Western Australia: A Guest Post by M.L. Stedman

In the Australian outback, one family unravels after a series of tragedies. Heartbreaking and insightful, M.L. Stedman delivers an expansive story of fate, time and sacrifice. Read on for an exclusive essay from M.L. Stedman on writing A Far-flung Life.

It’s rare to meet an American who’s ventured as far as the state of Western Australia (‘WA’ to locals), the sparsely populated million square miles that makes up a third of the continent. Even many Australians consider it just too far-flung to visit.

But WA is fundamental to A FAR-FLUNG LIFE. Novelists have so many different approaches – some don’t start writing until they’ve completed their research; some don’t put pen to paper until they know exactly how the story ends. Less often, like me, they start with nothing, and see where it goes: I never plan what I write, and I don’t really know what I’m writing until I’ve written it. This novel emerged slowly, over many years, and I’d say that place was the first piece of the puzzle.

At school and university I read Shakespeare and Dante and Dickens, and stories with improbable elements like white swans (ours are black) and snow at Christmas (it can be over a hundred degrees here).  The few Australian authors we studied were mostly from ‘over East’: I almost never saw my home State on the page. I certainly never read our local words or expressions (such as ‘over East’, by which we mean pretty much anywhere in the country beyond our state border.)

So I was drawn to write about the colours and sounds of WA, its climate, its vast scale, its isolation – and how they shaped the lives of everyone in a particular era. I travelled to remote corners by trains, planes and automobiles, sometimes holing up in little country towns for weeks or months to write. I came across so many lonely, abandoned houses; contours of ghost towns: relics of vanished lives that inspired the idea of ‘forgetment’, a key theme of the novel. I visited sheep stations – some still working, some turned over to cattle or parkland. I hitched rides on small planes, on one occasion to a station cut off by flood, where, along with groceries, we brought a tiny Kelpie puppy, a surprise birthday present for the little boy there. I even tried my hand at shearing a sheep (very briefly, and under very close supervision). The softness of the fleece, the heat of the animal’s skin, still stay with me.

I spent a long time talking to people who had had sheep stations, quizzing them about merinos and flock sizes and generators and shearing and how far their nearest neighbours were. I learned that you judge station distance not so much by miles, but by the time it takes to get somewhere according to how bad the road is and how many gates you have to open and shut in the paddocks along the way.

I buttonholed mining experts and field geologists and government cartographers. In archives, I pored over old station records that turned my pristine conservator gloves red from the dust that coated the pages. I listened to poignant recordings of men and women, mostly now long dead, recounting the minutiae of station and mining life in the early twentieth century.

As for the characters in the novel: as is always the case for me, they turned up as the world took shape, revealing themselves more deeply the longer I stayed with them and let them be true to that place and time and language. Like crystals grow on a string, the world of Wanderrie Creek grew, and grew, over the years, and perhaps now can bring a flavour of WA to readers even if they can’t actually set foot there.