“I think there’s an unspoken pact that you will use your imagination to create character and empathy and emotion, but you won’t actually bend the known history. What you hope is that people will read the story and wonder what really did happen and go off on their own little journey.“
He said he had found the overlay of character stories with real history tricky to handle. “I feel an obligation to keep those characters moving and interesting and convincing, but underneath it, you’re trying to tell real serious history and sometimes the characters can look a bit frivolous set against that.”
Katrina Nannestad admitted she was something of an accidental historical novelist. Looking online for a subject for a new novel, she lucked upon the story of Wolfskinder, orphaned German children left to fend for themselves in east Prussia as the Red Army advanced at the end of World War II.
Katrina Nannestad is an accidental historical novelist, but she’s not giving it up. Credit:Rebecca Rocks
She mentioned the children to her canny publisher, who immediately suggested she write about them. From this emerged We Are Wolves, which tells the story of three siblings alone and lost and their struggle to survive in the face of the Soviets’ march westwards in 1945.
Nannestad has more often written lighter, more humorous books for a younger readership but is now working on a third historical novel. “We are Wolves was a huge departure for me, and it is something I will continue to do.”
Serong chose to set his novels around the Furneaux Islands because he saw them as crucial to the development of south-east Australia and the “white colonial project and everything that means for Indigenous relations”.
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One of the significant characters in The Burning Island is Tarenorerer, a Tommeginne woman who for a period led fierce resistance to the colonialists. Serong says if you write about Australian history, you have to talk about Aboriginal people and colonialism.
“You can’t shirk it. I suppose you try to grapple with it in a way that is respectful and humble and very, very carefully done. I have consulted as much as I can with people who are authoritative about these things, and I’ve done my research, and I’ve tried to get myself out of the road as a writer and let the story speak.”
The final part of his trilogy, tentatively called Peajacket Point, will be set around the Wybalenna settlement for Aborigines on Flinders Island, which in 1835 was commanded by the so-called protector of Aborigines, George Augustus Robinson. It was a critical year, Serong says, as it was when Mannalargena, an important figure to Indigenous Tasmanians and leader of the Cape Portland people, died at the settlement.
Serong loves Flinders Island, has been going there since his university days and now has a home there. “I feel very sensitive to places and what I felt down there was a very strong sense of history.” Which was more than he felt at school.
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I hated history at school. Now I’ve won $50,000 for a historical novel
Source: Philippines Alive
