Melissa Lucashenko

I think it's Barbara Kingsolver says in one of her great works that when you're an author, you just, with the first draft, you just put your head down and you hoe till the end of the row, by which she means you chip the weeds out and you chip and you chip and you chip and you work and you work and you don't look up until that first draft is done because writing first drafts is like pulling teeth.

It really is.

It's no fun at all.

And then after you've got your first draft, it's just brilliant because you get to go back and improve it.

you know, time after time after time.

And that's the fun part for me.

And were you living in Brisbane or where were you?

Yeah, I've been in Brisbane for a few years now.

And that was important.

I think I had to be in Brisbane to write this book.

What I often do is I've moved around quite a lot in my adult life.

And what I often do is I live in a place for a few years and then I'll move away and I'll write about where I have been living.

Just by coincidence, that's what has happened.

But yeah, it was Brisbane.

I walked along the river.

I walked the CBD.

A fellow called Peter Eadie, who's an amateur historian here, he showed me where the

Wheat Creek still runs underneath the buildings in the CBD.

And Wheat Creek is what gave Creek Street its name.

And that's the creek where Tom Petrie's brother, I think Walter, drowned as a young bloke because he fell off this kind of makeshift bridge and fell into the water and drowned.