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While I’ve already worked out the ending of the third and final volume of the Jingera trilogy, I’m still figuring out precisely how to get there. I can tell you when it when it will end though — in 1971 or 1972. And it will also end in October 2011, which is the date my contract says I must deliver the final volume to Random House Australia.
Already I know I’m going to be sad to see the characters leave me because they’ve become my close friends, the villains excepted. I’ve lived with them for six years. When the final volume is published in 2012, I’ll reluctantly separate from them like a parent seeing her children leave home. Their stories will span a decade and a half, a period of quite profound change in Australian society.
After this it will be time to move on. Maybe then I can go back to writing my story of Peter Vincent’s grandparents or people like them, and set this in Australia prior to Federation.
Or perhaps instead I’ll write about this new age we live in, an age of information overflow, of surveillance, and of Wikileaks.
Around a year ago, when Stillwater Creek was published, I wrote a blog on this website claiming that there was no connection between being an economist and being a writer of novels. Now I think I was wrong. Logic, a crucial characteristic of an academic economist’s way of thinking, was helpful in weaving together the various stories in The Indigo Sky. As a very simple example, when working out the architecture of the book, I constructed a matrix with each column representing one of the characters whose viewpoint I am writing from and each row representing the passage of time, so the first row is where the action starts in the last row is where it ends. This structure I frequently revised. While this framework might seem very constraining to some writers, I find it allows me to keep track of where I am. Once I get into one of these cells within the matrix, I can then forget all about the framework and just write spontaneously within that cell.
How else does being an economist affect how I write? The socioeconomic issues that I’ve worked on as an economist for years have a tendency to come bobbing up in the fiction when I least expect them. You might ask what were these economic studies that relate to The Indigo Sky? With co-authors, I’ve worked on statistical analyses comparing Indigenous and non-Indigenous health outcomes, and also on ethnic and gender discrimination.
And finally for today, what about the reverse – does creative writing help with the day job? Only in the sense of speeding up the writing. Economists talk of stylised facts or empirical regularities. These are based firmly on the data.
People often say that they can remember precisely what they were doing when certain major or shocking events occurred. Events such as the assassination of John Kennedy. The first man on the moon. The death of Princess Diana. The assassination of John Lennon.
A pivotal event that I remember very vividly was the release of the Bringing them Home Report.[1] I first heard about in 1997 when I was living in Britain and one evening switched on BBC Radio 4. The report was devastating. It was shocking. And I, an Australian who had grown up in Australia, had no idea that this had been going on.
Perhaps it was no surprise that the character Lorna Hunter appeared spontaneously in Stillwater Creek, and more consciously in The Indigo Sky. The latter was my own apology. Though Lorna is important in The Indigo Sky, I haven’t written from her point of view –apart from the opening scene. That would be stealing her story as well as her childhood.
Lorna is a strong character and she will not be vanquished. But she will be politicized by her experiences at Gudgiegalah Girls’ Home.
A second related event that I recall very vividly was the apology by Kevin Rudd to the Stolen Generations. Well over a decade after the report, it was a deeply moving apology on behalf of the non-Indigenous Australian people. I intended to go to Parliament to listen to the broadcast and watch the apology on the screen. But I was late driving back from the airport and could find nowhere to park; until I got eventually to the university and I sat in the car and listened, on the radio, to this long overdue apology.
We have apologised, and yet as a nation we still have a long way to go.
[1] Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families, April 1997.
The answer to this question is simple: historical accident. When I signed a two book deal with Random House Australia back in 2009, they stipulated that the second book should be either a sequel or a prequel to Stillwater Creek. I flirted with the idea of a prequel; I’d always fancied writing a novel set in Australia prior to Federation. But was it stretching things too far to view a novel set six decades prior to 1957 as a prequel? I didn’t think so: after all, the main characters could have been Peter Vincent’s grandparents – or great grandparents. Full of enthusiasm, I ran this past my agent and, in the nicest possible way, she disabused me of the notion that this would fulfill the definition of a prequel. What about a bit closer in time, she suggested. But I didn’t really want to write about the characters in Stillwater Creek prior to 1957 because in a sense the reader already knew where they came from. So that left me with a sequel. And the more I thought about this, the more I loved this idea and the happier I was with my agent for her suggestions.
In the end I chose to pick up the story four years beyond the end of Stillwater Creek, because that gave me a chance to explore the development and evolving dilemmas of some of the characters. So once 1961 was chosen, off I went to read about the period. The books that most influenced me are listed at the end of the novel.
In fact 1961 was a fascinating period historically. It was the time when the civil rights movement was developing; it was a time when the freedom rides in the US were beginning; it was a time when issues of women’s rights as well as black rights were emerging. It was also after Aboriginal people in Australia had been given a vote at the federal level but before the referendum on amendments to the Australian constitution relating to Indigenous Australians. And the part of New South Wales in which The Indigo Sky is set was perhaps one of the most racist areas of New South Wales, as demonstrated in the book by historian Mark McKenna, Looking for Blackfellas’ Point.
I think a lot of writers have difficulty answering this sort of question about their work because there are so many layers in most novels. For example, I’ve just finished reading the wonderful book by Rose Tremain, a writer whom I greatly admire, entitled Music and Silence. This is a historical novel set in the years 1629 to 1630 at the Danish court, and it is written from many different perspectives. Rose Tremain pulls this off brilliantly. But how would you describe the novel in one sentence? Or even in several sentences? I look at the blurb on the back cover of the novel and I see that the publisher has chosen to focus on only one of the stories, stated in just four sentences.
When people ask me what The Indigo Sky is about, I struggle to come up with a short answer, though in one word, you might say it is about — bullying. The material on the back cover gives us the story of The Indigo Sky as an adventure yarn, and that is indeed one aspect of the novel. And I certainly hope that readers will become so caught up in the narrative that they want to turn the page to find out what’s going to happen next.
But another way of describing the content of the book is to focus on some of the issues. So I could also say that The Indigo Sky is shaped by the stories of Lorna, a resilient young Aboriginal woman, and Philip, a vulnerable musical prodigy. Although from very different backgrounds – Lorna is from a dispossessed and impoverished family, and Philip from a wealthy and privileged one – there are parallels in their experiences. Both are thrown into tough environments with institutionalized bullying. Both are cut off from their families. For Lorna, censorship precludes interaction with the outside world, while Philip’s stutter impedes communication. How each will survive – or not – is one of the main threads of the novel. Their narratives are connected by the strong mother-and-daughter team of Ilona, the refugee from Latvia, and her independent-minded daughter, Zidra. Other characters’ stories weave through the book: George Cadwallader, the butcher with a romantic streak and a troubled marriage, and his brilliant son, Jim, whose tender and subtle feelings towards Zidra develop as the tale unfolds.
Just as the writer has trouble summarizing the novel, there is often little agreement among readers. I find really interesting the diversity of interpretations of a novel made by different people. Of course that’s because every reader has his or her own imagination and individual history, and these together determine what aspects of a novel they connect with. This is one of the fascinating things about the writer-reader relationship – the enormous variety in readers’ responses to something over which the writer has labored for months or years. And some of what a reader may discover might well take the writer completely by surprise.
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