The Eden-Glassie Mystery series is actually a circular quartet – the end of each title leads directly in to the beginning of next was you work your way around the circle.

Where would we be without our primary school teachers? Teaching is a very demanding profession,  both physically and intellectually, and teachers deserve to be held in much higher esteem than they often are, especially those who see fiction as a way in to most of the subject areas, not just Reading and Writing.

One of these fabulous teachers contacted me during the week because, in New South Wales, they now have a new syllabus. Three of my titles, Deep Water, Black Earth, and Wild Wind fit neatly into the New Geography syllabus, Stage 3: topic, Wild Weather. These titles are available as eBooks but, in a classroom situation, where students are studying a novel, this format is not ideal. Thank goodness for print-on-demand!

We are still negotiating the finer details, but I am hoping that, with Teacher’s Notes already available, free via this website, paperback copies of the books will soon be in the hands of teachers and students who need them – especially in New South Wales.

The Ninety Mile straight stretch of the Eyre Highway now has an all-weather surface.

Revisiting a story that I first tried to write twenty years ago is a strange experience. At that time the events on which it is based were relatively recent. There were newspaper reports of the actual event, background material on the setting and some historical, archaeological and geographical material held in the Battye Library. There was also my father’s account of a trip that he and my mother made across the Nullarbor in 1951. At that time the Eyre Highway was an unsealed road all the way to Ceduna. There was a Roadhouse at Balledonia, mostly servicing trucks travelling overland with goods like heavy machinery, live animals, fresh produce and some medicines which needed constant and reliable refrigeration. Apart from that there were only the occasional water tanks, under a corrugated iron roof, where travellers could re-fill their waterbags and radiators. The maps, detailed descriptions and black and white photographs from that epic journey have become part of our family archives and probably deserve a story of their own, but I am not the person to tell it. When I look at those tiny black and white photographs my imagination goes wild. I find myself searching out mysteries, adventures and strange possibilities to add to the already fascinating  facts.

The internet has made a huge difference to the way in which I go about this. Now I can go down below the surface of the Nullarbor and explore six kilometres of tunnels, caves and blowholes that began to form there 15million years ago. Via YouTube clips and scientific video footage I can watch the scientists and palaeontologists squeezing through impossibly narrow crevices and discovering the skeletons of now extinct creatures. I can track the cyclone that cut both the Eyre Highway and the trans-Australian railway line back in 1995, effectively slicing Western Australia off the map. I can delve into the stories of truckies, overland cyclists and ordinary families who were caught up in the extended aftermath of Cyclone Bobby.

I don’t know how this story will pan out, yet. But I do know that it will be a much richer and more complex novel than the one I tried to write in 1996.

Meg McKinlay, Jen Banyard, Frane Lessac, Elaine Forrestal at the IBBY Quiz Night, 2015

The SCBWI presence at the annual IBBY Quiz Night is growing each year. From one table of eight SCBWI members in 2014 to three tables this year! And no wonder. The book quiz, with Glen Swift as MC, is always lively and entertaining. It is a chance to catch up with friends, network with colleagues and even learn a few things we didn’t know about books, movies, writers, illustrators and how to call an answer across a large table without giving it away to the table next door. In the heat of the moment this is a very difficult thing to achieve.  Incidentally the quiz night is a fund raiser for the International Board on Books for Young people. The acronym is almost as obscure and difficult to comprehend as SCBWI itself, although it does roll off the tongue a lot more easily.

IBBY plays an important part in promoting Australian children’s books overseas. Especially at the International Book Fair in Bologna, Italy, each year. If you’ve never been to the Bologna Book Fair, think about factoring it in to your next overseas trip. Even if you can’t stay for all four days of the Fair, just visiting is a unique experience. Thousand of book lovers, promoters, sellers and creators from all over the world gathered in one place is mind-boggling.  But then so is the IBBY Quiz Night.

I’m afraid you’ll have to wait until next year now. But I’ll try to remind you ahead of time.

Henry Lawson, a contemporary of the Coolgardie bush poet, Dryblower Murphy.

I have just been an article by Kerrie Davies’ about her new book A Wife’s Heart: The Untold Story of Bertha and Henry Lawson (UQP) and I find myself asking the question, ‘Is the work of a writer of genius worth any less because of flaws in his or her character?’

We know that many of our most famous writers were flawed human beings (as indeed we all are in some way). Dylan Thomas, Roald Dahl, Beatrix Potter and many others were notoriously alcoholics, manic depressives or just plain grumpy. George Robinson of Angus and Robinson, Henry Lawson’s publisher, is quoted as saying ‘I knew Henry even then (before he married Bertha) was a confirmed drinker: had at times a nasty temper, and all the other things that go to make a genius hard to live with.’ However, is it not because of their tortured souls that their writing is so powerful and speaks so directly to us.

It appears that Bertha was given plenty of warnings, but went ahead and married Henry in secret, in defiance of her mother, George Robinson and other colleagues. It is pointless ask ‘Why did she do it?’ She was in love with him, and he with her. They were consenting adults. Even after the marriage had broken down irretrievably Bertha would not malign Henry, especially in front of their two children. She never remarried and asked left instructions that she was to be buried in the same plot as he was, thirty five years after he died.

Although they never met the two women, Bertha Lawson and Clara Saunders, have much in common. The Lawsons were married in 1896 when Bertha was nineteen and Henry twenty eight. Clara married Arthur Williams in 1894 when she was sixteen and he was twenty eight. Both women died in 1957, having outlived their husbands by many years and brought up their children, single handedly, in extremely difficult times. There were no social security benefits to help them and they relied solely on their own intelligence and a lot of hard work. Henry Lawson and Clara’s friend, Dryblower Murphy, were contemporaries, competing for places in the newspapers and anthologies being published at that time. Dryblower Murphy was the most famous of the Coolgardie bush poets and Clara was a great fan of the poems and stories of both men.

I’m sure that if Clara and Bertha had ever met they would have had a lot to talk about.