Imagine a young girl suddenly appearing in your town, seemingly out of nowhere.
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Her clothes are ripped and stained, she has bruises, and she's parched. Also, she can't speak.
Where has she come from, and what has she seen?
And what if it's the desert she's walked out of - how has she survived?
When writer Lia Hills put this scenario to various people she met, she heard a variety of stories - theories and fables, conspiracies and criminal intrigue.
In fact, a fictional girl was as much a Rorschach test for a small community as a pitch for a story.
And when she set out to write a novel with a mysterious mute girl at its centre, this is exactly what she became.
"I think it's a classic story, right? Someone walks into a town and throws everything into disarray," she says.
And we do love the missing child trope in Australian story-telling. From Picnic at Hanging Rock to the famous Duff children of 1864, there is something visceral in the idea of the landscape of Australia swallowing up colonial children - and sometimes returning them intact.
But Hills' desert is not the one we're used to in fiction. It's in the Wimmera region of Victoria, and its Little Desert, about 300km north-west of Melbourne.
The girl who walks barefoot into the small town of Gatyekarr is the flashpoint for The Desert Knows Her Name, which spins slowly into something almost like a crime thriller. Almost, but not quite.
"The fact that she can't speak, I found this notion fascinating, because then people are going to project onto her," Hills says.
"History has a whole lot of projecting stories. And so it enabled me to investigate people's relationship with the land, via how they projected a story onto her.
"And at the very outset, because I went and visited the communities up in the Wimmera, going out with an elder on country, and then getting to know lots of other different communities, Indigenous and non-Indigenous up in the area, I just straight away asked people who they thought she was.
"I wasn't coming with a set version of who she was. I wanted to see the kind of stories people would tell about her, and it was amazing."
Hills has always had a fascination with the desert, although she spent her formative years in New Zealand, and didn't move to Tasmania with her family until she was 15.
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Her previous book, The Crying Place, which was longlisted for the 2018 Miles Franklin Award, was set in the central desert. This time, she was drawn by the notion of a smaller, more contained desert, one that included a river and a small town.
"We do tend to think of deserts being in the Northern Territory, for example, or Western Australia," she says.
"This kind of contained desert was also very attractive symbolically as well, in terms of storytelling."
When the mysterious girl appears, it's in the garden of Beth, a regenerative farmer who is devoted to bringing her family's farm back to life after years of neglect and western-style farming.
To Beth, the girl comes to represent a form of possible salvation, the answer to questions she didn't realise she had.
For her friend Nate, another local who has returned to the town as an adult and is running the pub, she reminds him of his own dead daughter.
For others, she's a symbol - of past wrongs, of mysterious cults, of medical phenomena. Is she from a sect? Is she a ghost? Why won't she talk?
The story unfolds much like a whodunnit, although the crime in question isn't always obvious.
Hills has never forgotten what it was like to arrive in Tasmania as a 15-year-old, from Aotearoa, New Zealand, where the Indigenous people and what had been done to them was front and centre of public discourse.
"I grew up very much in a different world, of cultural linguistic revival, then I moved with my family to Tasmania.
I wasn't coming with a set version of who she was. I wanted to see the kind of stories people would tell about her, and it was amazing.
"I was ... deeply wounded by what we heard and saw when I arrived there, having come from a place where I had a lot of Maori and Pasifika friends to a place that was still in denial about its genocidal history.
"I was a teenager, so it affected me deeply. It was formative in terms of my understanding of this country, and it informs my work to this day. I've never got over it."
In many ways, she says, Australia's colonial history is the ultimate cold case, with so many communities unable or unwilling to talk about the violence of the past.
"Who gets to tell the stories, what stories dominate, and what are the stories present, for example, within the Indigenous community and within the land?" she says. "What stories does the land hold?"
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