my monthly childhood
MY COUNTRY CHILDHOOD
Australian writers, authors and poets describe the joy of growing up in the country and how that informs their work today.
HEATHER ROSE
Heather is an acclaimed writer whose novels include The Museum of Modern Love and most recently Bruny. She grew up in Blackmans Bay, Tasmania.
“My parents built the first house on what was called the ‘new subdivision’ at the southern end of Blackmans Bay. ‘Village’ is too big a word — it was really a trail of shacks along the waterfront and back up into the low streets. I grew up in a house surrounded by paddocks. We had this roving cohort of children with incredible freedom.
“My mother, Dawn, was a secretary and personal assistant and my father, Kevin, a public servant. My mother was so imaginative — she would always be reading, sewing and cooking. She taught me to read by the time I was three, when my sister was born. My mother would sit me on her knee and read to me while she was feeding her.
“Mum’s love of books and language was amazing, and she was incredibly good at teaching me the fun and cleverness of language. Her father was always telling us jokes and quoting limericks and rhymes, so I learnt very young the magic of rhyming poetry and limericks and the fun of words.
“My dad was a very big reader, even though we only had about 20 books in the house — we came from very modest circumstances. Dad would take me to the library every weekend. When I was six, he took me into the adult section of Hobart Library and took a book off the shelf and said, ‘I think you’ll like this’. It was The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway. It took me six weeks to get through and it broke my heart — I’d never read a story with a sad ending. It made a huge impression on me and I recall thinking that writing doesn’t just take you places, it also makes you feel things.”
THOMAS KENEALLY
Kempsey-born Thomas is a celebrated essayist and writer of fiction and non-fiction – notably the Booker Prize winner Schindler’s Ark (1982), made into the Oscar-winning Schindler’s List by Steven Spielberg,
“My father was a genuinely tough guy and I was bookish and asthmatic, so I think I confused him somewhat — my illness put me in my mother’s company a lot. My mother was deprived of a real education herself. She died at 94 and was typical of her generation, a classic rosary-saying leftie. She was very driven when it came to my brother and me becoming academic, and put great stock in the value of books.
“I was six when Dad enlisted and seven when he went overseas. At that stage we moved to Homebush in Sydney, but we’d always go back to Kempsey for holidays and you’d pass the fettlers beside the railway line and hear them yelling out ‘Pape, pape?’ to see if anyone had a spare newspaper. The trains were so crowded that the soldiers slept in luggage racks.”
ALISON LESTER
Alison was born in Foster, Victoria. She is an illustrator and writer who has published more than 25 children’s pictures books, among others.
“It was a big, rambling weatherboard house that had been built a couple of years before I was born. It was comfortable and nice, and Mum had a big garden that she didn’t mind us riding our ponies in. We used to race round and round the house, on the garden and on the lawn — and often falling off with a thud on the sharp corner near her bedroom. We also used to grab the bar on the Hills Hoist and let the ponies gallop on riderless as we swung around.
“My first school was Foster Consolidated School. We had a great bus driver who used to buy us comics at the start of each term and leave them on the bench at the back of the bus; we would read them all the way to school and back again.”
CHARLOTTE WOOD
Charlotte’s latest novel, The Weekend, won the 2020 Australian Book Industry Award for Literary Fiction. She was born in Cooma, NSW.
“We grew up in a big, tumbling, chaotic household in Cooma, where my dad was a publications manager for the Snowy Mountains Authority…
“I always felt very loved, but I think I was quite needy for attention. Our parents didn’t say ‘I love you’, but we had the most loving upbringing — they were always there. My father would piggyback us to bed, and read to us — I remember him reading The Magic Pudding to me in bed. Both he and my mother read to us a lot. My mother cooked biscuits and dinner, and every night some kind of pudding.
“The landscape around Cooma became more beautiful to me as I grew older. Most of the books we had as young children were English — green fields and daffodils — so our landscape didn’t match what was supposed to be beautiful; ours was spiky and dry. But we spent so much of our childhood outdoors, and I grew to love the barrenness of the Monaro, the way the light moves over the plains. I began to read poets like Judith Wright and David Campbell, who saw its beauty. When I saw the film Jindabyne (2006), the opening shots — the stunning, bare beauty of those slopes — made me burst into tears. I thought, ‘That’s my home.’” >
“We used to grab the bar on the Hills Hoist and let the ponies gallop on riderless as we swung around.”
KATE MORTON
Kate was raised at Tamborine Mountain, Queensland. She has written half a dozen novels, all
New York Times bestsellers.
“Our first house was a Queenslander at the end of a long, bumpy driveway. On our first day there, we opened the windows and clouds floated through the house. Being very impressionable, I remember it vividly. It felt magical to live among the clouds.
“As a child I was earnest and rather shy, and I was able to fill time pretty easily. I hid in avocado trees to read because hiding made it more secretive and pleasurable.
“I learnt drama from when I was 10 and really loved it — in large part because I adored my teachers, Herbert and Rita Davies. Herbert had a little second-hand bookstore at the front of Rita’s drama studio. He had worked for BBC Wales and Rita had been a repertory actress in England; they were natural storytellers and windows to another place and time. It didn’t feel unusual to have friends who were 60 years older than I was, and the older I get, the more I realise Herbert and Rita provided a real turning point for me, focusing my love for books and storytelling.
“The most valuable part of growing up on Tamborine was the freedom to think and do what I liked rather than being told what was cool. When I went to high school, I realised unwritten rules existed, but by that stage I was already the person I was to be. It was a more truthful, open way to grow up.”
“I hid in avocado trees to read, because hiding made it secretive and pleasurable.”
LES MURRAY
Once voted one of Australia’s 100 national treasures, Les wrote almost 30 volumes of poetry and before passing away late last year at the age of 80. He was born in Nabiac, NSW.
“At Taree High, being a bit autistic and studious and generally out of fashion, I got rejected by some of the other students — particularly the girls. But there was a great teacher there, Keith Mclaughlin, who, being the experienced teacher he was, knew that trying to help a kid who is in trouble with bullying makes it worse. So what he did was to introduce me to something he knew would interest me more — modern poetry — and I more or less forgot about being bullied then.
“The Murrays are all word freaks. Dad had no literary training and had no constraints on his imagination — he’d tell these long yarns as we were working on the farm about men going down a stump hole and discovering another whole world underneath. If he didn’t know a word, he’d make one up. He had this whole fictional place overseas called ‘Choisago’.”