Into the Eyes of Hungry

In Into the Eyes of Hungry, Leila Kulpas tells the story of her first seventeen years in an isolated mountain region of New South Wales, Australia, in the nineteen-forties and fifties. At three, her loneliness because of her hard-working parents has her attempting to walk into the love she sees in the warm, brown eyes of her father's horse, Hungry. Soon afterwards, she spends six months with her family in tents while her parents endure the grisly, but lucrative, business of trapping rabbits for their skins-part of their struggle of over a decade to escape poverty by buying a bushland property. But when she's six, after they've settled on their own seven hundred acres, they find themselves under more stress than ever, and, though he remains loving for the most part, her father begins to binge drink, and her mother to rage and beat, targeting her in particular. She survives, and eventually prospers, largely because of the love of her father, her sister and various other relatives and friends, and her passion for the natural world and its creatures. She repeatedly finds herself transforming her abusive mother into the kind parent she once was, and her hunger for maternal love deepens into an abyss. Home-schooled with her mother as supervisor, her education is challenging, to say the least. Her parents are atheists and believe in communism-though her father proves himself to be a wily capitalist when the need arises. When she's fifteen, she and her family become the centre of nation-wide media attention after he discovers a gold reef. This work is unusual in that it is written in the present tense and from the point-of-view of the growing child. And, replete with encounters with delightful or curious human, as well as creature, characters, and strange or hilarious incidents, this is a memoir like no other.