I didn’t bother looking any of it up, and I’m pretty sure I still got the gist. You won’t miss anything as long as you don’t care about being able to picture all her outfits with 100% accuracy. Now, when you’re reading The Dressmaker, you can skip over a lot of the seamstress and fashion lingo, if you want. They pay her using the funds they had saved to insure all the town buildings. She agrees to do so on the condition that they pay her in full, up-front (fair enough). This goes on until the community decides to put on a play, and they come to Tilly – hats in hands – asking her to make their costumes. They’re the only ones who don’t care about her small-town scandal(s), and they actually pay her on time, which is very nice of them. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: men are stupid.Īnyway, this second death really sets the locals off, and Tilly is forced to do dressmaking work for people from neighbouring towns. The sorghum can’t support his weight, he sinks and suffocates.

What’s more, he has the most ridiculous death ever – he jumps into a silo (of all things), believing it to be filled with wheat, when it is actually filled with sorghum. That’s pretty heavy, I suppose, but then Ham goes and kills off Tilly’s love interest in the same breath, so it’s a fair wallop for the reader. It takes Ham a couple hundred pages (full of veiled references and allusions) to reveal Tilly’s “dark secret”: the locals blame her for the death of a boy who was bullying her when they were children. She also has a bit of a flirt now and then with a poor bloke who lives in a caravan up the road. He’s the one who spots her talent for dressmaking. The locals shun her, but Tilly finds one friend in the local cop who likes wearing dresses (of course!). The protagonist (Myrtle “Tilly” Dunnage) returns to take care of her ailing mother – who is more than a little cracked, it must be said. The story is set in a (fictional) 1950s Australian town, where everyone has names like “Gertrude” and “Muriel”. Lifelong unpublished struggling writers everywhere are eating their hearts out… She just showed up and started spitting fire, inspired by her mother’s life as a dressmaker in a small country town.

What’s more, Ham has said that she wrote The Dressmaker by “accident”, the product of participating in an RMIT creative writing course that she had never actually intended to join. The Dressmaker is Ham’s debut novel – and yet it’s sold over 100,000 copies since publication in 2000. (And you’ll make a book reviewer very happy if you make a purchase through an affiliate link on this page – you’ll be sending a small commission my way!)

The dressmaker by rosalie ham