GO WITH THE FLOW

A wonderful life growing up in the bush informs a romantic tale set in the Gulf Country up north

After reading my first Kerry McGinnis Outback romance adventure I am trying to think of how I would describe it to someone. Then it comes to me and I share my brief synopsis with the Bundaberg-based author when we chat about her latest novel, Croc Country.

“It’s like an episode of Skippy on steroids,” I say. The connection with the 1960s TV show is that it’s set in the bush and involves park rangers but not a kangaroo that can play the piano and use a short-wave radio set. Luckily McGinnis, 75, laughs heartily at my description. She knows what I mean, she says, but adds she never saw an episode of Skippy and I really don’t have to ask why.

There wasn’t that much television watching done in her childhood. The Adelaide-born author went droving with her father and four siblings at the age of 12. The family travelled extensively across the Northern Territory and Queensland before settling on Bowthorn, a cattle station in the Gulf Country, in 1966. That was her home until 2004 when the station was sold and she moved to Bundaberg. She had to have open heart surgery at that time and living in the remote Gulf Country was no longer feasible anyway.

“I spent most of my life in the bush,” McGinnis says. “And I miss it.”

Writing her books is a way of reconnecting with it.

She has been writing, she tells me, since the age of nine and contributed freelance pieces along the way to magazines and journals until she published her first book, a memoir entitled Pieces of Blue, in 1999. That was followed by a second memoir, Heart Country, and then a series of best-selling novels — The Waddi Tree, Wildhorse Creek, Mallee Sky, Tracking North, Out of Alice, Secrets of the Springs, The Heartwood Hotel, The Roadhouse and, now, Croc Country.

Croc Country is about a young widow, Tilly Hillyer, who works as a housekeeper and cook for rangers at a wildlife sanctuary in the isolated wilderness of the northwestern Gulf Country. Caring for injured wildlife and helping to run a popular tourist campsite are just the distraction she needs from everything she left behind when her husband, Gerry, and young daughter were lost at sea.

But there’s a mystery involving her husband, a shocking mystery, and there’s romance on the horizon when a botanist named Connor turns up and steals her heart.

There are drug, wildlife and people smugglers in the mix and plenty of drama and McGinnis’s usual vivid depictions of the bush and Outback way of life. And as for Tilly being a cook, well McGinnis knows a thing or two about that as well.

“I was a station cook myself,” she says. “I draw on my own experiences in all my books. Describing the country I know so well and making it a character is what I do. I had a superb bushman for a father and he taught us everything about the bush.

“Country means everything to Indigenous people and to me, too.”

While there is romance involved in her books, McGinnis is adamant that she doesn’t write “chick lit” and she keeps it reasonably wholesome.

“My romance doesn’t get too steamy,” she says. “Jackie Collins does steamy, I don’t. I am a modest woman. A lot of my readers are women, but I have also had a lot of men write to me. They have read my books and they are very complimentary about my knowledge of the bush. I know it so well.” Croc Country by Kerry McGinnis, Penguin/

Michael Joseph; $33