A Sense of Place

01 May 2010 3 Comments

by Leeann Nolan in Uncategorized

I’ve mentioned Kim Wilkins a few times in previous blogs. Along with doing a MA at QUT Creative Industries, I am participating in the Year of the Novel, which is run through the Queensland Writers Centre. Kim is the writer who is running the course. I had the pleasure of listening to her and Kate Morton speak in the Writers’ Hub at the University of Queensland’s Centenary Celebration Day a couple of weeks ago. It was the third time I had heard Kim speak at a public event, and the second time she has signed copies of her novels for me. Now that she knows me ‘online’, I was able to introduce myself as one of her students. It was so exciting to talk to her, and I even got a photo!

My enthrallment with Kim began just after I had completed seven long years of study at UQ, which left me with three degrees. It was the Xmas holidays right before I was about to embark on my teaching career. I stood in a bookshop holding a copy of The Resurrectionists, one of Kim’s novels. It had been a long time since I had read for pleasure. I was used to reading heavy texts on Feminist and Marxist literary theory, and staying up till 3am in the morning trying to get novels read before the tutorials. I had forgotten how to read for enjoyment. I had totally lost the concept of reading for fun and entertainment.

I vividly remember standing in the bookstore with the novel in my hands and turning to the inside cover. It said that Kim grew up in a seaside town in Queensland. I grew up in Sandgate, and I immediately began wondering where she lived, she couldn’t be from Sandgate, I thought. Queensland has a long coastline, so of course, the town could have been anywhere between Port Douglas and Brisbane.

After I finished the novel I spoke to a friend about the great book I had just finished. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘yeah, I know her; she was in my medieval literature tutes. She’s from Redcliffe.’ I couldn’t believe it, a writer from Redcliffe! To have read a novel by someone who lived that close to where I grew up seemed amazing to me. She wasn’t writing on the moors, or dying of consumption in eighteenth century England, she was literally just over the Hornibrook Bridge, fifteen minutes away.

I think my awe of Kim Wilkins comes in large part due to the fact that she grew up geographically close to me. I suppose in some way it makes me feel that if is possible for her to be able to write, then why not me? Her stories are not set in Brisbane, however, she chooses to write speculative fiction, set in exotic, ancient worlds. My favourite one is Angel of Ruin. Nevertheless, she is from Brisbane.

David Malouf also spoke at The Writers’ Hub. In a panel discussion with Nick Earls and Larissa Behrendt the topic turned to a sense of place in novels. David Malouf said, ‘The place which is most exotic is the place from which you come from and is most familiar to you.’

When I first read his novel Johnno, I was 23 years old, and an adult student at Hendra Secondary College in Brisbane. In the novel a street in Hamilton is mention. I cannot remember the name of the street now, but I recognised it at the time because about six months before I had been to a psychic reader who lived in that same street.

It was my first experience of reading a novel set in Brisbane and the fact that this street existed in the real world seemed amazing to me. I grabbed the book, hopped in the car and drove there. I remember sitting in the car as I was parked in the street, clutching the book. I got out of the car and walked a short way up the street, wondering in which house David Malouf has actually stood. I felt self-conscious at the time, worrying that someone would see me and wonder what on earth I was doing. But I had been compelled to go there. It was a profound moment for me. The moment when fiction and reality collided.

I’ve told this story to people before and they have looked at me a little oddly. But don’t people travel from far and wide to walk the moors near where the Bronte sisters lived, and can’t people actually walk the route taken by Leopold Bloom in James Joyce’s Ulysses? I felt the same sense of wonder walking along this street. Nick Earls said, ‘The exotic is close at hand. We are too close to see it.’ As I shifted my gaze from the book, to the street, Brisbane took on another dimension.

Brisbane was where I grew up, and apart from the three years I spent in Moranbah, it is the only place I have ever lived. At that time, I realised that words on a page could be about places I had seen, that it didn’t have to be the stuff of legends, and knights, and swooning girls in Victorian gowns. It could be about something ordinary. My life could be in a book, my city, people I recognised, because they were important too.

The panel chair told David that when her father read Johnno he said, ‘I could feel the humidity seeping off the pages.’ When I write about Moranbah I want people to feel the heat and smell the dry, barren earth. I want them to be in the moment, seeing and feeling the pulse of the town, as I saw and felt it when I lived there. In the first week that we arrived in the mining town, my daughter and I sat outside a bakery in the blistering heat and I turned to her and said, ‘This place is amazing, I have to write about it.’

At the Writers’ Hub David Malouf said, ‘Every place has richness put there by how odd people actually are.’ At no time is this more apparent than when you have just arrived at a new place, seeing everything for the first time. Over the next three years Moranbah lost its ‘exotic’ edge, it became familiar. It was home. In her book Becoming Qualitative Researchers, Corrine Glesne explains, ‘The strange becomes familiar in the process of understanding it.’

Reading Johnno, and becoming aware of a published, female author from Redcliffe, were powerful moments in my life. Writers were not other worldly creatures. They actually resided in my own town. I realised I could write about what I knew. I could represent things I had seen and experienced. When I do this, maybe then I will be able to venture out further into new worlds.

Meeting Kim Wilkins at the Writers' Hub

I also met Janette Turner Hospital at the Writers’ Hub. Though she now lives overseas, she also grew up in Brisbane, and went to school at Mitchelton State High. Her novel Oyster has a large focus in my literature review.

Janette Turner Hospital at the Writers' Hub

Janette Turner Hospital signing my copy of Oyster

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