CMYK (MATT LAM) SPINE 28.

73mm

A buoyant, beautiful debut! Dominic Smith,

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author of The Last Painting of Sara de Vos
Pip Smith has always been an agent of change. With her
powerful debut novel, Half Wild, she will surely change the
way we read, write, think and talk about Australian fiction.

HALF WILD
Sam Twyford-Moore, host of The Rereaders podcast
and former director of the Emerging Writers Festival

Sydney, 1938. After being hit by a car on Oxford Street, sixty-three-

year-old Jean Ford lies in a coma in Sydney Hospital. Doctors talk

WILD
across her body, nurses jab her in the arm with morphine, detectives
arrive to take her fingerprints. She has 100 in her pocket, but no
identification. Memories come back to hera murder trial, a life in
prisonbut with each prick of the needle her memories begin to shift.

Wellington, 1885. Tally Ho doesnt need to go to school because she

is going to be a fisherman or a cart driver or a butcher boy like Harry
Crawford. Wellington is her town and she makes up the rules. Pap
takes her fishing, Nonno teaches her how to jump fences on his horse
Geronimolife gallops on the way it should, until a brother, baby
William, is born. Go and play with your sisters, Pap says, but wearing
dresses and sipping tea is not the life for Tally Ho. Taking the advice of
her hero, Harry Crawford, she runs away.

Sydney, 1917. The burned body of a woman is discovered on the

banks of the Lane Cove River. Was she a mad woman? A drunk whod
Fearless . . . combines cinematic
accidentally set herself on fire? Nobody knows, untilthree years
intensity with rare intimacy.
latera tailors apprentice tells police that his mother went missing Steven Amsterdam, author
that same weekend, and that his stepfather, Harry Crawford, of The Easy Way Out

PIP
is not who he seems to be. Who, then, is he?

Based on the true lives of Eugenia Falleni,

Half Wild is Pip Smiths dazzling debut novel.
SMITH
Cover design: Romina Panetta
Cover photograph: Mohamad Itani / Trevillion Images

FICTION
Brilliant . . . original and highly
provocative. Naomi Wood,
author of The Godless Boys
PIP SMITH
HalfWild_COVER.indd 1 26/4/17 4:49 pm
 Praise for
HALFWILD
Half Wildis a triumph of novelistic paradoxa quixotic portrayalof
a subject whose life is a lessonin becoming. At the hybrid heart
of this work is an impassioned address to theNietzschean enigma:
how one becomes what one is.This debut signifies the taming of
an immense and soaring imagination in the figure of Pip Smith,
whowith cool command of formis here both the falcon and
the falconer.
LUKE CARMAN, author of An Elegant Young Man

Pip Smith is a writer full to the brim with brio and vim. Her
fiction leaves nothing behind: every sentence wrings language for
its emotional and aesthetic possibilities.Half Wild is a remarkable
work of empathy: Smith has committed herself entirely to the
imaginative act, plonking us right down into the shoes, skin and
mind of a person who shed these same things time and again. We
live in an era where the reinvention of self is common, and even
encouraged; Half Wildreveals to us in dynamic prose that these
concerns are timeless and universal, that one of historys most excep-
tional chameleons could have been you, me or anyone we know.
SAM COONEY, editor of The Lifted Brow

Smiths writing is lucid and lovely; its fearlessresonant with the

verve of another century and steadily surprising.
STEVEN AMSTERDAM, author of The Easy Way Out

A richly imagined and voicednovel that floats across time, and

through the shifting sands of identity. A buoyant, beautiful debut!
DOMINIC SMITH, author of The Last Painting of Sara de Vos
HALF
WILD
 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Pip is a writer of songs, poems and stories. Her first poetry

collection,Too Close for Comfort (SUP),won the Helen Ann
Bell Award in 2013. She ran the monthly writing event
Penguin Plays Rough, for which she published and edited
the multimedia anthology,The Penguin Plays Rough Book
of Short Stories. She was a Faber Academy Writing a Novel
scholarship recipient, has been a co-director of the National
Young Writers Festival, and holds a doctorate in creative
arts from Western Sydney University. She is one quarter
of garage band Imperial Broads and works in a bookshop.
HALF
WILD
PIP SMITH
The lyrics from the song By the Beautiful Sea on page 353 were written by
HaroldR. Atteridge and published in 1914.
All attempts have been made to locate the owners of copyright material. If you have
any information in that regard, please contact the publisher at the address below.

First published in 2017

Copyright Pip Smith 2017
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in
any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior
permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968
(the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever
is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational
purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has
given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.
Allen & Unwin
83 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100
Email: info@allenandunwin.com
Web: www.allenandunwin.com

Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available

from the National Library of Australia
www.trove.nla.gov.au
ISBN 978 1 76029 464 9
Set in 12/18 pt Warnock Pro by Bookhouse, Sydney
Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The paper in this book is FSC certified.

FSC promotes environmentally responsible,
socially beneficial and economically viable
C009448 management of the worlds forests.
She was just a half-wild creature who felt
herself apart and different.
Dr Herbert M. Moran, 1939

I was what other people made me.

Eugenia Falleni, 1930
 Sydney Hospital, 9 June 1938

Who is she?
Not sure. Female. Sixty, seventy maybe. Hit by a car up on
Oxford Street.
No purse?
No. Awad of cash, though. Ahundred pounds.
Stolen?
Probably.
Whats your name, Mrs... ? I dont think she can hear me.
No, her eyelid twitched. Did you see that? Her eyelid twitched.
Mrs? Can you hear me? What is your name?
 JEAN FORD

My name, my name. What should we say my name is today,

littleRita?
Today its Jean Ithink, but tomorrow, when I find you, well
christen me something newsomething you can decide because
my new life will be lived for you and no one else.
A name is a lie, Rita, remember that. If none of us had
names, how would we remember who each other was? How
would we call to each other from across the street? How would
we attach a face to a name, a name to a bank account? I tell
you, we couldnt. We couldnt even tell our own stories, because
stories need heroes, and heroes would not hold together without
a name, they would fall to jelly on the floor most likely, and
wouldnt that be delicious?

Who I am, you cannot know,

for Jean Ford is my name.
Like Fords they make in factories,
my selves all look the same.

The doctors will think: asensible name for a sensible woman,

and let me out.
So call me Jean.
Can you hear me? Im JeanJean Ford.

Half Wild 1
They cant hear me.
And theres a loud white pain flaring out from my hip and
the back of my head that makes it hard to speak. Dont. No, stop.
Morphine will only make me slip further away. Iwant to be inside
this pain, because its mine, because it proves this broken bodys
still got fight.
They are pressing into my wrist with their cold fingers. They
are feeling for a pulse. They are saying numbers and writing
on paper. Ha. Do monsters have pulses? I can hear someone
fingering my banknotes. Dont you dare, dont you bloody dare,
thats everything Ive got.

What was italmost twenty years ago now?I was sent to die
under a different name. I travelled to Long Bay Penitentiary
like a celebrity, on a tram with tinted windows. Instead of a
destination, the tram said SPECIAL. The woman next to me
couldnt stop giggling. Never thought Id get called special, thats
for sure.
Inside the tram we didnt feel special. We got shoved ten at
a time into compartments with seats for four and clung to the
chicken-wire gates that fenced us in. Awoman moaned the whole
way there, like a cow torn away from her calf.
Ah shuddup Sandra, ya whiny bugger
Long Bay had never kept a woman about to hang and they
werent sure where to put me. They settled on a concrete cell,
thirteen feet by seven. Igot a mug and spoon, ashelf, and a single
bulb hanging from the ceiling. Icouldve wrapped the light cord
around my neck and jumped off the shelf I suppose, but what
if the cord broke and left me lying on my back, more alive than
dead, legs twitching like a poisoned cockroach?

2 Pip Smith
 I lay on my bed and stared at the ceiling. The cell was like a
roomy coffin, and I was half convinced I was already dead when
I heard a warder whisper outside my door: Maybe theyll send her
to Hall B in the mens.
I could tell by the break in her voice what happened in Hall B.
They lowered their voices whenever they passed my cell, as
if I was a ghost likely to haunt any poor sucker who pricked
my ears. I probably wouldve, too, I was that hungry and sore
about it.
They say you eat whatever you want when youre about to hang,
but turns out this is a lie. Theyd fed me Ration One for supper,
the next best thing to dry bread and water. Isuspect they didnt
want to clean up my shit after I dropped. Aconstipated corpse
is a tidy corpse, and doesnt leave a trace.
But everything leaves a trace. You mightnt be able to see those
traces, but you can feel them, you can smell them. There are traces
of me in you, and mark my words there are traces of me in the
acid that burns the Crown Prosecutors gullet at night, keeping
him awake.

Wake up, Mrs; Mrs, wake up, anurse is saying.

Ah, darling girl, Iwould if I could.
Now she is giving up, too. Her soft shoes pad across the floor.

The warders bit their nails when I looked them in the face. They
barked occasionally, to remind me where I was, but it was hard
for them to keep up the gruffness when I gave them no reason
to complain. Mavis slipped a ball of tobacco into my pocket.
May gave me an extra scoop of hominy on Sundays, and in early
December a young warder slid back the hatch on my cell door.

Half Wild 3
 Good news, love, she said. There was a cabinet meeting. Your
death sentence just got commuted to life.
What? Ididnt understand. What about the jurys decision?The
lawyers two-hour speeches? The months of preparation for
thetrial, and all along they could change their minds, just likethat?
No premier wants a hanged woman on his hands, not now we
can vote.
So it was life, then. Sentenced to life. It was worse in a way,
but the women in the cells began to clap. The sound was water
smacking stone; the drops accumulated and became rain. They
clapped harder, they whooped and holleredthe cheers of women
wild or poor enough to break the law are as close to rapture as a
person can get now that churches dont mean much.
My cheeks were wet, my throat choked up; Ihadnt cried like
that in years.

Sister, the old woman is crying, Ithink.

The nurses are coming from all directions, needles out.
No, no more morphine.
Too bad. Jab.
And off I float. Ive been trapped like this before, long ago now,
but its all coming back

4 Pip Smith