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It’s an image many mothers will relate to. It was just before Christmas 2009 and Louise Allan was weeping as she pegged out the washing at 11pm.
It was not just that the doctor and motherof-four was exhausted and overscheduled. It was a deeper feeling that she was not doing what she really wanted to do.
“My children were aged about seven to 14 then, with the eldest ones hitting that teenagehood, when you think they won’t need you as much, but they do,” says Allan, 51.
“I kept telling my husband the way we were going was unsustainable. It was constantly hectic. I was barely coping and I thought, ‘I can’t keep doing this, I am too tired’.”
Somehow, between her work as a breast physician and mother, Allan had been squeezing in an extra-curricular activity. She loved the regular classical singing lessons she had been taking for seven years, but knew music was not a career option for her.
As she prepared to ditch her medical career, comfortable in the knowledge her doctor husband would shoulder the load as the main financial provider for their family, she cast about for something else that would stimulate her mind and satisfy her creatively.
From their home in Western Australia, the former Tasmanian took an online writing course and something was unleashed in her second assignment, when she was writing about a candle, of all things.
Heartened, she took a second course. This time the characters of what would become her first novel were born. Ida and Nora, two Tasmanian sisters from the North East who come of age in the 1920s, first appeared in a short story.
Allan spent the next four years expanding that short piece into what would become The
Sisters’ Song, which was released in January and spans 50 years in the sisters’ lives.
Loss and longing permeate the narrative as they struggle to come to terms with what they see as their unfulfilled destinies.
Level-headed Ida longs for a family. While working as a nanny for a family in Launceston, she meets and goes on to marry kind and reliable Len. Her future looks bright, if deeply conventional, as she prepares the nursery for the homecoming of their first baby.
Nora, beautiful and musical, is set on a different course when their grandmother secretly nurtures the younger girl’s talent for operatic singing.
Over time Ida realises her dream to become a mother may never be and Nora’s stage dreams are dashed by domesticity. In plain but deeply insightful prose, Allan explores what happens to people whose deepest desires are thwarted and how those resentments can play out destructively in families.
Allan based the sisters loosely on her two grandmothers, who were both from Tasmania’s North East.
“My father’s mother had three stillborn babies and I grew up hearing about those three stillbirths and I didn’t bat an eyelid,” she says. “They were three boys and my grandmother knitted for each one. After the third one she was told she would not have a live birth unless she had a caesarean. It was only when I became a mother myself, I realised how hard it must have been to come home without a baby three times.”
Her maternal grandmother, she says, didn’t seem to like her grandchildren when they were young, though Allan got on well with her later. It was this matriarch who inspired many of her reflections on what can happen to women “whose intelligence and creativity get no airing”.
“When I started [writing], I was much angrier about what had been done to me as a child by women who didn’t see how damaging they were,” says Allan. “I had to look behind Nora and see what motivated her behaviour, and that helped me.”
While her late-night clothesline meltdown may have been triggered by contemporary “superwoman” issues, it contained enough painful creative yearning to set Allan on her path to becoming a writer able to deeply empathise with the characters of this classic women’s tale.