Talking Location With author Gill Thompson – Australia

1st April 2019

TalkingLocationWith… author Gill Thompson, author of The Oceans Between Us

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Perhaps it was too many misspent hours watching Neighbours when my children were small, but for as long as I can remember I’ve wanted to visit Australia. Lack of money, lack of time, family commitments, and just, well, life … have always prevented me. So when I stumbled across the true story of the child migrants from England to Australia, fictionalised in my debut novel, The Oceans Between Us (Headline), I was determined to travel there remotely, even if I couldn’t in person. I talked to friends who’d visited, spoke to an aunt who had a house in Perth and read everything I could get my hands on. But how was I to persuade my readers I knew about a country I’d never been to?

Well, luckily writers have strong imaginations and can paint pictures with words that transport people vividly to the destinations they describe. I took many ‘trips’ on Google Earth, through the  Mediterranean, along the Suez canal, across the Indian Ocean…following in the steps of those children who’d travelled with such hope to a land of ‘oranges and sunshine’ some sixty years earlier. Once in Perth, I felt the oven-hot heat through the stickiness of my clothes, experienced the cooling afternoon sea-breeze known as the Fremantle Doctor, breathed in the minty scent of eucalyptus trees and had my cream sandals stained red by dusty dirt roads.

Thanks to an email exchange with a bush walker, I inspected gecko tracks in the wild hinterland of King’s Park, where Mount Eliza rose blue and majestic in the distance. Spinifex brushed my ankles as I marched along, craning my neck for possums or kookaburras, careful to glance down from time to time to watch out for redbacks, spike-limbed spiders with bright splashes of crimson on their shiny fat tummies. Australia is a land of breathtaking sights, but it’s not without its dangers too.

But for those optimistic children, the dangers came, not from natural predators, but unnatural ones: the very people who were meant to protect them. Jack, the boy in my story, is sent to Bindoon, the boys’ town north-east of Perth, where the British children were so cruelly treated. And so my ears rang from the strident tones of the so-called Christian brothers as they bullied the boys to build their own dormitories and classrooms, often in bare feet under the searing sun. The land of such promise was betraying their hope.

In reality they’d been betrayed months earlier by the British government. Concerned that children’s homes were overflowing, the government made a pact with the Australians: they would give them ‘white stock’ to boost their dwindling Anglo Saxon population, and ward off the ‘Asian Hoards’ from the north, whilst simultaneously ridding themselves of unwanted kids. The Child Migrant Project was the result: around ten thousand children shipped to the antipodes after world war two to work on the land or as domestic servants, often in harsh conditions and told they were orphans, when many in fact had parents still alive and searching for them after temporarily abandoning them to institutions.

My character Jack’s mother, Molly, is one such parent. Injured in a bomb attack in Blitz-torn Croydon, she loses her memory, and with it the knowledge of her child. So my scene now moves to dull postwar English suburbia where the weather is gloomy, the houses patched up and dismal and the ravages of war are everywhere to see. It’s a monochrome world, a far cry from the vivid colours of Australia. Yet post war Croydon was another location I needed to bring to life. For this, help was nearer at hand, in the form of two octogenarians: Pauline Montgomery had grown up in Croydon in the early 1930s and remembered the war years with impressive clarity. So too did Betty Tredinnick who had lived in Mitcham during the Blitz (and survived in spite of her shopkeeper father keeping his stock of fireworks under her bed!) Their testimonies, together with archive photos from the time, helped bring my second location to life.

The book is out now…and I still haven’t been to Australia. But I haven’t given up my dream of getting there one day. And the first thing I’ll do is to travel to Fremantle and walk down the quay where the statues of the child migrants stand … and remember the terrible events of the last century, when so many young souls travelled in hope and were so cruelly let down by two greedy governments.

Thank you so much to Gill, sharing her research into such a compelling story. Follow her on Twitter and you can of course buy her book through the TripFiction database!

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