Tiny TripFiction Talking Location with Reece Carter, author of The Girl, the Ghost and the Lost Name

16th October 2022

To celebrate the much-anticipated release of his debut middle grade novel, The Girl, the Ghost and the Lost Name, Reece Carter has dropped by the Tiny TripFiction blog to tell us about the breathtaking south-west Australian landscape that inspired his writing.

I’m not sure what it was about the summer holidays I spent along Geographe Bay in Australia’s south-west as a kid, but they were magical. For those two weeks each year, it felt as if time stretched out. Every moment was charged with the promise of adventure.

The drive was a long one – some four and a half hours – from our family farm to the little holiday park where we stayed, but from the moment we arrived it would take barely a minute for my sister, my brother and I to bolt to the beach, leaving Mum and Dad to unpack the car. There, with the sand between our toes and the distant chime of Greensleeves promising that ice cream was on its way, our holidays would begin. Bicycle races between our caravan park and our cousins’. Sun-drenched afternoons spent looking for dolphins (and dodging stinging jellyfish) in the bay. Staying up way later than we were allowed to at home. Those two weeks belonged to us kids. We were kings.

Fast forward to today, and my visits to the south-west look a little different. Mum lives there these days, in a town called Dunsborough, and whenever I fly over from my home in Sydney – the trip takes me about eight hours now in case you’re counting – we go fishing on the rocks or take the dinghy out. We take the dog for a walk or a swim.

The only thing that hasn’t changed is how special the place feels.

From the moment I arrive and step out of the car, I’m struck by the same sense of excitement and possibility that I was when I was a kid. The smell of native peppermint trees and sea salt floods my senses, the sun hits my skin, and I feel my whole body relax. Time slows down, and every moment feels more meaningful.

It makes sense, then, that when it came time to choose a setting for my debut children’s novel – a spooky fantasy called The Girl, the Ghost and the Lost Name – I decided to write about a fictional town that was based on Australia’s south-west.

I was going for a jog one evening when the idea hit me. From my mum’s house, a path extends through the trees and along the coastline, eventually passing a big rock called Castle Rock. At that hour, the falling sun hits it in a way that makes it look like it’s glowing. Huge and hulking – and with cracks and crevices running all over it – Castle Rock is breathtaking. Rugged. Wild. Surrounded by protected parkland, and with nobody else around at that time of day, Castle Rock felt kind of isolated and secret too. Dangerous, even.

I’d already come up with the idea for my main character – a kid ghost, made of wax, called Corpse – but in that moment, I knew I had found her a home.

Set out to sea, the rock-that-doesn’t-exist would be a magically obscured rock; and hidden inside its cave – a cave which can only be entered through a lightning-shaped crack – would be a rickety and decaying old shack that housed three horrible Witches. Corpse would haunt the roof of that shack, I decided, dreaming of the day when she might leave it and cross the water to go hunting for answers. Answers to questions about who she had been before she became a ghost.

Her adventure would take place over one stormy night as she searched the forgotten fishing village of Elston-Fright – a village which crackles and fizzes with magic – for a treasure which would reunite her with everything she had been missing.

Of course, Elston-Fright doesn’t exist – and believe me, given the number of sea monsters and evil characters it plays host to, you wouldn’t want it to exist – but writing it was very easy once I had in my head that I wanted it to look and feel like the area surrounding Geographe Bay.

Lichen-crusted rocks. Bright blue water. Blankets of swaying trees. There are so many ghost stories for kids set in Europe and America, but I wanted to write one that felt Australian. One that, though Elston-Fright and its Witches could be anywhere, had a special sense of place, where the setting acted as much like a character as any of the ghosts or Witches or sea monsters.

A place that young readers would sense was hiding magic in its bones.

Reece Carter

Reece Carter is a high-profile Australian nutritionist who has written two non-fiction books for adults, appeared on many of Australian’s major television networks, and written for magazines like GQ. He grew up in rural Western Australia and now lives in Sydney. He has always wanted to write for children and The Girl, the Ghost and the Lost Name is his first novel, perfect for fans of Tim Burton and Neil Gaiman.

Catch Reece on Twitter @wordnerdreece

The Girl, the Ghost and the Lost Name is published by Usborne and out now.

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