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“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.
It is publication day and I’m feeling exposed, out in the open, caught in the spotlight and struggling to sound wise.
What is your new book about?
“The broad stream of life narrowed down to seventy years of Australian existence, and structured around the life of a drunk.”
Can I say that?
I hear the publicity clock ticking. There is a great silence out there, where I trust copies are being read by booksellers and reviewers, interviewers and opinion-makers, but I haven’t heard a peep from anyone.
No doubt a critic/reviewer is, at this very moment, somewhere in Australia, scoring my penetration of the national psyche, if that’s what I’ve even attempted.
I certainly had in mind a character to this country we can’t escape taking on: expansive, far-sighted, welcoming – or narrow, bitter, and dry. Words themselves have organic origins, more than you’d think. The Australian accent evokes a landscape in its vocabulary. It speaks of endurance and scorns false expectations.
On “background” I can talk, if need be, all day. But on meaning? Reading is for enjoyment, emotion, indefinable satisfaction. Meaning is for critics.
It’s a mistake to think of writers knowing about meaning, the way critics know what they know about a piece of work once it is done.
Writing a novel is mostly about solving problems that might be called technical. But a novel cannot be constructed logically. Ultimately it comes from mysterious place in the writer, which is disclosed to the reader dramatically. This idea frustrates the intellect, which believes in creativity as a concept, but finds it unforthcoming face to face. It does not help (during the writing process) that a persistent feeling of failure is often a sign that things are going well, because it’s also a sign that they aren’t. Welcome to the world of the writer.
Talking about a new book is hard because several years’ work resists summary in a few sentences. The book has been written, re-written, polished, edited with care, designed, printed, and distributed. Now I want it to speak for itself.
For the first few days after ripping open the padded bag on the Post Office steps I hold my glorious, irresistible baby all to myself: “When Colts Ran”, smooth dry touch of the pages, rich colours of the cover design, intricate tickle of the typeface, which runs from beginning to end with a beguiling chuckle.
Now I have to kick it out into the world.
There is an outrageous vanity to getting a book into print – a midnight whim converted to an architectural structure, a wisp of the imagination dressed up from the props cupboard into an epic of the mental stage, a passing glance grown into a love story, enacted under a reading lamp.
Here I am, with a new novel on the market, a typical author with a book to promote. You, my possible reader – I want you to love this book like no other. And statistically, you are a woman. Statistically, “You are the one who buys books.” Statistically, “You do not like reading books by blokes.”
Definition of bloke: a male with an emphasised masculinity bordering on the insensitive?
Blokiness doesn’t fit me. If I write about worlds of men, to greater or lesser degrees, it’s the feeling that matters. Feeling runs deep and is no respecter of gender.
There is much in “When Colts Ran” about friendship between men, “that undemonstrative, unexpressed, almost unconscious affection which, with men, will often make the greatest charm of their lives, but which is held by women to be quite unsatisfactory and almost nugatory.”
(from Anthony Trollope, “The Vicar of Bullhampton”, 1870)
The irrelevance of fixed categories – “gay”, “black”, “women’s”, etcetera – is so basic to the highest achievements of the novel as an art form, in its depiction of the broad stream of life, as to be almost embarrassing to raise between writer and reader. I am not gay, black, or female, but I have been enthralled by fiction about gay, black, or women’s life. A love story is the greatest magnet for reader interest, but there does not need to be a love story as such. All intense accounts of being human are love stories. Our passions are in thrall to mortality. It’s why even
“writing about nothing” can make fascinating reading. When I pick up a new novel in a bookshop I flick through pages 1, 40, and 120. Then to a page or two close to the end. If there’s a sizzle of surprise, enchantment, wisdom, humour, and a strong feel for language (with a hit like a gin and tonic up the sinuses) it’s for me. (Choose your own page numbers from “When Colts Ran”. I can live with that.)
Lurking in bookshops, as authors do, and trying to look invisible, I have seen my titles bypassed by women in a small scene at the cash register. 
And sitting at the signing table after a writers’ festival forum, I have been told more than once that a novel allegedly about sheep (“The Ballad of Desmond Kale”) or one supposedly about two men (“Mr Darwin’s Shooter”) is being bought for Dad on Father’s Day.
I am truly grateful, but I do want to say: boys, men and their characters are to the forefront, yet both these novels are not just informed by a love of women, but depict a quality of being alive in their women characters, inseparable from what the books are. I want you to hold “When Colts Ran” in your hands, delight in the dry, earthy colours of the cover, brown as a bottle of beer, red as a bushfire, pale grey and white
as dusty moonlight. I want you to sink into the world of its pages. Of course I would like you to go out and buy a copy as soon as you’ve finished reading this blog entry. Even better, hit the PURCHASE button now. But, as the author, to be honest, am I the person to make
that recommendation?
Think what you need to know. “Is it a good read?” All I know is this: if I am not surprised and delighted, thrilled by some sort of complete but satisfying strangeness arising from under my hand as I put a book together, then the reader will not be either…
On that basis, you have my recommendation.
If a novel or short story doesn’t surprise the writer it won’t surprise the reader.
Almost from a whim, a solid, real-seeming structure evolves to a length of around 80,000-140,000 words. If the writing goes well there’s a first draft in twelve to eighteen months. All seven of my novels up to this one grew in this way from a word or a phrase that wouldn’t let me go.
But “When Colts Ran” started quite differently. At first I didn’t think of it as a novel at all, but (if it was to be anything) as a long- and short-story collection. It still has some aspects of that shape, and might usefully be thought of as such in the initial approach by readers.
First there was a failed novel about a runaway boy (Colts) and his bumptious mentor, an old soldier (Major Buckler). I finished that novel ten years ago; it was about to be published as “To the Night Sky” when I backed out because of a nagging feeling that I had failed to bring it to a proper finish. 
Over the 2000s (that whirling run of zeroes) parts of what became “When Colts Ran” were published as stories in “The Bulletin”, “Best Australian Stories”, and “Making Waves: Ten Years of the Byron Bay Literary Festival”. Another part won the O. Henry Prize as one of the best twenty stories published in the USA (2008). The accolades encouraged me to bring them together but they had more in common than a collection of separate stories. Kingsley Colts and Major Dunc Buckler interpenetrated every part. I’d written a story about a rugby playing minister who became a quadriplegic. Colts was the referee in the match. And another about two boys who witness a horrific car accident. Colts runs past and is fixed in memory.
Colts, the runaway boy, the title character, passes through the seven ages of man in this novel – he is present in every chapter from adolescence to old age, watching, walking away, coming back, reliable, unreliable, losing himself in drink and dreams, while rousing love, affection, and sometimes terminal exasperation. Colts is my hymn to the virtues of failure, the way life has of conveying hope while “singing of despair” (to adapt Cyril Connolly’s phrase on F. Scott Fitzgerald).
There was also the love story between the old soldier and a barmaid – it went nowhere, originally, but revisiting the drafts I found (I think) a richer alternative outcome, a passage of the years consolation. Major Buckler went back to his wife, a painter – though relegated to an old pink caravan in a bush back yard –
and I went back to that story and took it in its new direction, spanning the years 1942-2009. This gave the yet to be fully assembled manuscript a chronological sweep matching my lifetime, not my autobiography, though I was able to report on each decade from the point of view of a participant, and to be truthful, all novels draw from the author’s life, but recognisable only to the extent (as Fanny Trollope wrote) that you can “recognise a pig in a sausage”.
Another part was a long story about a father and his daughters, the wish for male friendships in a household of women. The hero of one chapter (or pair of chapters) is the villain of the next. This pattern of existence gave me the balance, and rhythm, between the separate parts. In assembling the sections I found I could introduce almost completely new characters right up to the end, and still have them connecting back and towards all other elements of the story in a satisfying way. I hope the reader feels the same.
I would have to say, too, that the Australian landscape is a character in this sense – a villain in drought years, a hero when it rains.
At the end of last year, while finalising the not quite final draft of “When Colts Ran”, I changed the title to “Made in Australia”, words I saw embossed on the bottom of a galvanised iron wheelbarrow as I hosed out dirt.
The lettering came into view like an aerial shot – as if the worn-down landscape was turning itself into words.
“Great title,” said a friend.
“Terrible title,” said another.
“It suits what I’ve written,” I said. “Somehow.”
When hope and despair overlay each other you know you’re in Australia. You’ve been stamped by the place – branded.
That was my thought.
I had an old soldier in this book, a young boy, a betrayed wife: they chased each other through the wastelands of Western NSW and South Australia, hardly knowing how to reconcile themselves to each other, until the country itself made its claim on them, and showed a way.
The main character of the novel is Kingsley Colts, whose “run” starts at the age of sixteen and is still going when he’s well into his eighties. Fleeing Sydney, Colts goes bush and ends up spending the rest of his life there. Great expectations blighted him when he was young. As an orphan and “ward of Legacy” too much was asked of him. In the rhetoric of two world wars he was the inheritor of national sacrifice. Could anyone really be worthy of that?
Most people have to reach up in life in order to make themselves. Colts is an example of someone who needs to reduce or detract from himself. Colts becomes a connoisseur of waste, in the Australian way – vast spaces at his disposal, where paranoia and visions of betterment compete. Alcohol, in liquid quantities greater than ever flowed down an Australian river, pour down his throat.
Colts is a presence in the lives of around twenty characters, men, women, children. Their loves, their heart breaks, their dreams, rivalries and disappointments are shaped by where they live, as are their sun-crusted skins and blistered noses, and, let it be known, their sardonic imaginative energy.
So into an Australia Post overnight express bag the manuscript went with its new title. My editor liked it, sales and marketing gave the thumbs up. There had never been a novel of that name before (I searched). When I looked over the draft, it seemed that every word was indeed squeezed out of the soil. “Made In Australia” would do.
Then, not long before advance copies were printed, I learned from a friend (despite my previous searches) that Chris Kennedy had published a novel called “Made in Australia” just a few months back. I was disappointed, but, Good on him, I thought, he got there first. Difficult as it was for all concerned, I reinstated the title “When Colts Ran”. There is no copyright in titles, but I value uniqueness – why else write?
Now I think that “When Colts Ran” says it all.
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