Ruby Moonlight by Ali Cobby Eckermann

A verse novel that centres around the impact of colonisation in mid-north South Australia around 1880. Ruby, refugee of a massacre, shelters in the woods where she befriends an Irishman trapper.

The poems convey how fear of discovery is overcome by the need for human contact, which, in a tense unravelling of events, is forcibly challenged by an Aboriginal lawman.

The natural world is richly observed and Ruby’s courtship is measured by the turning of the seasons.