Dear Madman

I had the best of intentions when heading out to Warwick, of descending upon old people’s homes and cold-calling people with the same surnames as the pioneers of the area I’ve been researching, but when I got to The White Swan and it’s hand-hewn sandstone walls, its magic took hold of me and all I wanted to do was sit on the verandah near the roses, breathing in their perfume and writing.

Hand-hewn sandstone

Just what I needed. When tackling a project as enormous as Dear Madman, I’m having to learn new ways of doing things. Not only the researching aspect, but the necessity of breaks – to contemplate, to let my mind find connections between all the disparate facts I’ve collected. To let the voices of my characters find me.

I took some drives and long walks in the countryside and absorbed the sounds and sights and smells. I tore off a willow branch and stripped it, felt the sting of it on my palm, to know what it had felt like for my dear madman, punished as a boy. I sat on bales of hay and imagined what it would have been like to sleep in a shed full of it. Inhaled the saltiness of cows.

Then I came back to The White Swan and watered the roses, and began to imagine a life spent primarily outdoors. Where the fields were more home than the barn you slept in. Where beasts of burden were comrades, not picturesque additions to a pastoral scene. I put my hand on the sandstone and felt the years between us fall away. Had these very pick marks been made by my madman?

This is a very different world I’m entering. How does a pampered twenty-first century woman, imagine life as a barely literate laborer over one hundred years ago.

I’m attempting to write my way into the past and make it, somehow, ring true and feel real.

he old cemetery and The White Swan

WELCOME TO KINGAROY!

Well I’m back. And what an adventure it was. Kingaroy is a pretty, propserous town with deep red earth, so fertile that “the posts Grandpa put in to run his beans on sprouted,” as one of my new friends said.

For that’s what the people I’ve met have become, new friends. I was welcomed at the descendant’s comfortable home with a warm hug, curried egg sandwiches with the crusts cut off, iced tea, air-conditioning, and even a sponge cake with strawberries and cream! It wasn’t long before I felt very at home. Their rooms were filled with books and arty knick-knacks and the descendant and his lovely wife were more like a long lost uncle and aunt of my own, than relatives of the man who had killed my great aunt. Before I contacted them, they had no idea of their connection to such a dubious character. It seems their grandmother was a better secret keeper than mine. We sat for hours with papers and photos talking about family, and the undercurrents and depths that lie beneath.

Gladys, my friendly Kingaroy historian

After a night at a local hotel that looked charming, but had me up till twelve with pokies and people, and woken at six with a vacuum cleaner and someone hosing out the beer garden, I met up with Gladys. She’d spent years establishing the local historical museum and organised a school centenary reunion, so knew more stories about the locals than anyone else in town. I even got to ride in her original 1971 Holden, complete with red vinyl bench seats and metal seat belt clasps that took me swirling right back to being six and yelling “belt up!”in the back seat of our own Holden. I treated Gladys to cake and coffee and again we sat for hours talking about secrets and families and what goes wrong despite the best of intentions.

I’ve come away convinced that not one of us escapes family secrets. We all have them, whether they’ve been told or not. The question is, is it better to know, or to remain in ignorance, but still feel the undertow?