SYNOPSIS

At fourteen Miro falls out with the communist grandmother who has raised her since she was seven, and is sent to live with her father and his rural-hippy friends. It is 1978, Canvastown, New Zealand, and the Floodhouse is a dwelling of pre-industrial gifts and deficiencies set on the banks of the Wakamarina River, which routinely invades its rooms.

 Isolated in rural poverty, the lives of Miro and her father and sister are radically enhanced by the Manaroans—charismatic hippies who use their house as a crash pad on journeys to and from a commune in a remote corner of the Marlborough Sounds.

Arriving by power of thumb, horseback and hooped canvas caravan, John of Saratoga, Eddie Fox, Jewels and company set about rearranging the lives and consciousness of the blasted family unit.

In the Time of the Manaroans brilliantly captures a largely unwritten historical culture, the Antipodean incarnation of the Back to the Land movement. Contrarian, idealistic, sexually opportunistic and self-mythologising too, this was a movement, as the narrator duly discovers, not conceived with adolescents in mind.

AWARDS

Shortlisted for the Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction, NSW PREMIER’S LITERARY AWARDS 2021

REVIEWs

“Aged 14, Miro Bilbrough embarks on an extraordinary adolescence as documented in this sublime memoir. The book is a polished amalgam of anecdote, character sketches and family histories, elevated by Bilbrough's exquisite wordsmithing…”- Christine Kearney, The Canberra Times, Dec 5, 2021

‘What is crucial about this book is its tender language, which allows you to visit this “drowning and waving” coming-of-age as if watching a shuddering movie reel.’ Australian Women’s Weekly, January 2022

“…Miro Bilbrough's In The Time of the Manaroans was pretty damned close to being a masterpiece…This is the best book of non-fiction published in New Zealand in 2020. It's a charming, funny, beautifully detailed memoir of the author's adolescence on a commune in an obscure nook in the Marlborough Sounds…The writing is luminous; it's a work of art, as well as vastly entertaining.” - Steve Braunias, ‘Xmas: the 10 best books of non-fiction of 2020, Newsroom, December 16, 2020

“Bilbrough is, at her best, a quite sublime writer…for anyone who lived through those strange days and cannot remember them, this makes for a highly readable aide-memoir” - Peter Calder, The Listener, October 3, 2020

“In The Time of the Manaroans operates as a work of high art, because of the prose, and also as something very easy and entertaining to read, because of the story.”  - Steve Braunias, Newsroom, September 17, 2020

“The New Zealand writer and film-maker’s memoir of her hippie upbringing is restrained but often moving, boasts an entertaining cast and is insightful about the often unglamorous realities of collectivist, off-the-grid lives. “ - Mark Broatch ‘Best 101 Books of 2020’, The Listener, November 2020.

“The most attractive feature of this memoir is Bilbrough’s use of language, her ability to sum up mood and the era in a phrase or a few sentences. - Reids Reader, September 14, 2020

“Her writing has an appealing light touch, even when recalling the most dire of times…In an early chapter, she notes she had been “on the chase” since childhood. Here, she makes a really impressive effort to articulate what she has been pursuing, optimistic against all the odds, for most of her life.” - Linda Herrick, for Kete, September 13, 2020

“Bilbrough’s writing is both aesthetically and narratologically sharp; her story is pieced together tangentially, subtly familiarising readers with its inhabitants in a way that creates the distinct impression that our relationships with these characters somehow precede this book.” - Ollie Kavanagh Penno

“…a masterwork memoir of—to borrow the language of the author Miro Bilbrough—‘feral dreaming’….Her wry, parenthetical observations cut to the quick of whichever grimy context she is ensconced in: the hippie clans ‘drunk on mythologies’, or New Zealand society at large: ‘we are not as post-colonial as we think we are’.…Bilbrough’s prose style is perhaps the finest feature of this book. She is a master of evocative metaphor, dances quixotically with words…and is darkly, idiosyncratically funny…” - Emma Gattey, Landfall Review Online, February 1, 2021

interviews

Interview with Kate Fagan, To Encounter the Unexpected, Cordite, Feb 15 2023
FBi Radio interview with Mia Hull, Out of the Box, December 1, 2021
Interview with Steve Braunias, Once Were Hippies, Pukapuka Talks, Nelson Arts Festival 2021
RNZ Interview with Kathryn Ryan, From Nine to Noon, September 22, 2020
Interview with Britt Mann, Stuff, September 13, 2020
In conversation with Sarah Jamsen, Honi Soit, September 6, 2020

WRITER TESTIMONIALS

“A lost world of hippies and drifters breaks into gleaming life in these pages. Miro…trains a poet’s tender, unsparing gaze on growing up female in the anything-goes 1970s. In the Time of the Manaroans lucidly portrays the visions and limits of the counter-culture, as well as all the fearful ecstasy of being young.” - Michelle de Kretser

“Gives insight into a world and a soul few people will have encountered before; and does so with grace and acumen. That world is almost undocumented (except photographically) because its denizens were enemies of time. But Miro, a wise child, was there. She has told what it was like.” - Martin Edmond.

FESTIVALS

Inside the Confession Machine with Sheila Ngoc Pham, Eda Gunyadin, Addi Rd Writers Festival, May 2022
Domesticity Under Scrutiny with Al Campbell, Sophie Overett, Brisbane Writers Festival, May 2022
Once Were Hippies with Steve Braunias, Pukapuka Talks, Nelson Arts Festival October 2021
Autumn Salon with Paula Morris, Marilynne Robinson, Douglas Stuart, Auckland Writers Festival, May 2021