Catherine Nosky

So there's a couple of classic texts that, you know, weren't overtly involved in the writing for me but have been of huge influence to me.

The first is Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights which

And obviously there are family dramas right at the centre of that story.

But there's also strangeness, which is part of why I find that text so fascinating.

And it's what I enjoy about the families within that novel, just how strange and how twisted their lives become.

And that was certainly something that I think in hindsight has had influence on my writing, embracing the strangeness and exploring the strangeness.

alongside that there was Shirley Hazard as well.

She's a wonderful Australian novelist and her novels The Transit of Venus and The Great Fire have both been really influential for me.

They often involve families that are broken up or shattered or spread across the world in different ways and that tension of family connections which have

It could be, you know.

I've not really thought about that too much.

I think, for me, the idea of Hannah as a schoolteacher is finding a role within a community that has that attention to it already.

And that's something that was very much in Henry Lawson's short stories quite regularly.

They're written from the perspective of figures who were both

within and a little bit outside the community circle.

So you have a lot of priests coming in who witness the close ties of a community but aren't necessarily at the centre of it.

You have people who are vagrants or wanderers, you have swaggies coming in and out.

So

For me, it was a way to find a role for Hannah coming back to that community where she's really at the heart of it.

She's engaging with all the local children and all the local families, but she's also there in a very distinct position and in some ways a little bit uncomfortable as a position.