A Writer’s Attachments by Roger McDonald

“How could this loud, obstreperous man be the Anthony Trollope who wrote with such extraordinary insight into the hearts of men and, even more extraordinary, of women?” (Victoria Glendining, Trollope, 1992)

Somebody once told me it was hard to believe that someone as stupid as I was could have written something as wise as I had (stupidly, I can’t remember which book that was).

I didn’t have to be very clever to know I was being paid a compliment as a writer, and whatever the meaning of it was in relation to my standing as a human being, that was something for me to reflect on separately from my vocation, if I wanted to.

Trollope was the dunce of his family, and “last boy” at Harrow School. When he started writing novels, a supposed friend didn’t like something he’d written, but (with artful malice) admired it enough to say that he couldn’t believe Trollope had written it.

My instinct is that Shakespeare fitted this category. He was everybody in one. An element to his story – the unremembered man – fits this version of writerly foolishness. To this day it is argued that “Shakespeare couldn’t have done it.”

I think I must have been thinking of something like this with Kingsley Colts, in “When Colts Ran”:

Everything about Colts is a failure. But something about him gives hope.

Now that “When Colts Ran” is published, I have a feeling of being finished, in a fictional sense, with the NSW landscapes connected to where I was born, which have given me, in some way or other, eight novels since 1979 including this one.

I have no idea what I will write next, except that this week I am in Rockhampton, Queensland, finishing this blog on a sweaty laptop perched on my knee – Rocky where my father was born and died, where my mother has lived for almost fifty years, and my younger brother (who left the Riverina for tropical Australia at the age of seventeen) came after selling his farm north of Clermont.

With a Victorian mother, a Queensland father, we were born, raised, and educated in New South Wales. But every few years, on family holidays, we came up to Rocky by train from Temora, or by car from Bourke, and – one astounding year – alone, I came by DC3 from Sydney, a milk run up the coast at around 5,000 feet. After my father took early retirement from the Presbyterian ministry my parents came up here and found they could buy a house. So they stayed. I was a first-year-out teacher, then, at Murrumburrah-Harden. I lived in the Criterion Hotel, which became the Five Alls in “When Colts Ran”. Last time I saw the “Cri” it was a pile of rubble. It no longer exists except in memory.

Although I was the one who remained behind, in the south, I tried living in Queensland between my mid 20s and mid 30s. It never felt like home. When I was born (at Young) we lived at Bribbaree, a small town, hardly more than a locality, on the Forbes-Stockinbingal railway line. Maybe it’s the cool night air, the dry grass, the blue distances. Maybe it’s the bare desperation, and sudden beauty, of sheep country. It’s always had its hooks into me. In my writing I’ve always circled back to that primal landscape where I blinked my eyes open on the world, went to school, and came back as a young teacher after university. It’s background to “1915”, “Slipstream”, “Rough Wallaby”, “Water Man”, and “The Slap” – and of “When Colts Ran” – a fictional compound of the Central West, Eastern Riverina and Bourke, and the Dividing Range slicing across the Canberra-Monaro, where I have now lived a good part of my adult life – at 800 metres and with 100 frost days a year while Rockhampton swelters.

This side of Rocky is protected from any further housing estates by the wide low ring of billabongs and lagoons that circle to the west. Apart from the occasional weekend eruption of party noises, it is as rural a suburban enclave as could be found anywhere. The Queensland outback starts at the end of the street.

The closest I’ve come to it in fiction is when Randolph Knox crosses into Queensland from the South Australian side with a mob of sheep (Chapter 6, “When Colts Ran”). The geographical placement of those scenes is more than a thousand kilometres south-west from here. Barely into Queensland at all, Knox turns the mob away and heads for the cold country.