Stilwater ― Finding Wild Mercy in the Outback

"A young woman is airlifted to join a small crew on an abandoned Australian cattle station and drags feral cattle in from the wild, resulting in a spellbinding story that challenges notions of wildness and domestication, contrasting the pastoral with thebrutality of modern ranching. Rafael de Grenade was twelve years old when she quit school and soon began to work on a mountain ranch in Arizona. There she learned how to sleep out when there was no fast way home; how to track her way by familiar mountains and canyons; how to survive off the water that seeped from moss hidden springs. But when she heard about cattlemen working the far edges of the Australian outback, they sparked a dream in her far wilder than anything she had ever known. A little over adecade later she arrived on Stilwater Station with two shirts, two pairs of jeans, cowboy boots, and some doubt that she would ever come home. A deeply poetic inquiry, Stilwater suffuses us with salt and scrub and blood. This is a whirlwind of men, women, cattle, horses, machines and landscape in collaborative evolution, all becoming different manifestations of the same entity--the Australian Wild"--