Catherine Nosky

She's both connected but not embedded in that society.

She's there acting in a very specific way.

I grew up in the bush, really.

I grew up in a rural town and was an awkward teenager in many ways.

And I read a lot of books.

I read things like Mary Grant Bruce's Nora of Billabong, the series there.

And while as an adult I go back to it and I find those books really uncomfortable in many ways, particularly in their portrayal of Indigenous people.

Yeah, explain that series.

set in the early 1900s um and the family have lots of adventures uh they they find gold on their property at one stage um they they chase robbers uh they're all wonderful wonderful horse people and uh you know I broke my jaw at one stage as a teenager trying to ride bear back out in the bush in emulation of Nora's prowess on a horse um so there's um there's

a lot in those books that had a huge sort of fantasy appeal for me as a teenager.

You know, these ideas of charging around in the forest on a horse.

So my own teenage reading was probably not your average, but emulated, I think, this desire to live up to the stereotypes of Australian stockmen and the hard work and mateship of very classic Australian ideals.

And those books are a little bit uncomfortable in some ways to read as an adult in the sense that they have a lot of stereotypes within them.

Their portrayal of Australian Aboriginal people is pretty awful.

And there's lots in there that's a little bit uncomfortable.

So it's interesting to come back to them as an adult reader and reassess the ways in which those values are shaped in that literature.

Yeah, so books about teenagers, to come back to your question, were often for me or writing the teenagers in my book was often for me a process of thinking about the sorts of ideals and assumptions that the world makes about what a teenager's life should be and the difficulties in living up to that too.