You don’t have to be a father, or a son, to enjoy Laurie Steed’s witty, self-deprecating memoir of love, family and contemporary masculinity. I was especially taken by the parts of the narrative that speak of the creative process—made particularly challenging, in Laurie’s case, by the competing demands of fatherhood and the need to earn a living. Having said that, I think Love, Dad would be an exceptionally welcome gift for fathers and sons alike—infinitely more stimulating than socks and barbecue tongs.
A must-read for all new parents, Love, Dad explores what it means to be a father in the twenty-first century.
The father of two young boys, Laurie reflects on how his own experiences have defined the kind of man he is and the kind of parent he would like to become. His stories—triumphant, funny and sad—draw on Laurie’s own childhood experiences and important relationships with family and mates, alongside the challenges of trauma and mental health shared by many men. This memoir openly shares how Laurie strives to overcome challenges—from breaking generational cycles to maintaining joy in work and parenthood—and how others fresh to parenting can learn from this authentic story of a new dad and his family.
Coming soon (October) from Fremantle Press, Salt River Road is the most recent winner of the City of Fremantle Hungerford Award, again showing the value of this longstanding unpublished manuscript award in introducing fine new writers and exciting new books. Molly Schmidt consulted with Elders of the Menang and Goreng people in developing a story—both authentic and ambitious—that reaches far beyond its premise of a family whose grief is tearing them apart, bringing in a wider view of careless, systemic racism in a rural town in 1970s Australia. Once again I’m struck by the way a work set in the past can have so much to say about the present.
Introducing an exciting new voice in Australian fiction: Molly Schmidt, winner of the 2022 City of Fremantle Hungerford Award. Salt River Road is a compelling coming-of-age novel about grief and healing set in a small town in the 1970s.
In the aftermath of their mother’s death, the Tetley siblings’ lives are falling apart. Left to fend for themselves as their family farm goes to ruins, Rose sets out to escape the grief and mess of home. When she meets Noongar Elders Patsy and Herbert, she finds herself drawn into a home where she has the chance to discover the strength of community, and to heal a wound her family has carried for a generation.
A.J. Betts One Song Pan Macmillan $19.99 YA fiction
Good YA fiction written for young adults may equally be enjoyed by those a bit (or a lot) older—and A.J. Betts always writes good YA fiction. It’s easy to be drawn into the story of Eva’s obsessive quest to win Triple J Unearthed High, and the perils of having to rely on a band of teenage musos yet to gel as a band. The action takes place over a single weekend, in a single setting, and you can feel the tension, smell the aromas of sweat, angst and pepperoni. An engaging, well-paced read about friendship, desire, creativity and resilience.
Aspiring singer-songwriter Eva has one last chance to enter Triple J Unearthed High and break into the music industry.
But after three failed attempts, she needs some help.
Cue the band: perfectionist Eva, charismatic Cooper, easy-going Ant and moody Ruby. Plus fly-on-the-wall Mim, who’s filming them for her school Media project.
Five people who have nothing in common but music. One emotionally and creatively charged weekend.
Can they record the most important song of their lives?
Sharron Booth’s debut novel, The Silence of Water, is a beautiful work of historical fiction. I admire it immensely—as you can see from my endorsement on the cover.
In constructing questions to pose to Sharron, I think I was influenced by memories of my own exploration of Western Australian convict history for The Sinkings, and the ever widening circles of research that help a writer to understand the people, places and social worlds of the past. It’s evident from her responses that, like me, Sharron formed deep emotional attachments to those she researched, and to artefacts of the past—sometimes to be found beneath one’s feet.
Sharron emigrated from the UK (Yorkshire) to Western Australia as a child, and works as a professional writer. Her creative work has been published in literary journals and newspapers and broadcast on ABC Radio. The Silence of Water was shortlisted for the 2020 City of Fremantle Hungerford Award—once again proving what a wonderful source of new talent this award represents.
It’s the turn of the century when Fan’s mother, Agnes, announces the family is moving to Western Australia to take care of Agnes’s father—a man they’ve never spoken of before now. Fan finds herself a stranger in a new town living in a home whose currents and tensions she cannot read or understand.
Resentful of her mother’s decision to move, Fan forms an alliance with her grandfather, Edwin Salt, a convict transported to Australia in 1861. As she listens to memories of his former life in England, Fan starts snooping around the house, riffling through Edwin’s belongings in an attempt to fill the gaps in his stories. But the secrets Fan uncovers will test the family’s fragile bonds forever, and force Edwin into a final reckoning with the brutality of his past
When you witness a different crime
AC: Sharron, The Silence of Water is a work of fiction, but it is partly based on people and events drawn from convict history. Was there something in your research into that history that immediately presented itself to you as being a subject for fiction or did you arrive at that point gradually, through the process of accumulating facts and impressions? What was it that lit the spark?
SB: I knew that I needed to write about these events and people, particularly the women, immediately after I read the medical reports and newspaper accounts of the crime that Edwin Salt committed. They upset me so much. I felt as if I had witnessed a very different crime to the one being reported. In the early days, I’d imagined I might write a fairly straightforward account of the life of a Western Australian convict. Those documents reminded me there was no such thing as a straightforward account and that archives always reveal the biases of their times. I didn’t have a clue how I would do it but I knew I wanted to write about the women I had read about, in addition to the convict.
Fragments, glimpses and whispers
AC: The novel is told from the alternating points of view of three characters: Edwin Salt, his daughter Agnes and his granddaughter Fan. Fan’s narrative anchors the present of the novel—the events of 1906—while Edwin’s and Agnes’s range between 1906 and earlier times. There are always challenges in using a non-linear approach, but could you talk about the opportunities such a structure gives a writer in telling the story of three generations?
SB: Before I did much research, my original intention had been to write a past/present dual narrative. Then I discovered that Agnes had left Western Australia at around eighteen years old and started a new life in South Australia. Based on the records, she didn’t seem in a hurry to return. Creatively, I liked the idea of the family conflict that could arise from a decision to move back to Western Australia after a long absence. Plus, moving states at a young age in the late 19th century seemed like a gutsy move for a woman. It made me want to give her a bigger role in the story.
The interwoven structure allows the reader to watch Edwin, Agnes and Fan as they grow up, struggle, make decisions, lie, behave badly. The structure lets the reader know parts of each character that not even other characters know about. It makes for a richer experience of the story.
It also allows the reader to go on the journey with Fan as she uncovers long-buried family secrets. I think it more realistically reflects the way we tend to find things out about our families: in fragments, glimpses and whispers, and almost never in an ordered, linear way.
Bad wives and mothers?
AC: The adolescent Fan is my favourite character—imaginative, independent, witty, and endearing in her fascination with the past and its secrets; a strong girl in the process of becoming a strong woman. But many of your female characters—Eliza, Mary Ann, Cath, Agnes—are strong women, albeit within the context of their times and socio-economic constraints. Were you conscious of foregrounding women’s stories in a novel that is to some extent shaped by the life of one man?
SB: When I read the archival material about Mary Ann and Cath (two of Edwin’s three wives), my emotions ranged from anger to compassion. Mary Ann was decried publicly as a bad wife and bad mother and yet contemporary understanding might suggest she was suffering from post-natal depression. Cath was arrested for using offensive language, an offence that was used almost exclusively against women. I wanted to bring both women out from under the weight of the records. I consciously looked for moments of resistance; they were hard to find but they were there. I used those fragments as starting points for thinking about character. For example, one of the most enduring features about fictional Cath is her voice. She isn’t afraid to speak her mind. People pay attention when she talks. Agnes remembers the sound of Cath’s voice long after her mother has died. I did this to ‘write back’ to the fact that Cath had been criminalised for using her voice.
Flowers on an unmarked grave
AC: Your research for the novel was wide-ranging, taking you from Western Australia to South Australia to various places in the United Kingdom, and from archives and libraries to the kind of experiential research that involves communing with the past through the physical remains to be found in houses and churches, streets and landscapes. Where did you find your greatest inspiration?
SB: I loved the archival research, but visiting the places where my characters had lived got me properly under the skin of this story. Two moments stand out: one in Semaphore and one in Edinburgh. I was walking along Semaphore beach, minding my own business, when in my imagination I saw a girl running over the dunes towards the ocean, her hair trailing behind her. She seemed to fly into the ocean. It was one of those between-two-worlds moments that writers sometimes talk about but I secretly didn’t believe in, until it happened to me. I knew this girl was Fan and that she was here to shake things up.
The second was in Edinburgh in a small church graveyard on a quiet, sunny afternoon. I laid some flowers on the unmarked grave of a woman to whom I had no connection except the privilege of having time and resources to pursue my interest in her life. I told her that I had no idea why this story had chosen me, but no matter what, I would try to do justice to her. The novel did not really come together for me until that afternoon.
Lucky charms
AC: As someone powerfully influenced by physical objects, I’m wondering whether you also acquired anything of this kind during your research, something that helped you to make emotional connections with your material. Was there a talisman sitting on your desk while you wrote?
SB: I also find physical objects inspiring. They ground me to the truth of my characters, and to place, through the fog of the writing process.
My desk was crowded with lucky charms while I wrote The Silence of Water. I collected shells and rocks from Semaphore beach. I pinned all my train tickets from the UK research trip on a cork board. When I visited York, Western Australia, via the old convict route from Greenmount, I dug up a stone from part of the original convict-laid road.
I cut my hands and broke fingernails liberating that rock from the ground. I could only imagine the effort it had taken to put it there more than 150 years ago. It inspired a scene in the novel where Edwin and his fellow convicts work on a road gang.
Watery places
AC: Could you talk about the symbolism of water in the novel?
SB: The ocean is a place of duality. It both separates and connects places. I read somewhere that the ocean symbolises ‘the terrifying sublime’: it’s spiritually uplifting but it can also kill you. In the novel, some characters find great solace in watery places and others meet their end there.
The ocean is essential to my spiritual wellbeing and so it was perhaps unsurprising that it found its way into my fiction. I can’t say I intended to write about water but that’s what happened! I’ve given my love of the ocean to Fan, although she is much braver than I am. For Fan it is a place of calm, compared to the soup of unspoken tension in her Fremantle house.
For Agnes, too, the water is important: she associates the sounds and smells of the river with her mother and the precious times they spent together. Agnes’s relationship to water symbolises her grief and how she deals with significant losses.
I found it interesting that Edwin, Agnes and Fan all made long journeys across water to start new lives. I wanted to explore how people respond to unfamiliar places by asking the question: is it ever possible to truly escape the past?
Silences and the forgotten
AC: Are you naturally drawn to the past, and to historical fiction? Do you see yourself continuing to work in this genre? Which I suppose is another way of asking if you are currently at work on something new!
SB: I’m particularly drawn to stories about how actions of the past, particularly in families, influence the present. While The Silence of Water is historical fiction, I see it primarily as a family story that just happens to be set in the past.
At a broader level I’m also fascinated by the role that secrets and silences play in narratives of Western Australia’s identity. Reading the archives is eye-opening, but so is the daily news.
I’m working on a non-fiction project inspired by some now-forgotten Western Australian women writers, as well as a novel that is set in the more recent past. It’s wonderful to be writing something new, now that the characters from The Silence of Water are making their own way in the world.
Maria Papas’s wise, moving, beautifully lyrical novel Skimming Stones is the most recent winner of the City of Fremantle Hungerford Award, which has been instrumental in introducing many exciting new Western Australian voices. It was published late last year, and an appreciative early review from Lisa at ANZ LitLovers does justice to the novel’s many qualities.
Maria works as an English teacher and sessional academic based in Perth, and her fiction, non-fiction and academic essays have been published in Australian and international journals. Skimming Stones is her debut novel.
*Maria will be a guest of the Perth Festival Writers Weekend, to be held at the Fremantle Arts Centre 26–27 February. Her event, ‘How It Begins’, may be booked here.*
Grace first met her lover, Nate, as a teenager, their bond forged in the corridors and waiting rooms where siblings of cancer patients sit on the sidelines. Now an adult, for Grace, nursing is a comforting world of science and certainty. But the paediatric ward is also a place of miracles and heartbreak and, when faced with a dramatic emergency, Grace is confronted with memories of her sister’s illness. Heading south to Lake Clifton and the haunts of her childhood, Grace discovers that a stone cast across a lake sends out ripples long after the stone has gone.
Connecting past and present
AC: Maria, Skimming Stones is narrated by your character Grace, across two main time-frames. We first meet her in her role as a nurse in a paediatric oncology ward, but the narrative takes us back to the child Grace, who, at the age of 13, also inhabits a paediatric oncology ward, in a very different role. Could you please begin by talking about this specific connection between the 13-year-old Grace and the adult she has become?
MP: There was a time in my life when I drew a lot of strength from asking nurses what made them choose their career paths. Commonly, aside from having parents or grandparents who were also nurses, many said that either they or someone they loved had once spent a lot of time in hospital. It wasn’t uncommon, I discovered, for children who had serious illness, their siblings, or even their parents to later choose nursing or care work as a profession. In a way, Grace’s experiences do shape her choices. It felt logical for her to become a nurse, and logical that as an adult she should go back to reflect on her past. Those connections did feel real to me.
Listening to a voice
AC: I adore Grace’s voice and her unique perspective on those around her. Did the first-person point of view come naturally to you as a way to tell this story?
MP: When I write fiction my most comfortable default is third person, present tense. With this novel, though, first person felt more honest. For many reasons, I needed to hear Grace’s story myself, so the writing of the whole book was almost an act of listening to someone like Grace. She’s strong, she’s knowledgeable, she has been through a lot, and she is reflective, so why not let the story come from within her?
At the most basic level, yes, her voice did come naturally. I am the eldest of three sisters, so the older sibling was one I could easily draw from. Having said that, writing from the perspective of a character who had witnessed her sibling’s cancer raised ethical concerns for me. Was I writing this voice well? Was the representation sensitive? I did second guess myself, but in the end, the first-person voice was the one that spoke most clearly to me.
Toxic relationships
AC:
He touched my mother. He rested his hands on her shoulders, kissed her crown, and then left for work as if there was no hole in the pantry door.
There’s such power in this brief observation. From a writer’s point of view, I admire the craft—the restraint, the metonymy—but I also admire it for what it tells us about Grace as a character, her quiet, observing eye, her struggle to make meaning from incongruent things. I’m going off track a bit because my question relates back to the substance of the sentence: the troubled relationship between Grace’s parents. What function does this play in the novel?
MP: One of my aims for the novel was to write about the way illness can impact families, but I didn’t want to oversimplify and focus on just the illness alone. Instead, I wanted to acknowledge that there are often many pre-existing concerns, and that these won’t go away just because something more worrying or pressing has arisen. In addition, I also wanted to acknowledge that people have different ways of coping with tumultuous emotions—some healthy, some unhealthy—and that such mechanisms are likely to continue and have an effect through difficult times. The toxicity between Grace’s parents impacts Grace’s worldview and, alongside her sister’s illness, has its hand in forming her relationships as an adult.
Sharing a language
AC: Grace’s friend Nate is an important character, and I found it interesting that the psychic space he occupies in the novel is far greater than his actual presence in the narrative. Could you please tell us about Nate?
MP: Nate and Grace each have shared memories of hospital and of being somewhat cast aside while the focus of parenting is redirected towards a sibling in crisis. Nate’s presence in the adult narrative and his relationship with Grace does conflate past and present, but it also provides Grace a space in which she is understood without having to explain her past. To Grace’s mind, she and Nate share a language. She doesn’t have to speak or think about her experiences because Nate already knows. Having said this, it is precisely this relationship that puts Grace at a set of crossroads and prompts her to revisit her past. So, in a way, while Grace’s relationship with Nate seemingly allows her to leave a difficult experience unexamined, it also inevitably brings that experience forth and insists it be examined.
Myths and boundaries
AC: For all that Skimming Stones presents an authentic, intimately rendered account of the experience of illness and how it affects those who live with and alongside it, it is broad in its concerns and resists any easy categorisation as an ‘issues novel’. Among the many things I was drawn to is the way a geographical place—Lake Clifton in Western Australia’s south-west—becomes not only a character in the novel but a character in Grace’s life. How did this come about?
MP: Years ago, I remembered an old childhood memory that I think is attributable to the thrombolites. Soon after, I visited the lake and it struck me how ancient and mysterious the thrombolites were. You can’t touch a thrombolite and you’re not allowed to enter the lake, and so no matter how much I wanted to know what those structures were like, I had to leave comfortable with the uncertainty of not knowing. I am of Greek heritage, and something about the landscape put me in mind of mythological characters who cross boundaries into unknowable worlds. The lake was one of those boundary spaces for me. It was a place that allowed me to imagine, but not the kind of place I could ever fully understand. Grace has an ambivalent relationship with the lake. She exists on its edges. She is drawn to it, feels it as a healing place, but it is also a place of terrible drama. Metaphorically, the lake is central to Grace’s concerns. It urges her to consider how much we can know, and what we must be satisfied with not knowing.
Mothering
AC: Is the novel a narrative of motherhood, or perhaps as much about mothering as it is about motherhood?
MP: I think this is my favourite question that I have ever been asked. The whole time I was writing, I thought Skimming Stones was a novel about siblings, but now that I look back, I see that it is absolutely about all the things we conflate when we consider the word ‘mother’ alongside the word ‘care’. The narrative represents mothering within a nuclear family, parental conflict, and then motherhood after separation and divorce. There is mothering under tense circumstances, the desperation of mothering a sick child, the fear of becoming a mother, of not knowing what that might mean. There is also the kind of mothering that many people do when they participate in the upbringing of children that are not biologically their own. Harriet, for example, is very much a mother for Grace. People think of her as a surrogate or ‘childless’, but she is not childless to me. Her experience of motherhood is highly tragic, but she is still a mother, and when it comes to Grace, she shows us a version of herself and a version of mothering that extends well beyond the typical family structure into the community. Motherhood is definitely an underlying theme.
A place called Cancer
AC:
Nate knew cancer like I knew cancer. We were both from cancer. We shared it like a password between travellers in a foreign country. Or that moment in a crowd when someone says something or another and they carry just the right inflection, an accent you recognise, the sound of home…He knew where I had come from.
You write with an intimate knowledge of the foreign country that is cancer, and I’m wondering about the experience of revisiting that place emotionally in order to create this powerfully moving narrative—whether it was painful, whether you felt compelled to go there anyway. Did it feel inevitable to you as a writer that you would wrest from that place you once ‘came from’ a narrative of some kind, or did this story emerge more by stealth?
MP: To be fair, I wasn’t revisiting when I was writing; I was firmly a resident. I had begun this novel as part of a PhD, and for about a year or so I was working on themes to do with the kindness of strangers. In these early drafts, the sisters, Harriet, the lake and the boy already existed but in more sketchy forms. Then, out of the blue, one of my children developed leukaemia. For a while, I couldn’t read let alone write, and later, when I did start writing again, I couldn’t engage with the story I had previously worked on. All I wanted was to begin processing the experience that had since changed my family, but I was tied to the PhD, and I am the kind of person who must finish what I start. At the time, I remember considering changing my project to non-fiction, but I also recognised that I didn’t yet have the distance to reflect well. In a way, creating Grace and Emma from the sisters within an already existing fiction allowed me to garner the strength to look at the spaces I had just occupied with my children, really for the first time. It wasn’t painful, no, but it was difficult to write, primarily because writing and researching became a teacher for me. I was learning while I was writing. Oddly, it was later, after I won the Hungerford Award and throughout this publication process that I felt I was revisiting this long-ago place, and that did feel disorientating at first. It took me a while to know how to talk about the connections between my novel and my real-life experience, but again I garnered strength from the place I had come from and all the people who had once visited it and since talked about it. Ultimately, I think that’s important: that we do revisit and talk. It helps us not just to make sense, but also to acknowledge what people genuinely go through. It can be quite releasing simply to acknowledge.
Author of KATHLEEN O’CONNOR OF PARIS (narrative non-fiction), ELEMENTAL and THE SINKINGS (novels) and INHERITED (short story collection). looking up/looking down is an occasional blog about writing, reading and watching the world...
looking up/looking down 