Belinda Jeffrey’s book, Big River Little Fish, was a wonderful experience of immersion; in a time, place and a feeling. I was right there on the Murray in 1956 waiting for the levee to break; I felt as though I could see inside the heart and mind of every expertly drawn character. This is a quintessential Australian novel which I would recommend without reservation to adults and teens alike. I didn’t want this book to end. It was beautiful.

There is absolutely nothing better, for me, than knowing a reader has enjoyed my book. Filled with all sorts of warm fuzzies this afternoon.

From the moment Tom Downs was born backwards – the moment of his mother’s death – time has held him the wrong way round, like he’s caught inside a fractured story. But the thing about the Murray river rising, the thing about Tom’s town flooding, and the thing that takes him by surprise is not what Old Mother Murray takes away, but who she brings back.

I’m thrilled with the way it looks, I love the cover to bits and am so priviledged to have, once again, worked with the fantastic team at UQP. So. If you like the sound of this new little book, track down a copy and give it a read. I’ve also tried my hand at a book trailer. What do you think?  Big River Little Fish book trailer

A mackerel is a fish you can eat.

A holy mackerel is a fish you can believe in.

A PAGE FROM MUM’S BOOK

Build then the ship of death,

For you must take the longest journey to oblivion.

And die the death, the long and painful death

That lies between the old self and the new.

D.H Lawrence, The Ship Of Death

This is one beginning.

It is December, nineteen thirty-eight and Mum sits with Grace on the beach at Elizabeth Bay. A wicker basket rests, lop-sided, in the sand between their legs and a sheet of newspaper, covering the fish inside, rustles in the wind. The air tastes of brine.

It has been a year or so since Mum placed D.H Lawrence’s poem in her Book. It was not the name of the man himself that inspired her—and certainly not the hoopla about his literary talents and all that high-brow, brown-arsing she so despises (yes, he even visited Australia once). It was rather the image he conveyed to her of a man building that boat with his bare hands; a vessel he seemed to be carving out of the debris of his own past. That there exists, even in fiction, a man that will sail the sea of his own short-comings, a man that will honour his own life no matter he can smell death on the wind, is reason enough to hope.  If the world tears strips off ya, use it to sew a sail, she has taken to saying, or, if you can shit a brick, build a house. Death is inevitability from the moment of life and all that matters is the living in-between. Eat, love and believe, boys. It’s all a man can do. Yet, that there could be a man who will not give up…

She has seen the realm of men; found them, loved them, fed them and shagged them, and not found a single one worthy. Oh there have been companions amongst them—and more than a few that she’d have readily taken to her bed for free—but that is sorely different. Found them unworthy of what, exactly, she cannot say. All she knows is that somewhere along the line of her life this seeking is primal and her yearning unsatisfied. She believes men to be slaves to their own rudders and—while she has grown fat and rich from it—there is one small subconscious part of her that yearns to be wrong. And every man she saves could just be the one.

She listens to the crashing of water against the shore and watches the waves empty onto the sand. Flat-lining in clots of thick foam. Looking beyond the sand-line, past the undulating womb of the ocean, she sees the S.S Leuna, silhouetted against the horizon, gliding past Clarke Island towards Sydney Harbour.

A man has jumped from the ship—she knows this from her contacts—and he swims, out there in the water, towards her. She cannot see him yet, but she is with him, silently. Don’t you give up. His struggle is the gamble of life and she begs and bargains with every ounce of willing she can. Come on, boy. She holds her lucky penny in her fingers and rubs it round and round. He could just be the one.

Beside Mum, Grace etches the outline of a fish into the wet sand with a stick of driftwood and rubs it out with her foot. For her the waiting is almost painful and this is all she can do to steady her nerves.

The women are King’s Cross whores.

The man in the water is a Nazi deserter.

The mackerel inside the wicker basket— wrapped in page one of yesterday’s Syndey, Truth — is frozen.

Shh. Just wait. The sea is about to give birth.

There is another beginning: the moment a man looks beyond the ship’s railing, knowing he has to jump. It is not the physical task that detains Walter, the ice of the water, the hunt that will follow, it is the moment itself, the anticipation of falling.

He is hidden behind the lifeboat, facing the water, and the tarpaulin flaps in the breeze. Metal braces thrash against their bolts.Walter Schmidt flexes his muscles and glances over his shoulder towards the portside beam. He pulls his coat around his body and buttons it while the sea slaps against the ship’s hull with animal fists.

Walter has fled one beast already; a plague of greed and depravity, a tornado of rhetoric. Red and white armbands. Black, twisted crosses. Feast, they demand, feast to save your soul and country.

Find that weed amongst you and root it out, by God.
Burn them, burn them all to hell, and let heaven reign again.

Salute me, all ye people there;

Ye blue of eye and blond of hair.

Fly your banner for me and raise your German cup,

I will pour the Jewish blood and then together, we shall sup.

Sydney is a haze in the distance, yet Walter can still feel the Fatherland behind him. For all that the curve of land in front of him promises, Walter knows there is no escaping what he has done, and what he must do, and he thinks about everyone he will leave behind. His son, Richard, and always, Greta. This moment is neither an end or a beginning, it could be nothing more than a coward’s escape.

Clouds are thick, grey shadows in the sky. A wet mist hangs in the air and he shivers.

‘You filthy Jew-loving pig.’

Walter turns his head to see Ulrich and S.S men, in plain clothes, standing behind him. Walter’s muscles tense and his knuckles turn white on the rail. ‘Take one more step and I will shoot,’ Walter bluffs.

They laugh.

‘You think they will save you? These…Australians? They know nothing.’

‘Fuck you,’ Walter screams. He leaps over the railing and disappears under the water. For a moment the silence is a comforting pressure against the friction of his mind until a fire ignites inside his chest and the urge to live is overwhelming. He pushes up through the water, gulping and swallowing, with his clothes dragging against him. He swims towards the shore. Bullets thud around him but this beast bears him on her shoulders. She throws him high and swallows him whole and Walter is digested in the raging womb of oblivion.

The black ship will come for you, son, just look to the horizon. A seaman never dies. Except to himself.

His father is his last memory before the moment of his berth.

There is a third beginning: Sam returning to the Spread Eagle Hotel from the post-office with word of the Leuna’s approach.

It is almost six o’clock in the evening and the front bar is crammed with men squashing against the counter with fists of money. Smoke fills the air in choking clouds and here and there a man pisses into the sawdust on the floor rather than lose his place in the line.

Digger is a crumpled figure perched on a wooden stool beside the entrance. His mouth is puckered around a tin whistle and his up-turned hat sits on the floor beside him. There’s a trinity of drinkers in the pub. Blokes that are Irish to the core,  English to the bone, and Aussie Battlers at heart. On any given day there could be barneys over religion or sovereigns, kings and queens, but when it comes to workers unions and the disgrace of Lang and Labor, they’re all of one voice. Bloody disgrace to the working man. Digger has a repertoire to please; Oh Danny Boy, Knees Up Mother Brown and Wild Colonial Boy. And he flutes tunes to ditties penned by The Industrial Workers of the World.

The hours are long,

The pay is small,

So take your tie

And buck them all.

Work and pray

Live on that,

There’ll be pie,

In the sky

When you die.

Digger is like the dog that every bloke used to have or dreamed of having and most a man has lost.

The Spread Eagle Hotel fronts Onslow St with wide timber doors and tessellations of black and green glossy tiles. Elizabeth Bay isn’t visible from the pub itself—which is wedged at the bottom of a slight hill—but just over another row of houses, she’s there, pushing in along the curve of the land. Seagulls and the occasional taste of salt rise up with the wind.

Fish mongers trade their catch in carts opposite the pub and the briny tang of mussels and oysters, cod and mackerel is thick in the air. On dusk, mongers fry their remaining stock on open braziers and sell it cooked, wrapped in newspaper.

Sam stops at Chang’s monger-cart. ‘Mackerel, Chang. Make sure she’s from the bottom of the ice-chest. I want it frozen,’ he says.

Chang bows, his eyes lost in a blank smile as he hands over the mackerel as ordered. ‘You come find Chang later. Have business proposition.’

‘We’ll see, Chang.’

The fish is cold and heavy and Sam holds it above his head and pushes inside the pub’s front doors and through the crowd.

Mum’s Bread-And-Butter girls are among the crowd persuading blokes to spend some of what they have in their pockets for an emptying—of a kind—in a room behind the pub. Two Jingles perch at each end of the bar dispensing room keys and keeping tally of how much meat is sold for the day on palm-sized notebooks.

Sam is dark and thick-set and lacks enough height to make himself seen above the crowd, despite the meandering parcel he holds above his head, but he sees Grace seated on a stool at the bar.

The pub rabble drowns out Digger’s music and here and there a lone voice rises above the general throng.

‘What the bloody hell.’

‘Come on love, don’t be like that.’

‘Fill her up.’

Big Tom is amongst it all, trying to restore order amidst the chaos; his voice like an aging set of bellows. ‘Settle down, fellas. That’ll do.’ He is round and slow and heavy as a beer keg. In a few minutes he’ll be moving through the crowd, herding men like sheep through the front doors to clear the bar by six in line with the law. Bottom’s up to the referendum.

Big Tom sees Sam’s parcel and whistles towards Grace.

She waves at Big Tom and looks through the crowd for Sam. Finding him, she slides from her stool and walks through the outer crush of blokes at the counter. She slips the keys into her pocket and takes the fish.

Sam leans close to her ear. ‘Billy Blue’s in the lock-up. Tell Mum I’ll be round with the car.’

Grace shrugs and kisses Sam on the cheek. She turns and, using the fish like a prod, clears a track through the men to the door behind the counter.

Sam watches her leave. Her dark hair is curled under at her shoulders and bounces as she walks. Her waist is thin and, for a moment, Sam forgets she is a fanny for sale and imagines a regular private table where they sit together over an evening meal. He hears the crowd erupt in what seems like a collective groan and the mental picture is quickly gone. He glances up to the clock above the bar on the back wall. Six o’clock on the donger. Underneath the clock is a framed photograph of a stern-set woman; the matriarch of the Temperance Union.

‘Bless you, Maywith,’ Sam says before pushing his way back out to the street.

All life begins with three things; mother, father and a fish that swims through the crowd.

Or in this case;

Motherland,

Fatherland

Mackerel.

Out in the water, Mum’s deserter – for this is how she thinks of him – flounders towards the shore. The black ink-blot of him is almost at the shallows when he disappears completely and Mum can no longer see the wild thrust of his arms through the water.

‘Come on, boy,’ Mum mutters. With her hands thrust in the pockets of her cardigan, she rubs her penny-lucky round and round and it warms with her impatience. ‘Fight, you bastard.’

She removes her hands and reties the scarf under her chin (in the hope it will make her seem more ‘fish-wife’ than ‘rough-house whore). She is dumpy and well-bosomed and, though time has carved its path in her skin, her legs are sturdy. Her faithful gates to heaven and hell have never let her down. Her arms have beaten a thousand eggs, pounded lumps of potato with wooden spoons in saucepans wider than her middle, and her pastry-toughened hands can slap a bloke from home to kingdom come. And that is just the muscle of her. Her spirit is a stick of steel. She has never been anyone’s mother, but all those she takes under her wing call her, Mum. Not negotiable.

On any average night, Mum and Grace see roughly the same number of penises as sausages. Yet it only legal to prick the later with a sharp knife to let the juice run. For the former, there is an etiquette to the way it is done. A certain amount of cunning. And a profit to turn. There is a fine line between meat and mate, girls, ‘cause every man you meet wants to mate. Whoring knowhow number one.

‘Mary, Mary quite contrary, how does your garden grow? With balls and bells and cocks as well, his pin in your pastry dough,’ she mutters, glancing at Grace. Her voice is deep and rough.

Grace laughs. In contrast to the older woman, she is tall and pretty. Too young to have experienced as much of the world as she has, but then some girls haven’t the luxury of sensibility and morality. They must take hold of the edge of life with their teeth and hold fast. But the sourness of the world does not show in the colour of her skin. She still has the pink and peach about her despite the relentless demands of her prostitution. Oh, yes, the world is still her oyster and time is her lover. For her there is always tomorrow and the sins of yesterday have not tolled.

The man appears again. He is all determination and fury, his arms thrashing. Then, for a moment, the sea carries him on the back of her wave and he is propelled to the shallows.

‘Well done, boy,’ Mum mumbles as she picks up the basket to rest on her hip.

He staggers awkwardly, dragging himself upright against the weight of his sodden clothing and the push of the water against his legs. He lifts his feet through the water and falls to his knees on the edge of the sand. He stands, holds his arms out to the side and raises his face to the sky. His knees crumple, he falls flat and there he lies; a human cross on the beach. Water laps over his feet. He does not move.

Mum runs down towards him. Her feet sink in the soft sand and she leans against the weight of the basket on her hip for balance. The sand firms up under her feet. When she is beside her deserter, she looks up to see a man running along the water’s edge towards her. She signals back to Grace, raising her hand to her brow as if scanning the road-line for help.

‘Fuck it,’ she mumbles, yet she pretends she does not know who he is and what he is doing here in the early evening when there are German ships and Nazi deserters about. She pretends these things in the pretext of stumbling upon this poor man as she returns home with her catch. Yet she knows that the man who runs towards her with his suit done up and his hat in his hand would kill her deserter while she is determined to save him. Mum places the basket in the wet sand beside her deserter’s arm, bends down and shakes him. He does not stir. She leans down over her his body and places her ear to his nose and the warm haze of his breath warms her cheek. There is no other response. The Docker arrives on the other side of his body.

‘Please, mister,’ Mum says before he can speak. She exaggerates an Italian accent. ‘Please, you must hyelp him.’

‘You should go home, lady,’ he says. ‘This man is with me.’ He kneels down beside the body.

‘But-’ Mum looks across the water and then around her. She shrugs her shoulders and raises her hands in a gesture of incomprehension.’ I saw him fall hyere.’

‘I don’t want to scare you, lady, but you should go home. Could be dangerous.’ His English is good, but he cannot disguise his German accent.

Mum brings her hand to her mouth then her heart. With one hand, she reaches out and grabs the Docker’s arm. She crosses herself with her other hand. ‘Holy mother of God!’

The Docker pulls his hand free and smiles awkwardly.

‘I’m just a fish-wife,’ she says. ‘I don’t want trouble.’

‘Just you go now-’

‘Listen. Do you, perhaps, like fish?’ Mum reaches into the basket, maneuvering her fingers underneath the newspaper, to clutch the mackerel’s tail.

‘Excu-’

Mum swings the frozen mackerel towards the Docker’s head and, with a thunder-crack, the fish strikes him on his temple and he falls to the ground. The newspaper flies out of the basket and flutters on the breeze before racing off down the beach on the current.

Grace runs down towards Mum and together they drag the deserter up the beach to the road-side. Mum glances back to the water’s edge where the Docker lies on his side, his hat floating in the water.

‘Come on, Sam, you useless bastard. Where’s the bloody car?’ Mum says, scanning the road.

Grace sits on the ground beside the deserter and lifts his head onto her lap.

‘Don’t think you’re getting out of work tonight, girlie.’

‘You’re all heart.’

Mum leans over his body. ‘Bloody son of a clap-catcher!’ she says touching his shouler. ‘He’s been shot!’

They do not know to call him, Walter, yet, but they will.

I was gong to post a picture of what is technically my study though, after moving into a  town-house, this is just a little corner in a garage among everything else we have to store in there. It houses the mad mess of ideas and research for my novels, plus the paints and paper, ribbon, boxes and ’stuff’ for artistic endeavors, should anyone feel inclined, and the washing machine.

My preferred writing space, though, is a small table at Gloria Jeans at Indooroopilly Shoppingtown. Yes, I know, it’s not the most ‘ambient’ of places. It has no atmosphere, it’s opposite Woolworths and it is just a re-claimed space in the middle of the mall. But it’s where I go everyday to write (when I can).

The advantage of this particular place is that there is a constant background noise that cocoons me into my own thoughts. Too much quiet around makes my own myriad of other thoughts seem way too loud. Hmm. I feel like chocolate, damn I fogot to hang out the washing. When was that electricity bill due? Too much noise, like music, has me tuning in and singing along, that’s me in the corner, that’s me in the spotlight losing my religion. But with a constant level of background noise, I forget where I am and everything else except the novel I have in front of me. Oh, and the coffee is good and the staff know me. It’s the small things. People drop by for a chat, and it’s not far from home.

By current novel, Big River Little Fish, was mostly written here and it will be published by UQP in September.

Fiction Focus

It’s especially valuable to me because some schools perceive the content of my book to be unsuitable for young adults. I’ve never understood the need to keep teenagers and young adults from accessing some of the darker concerns of life. In fact, I think that if adults are too scared to confront a range of issues, then it makes it a scarier place for younger people.

My son recently saw a poster of ‘The Boy In Striped Pajamas’ and asked me what it was about. I gave a simple, fluffy answer and he kept picking up on the vague places in my answer and asking specific questions. He said he didn’t want me to leave out the bad parts because he needed to know the whole story.

When I hear comments from adults saying that young adults ’shouldn’t read about things like that’ I often think of what it would be like to be a kid who’s had to live through terrible things, imagining what it would feel like to hear an adult describe their life as unsuitable for ‘good kids’ to think about, read, let alone understand. If Barry (my main character) were real, he’s the kind of person I’d love my kids to spend time with. Real, honest, un-afraid of grey.

I came across this article the other day, while researching my adult novel. A man caught a shark in 1935 and put it on display in a public swimming bath. The shark doesn’t look so well and eventually vomits up a human arm. The arm has a tattoo of a boxer which is used to identify the man. The man, an amateur boxer, is linked to the criminal underworld. I think this will make it into my story. One of my characters will know the killer for sure.

read a full article about it here.

“Oh, I ran into so-and-so yesterday. You know she went to Indooroopilly high? But she’s not a Bogan,” she adds quickly to prevent what would be an apparently logical assumption.

It was quite a revelation to realise that Indooroopilly High attenders (past or present) are Bogans by default – according to some who, presumedly, attended a non-state school – unless they able to prove, to the non-Bogan, virtues belying their unfortunate education. It’s funny because I had always thought of Indro high as pretty up there in the state-school pecking order.* Just goes to show.

I do hate it when others cast nasturtiums about me and incinerate I’m dumb just cause of where i went to skool.

* This lack of knowledge is most certainly attributable to a poor education.

It has not taken me long to let my brain wander into another story and I’m back in the head space of my adult novel set in Sydney in the thirties. Prostitutes, gangsters, deserters. Debauchery at it’s finest.

I stumbled upon this fantastic book by Peter Doyle called ‘Crooks Like Us’ which is a collection of photographs that were taken in the 20’s and 30’s by police photographers. For some reason crooks and crims were photographed in poses and portraits in addition to mug shots. Doyle suggests it was in order to understand the criminal mind, to see if there were some physical way of discerning the criminal from the respectable citizen. In any case, Crooks Like Us is a fantastic chronicle of mis-fits and fences, rapists, murderers, penny-pinchers and schemers. The pictures seem to strip these people bare, to peel back some veneer and expose a rugged, hardened, resolved physchology. Through these pictures I feel I have an intimate view into the characters that make up the world of my story.

It’s set on the Murray River, in South Australia in 1956, in a small town called Swan Reach – where my father actually has a shack. The story of Tom Downs takes place amidst the greatest natural disaster on South Australian record (still), a mighty flood that decimated towns all along the Murray river. There had been floods in 1911 and 1931 but the 1956 swept past those levels and kept going. Some towns never recovered. Homes and shops were destroyed, crops and farms were ruined and, with the excitement of the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, most of Australia didn’t appreciate how great the disaster was until later.

I was down there at Big Bend in Swan Reach back in March, and it’s hard to imagine how much water there would have been all those years ago when today’s disaster is about how little water there is. Parts of the river bed now exposed haven’t been seen before. Pumps have to be specially placed to avoid churning mud through the septic systems. Back waters have completely dried up leaving huge brown basins. Further up the Murray, in the Coorong, whole species of wildlife are under threat.

The Murray is special to me, especially that place opposite the limestone cliffs on Big Bend where my father’s shack sits. The colours on sunset are breathtaking. I woke one morning to find two large kangaroos sunning themselves beside the verandah about a meter away from me and, on dusk, the air is alive with cockatoos that swoop home to their holes in the cliff. It’s magical. Hopefully some of my feeling for that place translates to the story.

Now it’s time to edit because, believe me, there are holes that need filling. Threads that need mending, lumpy bits and gouges. But this is my favorite part. I love having a draft to work with. The hardest part is in getting here.

Where do your words come from?

I watch too many movies than is probably healthy and read, read, read. I spend a lot of time wondering. Somewhere, in all of this comes an energy and urgency for a new story, an idea, that I simply must find the right words to express. Sometimes it’s like a babble inside my head and If I just relax, the right words will flow. The voice of a story is the most critical factor, for me, and finding the right words is about getting inside the right voice for the story.  It’s more subconscious than conscious. In fact, better words come when my own cognitive self shuts up.

There are people I know who are organisational freaks. They love having everything neat and tidy and in its place. It gives them a sense of peace and satisfaction. Finding the right words, for me, is just like that. I can’t completely rest until they’re all put down, neatly ordered, in just the right place.

Where did you grow up and where do you live now?

I grew up in Adelaide until grade 7.  I spent a lot of time with my family traveling with three other families on caravanning holidays. Fishing on jetty’s, building fires at night when our parents weren’t watching, getting lost in sand-dunes. My short story, The Hallelujah Roof, is based on events that happened to me in the first year we spent in Brisbane. But I’ve now spent more years as a Brisbanite than an Adelaidian so Brisbane is definitely home.

What’s the first sentence/line of your latest work?

Tom Downs came out backwards on the sand at Big Bend. (YA)

A mackerel is a fish you can eat. A holy mackerel is a fish you can believe in. (Adult)

What piece of writing do you wish you had written?

Wow. There are so many. It’s a toss up between Cloudstreet and The Book Thief, but today I’m going with The Book Thief. It’s so clever, so original, so moving.

What are you currently working towards?

In the short term I’m working towards finishing this next YA and I’m almost there. I’ve then got two adult novels half written that I want to finish. I’ll have to flip a coin to decide which one gets immediate attention.

Complete this sentence… the future of the book is…

Certain.

I can’t honestly see a future without books. Books in all different formats. I think the digital age will expand our accessibility to the printed word, not replace the printed, bound book.

This post is part of the Queensland Writers Centre blog tour, happening October to December 2009. To follow the tour, visit Queensland Writers Centre’s blog The Empty Page.