Work in Progress



IF YOU WERE MINE

The survivor of a difficult childhood, Aurora Hayes has swapped the drought-stricken settlement of Sugarbag for a crooked house on a crooked street in Dublin's Temple Bar. As a teacher of pianoforte, she spends her afternoons coaxing tiny hands into five-finger exercises and her evenings drinking, until Rose Mulcahy, seventeen and pregnant, knocks on her door.

If You Were Mine explores the delicate bonding process between mother and child, both biological and adoptive, and especially the plight of the woman who bonds with a child to whom she has no rights.

While thinking about an Australian setting for the early part of the novel, I came across a secondhand book by George Farwell called Ghost Towns Of Australia. During the 1960s, Farwell had visited outback towns on the edge of extinction and others that were already dead. One of these was Hammond in South Australia's mid-north; it was close enough for me to visit with ease, and I was keen to see how it had fared since Farwell's visit.

I imagined I would find a tumble of stones, perhaps the roofless remnants of the pub and not much more, but I was in for a surprise. Although some houses had been given up to the weather, others were obviously cared for. A few were boarded up, most displayed fierce warning signs to tresspassers, and to my astonishment there was a telephone box in working order outside the old post office.

The ruined Kanyacka homestead was a different story - once owned by the third son of an Anglo Irish Earl who drowned while crossing its flooded creek on horseback, the place reeked of hard lives and times. Both places were north of Goyder's Line of Rainfall, the remarkably accurate division of viable land from drought affected country plotted by George Woodroffe Goyder in the nineteenth century.