Fiona Palmer - Author

Fiona Palmer

Author of Rural Fiction including The Road Home (to be released in April 2012):

For Dad: Frank Coates ‘Softly Calls the Serengeti’ and Goldie Goldbloom’s The Paperbark Shoe because it’s set in the WA wheat belt.

For Mum: I’ve purchased two guide books on Italy, as she’s planning a trip in 2013.

I brought myself another Matthew Reilly Book, Ice Station and Fiona McCallum’s Nowhere Else, which my mum has already ‘borrowed’.

Kate Gordon - Author

Kate Gordon

Young Adult Author including Thyla

1. Black Painted Fingernails by Steven Herrick – I’ve been a Herrick fan for about 15 years, and this is his best to-date. A rare prose (rather than his usual free verse) novel, this is a simple road-trip story, beautifully written, with a lot of heart. Adored it.
2. Dangerously Placed by Nansi Kunze – A fabulous, funny, thrilling sci-fi YA novel, from one of this country’s most talented YA writers. About to be (deservingly) published overseas, this is a brilliantly quirky read that will have you in stitches and goosebumps the whole way through.
3. Angel Arias by Marianne de Pierres – A lushly dark, gothic, mind-bendingly original paranormal from the multi-talented Ms de Pierres. The sequel to the equally impressive Burn Bright, this novel is full of twists and turns and delicious darkness.
4. The Fix by Nick Earls – It’s always an event when my idol, Mr Earls, has a new book out, and his latest did not disappoint. Deviating slightly from his usual “bloke lit” oeuvre into something a bit more gritty and crime-caperish, The Fix will keep you guessing from start to finish. Love, love, loved it.
5. Only, Ever, Always by Penni Russon – a poem in prose form. This is a spellbindlingly dreamlike novel is part fantasy, part grief-soaked reality and every sentence is so beautifully crafted that it’s a work of art in its own right. Penni Russon is an incredible talent and this book is simply exquisite.

Gillian Mears - Author

Gillian Mears

Author of Foal’s Bread

1. The Biggest Estate on Earth: how Aborigines made Australia by Bill Gammage (Allen and Unwin, 2011) Anyone who has loved to walk the land and wondered what it would have been like two hundred and fifty years ago will be intrigued by this history.
2. The Wet Dark by Jess Huon (Giromondo, 2011) Stories so able to capture what it’s like to be young, be the setting Melbourne or overseas, that I was often reminded of a wild and mesmerizing dance.
3. So This is Life by Anne Manne (MUP, 2009) I always keep a few copies of this moving memoir on hand to give to friends who also hold horses dear to their heart. One of those books you can open anywhere at random and become instantly immersed.
4. Tangara by Nan Chauncy Although you have to hunt for it on websites devoted to second hand books, when in hospital earlier this year, this old favourite from my childhood stood the test of time. At whatever age that I read an old Chauncy novel I’m enraptured by how she describes the Tasmanian land she so loved. Surely there is something very healing too, holding an old hardcover edition with a charming dust-jacket? Irresistible for those who loved books before they became digital. First editions still available if you hunt hard.
5. Riding the Rough Road by Heyward Robertson (SID Harta Publishing, 2011) Yarns of yesteryear shot through with all the author’s humour and love of horses. When diagnosed with MS as a young man, it also becomes a tender portrait of a special mother-son love.

Sara Foster - Author

Sara Foster

Author of Beneath the Shadows

1. Afterward by Rosamund Lupton – I loved Sister and looking forward to seeing what Rosamund has done with book.
2. Animal People by Charlotte Wood – I really like the sound of this one, and I’m intrigued by the topic.
3. The Hypnotist’s Love Story by Liane Moriarty – I’m a big fan of Liane Moriarty and have read all her books except the new one.
4. 1Q84 – Haruki Murakami – I’m not sure whether I’ll like this one, but as I’ve just visited Japan I’ve been reading about Murakami, and now I’m keen to read his work.
5. Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth – Alice Walker – I love Alice Walker, and read these beautiful poems a while ago, but I don’t own a copy. I can’t wait to read them again.

My Christmas Book suggestions:

1. Angela Slatter – A book of horrors
2. Karen Joy Fowler - What I Didn’t See
3. Lisa Hanett - Bluegrass Symphony
4. Robert Shearman - Everybody’s Just So, So Special
5. Cathrynne M Valente - The Girl Circumnavigated Fairyland
6. Sara Douglass - The Hall of Lost Footsteps

When We Have Wings by Claire Corbett

In a dystopian near-future, genetic engineering, radical surgery and a regime of drugs can give you something humans have always dreamed about: the ability to fly. If you have the money, you can join this self-created elite: the winged. These fliers are not only given wings; they have their own architecture, fashion, religion and politics, and build floating towers in the sky. Those who live outside the City in RaRA-land can only look up at this new species of human in wonder and despair.

Except for one remarkable girl, Peri, a refugee from RaRA-land who is prepared to sacrifice everything to get her own wings. When she kidnaps a rich family’s child, the investigation threatens to undermine the glittering world of fliers and reveal its ruthless secrets.

I believe that if one always looked at the skies, one would end up with wings

   - Gustave Flaubert

When I began writing When We Have Wings, I was excited about the possibilities of describing humans flying with their own wings as well as conscious of the accompanying dark side of exclusion from such an elite.

Flying has never been just a means of transport. We have yearned for it for so long that it has an ancient history as a powerful metaphor for freedom, power and creativity, from mythic inventor Daedalus to artist visionary Leonardo da Vinci to rocket scientist Wernher von Braun.

The advent of airplanes has done little to fulfil this longing we have to fly with our own wings; it still haunts our dreams. In my book, flight is reserved for those who are rich and powerful and can afford to make those dreams reality. My main character, Peri, is not rich or powerful but she will stop at nothing to acquire her own wings. No price is too high, she thinks, but is it? This is one of the questions the novel explores.

Claire Corbett, Author of When We Have Wings

There are many social divisions in my book: between rich and poor, fliers and non-fliers, and importantly, between the City and the rest of the country – RaRA-land as I call it. That term RaRA stands for Rural and Regional Areas and comes straight from my own experience as a state government adviser on water policy.

RaRA-land is an important setting for my main character Peri and her story. In When We Have Wings, the divide between City and RaRA-land is enforced by law. Moving to the City requires temporary work permits and sponsoring from employers. Refugees from RaRA-land flee illegally to the City. Permanent City residence permits are almost unheard of; the fact Peri has one becomes a telling clue in the investigation of her disappearance.

Australia is one of the most urbanised nations on Earth but the movement of people from the land to the cities is a global trend that is accelerating. In 2008 it was reported that for the first time in human history the number of people living in cities worldwide was greater than the population of rural areas.

When We Have Wings shows some of the dangers and consequences of this trend. Cities are becoming virtual gated communities, their populations ignoring the reality that their survival depends on the land they never see. Most urban dwellers have no idea of the size of the ecological footprint of their city, the amount of soil, fertiliser and water needed to sustain them or the consequences of land mismanagement: soil loss, rising salt, loss of diversity.

Seen from above by my main character Peri, the impact of these trends on the landscape is dramatic:

The country began to look less wild, to show more recent scars of neglect and abandonment. One of these, a dead hydroelectric dam, made Peri shiver. The great hole in the earth lay empty. Below the crumbled rim of the dam, massive chunks of concrete bristling with its steel reinforcing bars torn from the ruined curtain wall were scattered and broken down the dry wash of the extinct river like the discarded toy blocks of a giant. Concrete leaked rust stains the colour of old blood.

They followed the scar of the dead river until it petered out into exhausted land left to rising salt, its deadly white scribbles stitching scars of raw earth, eroded hills and crumbling levees. The bones of splintered farmhouses weathered under the white sun. They saw few birds, except, here and there, a crow.

It is ironic that the most exclusive elite in my near-future City are fliers, those who could soar over the land and see all this for themselves, yet ignore what is really happening in their world.

But there are exceptions. As she flees, Peri finds her way to Audax, a group of fliers who are experimenting at the extreme edge of flight and have withdrawn to the heart of a rugged wilderness, easily recognisable as the Australian bush. They have realised that the act of truly becoming fliers requires a real connection with nature. The leader of Audax says to Peri:

Most importantly, if we want to be real fliers, we will be fliers in the world. We can’t ignore the degradation of the wilderness, the air, the seas. There is no Flight without becoming part of those things.

As part of the theme of needing to care for the land, I touch on the idea of Superweeds, transformed by resistance to herbicides conferred from genetically modified crops, and smothering large areas of RaRA-land. Superweeds are not science-fiction; transfer of resistant genes from crops to wild plants is already happening, as reported recently in The Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/oct/19/gm-crops-insecurity-superweeds-pesticides).

So too is another strange aspect of future agribusiness. As a small girl, Peri is brought to a farm that belongs to Janeane, her foster aunt. She lives in a brief rural idyll among apple and banana trees, swimming in the creek, looking after Nutmeg the horse, blissfully unaware that her aunt is in fact an illegal ‘pharmer’.

‘Pharming’  – the growing of vaccines and other pharmaceuticals in crops – is already a reality; an article titled Pharmland in the Oct-Nov 2011 Australian science magazine Cosmos explores its possible benefits. In my novel, pharming is one of the few options left for the landowners of RaRA-land. As Peri grows older, she comes to realise that, while the illegality of ‘pharming’ is painful for her foster aunt Janeane, it is less painful than giving up the land altogether.

When We Have Wings sounds a warning in its portrayal of a bleak possible future for regional Australia. It does so out of a real concern for that future and a love of the land.

The main focus of the novel is on flight and on the ways it transforms the lives of my characters. To explore the beauty and exhilaration of flight meant exploring the beauties of the land my characters were flying above. It became clear to me that to love flying means also loving the land. This is something I’m certain many Australian farmers appreciate as they fly over the vastness of their land as part of their work.

It was the land that entranced Peri as she flew south that morning. She exulted in its formal, industrial beauty, all senses heightened in her nervous excitement. She reckoned she was flying at about two hundred metres and from this height she could see the patterning of colour and texture: fields strict as tiles, squares of raw red earth ripped into furrows and laid next to rectangles of emerald pasture, the joins shocking as cuts.

Acid-green pasture crumpled like silk next to rows of lavender bushes carved thick as stone. Clear sounds rose singly through warming air: the falling note of one crow, the cough of an old farm truck, the swoop into full volume chanting of cicadas.

A dot moving over fields of burning gold startled her before she realised the black speck was her own shadow. She was so small against these vast fields; she and Hugo hung over this molten gold, seeming not to move at all, though she was flying swiftly.

Though I have vivid memories of travelling in and flying over South Australia, Far North Queensland and the Northern Territory, I needed more detail of what a flier would see from varying heights. During the decade it took me to write When We Have Wings, not only did books and documentaries appear based on exceptional photography of the Earth from the air but Google Earth also became available. These were invaluable tools for research; I pored over these incredible photos and flew over the land with Google Earth, checking what my characters could see from 100 metres up, 200 metres up, one kilometre, four kilometres. These views directly inspired passages such as:

The shallower water near the shore washed clear green, liquid glass, over parallel ridges of sand. The wind stirred the water and the shining green moved in the light, shimmering like an immense abalone shell with its fine silver and purple lines.

A lasting gift from researching and writing When We Have Wings was that I’m now far more aware of the sky, especially the variety and changeability of clouds. I live in the Blue Mountains, a wonderful place to watch clouds, and am fascinated by the big thunderheads, cumulus clouds exploding upwards even as I watch them, thermals whipping them hundreds of metres high. As one of my characters says, ‘clouds are the face of the weather made visible’.

Many of our most loved novels not only reflect our own lives and concerns back to us but also give us experiences of other lives we couldn’t have any other way. My hope for readers of When We Have Wings is for you to feel by the end that you really know what it is to fly.

Oh my god, exulted Peri. I am flying!

I—am—flying!

Peri was concentrating too hard to be distracted by the dazzling glitter sheeting below, light falling, sluicing over her wings like rain, air so blue she could taste it, pure as snow. It was beautiful but she wasn’t looking at it. Instead she was in it in a way she had never been in the world before.

This was Flight.

The true thing she’d struggled so hard for. It was for this she’d risked and endured so much.

It had to be worth it.

Claire Corbett

www.clairecorbett.com

Twitter: @ccorbettauthor

www.allenandunwin.com

Only Ever Always by Penni Russon

Only Ever Always by Penni Russon

Who dreams the dreamer?
 Claire lives in an ordinary world where everything is whole. But inside Claire is broken. The silvery notes of her music box allow her an escape from her grief into a dream-world, into Clara’s world.
 Clara’s world has always been broken. She finds broken things to swap at the markets; she walks the treacherous route past the brown river where lone dogs prowl; she avoids the seamy side when she can, but with powerful people pulling the strings, it’s not always possible.
 Which world is real? 
Claire’s and Clara’s paths are set to collide, and each has much to lose – or gain. 
Original and poetic, this captivating novel explores dreams, grief, friendship and love through a brilliantly constructed dystopian fantasy world. 
’Like the sound of the little loved music box that is so pivotal to the story, Penni Russon’s Only Ever Always is both deeply touching and strangely eerie, leaving the reader with a mixture of warmth and apprehension, yearning and wonder – about death, life, language, art, dreams and childhood. Fascinating and absolutely memorable.’ – Ursula Dubosarsky

Welcome Penni!

I began Only Ever Always in 2007 and it took me four years to write. It is a small novel but dense, bursting with ideas and driven by questions – questions my children ask me, or questions I ask myself. What is real? What is pretend?

If I mapped the journeys of writing this book (and I really couldn’t), there would be many winding paths looping back on themselves, as well as dead ends and blind corners. Although I have some early sketched out plans, the writing of this book was, by necessity, organic. It grew as an idea grows – in all directions, with false leads as well as true. Actually perhaps the map would look like a botanical drawing: the cross-section of a radish, with wiry hairs that lead nowhere, and a body buried under the earth with just a little scarlet poking up above, and finally the flourishing green fertile leaves at the top which is the part the reader sees.

One thing that happened during the writing process that changed the way I viewed the world and changed the way I thought about fiction was Black Saturday – the devastating bushfires of 2009. The fires came within a kilometre of my house in St Andrews. We were lucky. The change of wind that spared our house took the fires back over houses that had already burned once. People who had fought the front to exhaustion the first time were unable to face it again and perished or lost their houses. This sort of luck isn’t easy to live with.

I was haunted by loss. I felt the encroaching blackness as a dark splotch at the corner of my vision. We drove through a police blockade to get to our house, showing our licenses to prove we weren’t sightseers or looters. Fires continued to burn for days. At 3am our smoke alarm went off because there was so much residual smoke. Sunsets glowed luminescent and eerie and silent, no birds sang. The school closed and opened and closed again. Everyone was on edge. As I looked around our house I thought about the things we might have lost. I wondered what I would take. I couldn’t see anything that really mattered. Old things, new things, even photographs. Everything seemed replaceable. But more than that, everything I looked at had a mirror image – the object I carried in my head. Did I need the physical object too? Wasn’t my internal object more perfect because it lodged in my mind – untouchable, unbreakable?

Friends up the road fled their house in the fires when they saw flames coming down the hill towards them. They had two teenaged kids and a five year old (the same age as my oldest daughter – we knew them through kinder). Let’s call them Christian (16), Milly (14) and Sasha (5). As they fled the house Christian grabbed the two laptops. Milly took toothbrushes and stuff from the bathroom, the things they would need if they were spending the night away from home. She also grabbed her homework – remedial English, because in early high school it was discovered Milly had a reading disorder that somehow flew under the radar in primary school. (Later in the car, as they drove on tires melting to the rims down one blocked road and then another, Christian said to Milly, ‘Why did you grab your homework?’ Milly replied, ‘I don’t want to die dumb.’)In the car Sasha suddenly yelled out ‘Oh no, Rainbow Dash!’ (Rainbow Dash is a My Little Pony – there are millions of copies of them in K-Marts everywhere). Her mum ran inside, grabbed Rainbow Dash and then they bolted. The parents didn’t take anything for themselves. All they cared about was getting the kids into the car. Not everything is replaceable.

I think kids care about objects a lot more than adults do. Adults care about acquiring them, about the status of objects, about the things they represent. But kids care deeply for the objects themselves. They feel things for them – sorrow for the left out unloved teddy with the squished up nose. Deep inexplicable love for a stiff stuffed dog in the op shop. I even remember feeling sympathy for foods I didn’t like, a misplaced empathy for the apple I didn’t choose, left in the fruit bowl.

All my childhood toys were accidentally thrown away when I was a teenager – something that horrifies my children and incidentally is the main plot line for Toy Story 3. Something that horrified me was my best friend, on barely reaching adulthood burned hers, deliberately, in an incinerator at her family home. I felt this loss more than my own – perhaps because I had loved these things from afar, so they weren’t quite mine to hoard inside me.

I wanted to interrogate that loyalty that children have for their things and this became a main part of the characters’ journey in Only Ever Always.

“Littered on your bed are oddments, junk, bric-a-brac, the assorted miscellanea of your life, one-eyed dolls and threadbare teddy bears, two wooden ducks on wheels once joined now split, metal cars, wooden tops. Most of indeterminate value, things without history, but for the fact that they have lived here so long they have become part of you, and you couldn’t bear to excise any of them… For who are you before you own anything? A naked grub, a nothing.”

What is an object in fiction? What does it signify when we make out of words instead of physical parts a music box? Does it matter that there is no three dimensional referent? Is it any less real?

I remember how desperately I wanted to hold the book in Michael Ende’s beautiful novel The Neverending Story. How I longed to read it! But I was reading it, as Bastian read it. But I wanted to bridge the gap, push Bastian aside, seize it in my own hands.

Perhaps this discontent in our interaction with objects in novels makes them more real, because surely we feel the same with the things we have in our possession – a distance created by the very delineated boundary between us and them. As Clara muses, holding a coveted music box in her hands:

I want to hold it so close it gets inside me. I want my skin to grow over it. I want to eat it like it’s fruit. I want it to be more mine than it ever can be. It makes me feel empty, and full.

It’s not an easy thing, the marriage of humans and objects. We curate ourselves with them, our houses are museums of us, made of the things we collect and furnish our lives with – some utilitarian, some inherited, some for purely aesthetic reasons, all of uncertain value – for what are they really worth? To someone else? To us? Our houses are also museums of lost things, because something will part us eventually. Fire or flood, or invariably death – the death of our first object – our bodies, ourselves.

Penni Russon author of Only Ever Always

Thank you Penni.

You can read all about her four books here or visit her website.

She’s also on Twitter as @eglantinescake.

Caroline Overington - Author of Matilda is Missing

Caroline Overington is an award winning journalist and amazing author! She first came to my attention on Twitter, when her first book, Ghost Child was published – I must admit, I rarely find time to read the newspaper, so until then, her work was unfamiliar to me.

I delved into Ghost Child and went on to read I Came to Say Goodbye with the same gusto.

I’m really excited to have Caroline here today talking about her new book, Matilda is Missing. you can read more about this book here. Or visit Caroline’s website. She’s also on Twitter at @overingtonc

Welcome Caroline!

Matilda is Missing by Caroline Overington

I’ve recently finished writing my third – and, so far, most successful – novel, Matilda is Missing.

It’s about a custody case, gone wrong.

The main characters are Garry and his wife, Softie.

They are fighting over their only child in the Family Court.

Matilda’s only two. She doesn’t really know what’s going on, but of course, she’s right in the middle of it.

I wrote the book because I wanted to give people an idea of what it’s like to end up in the Family Court, fighting over your children with the man – or the woman – you used to love.

Of course, plenty of people already know all about it. Divorce is common, and custody disputes are also common.

We tend not to hear too much about these disputes, unless they are in our own families (it which case, we can’t avoid them, since somebody we love is usually in agony, and we can’t do anything to help them), or until a really bad custody case suddenly explodes onto the front pages, because a child (or children) have been killed.

That’s actually one of the reasons that I wrote the book – to remind people that while divorce is common, the stakes are still high.

When divorce goes wrong, it is children that suffer.

Before I wrote Matilda, I spent a year, reporting on the Family Court, for The Australian newspaper.

It’s not easy to report the Family Court.

You can’t use anyone’s name, and you have to respect the privacy of everyone in there, especially the children.

I can understand that: nobody deserves to have the painful, private details of their divorce spread all over the newspapers.

At the same time, there are things going on in the Family Court that I think we need to know about.

One of the things that people have asked me, since the book came out, is whether the two people in the book – Garry, and Softie – are real.

They are real, in the sense that I have come across many people just like them – people who are at war with each other, and over the children.

I have seen children pushed and pulled in every direction; yanked around by parents who just want to win, or to punish the other side.

I’ve seen children who never see their fathers, because Mum won’t allow it.

I’ve seen children whose fathers never bother to come to see them, even though it breaks their hearts.

I’ve seen mothers who refuse to deliver the children to their Dad, because she just can’t stand him, and she wants the children to hate him, too.

I’ve seen children who refuse to go to Mum, because Dad has made them feel so guilty about it.

Most heartbreaking of all, I have seen grandparents, whose adult children are going through a nasty divorce, who are desperately worried about whether they will ever see their grandchildren again.

I’m often asked to give advice to people who are thinking of going to the Family Court.

My advice is this: don’t do it.

That is actually the same advice that a judge gives, in Matilda is Missing.

“You want my advice about the Family Court?’’ he says. “Avoid it like the plague.’’

He doesn’t mean, don’t get divorced.

People do get divorced. It’s a fact of life. Sometimes, it’s even for the best.

But, as the judge says, “going to the Family Court is like taking a hand grenade and rolling it into a room, filled with all the people you love.’’

That’s actually true, and so my advice is, if you can keep it out of court, do.

All over Australia, there are good men and women who have separated, and have worked things out for themselves, and try every day to keep it amicable.

I know it can’t be easy.

It must take a big heart.

But in spite of their pain and anger, they manage to behave like adults, for the sake of their kids.

If only that weren’t so rare.

I hope you enjoy Matilda is Missing.

And thank you for having me here.

Cx

For those who wait by Barry Nicholls

On writing Barry Jarman’s biography

by BARRY NICHOLLS

Barry Jarman had coached me at Kensington and once foolishly claimed that I would play cricket for Australia. He was wrong but, on the other hand, he hadn’t only played Test cricket but had also worn a footy jumper for West Torrens, set up a well-known South Australian sports store and had been the jockeys’ and trainers’ representative on the SAJC. After retiring, he ran a houseboat business on the River Murray.

And did I say that, once, he captained Australia?

In a picture of Jarman and English captain Tom Graveney tossing the coin at a bleak Leeds ground in 1968, both players were leading their country for the first and only time in a Test match. The moment was almost missed because there were no photographers present – Graveney delayed the toss until they arrived.

Jarman’s story has only been told in parts.

Writers often write about the same thing, it’s just the subject that’s different.  I’m interested in how moments can define us and this is the appeal in writing Barry Jarman’s biography.

His career and to an extent his life was defined by the Queensland wicket keeper, Wally Grout, who was picked for Australia ahead of Jarman by one vote – Grout’s state team-mate Peter Burge – for the first Test of the 1957-58 tour of South Africa. Grout struggled in the first innings, broke a world record in the second with a broken hand and kept for Australia for the better part of the decade. Except for one vote, that could have been Barry Jarman.

I rang Jarman’s son, Gavin.

“Would BJ be interested in co-operating in a biography?” I asked.

“I’ll call him and let you know…It would be a small market though.”

Gavin knows his markets. He sells 250,000 small rubber balls each year. He’s also sold sand to the Middle Eastern countries but that’s another story.

Gavin rang back with the green light and I made the call to Barry Jarman. I hadn’t seen him for a long time and wasn’t sure if he knew I was a journalist.

We caught up on pleasantries. I raised the topic of writing his biography.

“Yeah. I’ve been thinking about it for a while now,” he said.

Where do you start with a biography?

You learn as you go.

After a few months of initial research, I made my way to Jarman’s neat three-bedroom house near the Burnside Village Shopping Centre.

He lived with his wife Gaynor and their dog, which was about the size of a pony but thinner. During the course of writing the book, his two daughters also moved in.  As the project developed I’d ask, “You still got your daughters living there?”

His reply was always quick as a flash: “Yeah, and the dog.”

Jarman was quick-witted, a little too quick sometimes. When I missed his quips, he’d repeat them until I acknowledged what he’d said.

The project began to take shape when Jarman showed me the scrapbooks that Gaynor had assembled and his vast collection of personal photographs, many of which have rarely been sighted.

Initially, we spoke about various parts of his career. Jarman talked well although his memory was fading. During these early visits I had enough prompts to encourage him to wheel out the well-known anecdotes but not enough detail to pin him down on hidden events. Writers need a lot of information to remind interviewees of things they have forgotten.

From Alice Springs,I emailed Jarman for contacts with former teammates. Australian off-spinner and author Ashley Mallett was keen to see this project thrive and gave me many numbers from his contact list.

I spoke to a couple of Jarman’s mates from his school days and managed to get hold of former Australian batsman Bob Cowper before he left for his annual six-month stint working in Monaco as a financier.

I’d tried to get Bill Lawry when I was in Melbourne, the week before Easter.

It was a bit too hard for Bill at that stage but I was more successful, interviewing Lindsay Kline in his lounge. He had scrapbooks too, and was terrific. We spoke for a couple of hours before he gave me a lift to the train station on his way to see the doctor.  I spoke to Ian Meckiff by phone as I was coming down with a big cold that laid me low for a week when I returned to the Alice.

But, still, I didn’t have enough of the finer details of Jarman’s life and I asked Ashley Mallett for advice.

“You’ve got to put a timeline on it,” he said.

I’d procrastinated on the prologue that I’d set in Jamaica in 1998 when Jarman had been the ICC ref in charge of the match that was the first Test to be abandoned because of an ill-prepared pitch.

“Boil it down and concentrate on just a few themes,” historian Warwick Franks told me. “Speak to as many people away from cricket that you can and don’t make it a love letter.”

I told Jarman the last bit of advice and he laughed and said he appreciated what Franks was saying.

I spoke to David Rowe, Jarman’s business partner for thirty years and Bill McDonald, who was head of the SAJC when Jarman was the jockeys’ and trainers’ rep. Richie Benaud responded to my email promptly and comprehensively, which gave me the chance to tease some finer points out of incidents in Barry’s career.

I was gaining momentum and then losing it. Then along came Bali. I packed a pair of board shorts, a T-shirt and a pair of sandshoes, books, articles and a DVD of the 1962- 63 Test series against England. Bali was a writer’s Mecca. Like a foreign correspondent, I walked in with a 1960s brown business bag in one hand and a laptop over my shoulder.

Staying at the sleepy town of Sanur on the south coast I followed the same routine every day. I worked in my hotel room early in the morning and took my notes and books to breakfast in the resort’s restaurant.  During the day, I walked or swam, and continued writing in the late afternoon and evening.

After nine days, I had completed 35,000 words.

After I returned to Australia, Ian Chappell gave me some detail with which I could challenge Jarman.

“Did you really push Chapelli against the state dressing room wall by his lapels or was that on a team bus after a match in Port Pirie?”

Little details tell the story.  Former Australian tourist John Drennan revealed much about the lack of preparation by international touring sides and some insights into the tour in South Africa. Drennan also told me more about the unfulfilled end to his career. More pieces of the jigsaw came together.

Some former players proved harder to track down than others. Some made my task much easier. Former league footy coach, Dick Jones, sent a detailed account of Jarman’s brief Eagles league career the day after it was requested.

The momentum was now hard to stop… I had some runs on the board.

At last, the book had wings.

.

Fleur: Welcome to the amazing author Tony Park. Tony has published over eight fiction novels plus a selection of non fiction books and I am thrilled to have him here talking to us today.

Tony, it may be a while ago, but can you tell us how you were picked up and your experience into the publishing world?

Tony: I was incredibly lucky.  The first book that I’d written and was comfortable sending to a publisher was my first novel set in Africa, Far Horizon. I’d written it during a four-month trip may wife, Nicola, and I did around southern Africa.  I sent it to Pan Macmillan Australia and it turned out they just happened to be looking for a mass market fiction thriller set in Africa.  Amazingly they gave me a publishing deal.

I’ve had a fantastic run with Pan Macmillan Australia and found them to be very supportive.  In fact, I’ve made good friends with several of the people in the company and have travelled in Africa on holiday with a couple of them.

What made you start writing?

I’d always wanted to write a novel, ever since I was a little kid.  It was the one thing in life I knew, from as far back as I can remember, that I really, really wanted to do.  I had a few false starts – I worked out I wasn’t the sort of person who could get up early before work and tap away at a novel, or come home from work and write in the evenings.  I knew the only way I’d be able to write a novel was if I quit my day job (I was working as a public relations consultant when I finally did quit) and devote myself to writing full time.

This happened in 1997-1998.  It was a big risk, but my wife supported me and the gamble paid off.

I listened to a radio interview with you, recently and you talked about yours and your wife’s love affair with Africa. Can you tell us a little about that and why you set your novels there?

Nicola and I first went to Africa on a three week holiday in 1995.  We thought it would be a once in a lifetime experience and that we would ‘tick the box’ to say we’d ‘done’ Africa, and that would be the end of that.  In fact, what happened was something that we’ve seen happen to a number of other people.  We breathed something in, or drank something, or got bitten by something and soon found we were hooked – addicted to Africa.  We had to come back, and we did, time and again.  We’ve been back to Africa every year since 1995 and now spend six months of every year there, and the other half of the year in Australia.

It was on our first extended trip to Africa, that four-month trip in 1998, that I wrote ‘Far Horizon’. I’d found that as well as not having the time to write in Australia I’d lacked stimulation and inspiration.  I’d also tried writing the way all the books said you should – having a plot and sticking to it – but found that didn’t work for me.  On that first long trip to Africa I ignored the writing textbooks and decided I would just make the story up as I wrote it, and draw my inspiration from the countryside, wildlife, and people of Africa.  It worked!

You’re touring for your new book, African Dawn which is a sequel African Sky. Can you tell us what it’s about?

African Dawn traces the recent history of Zimbabwe (formerly known as Rhodesia) from 1959 to the present through the eyes of three families, one black and two white.  Zimbabwe has gone through incredibly upheavals – war, economic ruin, the disastrous program of farm invasions, and political corruption and state-sponsored violence the likes of which are hard to imagine.  I can’t explain what went wrong in Zimbabwe, but I wanted to describe it through the lives of these three families.

Two of the families, the Bryants and the Ngwenyas, had their genesis in my third book, African Sky, which is set on a pilot training base in Rhodesia during the second world war.  All my other books have been stand-alone novels, so this was new territory for me, writing a sequel.  This is probably my most serious book to date, given the nature of life in Zimbabwe.

Which is your favourite book you’ve written and why?

I don’t have one (and that’s the truth).  I enjoy each and every book when I’m writing it – I become totally absorbed in the story and the characters – and then when it’s finished I’m ready to move on to the next one.  The good thing I find is that when people I know, or readers who’ve emailed me, nominate their favourite book they all seem to pick a different one.  I think that’s great.

Are you writing your next book yet? Or at least do you have an idea of what it will be about?

I’ve recently finished my ninth novel, set in Rwanda, Australia and South Africa.  It will be out in late 2012.  Nicola and I are just about to leave for another six-month trip to Africa where I’ll be writing a tenth novel.  I have no idea what it will be about!

What authors have influenced you and why?

I don’t know that I’ve been directly influenced by any other authors, but there are things I certainly admire and aspire to, such as Ken Follett’s clarity of story telling; Nelson Demille’s charactertisation and sense of humour; and Bernard Cornwell’s ability to make historical fiction and characters seem so believable.

I found your female main character in The Delta, Sonja Kurtz, really interesting. How do you get inside a female head and write from her point of view?

When I first started writing my novels I thought they were ‘boys’ own’ books that would mostly be read by guys, but as it turned out most of my readers were women.  Given that this was the case I thought it was high time I had a female as the true lead character of one of my books, and that’s how Sonja came about.

On one level she’s the same as any other character I’ve written, but I did talk to a few of my female friends about some of the aspects of her life (for example, Sonja’s a single mum with a teenage daughter and my wife and I don’t have children, so this was something my friends with kids were more than happy to share their experiences about!).  Before my book goes to print it’s only read by women – my wife, my mother, my mother-in-law, and my publisher, editor and copy editor, who are all female.  I get not shortage of comments if I’ve got something ‘wrong’ with a female character!

If you could have dinner with one person in the world, who would it be?

Nelson Mandela.  I’d ask him how come he’s the only politician in the world who was smart enough to quit while he was still ahead.

F: Tony, thanks so much for your time today. I can’t wait to read African Dawn.

T: Thanks for asking, Fleur!

My bookshelves are filled with John Grisham, Michael Connelly, Patricia Cornwell, Monica McInerney, Jane Green, Tamara McKinley, Belinda Alexandra, Rachael Treasure, Tony Parsons, Mark Abernethy, Jarad Henry and heaps of others.

As I try and grow as a writer, I find myself pushing outside of my normal boundaries to find out what makes a book, great. Why did I like that book, how did I relate to the characters and how can I take that over into my writing to make my books un-put-down-able.

So, here are some of the books I’m reading – I’m not going to review them – I’m just letting you know what I’m reading and if it’s captured me in the way I need to be drawn in.

I’m part of the way through The Castaways by Elin Hilderbrand and enjoying it!

Victoria Brown is a bush poet and a fantastic one at that! She’s a farmer’s wife who’s skill has extended beyond the front gate of the farm. Her talents have included Speaker of the Year for the CWA, to being a regular guest of the ABC radio and releasing her own CD of poems last year.

These hysterical poems tell of life in the country and how mowing the lawn naked, is actually, not advisable …

Of how an old wood stove was the bane of her life … until it left her employ.

Vic has a website where you can purchase her CD from and a blog where she ruminates about anything from country life to the latest epidemic of swine flu.

Completely readable, I would urge anyone to visit her blog and check her website. You’ll laugh aloud when you do.

Sharyn is an extraordinary woman, who lives alone on the side of a mountain. She has turned the land she owns into a recognised Wildlife Refuge and her concern for the Australian environment and all its native creatures is mind-blowing. She is a brilliant person to teach us about the problems that humans have created and the problems we are going to cause our wonderful native animals, after living among them for so long.

These ‘neighbours’ of Sharyn’s are a myriad of natives. From The Red-bellied Snake (gasp!), to the aggressive, noisy Quolls to beautiful birds and marsupials, they all have come to accept and now ignore her, so Sharyn is able to observe them at close quarters. Because of this, her stories of each animal are full of vivid descriptions, so much so, I could hear the cracking of seed pods by the Yellow-tailed Black Cockatoos and grunting of the Red-necked Wallabies as they try to attract a mate. I could feel Sharyn’s frustration at the possums who can mow her vegie patch to the ground in one night and her irritation at the stubborn little horse Shari.

Each chapter begins with a beautiful black and white sketch of the featured animal, drawn with exquisite detail by Sharyn.

Mountain Tails is a journey through the Australian bush as you’ve never seen it before. The tales are humorous, the information imparted is invaluable. Sharyn and her publishers Exisle have excelled themselves.

Mountain Tales is available through the Exisle’s web site with a 20% discount if you quote coupon number MT2009, or at any good book store

Heading home past the mailbox, I saw a brown paper mail bag addressed just to me. I tore it open and held Mountain Tails by Sharyn Munro in my hands for the first time.

I’m very lucky to be able to read it and do a review for you all to read – then you can go and buy it, because I can tell you that it’s brilliant!

My children played quietly in their rooms for a little while, winding down from their hyper day but also wisely knowing, that if their mum didn’t sit down for a while, she was likely to be exceptionally irritable! I poured my glass of wine, curled up on the couch and started to read, stopping only when I realised I hadn’t organised any tea.

Once I’ve finished, I’ll tell you more, but so far the stories on all of Sharyn’s ‘neighbours’ (the animals she shares her mountain with) have made me laugh and gasp out loud!