Melissa Lucashenko

You know, I was really determined that this book was not going to be depressing, that the correct artistic response to the kinds of trauma that we visit upon ourselves all the time, and the trauma that's been visited upon us and still is,

The correct artistic response to that is not doom and gloom and it's not just social realism of someone barely getting through each day.

It had to have a lot of energy and it had to have a lot of humour.

Otherwise, you know, why bother?

You could just read the newspaper.

I think that line came from the concept, which may or may not be true.

I'm not sure that there are only two stories and those are someone arrives in town or someone leaves town.

And because I am as fond of simple dichotomies as anybody else, that's something that's stuck in my head.

And so I thought, okay, we'll have a stranger ride into town, but then immediately subvert it.

But it wasn't a stranger, it was Kerry.

And also, it occurs to me as I'm saying this to you, it's about the dual vision in the novel and in most of my writing, you know, to the whitefellas, if they don't already know the family, then yeah, it's a stranger, but it's not a stranger to Kerry.

She knows who she is.

She does.

It's funny the way books work.

You don't always know what you're doing.

There was a scene with crows that got cut from Mullumbimby involving crows.

It just wouldn't go away.

The book began with a few throwaway lines and a few images and one of the strong images was the image of a

brown snake dead on the road and when I lived down out the back of Billy Nudgell you know there was a brown snake dead on the road outside our house and I was really struck by the the way something so deadly you know was itself sitting out the front dead and you know waiting for

to be eaten and so that's one image that has stayed with me for 15 odd years I suppose to make it into this book and another image was the shark and what what sharks mean in Australian culture and what they mean to us