Origins
They Called Me Girlie is off to the proof reader.
In book publishing terms, this sounds close. Over the scope of the last six + years since the first draft was finished, it is. But the origin of the story goes back to when I first arrived in the US, as I stood in international arrivals baggage claim. I had a very distinct impression of having stepped into an ocean of shared experience. Mine, granted, was comfortable and modern. But it gave me a glimpse of something unforgettable about the human experience and our movement throughout history that has never left.
The story started then, in 2003. I wanted to tell a story about convict women removed from their homeland to a place that, while governed by the same government, wasn’t their home. In fact, the women separated from family and all that was familiar and had to find their way in a brutal environment, in a land that wasn’t theirs and didn’t want them. I explored what style of story I wanted to tell, what protagonists might be the best to carry a story like this. What perspective might work best? Aristocratic? Criminal? Working class?
I started several times, researching the historical records, exploring character POVs, and even playing with conversations my characters might have based on real-life events. What became clear to me over those first years is that so much of what I knew about convict history was a shallow overview, and that the stories of women had been, at best for a lack of space or at worse intentionally, ignored or absorbed into the stories of male convicts.
But theirs was a very different experience. Long before anyone considered these women as founding mothers of a new nation (a reference that can be disputed for its own terms), one ship carrying them was known as The Floating Brothel. But even history records these women with differing lenses, and despite the legacy that remains of uneducated, hungry, unskilled prostitutes, the facts of the matter are to the contrary. An excellent summary exists here.
The same can be said for what I uncovered regarding the history of First Nation peoples in Australia. I found layer upon layer of misperception and misinformation, not only in fact but also in context. History isn’t just the past; it loads our present. Trying to explain what happened then without a conversation about now cuts us off from our own story. As I began to peel back the colonial mindset of my own education, albeit from a distance, it became apparent that my homogenised knowledge needed a reset. The First Nation experience of what happened in Australia’s past is just as diverse as the women I was researching, but far less accessible, and for tragic reasons. If convict women have a limited record, the First Nation one, to our shame, is sparse indeed.
Suffice it to say, I found myself fascinated by the misperceptions, the myths, and the stories that were rarely told. Records that remain are due to the bureaucracy of empire, but are still incomplete, especially regarding women. Information from the private sector can be hard to locate or has disappeared altogther. Notoriety, fame or notability would earn them a place in court or news papers, but for those who lived a quiet, uneventful or short life, they are recorded in death or not at all. The absence of voice speaks louder than the records that what remains.
It is this silence that fascinates me most. And into it I drafted a beginning.
