Gillian Polack's Blog, page 266

Women's History Month: Glenda Larke

Glenda is one of several friends who said "I really shouldn't be writing a post for you - I'm not interesting enough." Yet Glenda works in rainforest conservation and writes top-notch fantasy novels. I found her view of herself rather astonishing at first and then I realised it's why we need Women's History Month. We need to be able to see women like Glenda, to appreciate their lives and their work, even if they themselves think "Pfft, I'm just ordinary." If you want a bio (to prove that Glenda would have to work very hard to be uninteresting, you can find one here. In a perfect world, we'd all appreciate our own personalities and lives and talents, but in this imperfect world, at least we can appreciate the personalities lives and talents of other women.

I'm here under false pretences. Gillian wants blog posts from interesting women and I don't think I am. Well, I shan't dispute the "woman" part; it's the "interesting" I have an issue with. I spend most of my days sitting in front of a computer, hardly a world-shaking existence. But I suppose I have led an unusual life. I blame my childhood and a love of reading for that.

I was brought up on a farm without playmates, pre-TV. (Pre-plastic of any kind, if you can imagine that…) So I lived in books and in my imagination. Part of my pre-teen reading was a stack of tattered National Geographics – all in black-and-white with the index on the cover instead of a photo. They were piled up in the wooden wash-house on the other side of the back lawn, just the place for a quiet read when there were chores to be done. Talk about telling a farm kid there were places to go and things to do that didn't involve housework…

At nineteen, I stuffed all the money I had (money earned from making beds and cleaning loos in a holiday hostel on an island) in my pocket (no ATMs or credit cards back then), and headed off to New Zealand for a three month hitch-hiking holiday. Alone. Geez, it's a wonder my mother didn't have a heart attack. I came home unscathed, but with the certain knowledge that I wanted to see more of the world.

As a child, entertainment was scarce – no TV, films, dance lessons, records. Nothing but books. Many of these had the pages out of sequence, or printed upside down. (My aunt worked at a printers, and we were given all the books they messed up.) If I ran out of reading matter, then there was my imagination. And that was where the making up stories came from, along with the certain knowledge that one day I would be a writer of fiction.

And then I married. A foreigner, a Muslim, a scientist, an Asian – all the things I wasn't. (Talk about exposing a wannabe fantasy novelist to the scaffolding needed for world-building! I couldn't have done anything better.)

Does that make me an interesting person? No, I don't think so. But it certainly gave me an opportunity to see interesting places and meet people vastly different to myself.

I've done interesting things, or more often had interesting things happen to me. I've climbed mountains, skin-dived with seals and penguins, been followed by a wild tiger, been chased by irate wasps through a mangrove swamp, been surrounded by an Australian bushfire, camped on the beach of a uninhabited tropical island, been on a fishing boat in the Malacca Straits that promptly started sinking as we left the coast behind, ceremonially slipped the engagement ring on the finger of a young woman, been attacked by a skua with the wingspan of a roc, watched the sunrise from the top of Kinabalu, seen the midnight sun from my tent, killed a cobra in my house, sat next to prime ministers, seen with my own eyes a revolution play out in the streets of a city while a cabinet minister took us out to dinner and pretended nothing was wrong, chatted to a queen, tramped the Headhunters' Trail in Borneo and the Arctic taiga and the Hungarian steppes, watched the sea birds twist and turn on a far-off tropical atoll in the middle of the South China Sea…

Does any of that make me an interesting person? No, I don't think so. In fact, it might well make me a crashing bore who talks too much…

But it does make me a lucky person. And oh, what a store of interesting memories I have to draw on - and mangle - for my fiction.

gillpolack @ 2011-03-06T22:26:00

Tonight I am a happy little vegemite. Eventually I'll post my whole itinerary for July and then you'll see what wonders it contains. It's just getting better and better. You know it's a Gillian-journey when it includes required reading...

gillpolack @ 2011-03-06T13:21:00

PS One of the things about my WHM celebration is that it's in blogpost form. That means that all the posts are up for discussion and you can comment and spark ideas and all sorts of things. Be daring! Chat!!!

Sophie Masson - bio

Sophie has a better brain than me. She gave me a bio! When you've finished reading it, you might want to pop over to her website and see what else she's done. I didn't say she's a good writer, simply because I haven't asked any writer *not* well worth reading to be part of WHM. Which I ought to have explained. They are lovely writers, all, and you should check them out.

It's not that I actually have goldfish brain right now, it's that I'm doing too much at once. If I had twelve more hours in a day or didn't have the health things (or both) then everything would be 100% fine. As it is, I might slow down in a few weeks, just to prove I'm capable of it.

SOPHIE MASSON—BIOGRAPHY

Born in Indonesia, of French parents, Sophie Masson came to Australia with her family at the age of 5. All her childhood, the family went back and forth between Australia and France, so Sophie grew up between worlds, and between languages, something which has always influenced her work. Sophie has had many novels published, in Australia and internationally, for children, young adults and adults. Her books have been shortlisted for many awards. In 2002 her alternative history/mystery novel, The Hand of Glory, won the YA section of the Aurealis Awards. Her most recent novels are The Hunt for Ned Kelly(Scholastic 2010), The Phar Lap Mystery(Scholastic 2010), The Understudy's Revenge (/i>(Scholastic Feb 2011) and My Father's War(Scholastic April 2011). Forthcoming is The Boggle Hunters(Scholastic 2012).

Sophie has also written many short stories, articles and reviews, which have appeared in many publications around the world, including Quadrant.

She was a member of the Literature Board of the Australia Council for four years, is presently on the Management Committee of the Australian Society of Authors and is the Depity Chair of the New England Writers' Centre.

Women's History Month: Kaaron Warren

I suspect Kaaron doesn't need an introduction here. I'll send you to her website, though, because there are books of hers you might want to read. Slights is still one of the most terrifying books around. Kaaron is living back in Canberra now, and owes me a coffee. Or I owe her one. Or both.


One of the women who inspired me actually didn't inspire me much at all. Rather, she harangued me, harassed me, embarrassed me and told me I was a fool.

This was my history teacher in Year 12. I'd never been a big fan of history at school. It was taught by boring people and was all about the facts. There was nothing exciting, none of the blood and guts, none of the terror, the torture, the glory, the great love and devotion that could be the study of history.

I'd spent most of my school years fudging it. I hated studying and memorizing facts, so I learnt the mastery of waffling. I'd tell stories rather than facts. Fill in a page describing just how it felt in the trenches, because I had no date in mind, no names. I really was very lazy.

I did well along the way. My stories were exciting, and full of descriptive detail so it sounded like I knew what I was talking about. They must have made a nice change for the teachers reading them.

Then came Year 12 and this teacher. I can't actually remember her name, which I feel bad about.
She read my first essay. I was very proud of it; I'd filled three pages or more with a graphic description of a Chinese gold miner, including (if I remember correctly) the sweat on his brow and the smell of his incense. I expected an A. Perhaps a B, if the teacher was in a bad mood.

F. The woman failed me. She wrote across it, "I want more than this, Waffles Warren." She really did. She called me Waffles Warren, and she continued to call me Waffles until I stopped waffling and knuckled down. Until I wrote something of actual substance.

It took a while. But when I got my first A from her, I knew I'd done something good.

Strangely enough, I never waffled while writing fiction. Looking back at my first short story, and the novel I wrote when I was 14 to 16, it's as sheared back as the fiction I write today. I think that's because in fiction I know what I want to say. I don't have to waffle to fill the page.

These days, I'm fascinated by history. I grab copies of BBC History magazine and others whenever I can, loving the detail and the way you can trace NOW from THEN.

One of the things I think about is the people who play a small but vital role in history. Was it the tealady who took the poisoned cup of tea into Alexander Litvinenko's hotel room? Che Guevera was arrested carrying a aluminium tin with six eggs in it. I want to know; who gave him the eggs? Did they love him? Fear him? Was he saving those eggs to eat when he safe, and he was never safe again?

Who sewed Franz Ferdinand into his clothes that day?

I think women play these roles very often. They are often unseen in the pages of history, yet they are what keep things together, make them function, and move the human story forward.

Those are the stories I want to hear.

Ian Whates: City of Hope and Despair

It's Angry Robot time!

I know I have a thousand things I must do this weekend, but life without new books is just not right, and Angry Robot put a set of new e-ARCs on their Robot Army website very recently.

City of Hope and Despair is part two of the trilogy that began with City of Dreams and Nightmares. The trilogy is closely connected - you need to start at the beginning. If you don't, the book will still make sense, but you'll lose a lot. And there's a cliffhanger ending.

You may remember that, while I didn't adore the first book in the trilogy, I said it was worth hanging in there and reading on. That hanging in is paying off. While this is not a great adventure fantasy trilogy, it's a solid one. Perfect fare for northern summers (perfect fare for southern summers, too, but the southern summer is so far off that it doesn't bear thinking of) or slipping into an overnight bag to take on a weekend away.

Whates is more secure in his voice in this volume, although he doesn't always assign the right amount of time to a particular narrative thread to keep us hanging. Some of the action sequences are still overdescribed and some are skipped over almost entirely. For the most part, though, it's a great deal of fun. Whates isn't scared of giving his characters a hard time, which means that there's no guarantee of most happy-ever-afters. Real jeopardy equals real tension.

It's not a big book. It's a comforting read, however, for lovers of adventure fantasy, and it has enough inventiveness and strong enough characterisation to be definitely worth a look.

Women's History Month: Sophie Masson

I forgot to ask Sophie for a bio! She's one of the most supportive writers I know. She has given many young writers a hand-up at one time or another. I met her, however, through our shared Arthurian interests. While her post has seen the light of day before, it's being republished here because it's apposite. Not only does it fit our shared love of history, but it is directly relevevant to WHM and also to her new book The Understudy's Revenge.

Writing historical novels

When you're writing a novel set in a period that's not your own, research is an inescapable part of the equation. Not that it bothers me—I love setting off on in my mind-powered time-machine on a journey of discovery into the 'foreign' yet teasingly familiar country that is the past. It is indeed often so much fun that it can be hard to tear yourself away from the research to begin the hard work of the book itself! And you also have to temper enthusiasm with temperance—to know the point at which enough research becomes too much. And not to paralyse your creativity with too much emphasis on logistics or facts—to remember you are writing a historical novel, not a historical textbook. Over the years I've become familiar with those tipping points and now, by instinct, know when to stop—and not to become enslaved by historical fact. The trick is to learn enough facts and absorb enough cultural atmosphere to feel as though you are comfortable in that period; but not to think you need to know absolutely everything—after all, you don't even know absolutely everything about your own times!


When I do research into a historical period for a novel, I look at a whole range of source materials. Though I do briefly look at secondary sources such as general histories of the period(and also books focussing on particular aspects of that period, say, clothes, transport, weapons, social or cultural developments, etc), by far the major part of my reading is done in primary sources. I'm not just talking about original historical documents, here(their importance goes without saying) but also the creative primary sources of the period I'm writing about: novels, plays, poetry, narrative non-fiction of that period(including travel books), and contemporary magazines. These give a much better and warmer feel for the actual atmosphere of the times than books written later, with the benefit of hindsight. You get a real sense of how people thought and spoke—and it can be really surprising.

For instance, I'd assumed that the word 'cool' in the sense we use it today was a fairly modern usage. Not a bit of it! It was used the same way in Victorian times: in Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone, at one point someone exclaims, 'Cool!' meaning 'Wow'; in Charles Dickens' Great Expectations, a 'cool few thousand' is inherited. Similarly, the Victorian term for a police detective(which also appears in Great Expectations), a 'jack' is still in common use in the Australian criminal underclass, at least in Melbourne ganglands, as evidenced in the Underbelly series. Along with 'copper' and 'pig'--the latter of which has been in use as a deragotary term for the police, since the sixteenth century.

I'm not saying of course one should slavishly copy 19th century novel structure or speech patterns in order to write a modern novel set in the 19th century—any more than 19th century novelists like Alexandre Dumas used seventeenth-century structures or speech patterns to write novels set at that time. But the flavour of a time is strongly there within those fictional worlds, and it can't help but influence you as you write your own book. For instance, staying in the 19th century, there is a dominant lightness of touch, an elegant irony in the style of many novelists, which combines with Gothic romance, a touch of melancholy, intensive and sometimes extreme characterisation, comic elements and strong stories to create a rich and engaging atmosphere that for many readers typifies the novel of the 19th century. The writers are all different and express their own thing, of course; but there is still something we come to recognise, and which even in a modern novel set at that period, we unconsciously look for.

As well as novels, plays and poetry of the time I'm writing about, I also find it rewarding to plunge into the more ephemeral form of period non-fiction. More ephemeral because of course unlike fiction with its more universal and ageless themes, non-fiction, particularly of the social observation or comment type, tends to concentrate on the here and now. And what is accepted wisdom in one generation is often upended in the next. But it is still intensely fascinating and absolutely necessary as reading material for a historical novelist, as far as I'm concerned, anyway. For instance, when I was writing The Case of the Diamond Shadow, my mystery novel set in the 1930's, I bought, second-hand over the Internet, a great many books and magazines from the time. All sorts of things, from film and fashion magazines to handbooks of forensic pathology, true-crime books and magazines, literary magazines, guide-books to London and Paris, political tracts, and more. As well, I had my grandparents' photographs to pore over, and pictures and photos in the various contemporary books and magazines(the visual material is almost as important as written things, and should never be overlooked.) I also watched a good many films from that time, and listened to its music. As well as being wonderfully entertaining, this all immersed me completely in the atmosphere of the time, maing me feel almost as though I were actually living in it, becoming so familiar with it that it was easy then to create exactly the kind of atmosphere I wanted for my book.

Magazines are particularly good for recreating in your mind all those sorts of elements that people forget about, once fashions change and time moves on. It's not only their stories and articles that are such a rich source of atmosphere—but also their advertisements. They are the small beer of daily life, but looking at them, you get a sense of people's daily concerns, fears, hopes, and wishes.

Similarly, when researching The Understudy's Revenge, my forthcoming novel, which is set in the London theatre world in 1860(and which features a cameo apparance by both Dickens and Collins) I lived in the rich climate of the Victorian novel, plus reading a good many Victorian works of non-fiction. From www.abebooks.com, my favourite source of such material(and which is a virtual shopfront of hundreds of 2nd hand bookshops from across the world), I ordered original, bound copies of Dickens' magazine of the time, All the Year Round, (a particular thrill was seeing The Woman In White in its original serial form)as well as Punch, and I dipped also into bound collections of magazines I already own, which come from that time—such as Blackwood's and one called London Society which only seems to have lasted a few years (I am an inveterate haunter of second-hand bookshops and am always picking up odds and ends). Magazines proliferated at that time, each of them aimed at a different niche market, each of them featuring short stories, serialised novels, poetry, and articles on every conceivable subject. Some, like London Society, were profusely illustrated; others, like All the Year Round, were not. But they are absolute goldmines of wonderful atmosphere, unusual facts, stray bits of ideas and dialogue, and they will often spark you off on trains of thought you might never otherwise have considered if you hadn't picked up that magazine.

Women's History Month: Sharyn Lilley

Sharyn Lilley: mother of seven incredible individuals; as a writer, editor and publisher, when she looks back over the last few years is probably proudest of the book she had least to do with: Baggage edited by Gillian Polack. This would be closely followed by the novel short-listed in last year's Ditmars - Gillian Polack's Life Through Cellophane.

Gillian tells me a truly amazing woman can silence rabble with just a look. And, to give credit where it's due, any mother will tell you that a good quelling look is very definitely an art worth cultivating. But you know, I get this feeling that, had I been the young and innocent girl being sexually accosted by a drunken ruffian in the frontier town of Bald Hills in the 1800's, I would have far rather had Mother Buntine there to take to the cad with her bullocky whip, and thrash him into soberness, than another woman who might have given him the glare of a lifetime.

So – is this guest blog about Mother Buntine? In part, but it's been sparked by several things:
a) my hackles rising every time someone tells me Australia's history is boring;
b) some of you might know of my Granny alter ego, a friend recently said she wished she could create a character as interesting as Granny, and hang on – Granny is based on my real (if tea total) Grandma. Granny characters are all around us if we take the time to look; and
c) the surprise I still feel that a very good friend of mine, university educated, and interested in history, hadn't so much as heard of the Battle of Broken Hill, until in her forties. This blog post is about some of those Australian women whose lives have inspired me, ever since I was old enough to hang about in the front room, reading a book, but truly eavesdropping on the conversations of my elders. *g* I hope it might interest some of you enough to find out more for yourselves.
Mother Buntine's name was Agnes, and A is a good place as any to start, so: Agnes Buntine (nee Davidson. C 1822-1896) Born the eldest of six children to a Scottish crofter and his wife, she emigrated to Australia with her family, leaving Glasgow December 1839. In October 1840 she married farmer Hugh Buntine, an ailing widower with five children. They moved to the Gippsland area where she was not only the first European woman, but where she gave birth to her first child when she was 19, and in the same year set up a fledgling business as a bullocky driver. I'd lay good money that Mother Buntine could do a wonderfully quelling look, but she was also noted to keep insolent men in their place by boxing their ears, and twisting their necks. Mother Buntine raised eleven children in a bark hut. She cared for her ailing husband, and together they ran an 8,000 acre station, all the while she built up her business as one of Australia's few female bullocky drivers, often beating the men at their own game, by being the very first to bring supplies to new, remote gold mining areas. She could ride after stock, kill, and dress a bullock, use a pick and shovel, split posts and rails, as well as run a store, and help her husband run a pub.

B is for Bushranger, and while most people concentrate on the men, (which, to be fair, we did have six thousand of them) there were some female bushrangers too. The three best known were Mary Ann Bugg, known as the wife of Captain Thunderbolt, the fact he evaded capture for so long was entirely due to the particular life skills of Mary Ann. She is described as being very beautiful, with a boarding school education from her European father and bush skills from her Indigenous mother. She even swam out to Cockatoo Island to help rescue Captain Thunderbolt from prison;

Mary Cockerill, also known as Black Mary, who was the partner of The Governor of the Woods, Michael Howe. Mary was also described as being very beautiful, with superb tracking and bush craft skills. She stood by her partner, keeping up with him, no matter what the circumstances. There are two stories about their parting of the ways, one has him shooting the heavily pregnant Mary in order to distract the troopers, and allowing him to flee, the other has it that Mary was shot in the melee between Howe and the troopers. I tend to believe the first, because Mary, once healed, tracked her former partner down, delivering him to the law, but I wasn't there, so of course, it is all only conjecture, but no matter how bare the lines between the story, what does shine through is a fleeting glimpse of one hell of a remarkable woman;

Elizabeth Jessie Hunt, known as The Lady Bushranger, at approximately eight years of age her parents gave her to a travelling bush circus. A young girl in those times and conditions, it can be conjectured with some degree of surety that there was every chance she was used and abused. Jessie was a champion rough rider, and after the breakdown of her marriage in 1924, she established herself near Kandos, running her own outlaw gang, stealing cattle and horses. Jessie was a survivor, and she used great daring and a degree of impudence to steal cattle from police holding yards, and convincing a jury that the cattle she was accused of stealing had actually strayed into her own herd. She died in 1936 of a brain tumour, and her granddaughter, Di Moore, has written a book about her life.

C, well that is going to have to go hands down to Children's author, and the Children's author that exemplifies Australian history for me, as well as being one of the loveliest ladies I was ever lucky enough to meet, is Elyne Mitchell, OAM. Author of the Silver Brumby series, stories set in the Snowy Mountains, these books were the first that gave me a landscape I recognised. I remember being constantly confused as a child by the books from the UK talking about the green grass of summer. Huh? What planet did that author live on? You don't get green grass in summer (ok, we have green grass this summer – but it's hardly a usual summer, water wise.) The ranges that Thowra rode through were the ones I saw every time I looked towards the mountains. But aside from creating wonderful stories, Mrs Mitchell was also an accomplished skier, winning the 1938 Canadian downhill skiing Championship, and in 1941, according to some sources, being the first woman to descend on skis, the entire western face of the Snowy Mountains. She and her husband raised their four children on their High Country station, working together, and being a part of an isolated community.

I could fill an entire alphabet of amazing women, from the forthright and passionate Women's Rights leaders of the 70s, and their impact on my childhood; to Australian scientists; teachers and musicians. But I'll stop with this A B and C that takes us from the 1800s to this century when Ms Mitchell passed away. We have a history of remarkable characters, people who took big bold steps to a new land, a new life, and tried to make their world a little bit better for them being there. People who most likely didn't give a rat's behind about whether their descendants thought their lives were boring; because they were too busy living those lives.

gillpolack @ 2011-03-03T21:32:00

I feel that I ought to warn friends that tomorrow's WHM guest is one of my publishers. I may not give this warning every single time, but I thought that it would be only fair to point out that I had *nothing* to do with her bio (except to ask if she would mind providing one).

gillpolack @ 2011-03-03T14:10:00

I was quietly working away yesterday (by quietly, I mean I wasn't actually talking back to my computer) when I realised that I have an astronomer in my time travel novel. I knew I had an astronomer previously, and Lara had kindly created me some views of specific skies she would have seen in 1305. The thing was that I had become so engrossed in S's personality and her effect on the other characters that I had forgotten to take her outside at night, to make observations. I had only given her half of herself. Having realised this, I also remembered that Lara has given me details of eclipses in 1305. I had missed out a whole planned arc! The lunar eclipse of the full moon on the 9 May very nearly didn't happen!

My fiction today is dedicated to Lara. I have to write the sky.