The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart

The novel delves into aspects of Australian culture, particularly the significance of native flora and Aboriginal land, offering a perspective on the country’s heritage. Australia is authentically shown through the landscape, traditional storytelling, and characters like Ruby. The book describes countless different plants found in Australia, and Alice’s family devises specific meanings for each flower. Every chapter is named after an Australian flower with details on the plant’s meaning, how it grows, and where it grows in Australia. By using native flora and Aboriginal stories, the author establishes the novel’s setting as distinctly Australian.

Likewise, Ruby exemplifies Aboriginal culture as Alice’s teacher. Since she is a native Aboriginal person, Ruby carries the traditional stories of her ethnicity, stories she shares with Alice. The most prominent story is about Ngunytju, the goddess whose baby falls from the sky and creates a crater at the national park. As Ruby explains, the crater is the goddess’s heart, which she threw down from the sky in mourning after her child’s death. The land is sacred to the Aboriginal people, a place where they “bear witness,” “grieve,” and “honor what they have loved” (252). Ruby continues that the site is “where malukuru grows from the star mother’s heart. [...] That’s why we ask people not to pick any of the flowers. Each one is a piece of her” (252). Ruby embodies the Aboriginal perspective, and the other characters, like Alice, do their best to respect and protect the desert pea flowers from being stolen or destroyed.

In her Author’s Note, Ringland writes that she was inspired by the Australian landscape and cultural heritage. Although some of the settings in the story are fictional, she was inspired by real places and Aboriginal traditions. For instance, the crater site is modeled after the sacred rock of Uluru in the Australian desert. The natural landmark and native flora and fauna of Uluru hold deep cultural and religious significance to the Aboriginal people, acting as an “important spiritual site” with “caves painted with remarkable rock art” (“Uluru.” Parks Australia. Commonwealth of Australia). Furthermore, Ringland’s inspiration for the creation story for the crater comes from a story within Arrernte culture. That tourists leave “sorry flowers” to apologize for disturbing the natural landscape is also inspired by real life, as Uluru rangers receive similar apologies from tourists in the form of rocks. Ringland takes care to credit her muses and ensure the accuracy of her Aboriginal translations. For instance, while Earnshaw Crater is fictional, its Aboriginal name—Kililpitjara—comes from the Pitjantjatjara language, which Ringland translated with the help of a dictionary.

Ringland notes that living in the desert among women like Ruby inspired these choices in the text: “They shared their stories and their spirits with me, which taught me lessons I hadn’t learned anywhere else. Australia has a black history. It always was and always will be Aboriginal land” (374-75). By being intentional with her choices, Ringland writes with admiration and respect for her home nation and its Indigenous people and native fauna and flora.