I grew up in the arse end of nowhere. Magnetic Island. Before you go to the trouble of looking it up, I can tell you it’s not off Cairns and it’s not part of the Whitsundays, either. You’ll find it between those two famous holiday spots, just off the coast of Townsville. A semi-isolated community of around 1500 people, the list of things Magnetic Island didn’t have was long: shopping centres, cheeseburgers, a proper supermarket, traffic lights, more than one cop. It did have three pubs, two chip shops, a bakery, post office, twenty-three largely untouched beaches, and maybe two or three million giant granite boulders.
It sounds exotic but by the time I turned sixteen I bloody hated it.
Because I read too much. Almost none of the stories or characters in the books I read reflected my experiences of living and growing up in regional north Queensland. Neither did any of the movies or TV shows I watched. So, I began to think of the stories of my region as inferior. I knew there were no authors from Magnetic Island but figured there had to be a handful from the wider region. But when I went looking, I could only find Thea Astley. And she was originally from Brisbane.
When I decided to turn my hand to writing I set my early stories in fictional towns so that nobody would know I was from Magnetic Island. And I copied the styles of ‘serious authors’ like Peter Carey and Christos Tsiolkas and Tim Winton because (*cough* internalised misogyny) those guys lived in the serious parts of the country where the serious art got made.
So, I did gritty.
I did serious.
I even did Tolstoy. I wrote a ten-page manifesto (or close to it) on the transformative power of a lady’s sapphire hair pin.
Suffice to say my attempts at literary fiction and pretending I knew anything about Perth/Melbourne/Moscow were less gritty than grim.
All I can say is thank God for crime fiction. The release from the pressure to be literary came with a release from feeling that my formative years were less than. So what if my parents never took me to McDonalds? And so what if I never got held up at knifepoint in a Sydney back alley? Outback crime novels had no back alleys at all. And if I didn’t want to do outback crime, there was medical crime, legal crime, thriller, noir, hard-boiled, cosy crime, the list goes on and expands by the month. It was a veritable smorgasbord.
I’m not sure what sub-genre my debut, The Washup, fits into but my publisher is calling it ‘quirky crime’. I’m not entirely sure what that means, but wonderfully, I don’t care. Which is probably the moral of my long, winding journey into writing and publication. My novel is from Magnetic Island first and foremost. It’s from me. The genre comes second. This came about because I started writing what I know. Living in north Queensland, I might not know what a world-class flat white tastes like, but I do know how to spot a cone shell at ten paces. You can look that one up now. Those bastards will make a dark Sydney back alley look like no big deal.
More info here.