The Writing Process

By Lucy Treloar

Days of Innocence and Wonder is probably the hardest book I’ve written. I was writing about difficult things across multiple timelines. The logistics of it sometimes felt insurmountable, especially during Covid lockdowns, but it was utterly absorbing too.

Inspiration

The idea for this novel came when I saw a photograph of an abandoned railway station in the middle of parched landscape in South Australia. Immediately, I knew a railway station (though not this one) would be a setting in my next novel. But who was going to live there?

I had in mind the escape of a child from a local kindergarten years ago and the possibilities in that. What if that child had been taken? It was the child left behind that interested me. What happened to her? What if the kidnapper was still alive, and stalking her?

Semi-ruined Eudunda railway station, the model for Till’s station in Wirowie

Finding the narrative voice

Working out the narrative voice took some time. The close third person narrator I’d decided on felt somehow voyeuristic. Thinking of The Great Gatsby, I inserted a first person narrator who is always present and knows Till well inside the frame of the story. Suddenly, I was able to go on. Not explaining the identity of this strange narrator introduced an element of mystery that the reader has to solve.

Research: exploring locations

I think a lot about Rebecca Solnit’s observation about keeping an open mind: ‘As a writer you are looking for the thing that you don’t know you’re looking for.’

I try to follow impulses to return to places I’ve visited when researching, even if I don’t understand them. They’re the things that are important in the writing. They’re helpful for setting, character, metaphor and they almost always suggest plot. The ruin, the railway station, the ghost town and the Brunswick lanes are examples of such places.

I love driving around exploring and wondering about what I’m seeing. I need to understand places I’m writing about. Community histories, settler diaries, academic studies of colonialism and works on Indigenous culture and dispossession were important resources in understanding the past.

Ruined farmhouse kitchen

Fallen chimney

A First Nations perspective

I was very aware of what Evelyn Araluen calls ‘the pernicious erasure in Australian literature of Aboriginal presence and possession of our sovereign ancestral Countries’ and wanted to respond to that.

It took years to find someone who could speak from a First Nations perspective. I am grateful to Ngadjuri elder Angelena Rigney for her advice. It’s a working relationship that we want to pursue with another project about her life and connection to Country.

The ruined farmhouse, where Marian was dumped, from a distance

The actual writing

I drafted material and arranged the three timeframes through lockdowns. It became a literal jigsaw puzzle, as I snipped up pieces of paper, laid them out on the floor and sticky-taped sections together. The tactile element seems to help – as do editors!

Railway station palm trees

Shopfront, Terowie (on which Wirowie is based)

Mainstreet, Terowie (the model for Wirowie)