Miner’s Rights which allowed the holder to ‘peg’ an area of land, but not to own the land itself.

Last Friday Clara took a significant step towards publication. She went to Melbourne where her story will be read by the team at Allen and Unwin. Meanwhile, I am dealing with the vexed question of indigenous protocols.

Clara had very little contact with the original Wongai inhabitants of the Coolgardie area. But they were there. To leave them out of her story would not only be ridiculous, but would make a mockery of the tolerance and respect that both Aboriginal and European groups initially showed towards each other. As in other parts of the country, this tolerance deteriorated as time went on. The huge influx of Europeans put pressure on precious water and food resources and cultural differences not only became obvious, but often destructive. But no matter how much we would like to, we can not change history.

My grandparents arrived from Victoria as part of the enormous influx of people from all over the world that occurred with the discovery of gold. Without the Coolgardie gold rush of 1893, I would not have been born here and would not have become the writer of historical fiction that I am today. I grew up in country Western Australia. There were always Aboriginal students in the schools I attended and we played together after school. In the small towns where we lived everyone was accepted. Immigrants, or Displaced Persons as they were called after World War ll, were less common that Aboriginals, but were quickly absorbed into the life of the town.  In many ways Clara’s story is also my story. If the gatekeepers of Aboriginal culture and heritage do not encourage people like me to publicise the positive contacts that did, and still do, occur between Aboriginal people and ‘white’ settlers, they do themselves and their descendants a disservice.

Early goldfields house made from wood, iron and hessian

At this point in my new manuscript the problem is not what to add, but what to leave out?

The story of Clara Saunders now has a shape that I can work within. But there are so many ways to tell the story of 14 year-old Clara and her adventures as a pioneer woman in the goldfields, and later the wheat belt, of Western Australia that I have struggled to narrow it down. There is probably more than one book here. I don’t want to be distracted from writing the one I have in mind. But it probably helps to think of the possibility of using other, completely different,  approaches to this story. Hopefully, that way I will avoid the temptation to cram in too much material. I need to maintain a pace that suits Clara’s lively, energetic and determined approach to life, in spite of everything she encounters in the frontier town of Coolgardie in 1893.

Getting close to a readable draft now. Fingers crossed.

Ballerina Sarah Hepburn in The Clearest Light.

Most people would agree that ballet tells a story. How accessible that story is to different audiences depends a great deal on the choreography of the work. Prose, like ballet, is as much about rhythm and body language as it is about the actual words. We have all read sentences that have danced across the page. Skilful writers can create moving pictures of incredible grace and beauty in our minds, just as skilful choreographers do on stage. But how do choreographers communicate the story they have in their minds to dancers who will recreate it on stage? It is something I have often wondered about, but never really understood until last night, when I saw Ballet 101 performed at the Quarry Amphitheatre. Now I know that a numerical code exists for classical ballet, just as it does for computing. Every classical dancer learns the 100 classical dance positions by heart in order to read the story the choreographer is telling.

What about the one hundred and first position, though? In the solo dance, Ballet 101, each of the 100 classical dance positions is performed in sequence with a voiceover calling out the numbers and the dancer responding by adopting the positions. But where is the story? Then it was revealed that that was just the Prologue. The dance continued with the voiceover/narrator calling out the numbers in random order – so he said – but what he was actually doing was developing his plot. He directed the dancer to perform more and more complicated sequences at a faster and faster pace, preparing his audience for the surprise ending that was to come. Finally the dancer lay exhausted on the stage. The narrator paused, as every good storyteller does, and congratulated the dancer on his performance. The audience applauded. The dancer stood up. But he did not take a bow. Instead the narrator asked the question that was on everyone’s mind. ‘What about position 101?’ The stage lights went down for three seconds, then came up again. There was an almost audible gasp from the audience. Our dancer was lying on the stage in bits and piece – totally destroyed. A leg here, an arm and shoulder there, a torso with head attached. It all looked so realistic that it took me a few seconds to actually see that, of course, these were parts of a dummy disguised as our dancer.

Everyone laughed. The story was complete. Cleverly conceived and wonderfully delivered with all the elements of character, setting and plot present in the narrative. As an audience we had completely suspended our disbelief and become absorbed in the story being told in dance.

Bravo WA Ballet for bringing such a challenging performance to us.