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In the Time of the Manaraons

Miro Bilbrough

A fascinating memoir of a largely unwritten place and time, the perfect read for those who loved The Erratics.

At fourteen Miro Bilbrough falls out with the communist grandmother who has raised her since she was seven, and is sent to live with her father and his rural-hippy friends. It is 1978, Canvastown, New Zealand, and the Floodhouse is a dwelling of pre-industrial gifts and deficiencies set on the banks of the Wakamarina River, which routinely invades its rooms.

Isolated in rural poverty, the lives of Miro and her father and sister are radically enhanced by the Manaroans—charismatic hippies who use their house as a crash pad on journeys to and from a commune in a remote corner of the Marlborough Sounds. Arriving by power of thumb, horseback and hooped canvas caravan, John of Saratoga, Eddie Fox, Jewels and company set about rearranging the lives and consciousness of the blasted family unit.

In the Time of the Manaroans brilliantly captures a largely unwritten historical culture, the Antipodean incarnation of the Back to the Land movement. Contrarian, idealistic, sexually opportunistic and self-mythologising too, this was a movement, as the narrator duly discovers, not conceived with adolescents in mind.

About the Author

Miro Bilbrough is a writer and filmmaker who grew up in New Zealand and lives in Australia. Her poetry chapbook Small-time spectre was published by Kilmog in 2010, and she has a Creative Doctorate of Arts in screenwriting and screen studies from the Writing and Society Research Centre, Western Sydney University. Her critically acclaimed feature films are Being Venice (2012), which premiered at Sydney Film Festival, and Floodhouse (2004). Excerpts and trailers, as well as her six-minute ciné-poem Urn (1995), can be viewed at www.mirobilbrough.com

Praise

‘A lost world of hippies and drifters breaks into gleaming life in these pages. Miro Bilbrough trains a poet’s tender, unsparing gaze on growing up female in the anything-goes 1970s. In the Time of the Manaroans lucidly portrays the visions and limits of the counter-culture, as well as all the fearful ecstasy of being young.’ — Michelle de Kretser

 

‘moving, surprising and deeply tender.’ — Gail Jones

ISBN
9781761150548

Format
Paperback

Cost
$34.99

Pub Date
December 2021

Extent
304pp

Rights
Australia

Category
Non-fiction

Themes
Memoir. Commune. Counter culture.