This novel was read at Kalimna, Yeranda Cottages, Main Creek (Dungog) NSW, August 2026
Life is so full of quiet, everyday moments that we can forget how momentously explosive it can be, how, that hiding in those self-same nuanced and seemingly unremarkable slivers of time, can sit some of the most lifechanging moments of our lives.
Very few of us ever dig down far enough to uncover them, partly because life rushes by with such furious busyness that we don’t have time to look, but also because while there can be real fulfilment and reward in finding what has been long hidden, there can be real danger and pain too, and we can’t know, in that instant of deep discovery, which way it will go.
Sometimes, however, as is the case with the three marvellously memorable and intensely remarkable women of Billie King by Shannon Kelly-White, you simply don’t have a choice and you have to go wherever the wild and unknowable moments take you.
Especially when the architect of all these great life punctuation points is Australia’s last female bushranger, known more than little condescendingly by authorities and the public at large as Lady Bushranger, who is hellbent on an epic campaign of revenge that leaves no time at all for hesitation or even the hint of second thoughts.
The actual name of the bushranger is Dulcie James and when she reaches a very dark and final point in her life it becomes clear to her that before she is done with this life, she must tie up one profoundly important loose end.
‘Shit’ she [Billie] whispered, scrambling over onto her hands and knees. Her hand caught a bit of spiky glass, but who have a shit about that when there was some bastard with a gun coming her way.
Heading to the town of Orilong she is going to find the eponymous hero of the story, a remarkably together 12-year-old known as Billie King – only those who don’t know her well or are in positions of authority call her “Elizabeth” such as local priest Father Sean who seems to have a soft spot for his young parishioner – and finally do what needs to be done.
The thing about long percolating revenge though is that it sometimes forgets life has moved on in the meantime.
While Dulcie may have a set idea of how she will right wrongs and get justice for Billie’s seemingly long-departed mum Anna whom she first met in 1918 when she held up Anna’s dilapidated farmhouse seeking food – Anna for the record wasn’t frightened and seemed glad to have some sort of excitement and possibility hit her tired, broken life, the only bright point being a newly born infant known as Billie – things have moved on in the interim and now, 12 years later in the early depression year of 1930, what she wants to do may not be what’s best for Billie.
For a 12-year-old girl, Billie is fiercely, funnily and inspiringly independent, and it’s this impossible to miss or love fiercely girl who becomes the beating heart of a brilliantly written and hugely engaging novel which refuses to accept that the lot we are dealt in life is where it all ends.
It’s understandable that it would seem that way, especially in an age where women are little more than goods to be traded and domestic add-ons to be used without thought, but Billie King demands more for its characters and by extension women everywhere.
(The author and I at the Dymocks book launch, 22 July 2026)
The author herself emphasises how important a part of her story this messaging is:
Every day, just like Billie, Anna and Dulcie, many women and girls are beaten down. By hands, by expectations, by words. And it thrills me the number of times these women get back up. But what truly electrifies me is when another woman reaches down and offers her hand, reffing the other to her feet, bringing her back to life. The woman who bothers to do that knows that without belief and belonging, we’re in strife.
I wanted to tell a story about that.
It’s there on almost every page but it is a testament to Kelly-White’s skill as a writer and consummate storyteller that not once does the messaging built into Billie King feel heavy headed or delivered at the expense of a lively, heartfelt and epically blockbuster-y tale that somehow still manages to feel fully and immediately emotionally intimate.
And the story is truly something intensely special.
As Diulcie and a now 12-year-old Billie King connect through some extraordinary circumstance, and Billie proves again and again that after a lifetime of looking her alcoholic father and herself, often with child services threatening to separate the two (which would rob Billie of the little family she has left since Anna disappeared 12 years earlier) she is more than she knows her own mind and what she needs, Billie King comes gloriously and immersively alive, a furious and funny bundle of a fight for survival against what appear to be impossible to beat odds.
But that’s the thing about life – it can surprise you when you really need it to and as Dulcie and Billie collide in the very best and most terrible of ways, somehow simultaneously, it becomes clear that life isn’t Dione with any of them yet, at least not in the form they, especially Dulcie, have in mind.
Billie didn’t really know how to explain it. All she knew was she was glad she didn’t. If she had gone through with it, she night’ve stayed trapped in her old life. Now she felt like a bug who’d been snagged in a sticky spider’s web but had managed to break free. Somehow, from doing that, she’d realised something: she had a big life to lead. She wasn’t going to be held back. Wasn’t going to let herself be stuck.
What grabs your attention most of all in this beautifully evoked story is the powerhouse that is Billie King.
While Anna and Dulcie are remarkably memorable characters and will stay with you long after you regretfully turn the last page of Billie King, it is Billie who absolutely and irrevocably seizes your attention and very soon after, and for all time your heart.
She is nothing short of blisteringly extraordinary.
Passionate and naive, lost and yet so very sure of herself, Billie has one of those hearts that innately knows what is good and what is right and which will fight fiercely against anyone who says otherwise.
Her inner moral compass is so fully formed and so astonishingly powerful that even though she has a lot of life lessons to learn – though, to be fair, she has already has a metric ton of them in a life short on favours and long on struggle – she is going to do just fine because she knows, KNOWS, who she is and what really matters and she won’t be dissuaded from lifting them up and fighting for them at every turn.
Even Dulcie, who thinks she has seen it all, and who has a good soul too despite all the killing and stealing, has things to learn from Billie, and their story, and that of Anna, shows you what three brave and not easily dissuaded women can do when they decide to help each other and stand up for what truly matters, male-centred orthodoxy be damned.
Billie King is an inestimable and warmly funny and fiercely intense novel to read, one that will seize your heart, enthrall your soul and which will remind you at every turn of the power that comes when you dig down into life, really get to know it and who you are and act accordingly in ways that change not simply you but the world around you for the better and remakes seemingly unchangeable lives into something that elevates everyone and everything, not just now but will into a now amazingly promising future.