Historical crime novel set in County WEXFORD
Talking Location With author Emma Styles – WESTERN AUSTRALIA
13th August 2022
#TalkingLocationWith ... Emma Styles, author of No Country for Girls, set in Western Australian
There’s no journey quite like a road trip, and no road trip like one through outback Australia.
No Country for Girls is a Thelma & Louise-style road trip thriller that unfolds along two thousand kilometres of remote highway in Western Australia. It propels teenage girls Nao and Charlie, who don’t know each other at the start of the book, into one another’s company and a dead man’s vehicle after their involvement in his death.
The setting and characters of No Country for Girls chose me rather than the other way around. My longing for Western Australia, the place I grew up, has fuelled everything I’ve written over the years, so it’s no surprise that setting is the first thing to arrive whenever I start work on a story.
When I landed in Perth from the UK aged nine, our first rented house had the Indian Ocean at the bottom of the street and we swam and wore T-shirts all winter while the locals huddled in their winter coats. We started road-tripping north for family holidays the following year.
Those road trips were formative. I remember the first time I stopped at the side of a highway and experienced silence as a physical sensation in my
ears. The first time I saw wedge-tailed eagles feeding on roadkill. The first time we sat in the car in near hysterics as a family because a huntsman spider was outside on a window and no one wanted to open their door. So it’s no surprise either that my first published novel happens on the road.
No Country for Girls began during a writing exercise when the two protagonists appeared in Karrakatta cemetery – the cemetery across the street from the high school I went to in Perth. They didn’t like or trust each other and argued constantly in my head. I knew right away I’d send them on a road trip, because what better way to get to know a total stranger than on a five-day drive with one or more bad dudes on your tail?
I first researched the journey early in 2019, my last trip home to WA before the pandemic. There was a gold theft in the novel and I took a drive to the Eastern Goldfields with my dad, soon realising the six hundred kilometres from Perth to Kalgoorlie was too short for what I needed to happen on the road. I relocated the drive to Great Northern Highway, one of the longest most remote sealed roads in the world and a route I’d taken many times over the years.
I was still writing the first draft when the pandemic hit, and I was one of tens of thousands of Australians living overseas who were unable to get home. From that point on I worked from memories, photos, adventures in Google Street View, and the impressions of family members who were either working as FIFO (fly-in-fly-out) contractors or on road trips themselves during the travel-restricted year that 2020 turned out to be.
The journey in the book spans over two thousand kilometres of country between Whadjuk Country in Perth and Bardi Jawi Country up on the Dampier Peninsula north of Broome. The setting moves from suburbia through pastoral land to cattle and mining country, from coastal plain to mulga scrub and spinifex to pindan, traversing the traditional lands of many different groups of First Nations Australian people.
The route passes through a range of landscapes and some truly awe-inspiring scenery, including the Collier Range, Karijini and Millstream-Chichester National Parks; the mining towns of Mount Magnet, Tom Price and Port Hedland; as well as the country around Broome/Rubibi and the Dampier Peninsula.
I’m a sucker for anywhere red dirt meets white sand, and the desert meets the ocean in many of these places, including Barn Hill Station at the top end of Eighty Mile Beach, and the stunning Kooljaman at Cape Leveque.
If you’re considering a Western Australian road trip and you’d like to avoid some of what happens to Charlie and Nao in No Country for Girls, I’d recommend traveling with an experienced local guide and someone familiar with remote driving in Australia. And to learn about country through a local’s eyes on the way, there are many First Nations-led tourism initiatives along the route described in the novel.
No Country for Girls was published by Sphere in the UK on the 21st of July and Hachette in Australia and New Zealand on the 30th of August. You can find Emma on Twitter @emstylesauthor, Instagram @emmastylesauthor and connect via her website
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