Rick Morton, One Hundred Years of Dirt.

              

- This memoir has got rave reviews all over the place but I can’t recommend it wholeheartedly because it’s both exceptionally good and too often mundane and annoying. 
- The early chapters are a beautifully written, often heartbreaking, story of a dysfunctional family going back generations and living on a huge cattle station in the far southwest of Queensland. His father and grandfather were violent, abusive men. His mother suffered terribly, and his brother nearly died from severe burns and later became hopelessly addicted to drugs.
- But then the focus changes just to him and the story pales into just another coming of age drama, and not a very good one. The chapters on his severe anxiety issues, his depression and one or two rather lame suicide attempts lack power. He comes across as self-preoccupied and indulgent. Sure, it’s honest and raw, but it’s also immature and underdone. 
- His struggle with disclosing his homosexuality to family and friends feels dated. He’s in his late twenties in the mid 2010’s for god sake. It shouldn’t be that hard.
- There’s a hint of self-dramatisation and I found it off-putting. There’s nothing terribly exciting about a young man from a difficult and impoverished family landing a job as a journalist in a country newspaper. 
- The book is fleshed out with constant references to research of one sort or another. It’s massively overdone and seems to be included just to lend weight to a pretty lightweight narrative. He’s not an expert in anything after all. Take this sentence as an example: ‘Read into it what you will, but the proportion of journalists who described their personal politics as ‘left of centre’ rose over the two decades (1992-2013) from 39 per cent to 51 percent’. Wow, who’d have thought.
- On commenting on current political debates in this country Morton shows his loyalties - to his right of centre Newscorp masters. His views reflect their shallow ‘anti elite’ flavour (which he later walks back from) but he’s all over the place. Try to make any sense at all of this sentence: ‘One of the major failings of progressive politics in Australia, indeed around the world, is a preoccupation with the grievances of the middle class. Put another way, this brand of politics prioritises the woe of people who can afford to worry about anything other than paying the bills and feeding themselves’. So conservative parties with their miserable expenditure cutbacks at every turn are pro-poor?
- We’re supposed to sympathise with his financial problems as a young cadet journalist. As a struggling millennial he's hardly unique. He’s using his poor family status as a brand and trading on that. As he continually reminds us, he got his dream job at a young age and he's well paid.
- Yes, there’s the expected swipe against Fairfax and a positive nod to Chris Mitchell, former editor of the Australian. 
- The book is thin. He’s essentially a mummy’s boy. There are far more interesting, enlightening and inspiring personal stories out there that are more worth your time.