Will > Books: australia‎ (3)

For every girl child, there seemed to lurk a dead-eyed man, hair receding prematurely, with a car and the offer of a lift and a plan and a knife an

For every girl child, there seemed to lurk a dead-eyed man, hair receding prematurely, with a car and the offer of a lift and a plan and a knife and a shovel. Did we create the man by imagining him or was he idling there in his car regardless?

None of us can escape who we are when others aren’t looking; we can’t guess what we’re capable of until it’s too late.

I started a PhD in creative writing in 2016. It can be dangerous to ask me about collective narration because my research project looked at novels that had Greek chorus-like narration, and I can go on a bit. But I do have a clear sense of where Dirt Town the novel started. I sat down to write a short story from the point of view of the children of a small town, kind of like the one where I had grown up. What I wrote was largely just these kids coming home from school, but there was an energy in it that made me think it could be a novel. That writing is still in the book, pretty much as it was written. It occurred to me that if I was in these kids’ heads, then I needed something for them all to be looking at, thinking about: an experience that was as big as the town. One of the next flashes I had was that a girl had died, and the story grew from there. - from the Books and Publishing interview

We are not sure if it was our childhood or just childhood in general that has made us the way we are.

Hayley Scrivenor is a former Director of Wollongong Writers Festival. Originally from a small country town, Hayley now lives and writes on Dharawal country and has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Wollongong on the south coast of New South Wales. Dirt Town (our Book of the Month for June!) is her first novel. An earlier version of the book was shortlisted for the Penguin Literary Prize and won the Kill Your Darlings Unpublished Manuscript Award.

The simple answer to the setting question is that the character of Ronnie is twelve in 2001, and so was I - so it helped me keep my timeline straight!

I spent quite a bit of time thinking about the names of characters. Some have been the same almost since the start: Veronica, the missing girl’s best friend, goes by ‘Ronnie’, and that always felt absolutely right for her character. The character of Lewis, a young boy who sees Esther after she’s supposed to have gone missing, gets called ‘Louise’ by his classmates, I had to reverse-engineer a name that kids could play with in that way. Sometimes, names can become a little in-joke with yourself, too. There is a character named ‘Constance’, who is the mother of the missing girl. I called her Constance because she changes her mind a lot, over the course of the story.

All across this vast country they were burning, as they had for a hundred years, all lit by men like Noone. So many dead in the ashes, thousands of

All across this vast country they were burning, as they had for a hundred years, all lit by men like Noone. So many dead in the ashes, thousands of them, scattered over the colonies, never to be found, the wind tossing their remains like a plaything, and teasing the dust off their bones.

“…memories can be slippery as fish, in my experience. Once you have them out of the water, it pays to get them good and clubbed.”

I’m British-Australian, but was largely ignorant about Australia’s settlement history and the role Britain played, so was reading about the frontier period for my own interest at first, and became intrigued by this alternative Wild West that played out against the stunning Australian landscape but which remains comparatively unknown, both at home and overseas, and is still relatively under-explored in fiction or film. I was also seeing a lot of relevance in that history to the world today, not just in Australia but in the USA and Europe too. Then as I began to try to write about the period I came across information about the infamous Queensland Native Police—and that was the spark that really set this novel in motion. - from the More2Read interview

Henry collected his bags, started for the door, then paused with his back to the two men. He wanted to say something, to have the last word. Ask the magistrate how he lived with himself, how he was able to sleep at night. There was no point. Nothing he could do or say would change anything, not in a town like this. They all lived with themselves quite comfortably here. They all managed to sleep just fine.

The guilt is collective, the responsibility shared. In a hundred years no one will even remember what happened here and certainly no one will care.

The guilt is collective, the responsibility shared. In a hundred years no one will even remember what happened here and certainly no one will care. History is forgetting. Afterward we write the account, the account becomes truth, and we tell ourselves it has always been this way, that others were responsible, that there was nothing we could have done.

Father had a surveyor’s map showing their selection and the surrounding land, everything to the north, south, or east. The lines only went so far west then faded into nothingness; the interior blank.

“Might have only dust in it,” Locke said. “We could ride right through.”
“Or might not,” Noone replied. “Might be a sandstorm, blind the horses, strip the skin from your bones. You’re welcome to stay, Raymond. Please do. But the rest of you, back to that shit-pile of a house we found this afternoon.
Locke began protesting but Noone didn’t wait. He turned his horse sharply, gave it both spurs; the horse bared its teeth and took off like it had been shot. Noone didn’t check who was following, though all of them did. Pushing their horses desperately, frantic backward glances as they rode. Tiny little figures on the darkening plain, the wall of earth behind them, its shadows lengthening, swallowing all before it, and gaining. Like the advance of the end of the world.

Four days ago the world had been one way, now it was twisted another way around. He couldn’t get his bearings. Didn’t know for certain where anyone stood. What he’d always taken as definite now felt flaky as the soil on the ground.

“Listen,” Noone said. “Listen to me now. I’m going to tell you what will happen if we were to let that man live. He will hate us. Not only you and I personally, but all white men. He will become like a tick on the back of a beautiful horse, biting and gnawing and burrowing into the very fabric of this country we are trying to build. He will hunt us, all of us, we will never be safe in our homes. Your families, should you have them, will not be safe. Your children, your grandchildren, will not be safe. Remember, he will breed also. He will produce a dozen heirs, all with his hatred in their blood.