Catherine Nosky

Oh, it's an absolute pleasure, Kate.

I'm really enjoying being here.

Oh, it's a hard one to describe.

I kind of dread that question, to be honest, when I'm talking to people.

Apart from anything, it's been 10 years of my life, so it feels trite to try and condense it into one sentence.

But it's a book that's about the strangeness of small communities, I suppose.

It's about the things that haunt us in contemporary Australia, the violence of colonialism and the way that erupts within our contemporary lives.

And it's a book about dealing with history and trauma and guilt and how to survive those things in one's society.

No, this is very much an imagined place.

It's based very loosely on the landscape of my home where I grew up in southwest Victoria, but it's been reimagined as an island.

I didn't grow up on an island.

I grew up on the Australian mainland, but looking out into the southern ocean.

And making it an island was a way for me to, I think, remove myself from the context of my own lived history, remove myself from being too tethered to that and giving me some freedom to imagine stranger and more dramatic possibilities in that world.

Because, yeah, I was really interested in small communities and how small communities function and

the way in which their dynamics are different from life in a city or life on a large scale.

And creating it as an island helped heighten that tension and that atmosphere for me.

Yeah, it's really dramatic and it's a fun thing to write apart from anything.

I mean, there's lots of wonderful island stories and I think a lot of Australian literature comes back to that idea that, you know, Australia itself is an island, the sort of old colonial concept of it being the island at the end of the earth where convicts were sent, the ultimate prison cell.

So, yeah, it's pulling from a long sort of Gothic tradition in Australian literature in that sense too.

Okay.