Grab the chance to see the SSPP production of Fox

One of the great joys of School Holidays is that they provide an excuse for going to Spare Parts Puppet Theatre. Fox was showing during these holidays.

The first production of this stunning show was staged in 2015 and my friend and I took all four children to see it. They were, of course, four years younger then, the little one just four years old. Recently we asked them how much they remembered about the show from last time. ‘Not much’ was the consensus. ‘Good,’ we said. ‘It will be quite new to you then.’ At this point the eldest, who had been fourteen at the time, began to dredge up some details from what seemed to her to be a very long time ago. Hearing her recollections sparked the interest of the others. ‘Does the crow die?’  her brother wanted to know. She refused to tell. After a few unsuccessful attempts at making her spill the beans everyone decided they needed to go and see the show again to find out.

With tickets duly booked and all four children in tow my friend and I met at the theatre. There was a mixed audience ranging from toddlers to teenagers but, once the show began, there was not a sound from the auditorium. From the youngest to the eldest, everyone was absolutely mesmerised by the story unfolding on stage. In a combination of dance, drama, music and sound effects this powerful story, adapted from the picture book by Margaret Wild and Ron Brooks, wove its timeless spell. My friend and I were blown away, not only by the stunning production of this immensely powerful story, but by the fact that, for 50 minutes, over a hundred people of all ages sat watching in complete silence. Usually, in children’s theatre, at least one kid wants to go to the toilet. But this time no one moved.

At the restaurant afterwards we all agreed. There are some stories that speak to everyone. And this is one of them.

Inside the kitchen of a prospector’s hut, Coolgardie 1894

Well … to say that a Coolgardie Safe was the forerunner of the refrigerator is probably an oversimplification. In the areas I grew up in (before electricity) even refrigerators were not what they are today. We were very excited when our first fridge arrived! It ran on kerosine and had a tray at the bottom which had to be refilled daily – much like our old Coolgardie Safe really, except that it had water in its trays. My mother made ice-cream, which was the height of luxury, and we put coloured water in the ice-block trays and made pretend icy poles.

Our Coolgardie Safe was a manufactured one but in 1892, when Clara set off on her big adventure to the new diggings, they were made by the prospectors from empty 40 gallon kerosine tins. Dozens of nail holes were punched into all four sides of the square tins and pieces of hessian were hung on the outsides. A door was cut in the front and shallow metal trays were improvised to fit on the top, and slide underneath. A few holes were also made around the edges of the top tray which was then filled with water. The water dripped slowly down, soaking the hessian and eventually collecting in the bottom tray. The constant desert winds blew through the wet hessian and kept the food inside cool and safe from most of the marauding flies, insects and the odd animal.

Did I show you this picture last week?

Found at last. The inside front page of Clara’s ‘Memories’

Black Jack Anderson leapt out from the shadows in the Maritime Museum when I was researching something else entirely. Rose de Freycinet tapped me on the shoulder at a wine dinner. But I had to work much harder to find Clara Saunders.

All three of these larger-than-life people from early WA history had changed their names. Black Jack Anderson for the obvious reason of avoiding being locked up. Rose when she married Louis de Freycinet. Clara Saunders three times as she outlived successive husbands. She was a pioneer in her own right, but by the time I came looking for her in the Battye Library she was all but lost among the precious documents and artefacts in their gargantuan collection. The Battye Library staff are wonderful; always knowledgeable and helpful. A computer search of their catalogue brought up details of Clara’s wedding to Arthur Williams in 1894 – the first European wedding ever to be held in the frontier town of Coolgardie. There were also a couple of letters and a lease application for a property at the Ninety Mile. But I was looking for something much more substantial. In my previous research I had found two different references to a journal of some sort, written by Clara, describing her life as one of only two women who went out into the desert with the first rush of two thousand men, when there was nothing there but sand. What an adventure for a fourteen year old girl. But where was this journal of hers? What had become of it? Did it still exist?

Looking back now I can see that the search for, and eventual discovery, of Clara’s ‘Memories’ has become a story of its own – almost as exciting and absolutely crucial to the one I can now tell in my new historical fiction, Life Blood.

Stay tuned.

Elaine Forrestal inner office surrounded by friends – books, puppets, pictures

During the week I was at a function where good wine is offered and small-talk is expected. I’m not very good at small-talk, but found myself in conversation with a woman who launched into a monologue about how lonely I must be, working away at my desk all day, on my own. ‘Well you’re an author aren’t you?’ she said, in response to my gob-smacked silence. ‘I have a friend who is an author and she says it’s a very lonely profession – very isolated.’ Immediately I got a picture in my head of her friend the author, pinning away in her upstairs garret, and I said, ‘Yes, but I’m never lonely.’ She obviously didn’t believe me because she gave me a searching look, then proceeded to ask probing questions about every aspect of my working life.

Sure, I work alone every day in my office overlooking the back garden. But how could I be lonely? The garden is full of birds coming and going, nesting, learning to fly and singing to me.  Inside I am surrounded by my puppets, my books, my favourite artworks on the walls. They keep me company.  And most importantly there are my characters. Each morning I look forward to going into my office to reconnect with them. I want to know what they have been up to while I have been sleeping, walking on the beach, shopping, socialising. Pretty soon I find they have drawn me back into their world, which is full of action, suspense and mystery.

Who could possibly be lonely with all that going on?

The port of Toulon, France, where the Uranie departed in 1817 on its voyage around the world

I’m always excited to see a new translation of a story that is close to my heart. In this case it’s the story of Rose de Freycinet, who stowed away on her husband’s ship, the Uranie, in 1817. Dr J. Paul Gaimard was the surgeon on board and saved Rose’s life when she was poisoned by eating an unripe olive in the islands north of Australia. Like Rose, Dr Gaimard kep[t a very detailed account of the Uranie’s voyage around the world from 1817 to 1820. Unlike Rose his notebooks have never been translated into English.

However, my friend John Milsom from Cambridge, UK, has been working away at translating  

sections of these fascinating documents. Until recently the wealth of knowledge contained in the ten Gaimard notebooks has been accessible only to French speakers, in spite of the originals being held in the State Library of Western Australia. But because there are celebrations to mark the 200th anniversary of the visit of the Uranie to Guam this year (2019) John has decided to publish, in eBook format, an English translation of Dr Gaimard’s notebooks which describe this visit. The Uranie arrived in Guam at the end of a particularly trying stint of five months in the Pacific Ocean without making landfall. Everyone on board was exhausted. More than one third of the crewmen were ill and Rose had declared that she was heartily sick of this constant sailing in the name of science. ‘I confess that I can’t get excited about it,’ she wrote to her best friend in France. When the ship finally reached Guam she wrote, ‘The Lord be praised!’

John Milsom’s writing is easy to read. He sticks closely to the original notebooks while carefully selecting the most informative, humorous and engaging anecdotes to tell the remarkable story of this epic voyage that became an important part of our Australian history. Download The Urnaie in Guam, by John Milsom.

One of Karen Blair’s Illustration from The Puddle Hunters by Kirsty Murray, published by Allen and Unwin

For the second year in a row the Rottnest ferries are cancelled, the weather is lousy and the wind has blown down all our signs. But the intrepid SCBWI Rottnest Retreaters are undaunted. At the new venue, Paper Bird Bookshop in Fremantle, the chairs are moved, power cables are found and connected, power-points and thumb-drives spring to life. And in spite of everything the good humour and camaraderie of participants and hard-working organisers remains in tact.

The International Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators plays a vital role in the lives and careers of the whole writing and illustrating community. Where else can you get to meet publishers one on one, show them your work face to face, and have it individually critiqued by them? Publishers are such busy people and most publishing houses are so swamped with manuscripts that they have to close their books to anything unsolicited. And yet each year the amazing SCBWI West committee manages to entice not one, but two of them across the Nulabor to sunny (ha ha) Western Australia to join us and our very own Cate Sutherland from Fremantle Press for four days or more of professional interaction, socialisation and relaxation.

I hate to think where we would be without you guys. Bravo and heartfelt thanks.

Cover of ‘Celebrate: The End of Year Reciter’

Ever since I was a child I have written stuff – stories, poems, essays, reports. I have used writing as an outlet and an input. For me it has been a way of releasing anger, recording moments of great joy, clarifying my thought or explaining complex emotions. It has been my go-to method of releasing life’s tensions and solving problems.

I am a prolific story writer, but poems are rare gems and always come to me at times of heightened emotion. The last one I wrote was for my mother’s funeral in 2012. Like most authors I am a magpie, picking up ideas from everywhere, constantly searching for new ways of making sense of the world and different ways to describe what I find. Sometimes a poem delivers the words to capture an experience or an idea so perfectly that I’m totally blown away. As a child of the Wheatbelt, growing up in small country towns, I was particularly gob-smacked by this line from the poem ‘Return’ by Gregory Day, ‘… the town’s an ashtray always being emptied and refilled.’ It so perfectly encapsulates the way the population of a small town swells and ebbs away on a regular basis, taking some people with it, leaving others behind with empty spaces to be refilled.

On that note of praise for poetry I might just go and write a poem. I’ll have to do it quickly though, before someone comes along and empties the ashtray of my mind.

Elaine Forrestal’s poem published in ‘Celebrate’

(‘Return’ was published in Review, The Weekend Australian, May 25-26, 2019)

Moira Court’s art both reflects and reinvents life (from Miss Llewellyn-Jones Goes to town)

When life imitates art, colliding with it as it did during the recent six-day search for a missing woman in dense bush around Bluff Knoll, should we be surprised?

The art of writing fiction demands a strong connection with life. As authors we must convince our readers the story we are telling is real, no matter wether we are writing fantasy, science fiction, magical realism. Readers will not suspend their disbelief unless we are able to convince them that our characters have similar hopes and fears, loves and hates, vulnerabilities to their own. Even robot characters, while staying true to their mechanical nature, must have some human frailty in order to connect with the reader. Settings can be other-worldly. Dialogue can be simply a series of expressive grunts or entirely body language. But there must be something totally convincing about the characters. At their heart there must be a fundamental humanity, a recognisable emotion.

In other words, no matter how outrageously different we imagine our invented characters to be, they must have enough vulnerability for readers to feel a connection with them. If a reader ends up not caring whether a central character lives or dies there is no incentive to keep reading.

That would be a tragedy of a different kind.

Moira Court’s artwork goes beyond representing the scene, it distills the essence

For writers of fiction there are two attributes you really need. A knack for writing dialogue and passionate attention to detail. Of course there are others, but these two are the essentials. And they don’t just fall from the sky as a free gift to you. You must work at getting these two things right before you can reap the rewards.

In an interview with the late Peter Temple, whose body of work straddles the boundary between crime writing and literary fiction, Adrian McKinty commented on the great novelist’s excellent use of dialogue and asked how someone like him, born in the UK and coming to Australia as an adult, could get the Australian voice so right? Peter Temple said,’Be a good listener.’ It sounds easy, but he doesn’t just mean listen, he means practice the art of listening. Pay attention to the shifting tone of voice, the differing length of pauses, the enormous range of body language that goes with any verbal communication. That’s at the same time as you are thinking about a person’s accent and how to capture that on the page so that your readers will not find it confusing to read.

And if you happen to already be a person for whom attention to detail is a habit you will start off ahead of the field. If not, you must work hard to develop the skills, the patience, and a sort of sixth sense about where the crux of a matter lies. You must learn how to jot things down, to quickly make a meaningful note of the details and to only take what your reader needs from research you are doing. Adrian McKinty says that in Peter Temple’s books it is always obvious that he has walked his landscapes, sailed his waterways, talked to people and figured out not just what they are saying, but how they are saying it.

Hard work, but essential to well written novels.