Robyn Walton spoke to much-published author, Catherine Jinks, about her latest novel Panic (Text Publishing 2025).
Hello Catherine. What an impressive record: more than 50 books published across the adult, young adult and children’s markets, with a number of short-listings and awards, including two Davitts for Best Young Adult Novel. Is it a person, place, event or something else that gets your mind working on a new storyline?
For me, anything can provide a creative trigger—person, place, event or social problem. For my YA novel Evil Genius (which won a Davitt Award, years ago) the trigger was the phrase ‘university of evil’, combined with Elijah Wood’s angelic face. For my most recent thriller, Panic, it was a newspaper story published way back in 2020, about a woman involved in a police siege in South Australia. For Shepherd, it was a passage out of The Fatal Shore, where Robert Hughes mentioned convicts enduring lives of the most intense isolation in far-flung shepherd’s huts. Anything can do it, if you’ve trained your mind to snag on story seeds.
I’ve been enjoying the titles you’ve published in recent years with Text. Panic has lots of zest and social satire. Am I right in sensing you had fun writing it?
Yes, after several years of older, grimmer, more exhausted protagonists, I reverted to a young-adult heroine with less baggage and more zip—largely because I didn’t want to write the same thing over and over again. Revisiting the humour of books like Pagan’s Crusade was good for my mental health, I think!
Humour is a tricky thing to use in thrillers—it can undercut tension—and I was worried about using it in this book. I think it works, though…
It’s a case of out of the frying pan into the fire when your main character flees Katoomba for a volunteer role on a property further west. Why is Bronte running away and what are her initial impressions when she’s met at Bathurst station and taken to ‘Gwendolynne’?
Bronte is running away because she’s posted a drunken rant online that was supposed to be private but has become viral. The person she was dissing has a large and rabid following, so she’s become a bit of a meme—and the online abuse has leaked into the real world. She’s feeling very unsafe in Katoomba, where people know her address and habits, but because the viral video is affecting her work prospects she doesn’t have much money. That’s why she’s signed up for an unpaid HelpX position and hopped on a train to Bathurst, where she thinks she’ll be safe.
Unfortunately, even out west some people know who she is—and it isn’t long before she realises her new hosts are on a collision course with various government bodies. Even the drive from Bathurst station to ‘Gwendolynne’, the spiritual retreat that her host runs, is fraught with drama.
But because Bronte’s young, and in a panic, she doesn’t turn around and head straight home again.
Bronte is early twenties and as the story progresses we see her learning and maturing. Also her training in social work comes in handy. Can you say a little about these aspects?
As I said earlier, having a younger protagonist was a deliberate choice—not only to differentiate this book from my other thrillers, but because I needed someone without much of a support network. Someone who could cut loose and run, without having to worry about kids, or partners, or a full-time job, or paying rent or mortgage.
A person of Bronte’s age who finds herself in this kind of situation hasn’t necessarily made terrible life choices in the past. She isn’t necessarily wrestling with massive mental health issues. Bronte’s just made one misstep, and that’s what I wanted—not someone dragging a huge backstory behind her.
In addition, Bronte being young means that social media’s impact on her life is much greater—as is her ability to manipulate it.
I was definitely trying to make her mature during the course of the book—so I’m glad that seems to have worked! Her character needed an arc, and she needed to defeat her panic in the process, so ‘growing up’ was part of that. I was also keen to look at the fallout from dramatic events like the ones at Gwendolynne—how the people involved can’t just shake it off and walk away, simply because of the long, drawn-out legal process, which would also force characters to mature.
For readers who enjoy thriller action, Panic lives up to its name. Did you need to do much research for the details of the action? And what was your thinking about whether to make the police sympathetic characters or nasty and unhelpful?
Most of my research focused on the sovereign citizen movement. It was online research, using media articles and numerous posts uploaded by various adherents. I spent a couple of years monitoring common law assemblies, cases of pseudo law, protests, armed resistance . . .
I also had to research police procedures, hospital administration, and the office of the NSW Trustee and Guardian. The police feature quite prominently in Panic, and my cast includes a variety of frontline police officers—some unhelpful, some very nice. My nephew is now in the police force, and it’s not an easy job.
I have to say, dealing with sovereign citizens at traffic stops would send most people round the bend. I can only salute the calmness of every single police officer I’ve ever seen in uploaded footage of these encounters.
Thanks very much for your responses.
More info here.