Kristina Olsson

Writing on the road
Claire Coleman
The first impressions that would
become my story began on the
road. I had always intended to
try to write a novel on the road;
I had even started one once,
so abandoned now that I can’t
even remember what it was. As I
crossed the Nullarbor Plain, the
great desert that stretches across
Australia’s south—a landscape
most Australians never encounter—
an idea embedded itself in my
head and in my heart. It was too
nebulous to write. When I returned
to my ancestral country, to the
coast where my ancestors had
always lived and to the town where
my grandfather was born, I felt the
story edge closer.
There is a cute little museum in
a small, dusty mining town called
Ravensthorpe. That was where
my grandfather was born, where
my ancestors, both Aboriginal and
White, helped establish the town.
In the museum I found a wall that I
did not even know existed, covered
in photos of my ancestors and
my family. They must have spent
significant time, years maybe,
uncovering all they could on the
history of my family and
cataloguing it.
It was also there in that museum
that I was told of a memorial
to the massacre nearby of my
distant relatives, of the family of
my ancestors. I was invited to
the opening of the memorial and
resolved, though due elsewhere, to
return for it.
After the opening there was no
going back; it informed my entire
life, this knowledge not just in
words but in feeling, of a massacre
in my family’s background. This
experience was also the foundation
for my novel; that massacre,
that landscape, all massacres of
Aboriginal people informed my
writing. I would never have had
that exposure, more profound than
words, from reading.
I started my
manuscript in an
ancient, ragged
caravan, travelling
from Ravensthorpe,
through Perth,
then up the coast of
Western Australia.
The sun was relentless, cooking
the asphalt, threatening our tyres,
stabbing our eyes. All around were
ancient mountains, weathered
into red dirt and fallen carmine
rocks. Among those rocks were
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