edwina shaw

ONCE A NOT SO JOLLY SWAGMAN

/ Edwina Shaw / 3 Comments
the not so jolly swagman

the not so jolly swagman

Does this swagman look happy to you? Look at his eyes.

My dear Madman, one of the central characters in my latest novel, was a swagman, traveling from place to place with everything he owned rolled up in a blanket on his back, his billy tied to his belt. He wasn’t on a happy-go-lucky camping trip. He was looking for work and a roof over his head – even if it was only the barn where the animals slept.

It was a hard life for many of those who helped establish Australia’s agriculture, the back-breaking work of clearing land and making it usable for crops. In the mid 1800s in Queensland, once the supply of convict labour was gone, many paupers and illiterate farmhands were imported from England on assisted passage tickets on ships to provide this labour. No free tickets home though.

For a lucky few, it was a golden ticket to prosperity. But for many, like this fellow and my character, it was only poverty in a hotter climate.

Poverty, hard work and madness.

THE WORLD OF DEAR MADMAN

/ Edwina Shaw / 2 Comments
Laidley Corn Day

Laidley Corn Day

This is the world I’ve been living in for the past few years as I’ve been researching and writing my latest project, Dear Madman, a novel based on a tragedy that has haunted my family for generations. Laidley is a town in the Lockyer Valley west of Brisbane where the story is predominantly set, one hundred years ago.

I love this photo because it captures just how “edge of nowhere” it was back then. I am especially intrigued by the girl on the pony in the middle on the far right. Pinafore and all. Who is she and where is she going? She could even be one of my great aunts.

For a long while I had this picture pinned up beside my desk to remind me where my characters were living. For them, this was the nearest big town.

I loved living in this quieter time and place where I could hear the thud of horses hooves and my own footfall, not the constant stream of traffic flowing past my home now in busy Brisbane.

I’ve finished the latest draft and have sent it off with fingers crossed and candles lit. But now I’m left, relieved in one way to be free of the madness and violence at the heart of this story, but sad too that I have lost this slower, simpler world.