It’s an odd thing being at the tail end of this now and being able to say, well, this is where we’ve come to. I thought it might be interesting to look at where we’ve come from.
It may be of interest to those deluded twits among us who have decided on writing as their activity in life.
It’s never easy, but I’d say we’ve had a relatively smooth process with this story. A lot of that came down to making sure the creative relationships were solid right from the start. We probably took more care and time with that than with anything else in the early stages and it’s something worth keeping in mind.
But before that…
I’d been trying for a long time to find a way to tell this story in the present. I’d tried all sorts of different scenarios and genres but it just didn’t seem to be working. It’s interesting when you’re trying to shine a light on some part of the national conversation but it just won’t work because it’s too close to where we are now. I think it often seems the straight solution is to write a story about the now in the now, but it may well be the worst place to situate it.
I needed a different kind of cinematic story space, somewhere I could make good use of genre and create a story world that had its own sense of place – somewhere all the usual trite daily bullshit around us could be stripped away so the story could come through clear, lean, and uncluttered.
And then on a camping trip in Northern New South Wales I came across an old settlers cabin in the woods and was instantly entranced by it.
This flimsy little hut was completely cocooned and shadowed by the woods and dwarfed by a steep rise of thick forest behind it. When it went up it would have just sat there in the middle of bloody nowhere with some godawful mud track the only link to the world. Who on earth would do such a thing? Why?
I stayed up a long time with the Bourbon that night, just staring at this cabin across the fire. Which was clearly beginning to seriously spook the young family holidaying in it at the time.
The last thing I remember was staring at the cabin through the darkness, the curtains twitching in the windows, and as I gazed blearily at the empty Wild Turkey bottle I knew that one of us was going to have to turn in…
And the story just arrived, practically intact.
There’s been a great deal of serendipity and happy accident during this project, and this was the start of it.
The place was very different to how it ended up in the story. It was a windswept, desolate beach by a rough ocean. It reminded me of Paul Cox’s ‘Exile’, which is interesting given that Aden was to later come on board.
But clearly the kind of grim torture I had in mind for the poor buggers populating this story wouldn’t work in a place where food was so abundant. There were Pelicans for god’s sake.
I shut myself away in the Mitchell Library and went about searching out details of life on what remained of the selections around the time of federation, realising that most of these parcels of land had been fallow stretches of the worst strips of land the big owners could find to comply with the government stipulation to apportion shilling acres out to prospective ’selectors’ – many of them city families who had never turned a day’s labour in their lives, often urged by local and travelling pastors and preachers to do the work of God and make the land ‘productive’.
I’d never really worked this way before and went on instinct, sensing that I could perhaps gain a feeling for the characters through their immediate daily needs – the little things that were around them.
So I trawled through the period newspapers like the Pastoral Times and the Wagga Wagga Hummer on microfiche, but instead of looking for articles and news I concentrated on the ads – unguents, ointments, tins and boxes – the items that would surround these people. Somehow through these small objects voices and motivations started to creep in and the characters of Nat, Sarah and Tom began to materialise.
It’s something I’m doing again at the moment, accessing the story world of a thriller set in the 1950s, and I’m doing it by looking at types of wallpaper, trouser hems, shop sign typefaces…
I realised what I had on my hands was potentially a dark, macabre thriller, replete with all the iconography of the Western. This wasn’t going to be Steele Rudd. This was a place where idealism and pragmatism had to co-exist, and not necessarily as happy bedfellows. The basic premise of the Western seemed to fit with this – the death of idealism, the end of an era of pioneer dreaming. Federation was coming and with it a new political reality far removed from the naive, idealistic determination of a man like Nat Doole.
This was the stage where everything is still really exciting, and you think to yourself, yes, I’m writing, this is great…
The stage just moments before you realise you should have been a locksmith.
