended to write about. The main characters are based on people she met along the way. It is an Australian classic and has been compared to Steinbeck‘s The Grapes of Wrath although the ending is far more hopeful than Steinbeck’s. It was awarded the Gold Medal of the Australian Literature Society in 1942 and shared the Sydney Bulletin‘s S. H. Prior Memorial prize in 1940.
Kylie Tennant is one of a number of impressive Australian female authors writing between the wars such as Katharine Susannah Prichard, M. Barnard Eldershaw (Marjory Barnard and Flora Eldershaw), Eleanor Dark, Christina Stead and Dympna Cusack. Their stories still resonate and show the harsh reality of the lives of working and underprivileged Australians that period.
The Battlers by Kylie Tennant (published 1941) follows the journeys of a group travellers on the track in country New South Wales. The main characters are Snow and Dancy, called ‘The Stray’ by Snow. Snow, a loner, has left his wife and children behind in the search for work. Dancy, from the slums of Sydney, prematurely aged at only 19, has been deserted by her husband on the road. When Snow discovers Dancy trying to rob him, they form an unlikely partnership. They are joined in their travels by other battlers in similar straits – ‘The Busker’, Harley Duke a young man with aspirations as a singer; Dora Phipps, a genteel educated woman fallen on hard times, moralizing but always with an eye out for her own benefit. The story follows their travels as they struggle to survive, dreaming of better things (in Dancey’s case, initially, a set of false teeth), make pragmatic partnerships and surprising friendships.
The narrative realistically presents the bleakness and hardship of life on the road, not only the treatment of the travelers by townspeople and farmers but life in the camps outside towns with their own rules and hierarchies. All the characters are strongly and compassionately drawn, showing the humanity of even the more dubious characters. Tenant’s prose is understated and carries the flavor of the language of the ordinary Australian of that period with the black humour that got people through the worst of times. The harshness of the Australian landscape is vividly brought to life from the heat and dust to the cold rain and floods, yet there are also moments of beauty. Tenant’s political philosophy shows through on occasions, but as most people of the time had views on what was fair and just and what had got the world into the state it was, no realistic novel could avoid considering politics in some form.
The Battlers is based on Kylie Tennant’s own experiences when she went on the road herself for several months to experience first hand the life of the itinerant unemployed workers she intended to write about. The main characters are based on people she met along the way. It is an Australian classic and has been compared to Steinbeck‘s The Grapes of Wrath although the ending is far more hopeful than Steinbeck’s. It was awarded the Gold Medal of the Australian Literature Society in 1942 and shared the Sydney Bulletin‘s S. H. Prior Memorial prize in 1940.
Kylie Tennant is one of a number of impressive Australian female authors writing between the wars such as Katharine Susannah Prichard, M. Barnard Eldershaw (Marjory Barnard and Flora Eldershaw), Eleanor Dark, Christina Stead and Dympna Cusack. Their stories still resonate and show the harsh reality of the lives of working and underprivileged Australians that period.
August 9, 2022
So often I am startled by what we forget. Australian literature is a goldmine of works once deeply prized, still important for what they tell us, but lost to public knowledge for a variety of reasons. Time, of course (not everything relevant can be lasting); rapid changes in society (portrayals of the marginalised which seemed hard-hitting or controversial - or even sympathetic - can now often seem backward or unsettling); the move from literature to popular fiction that has left some styles behind; an education and cultural system which prioritises the new and a limited canon of old; and at least a little dab of that famed cultural cringe. It's fading, but it still lingers.
All of which is to say that The Battlers, while not a perfect novel, is compelling Australian fiction that must have been truly powerful in its day. Contrasting the lives of down-on-their-luck, itinerant Australian folk, Tennant weaves a tale of mateship, possible romance, hope, and humility. I remember this from a considerably romanticised adaptation by the ABC in the '90s with Gary Sweet and Jacqueline McKenzie. The book is rougher - aside from a few specks of mud on occasion, neither Gary nor Jacqueline ever look worn down by the road!
On literary merit, I'd give this 3 stars. But the weight of history, and its oft-neglected place in the canon, bump this up to a 4 for me.
All of which is to say that The Battlers, while not a perfect novel, is compelling Australian fiction that must have been truly powerful in its day. Contrasting the lives of down-on-their-luck, itinerant Australian folk, Tennant weaves a tale of mateship, possible romance, hope, and humility. I remember this from a considerably romanticised adaptation by the ABC in the '90s with Gary Sweet and Jacqueline McKenzie. The book is rougher - aside from a few specks of mud on occasion, neither Gary nor Jacqueline ever look worn down by the road!
On literary merit, I'd give this 3 stars. But the weight of history, and its oft-neglected place in the canon, bump this up to a 4 for me.
May 23, 2025
4.5 stars
"What was the use of wandering and wandering, never reaching any place of rest, coming to a town as strangers, and leaving it unwanted."
Considering the life led by 'the battlers', it is not surprising they would have thoughts such as this. But what is more surprising is that this is the exception. The majority of the time, they battle on while remaining hopeful.
"Humanity seemed to him so pitifully, so heartbreakingly, hopeful."
This is the feeling that you come away after reading about Snow, Dancy and the other battlers on the road. The little Aussie battler is still a saying to this day, meaning someone who faces adversity, disaster after disaster, and yet still continues on with a smile on their face and hope in their heart.
Tennant has such an authentic voice, as she spent time in the 1930s on the road. She captures both the spirit and tenacity of the people and the beauty and harshness of the landscape, with a raw charm and a genuine feeling for the people of the road. A wonderful book to read for a real sense of the Australian landscape.
"What was the use of wandering and wandering, never reaching any place of rest, coming to a town as strangers, and leaving it unwanted."
Considering the life led by 'the battlers', it is not surprising they would have thoughts such as this. But what is more surprising is that this is the exception. The majority of the time, they battle on while remaining hopeful.
"Humanity seemed to him so pitifully, so heartbreakingly, hopeful."
This is the feeling that you come away after reading about Snow, Dancy and the other battlers on the road. The little Aussie battler is still a saying to this day, meaning someone who faces adversity, disaster after disaster, and yet still continues on with a smile on their face and hope in their heart.
Tennant has such an authentic voice, as she spent time in the 1930s on the road. She captures both the spirit and tenacity of the people and the beauty and harshness of the landscape, with a raw charm and a genuine feeling for the people of the road. A wonderful book to read for a real sense of the Australian landscape.
March 29, 2020
This novel is based on the author's experiences travelling with transients and desperate people in the Australian outback during the depression of the 1930's.
What is most striking about is the empathy she has towards people that are, in the eyes of civilized society, trash. She tells of their flaws, their petty criminality, their drunken workshy nature, yet still sees their hearts, their private griefs and sorrows, their small joys and loves.
This is a beautiful book that should be read by everyone.
What is most striking about is the empathy she has towards people that are, in the eyes of civilized society, trash. She tells of their flaws, their petty criminality, their drunken workshy nature, yet still sees their hearts, their private griefs and sorrows, their small joys and loves.
This is a beautiful book that should be read by everyone.
May 15, 2013
What an extraordinary tale of hardship, loyalty, perseverance and hope! It took me a while to get into it, the setting not being a favourite of mine, but I ended up becoming very fond of the characters, particularly the Stray. The characters are wonderfully eccentric and very Australian, drifting along from town to town. Battlers indeed, such a hard life on the road in the 30s, but it ended so sweetly that I closed the book greatly satisfied.
December 28, 2017
Through this the antecedents of so much of our literary canon can be traced. I can see the antecedents of George Johnston and Patrick White; genuinely talented authors who built on these foundations. Wonderful book.
July 9, 2019
Wonderful reminder of the resiliency of people.
February 2, 2020
What was good about it:
This was a really lovely book to read and it is engaging and despite its heavy and very sad topics, was light and non judgmental towards its protagonists. It had a very similar feeling in terms of its message, to Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, in terms of evoking compassion, minus sentimentality, towards the less fortunate. It awards them respect and humanity. It romps along very nicely and efficiently, all the characters, of which there are many, are required to build the story. The ending isn’t rosy but there is, as in Steinbeck, hope for the future that seems to be laid at the readers feet to influence.
What didn’t I enjoy about it:
Too many names and relationships I get confused with. Hard to remember all the battlers when they’re all getting up to shenanigans together.
This was a really lovely book to read and it is engaging and despite its heavy and very sad topics, was light and non judgmental towards its protagonists. It had a very similar feeling in terms of its message, to Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, in terms of evoking compassion, minus sentimentality, towards the less fortunate. It awards them respect and humanity. It romps along very nicely and efficiently, all the characters, of which there are many, are required to build the story. The ending isn’t rosy but there is, as in Steinbeck, hope for the future that seems to be laid at the readers feet to influence.
What didn’t I enjoy about it:
Too many names and relationships I get confused with. Hard to remember all the battlers when they’re all getting up to shenanigans together.
July 8, 2025
This won the ALS Gold Medal in 1942 for good reason - It's raw, it's authentic and it's 100% Australian. This would have to be in my top three Australian novels.
Kylie Tennant was a unique voice in Australian literature. Who else at the time of The Depression was travelling the dirt tracks with the itinerarant unemployed just so they could have enough genuine and accurate material from which to write a book from.
The characters were so well drawn and each had their own distinct personality. I really came to admire The Stray with her tenacious spirit despite the constant setbacks such a life kept throwing at her.
This wonderful novel feels a lot like The Grapes of Wrath, but for me more personal, as it's backdrop is my own country
Kylie Tennant was a unique voice in Australian literature. Who else at the time of The Depression was travelling the dirt tracks with the itinerarant unemployed just so they could have enough genuine and accurate material from which to write a book from.
The characters were so well drawn and each had their own distinct personality. I really came to admire The Stray with her tenacious spirit despite the constant setbacks such a life kept throwing at her.
This wonderful novel feels a lot like The Grapes of Wrath, but for me more personal, as it's backdrop is my own country
January 13, 2014
An excellent read, i really love this book. If you get a chance read this wonderful book by Kylie Tennant...
April 1, 2016
Very interesting portrayal of part of Australia's history.
June 15, 2014
A great tale of life among the homeless in WWII era Australia. A totally enjoyable read.
June 14, 2017
A great account of life as a doll bludger in Australia during the 1930s great depression.
Want to read
January 11, 2019ok
Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews