Sailing around the world sparks novel
Anne Millen can’t swim and didn’t physically see the sea until she was 7, but that didn’t stop her venturing out with her family on a sailing trip around the world in the 1980s.
The trip is the subject of her new novel, Tripping Over The Ocean, which she is hosting a launch event for at Gover St Gallery in New Plymouth today at noon.
Millen grew up in central Queensland on a cattle station but moved to New Zealand when she was 21.
“My then-husband was a keen sailor and his lifelong ambition was to sail around the world and I had two choices, get with the programme or stay home with the kids. So I got with the programme,” the now 76-yearold said.
“And I absolutely loved every minute of it – it was wonderful.”
The couple’s two children, then aged 10 and 11, came along and the family sailed for 4½-years.
She decided to launch the book in New Plymouth as that’ was where she lived when she had her children, one of whom still lived in the city.
Having spent a large part of their childhood at sea, only one of Millen’s children still sailed.
Millen said there was nothing like the feeling of being out at sea. “it’s the most beautiful feeling of freedom. We went west around the middle because only a lunatic would go east around the bottom.”
Millen decided to start writing about the journey when she retired from her career as a physiotherapist.
Her first book was a series of anecdotes called More Than A Thousand Dawns, whereas the new book is a fictional novel.
Central character Aria Stihl is a tough lawyer and dreamer who takes on a delivery voyage from Auckland to Suva with a crew of three, thinking it will be a laid-back journey. Instead, it proves to be dramatic.
Millen wrote the book in the Middle East, where she spent 23 years working as a physiotherapist. “I was part of a short story group and most of us have gone on to publish books.”