Every day, women and girls get knocked down. Maybe by violence, maybe by words, maybe by the weight of expectation. But it amazes me the number of times we get back up. Time after time. How the hell do we keep going? In a world built for hard men, how do we find our way through?
While looking for inspiration from the past, I realised that the women were often standing in the background of Australian history. There were plenty of stories about outlandish men doing outlandish things, but what about the women? The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to write a story about the kinds of women who slip through history’s fingers. Bad women. Women who are furious and brave and aren’t interested in being respectable because they’re too busy trying to be free. From that, Billie King was born.
I chose three striking leading ladies: a bushranger wanted for murder, a struggling mother with a past, and a bastard-child with an entire town breathing down her neck.
The reason reading is so special is that it lets us enter the heads of others. It allows us to see the world differently and contemplate life from perspectives we hadn’t known existed. So, it meant something to me to let readers see this story from various angles. Multiple POVs can be tricky. But if it’s done right, the reader knows whose head they’re in just from the voice. So, I was sure to make my three protagonists true individuals with fully lived lives. Then I thought of them as a plait. Three strands being woven together, tighter and tighter until they were all tied together at the end.
Through their stories, I hoped to show the ways we are shaped by circumstance—the choices available to us, the people around us, and the things we have to do to survive. Dulcie, Anna and Billie being so different highlights that life is hard for all kinds of women. It doesn’t matter if we’re beautiful or as ugly, clever or dopey, wild or placid … every woman struggles. But one of the most dangerous things we can be is isolated. That’s when women get into real trouble, I think. That’s when our spirits can really be flogged out of us. That’s when we can get knocked down and not be able to get back up. When that happens, what we need is another woman to reach down and offer her hand, reefing us to our feet, bringing us back to life.
The woman who bothers to do that knows that without belief and belonging, we’re in strife. They’re the kind of woman we need in the world, and I wanted to tell a story about them. Billie King (Harper Collins Australia) contains plenty of revenge and mischief, but beneath all of that is a tale of loyalty and a reminder that a sister at your back is worth a hundred men.
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