Show notes
Di Morrissey is the out and out Queen of Australian popular fiction, with 3.5 million books sold and her latest, 28th novel – Before the Storm – recently debuting at number 1.
She’s published one of her page-turners every October for 28 of the last 29 years, but she’s so much more than Australia’s top novelist. She’s a dedicated local newspaper editor and a committed environmentalist who in 2019 was awarded Australia’s top honor, made a Member of the Order of Australia for services to literature, conservation and the environment.
Hi there, I’m your host Jenny Wheeler and in today’s episode Di talks about getting the last laugh on the critics who once described her books as “hair spray on a page,” and why she’s made it her life’s work to write books with an enduring sense of Australian location and identity.
Six things you’ll learn from this Joys of Binge Reading episode:
How taking a gamble on her first book paid off
Why she’s so passionate about local newspapers
The wise godfatherly advice that’s guided her career
How being popular also got her snubbed
The writers she admires most
How a reader’s dog ended up on her latest cover
Where to find Di Morrissey:
Website: https://dimorrissey.com.au/
Facebook: @Dimorrissey
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dimorrisseyauthor/
What follows is a “near as” transcript of our conversation, not word for word but pretty close to it, with links to important mentions.
Jenny Wheeler: But now, here’s Di. Hello there, Di, and welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with us.
Introducing Di Morrissey, author
Di Morrissey: Thank you Jenny. It’s fun to do this and catch up.
Jenny Wheeler: It’s wonderful. You are out and out the queen of Aussie fiction. You’re billed as Australia’s favorite storyteller and the proof is in the pudding. Your latest book, Before the Storm, I believe it debuted at number one in the seller list, didn’t it?
Di Morrissey – author
Di Morrissey: Australian fiction, yes. I’m still up there in the top five or something, but there are so many wonderful books coming out this year and all in October, so we all have to take our turn. I think Covid has been extraordinary for encouraging people to read books again. It’s wonderful.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s good news. Before the Storm is your 28th novel in 29 years – a remarkable record in itself – and you’ve clocked up something like 3.5 million book sales in the time you’ve been writing.German readers love Aussie stories
German readers love Aussie stories
Di Morrissey: In Australia, yes.
Jenny Wheeler: Do you sell anywhere else?
Di Morrissey: I’m very big in Germany. The Germans love Australia. They didn’t want to buy The Last Paradise because it was partly set in Bali, they want the great Australian landscape.
Often when I go out to places like Broome or the Kimberley or the middle of a desert, there’ll be some strapping blonde-headed bloke with a knapsack and boots, striding out of the desert, out of nowhere, and he’s always German.
Jenny Wheeler: With the record you’ve got, this fantastic number of sales, and every October you’re producing a page-turner – when you started out, what were your expectations as a writer? What did you have in mind as a goal?
The romance of the outback – in this case Broome – has helped make Di’s Australian stories international best sellers.
A modest goal starting out
Di Morrissey: Get published. We all write, but getting a book published, that’s what I wanted to do. That was my childhood ambition from age seven. I had no idea what I was going to do, but I was very fortunate in that I met a very elderly Dorothea Mackellar.
She lived down in Pittwater in the bush where I was living as a seven-year-old and she invited me in for tea and a biscuit. We were quite poor, and I’d never seen so many books because I adored books, and I said I had to make up stories in my own head because I only got a book at Christmas and birthday. She very seriously said, well, my dear, you put your stories down in a book one day for other people to enjoy.
And I went oh, what a good idea, okay. But I discovered you don’t leave school and become a novelist.
A beginning in journalism
Jenny Wheeler: You didn’t do it in quite that order in those days, did you?
Di Morrissey: No, but what I did do was, I was struggling and I was modeling and I was doing a bit of acting and floundering because my mother couldn’t afford to send me to university. My very wise uncle who was an ABC foreign correspondent said the best thing you can do is go and work on a newspaper or magazine.
He took me into ACP and I got a job as a copy girl and then a cadet on the Women’s Weekly. The best thing I could have done.
The Red Coast – Di Morrissey – Iconic landscapes part of the story
Jenny Wheeler: That’s fantastic, and it does introduce the theme of Before the Storm because there’s a very strong theme about the importance of the local media. That is a very personal cause for you. You are currently running a monthly independent newspaper in your own community called The Manning Community News and it’s all funded out of love and your bank account.
Di Morrissey: And a few brave advertisers. For one thing, the demise of local media is shocking. When News Limited sold all their regional newspapers and then Fairfax was taken over by ACM – Australian Community Media – they swallowed everything up like big corporates who are only interested in advertising and selling newspapers.
They are like zombie papers. The same stuff is in all of them all over the country. Local news is what communities and even suburban communities need. You want to know what’s going on in your backyard and what your Council is doing. What’s happened to my rates and rubbish and bloody roads, you know?
That applies even more so in isolated regional communities. The local newspaper is really important. Also, a lot of aging population, they don’t want to go online and read a newspaper. They want to walk up the street and have a cup of tea, see their mates and pick up a paper and sit down and read it.
Holding local politicians to account
I’m online, but the majority of newspapers circulate way out of our area. I have general news and international news and stuff I find interesting, which apparently other people do, plus holding the local Council to account.
Jenny Wheeler: We’ve got a lot of listeners who aren’t in Australia, they’re either in Europe or the U S so can you tell them a little bit about the Manning? What sort of a community is it? And the key issues – are they also things that would be affecting your own readers? Is that one way of keeping in touch with the people who are going to be reading your books?
The Silent Country – Northern Territory adventures
Di Morrissey: Yes. The books are basically all set in Australia, and they’ve got Australian themes. Sometimes I go to countries, and I do literally go there and live and research, that have links with Australia, be it the UK or Hawaii has a lot of links.
But there are a lot of Europeans like the Germans who absolutely love Australia, and people from overseas, before the current situation of Covid, and the same in Australia, who would read my book and think, Broome sounds amazing, I must go there.
What readers care about
For a lot of readers who can’t travel, they have armchair traveling and they feel they go to the place because in doing the research I go and spend a month in Broome or in Mandalay or wherever, to soak up the atmosphere and, being a journalist, do all the research and get the background right.
But essentially the issues are really what concern all of us in many ways. The environment is a massive issue for me. Up here, we have these terrible bush fires. We’ve lost millions of wildlife, particularly koalas. I have koalas in my garden.
Kimberley Sun – Safeguarding environment a priority
With the corridors we’re fighting developers and greed. If we’ve learned anything from Covid, it’s how important nature is and family and taking time to smell the roses and grow veggies and stuff like that. Hopefully, we won’t go back to the way it was. We have to protect nature and stop these awful housing developments that are like a cancer.
Where I live is a very old dairy country of rolling green plains and beautiful rivers and beautiful old mountains that was the cedar industry.
Jenny Wheeler: Bringing it back to Before the Storm, your key character, heroine, Ellie, quits her job in the big city and goes back to a small town and her grandfather is running the local independent newspaper.
It rolls into a story about a big money family who is trying to trick people into having this development without declaring what’s really going on, as well as corrupt local body politicians. It’s very much the kind of thing you’re talking about. If they can’t do it by overt means, they try it by covert means.
Di Morrissey: Yes. Well, I’m beginning to suspect highly that the countries and the politicians are all being run by developers. Money rules and it’s wrong, and particularly when it’s not what the community wants.
Using books as a talking point
The acknowledgement of climate change is a bit thin on the ground, but people know, farmers know, we all know, and we all worry about our kids and our grandchildren and what they’re going to inherit. So in a fictional way, I try to introduce issues within a normal family or quirky people or whatever. It raises things without preaching so that the message gets across. I think that’s what people resonate with.
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They are books that still have adventure. I’m not a romance writer. I write about relationships and my readers don’t care about sex, whether they’re 20 or 95. I have a lot of men and women that read my books. I get more to the heart and the head, and people always want to go to the place, they want to do the same things, and they get riled up about things. That’s the journalist in me, but also, if you can do it in a way that’s entertaining, it’s far more effective.
Shining light in dark corners
Jenny Wheeler: Yes. The foreword for the book makes it clear where you stand. It’s quite touching. A little community newspaper in the Manning, you might not think it had that kind of grand level significance, but you devote the book to those who lost their lives seeking to tell the truth and shine light in dark corners.
We know from the international news that there are journalists still losing their lives. What do you see in our world that most concerns you in relation to media?
A Distant Journey- Di Morrissey – A consistent best-seller
Di Morrissey: Climate change, I would think, it has to be. The way we grow and sell our food, mine land, where our priorities are and the corporate greed that funds politicians who then have to go along with ridiculous gas and coal, when so many European countries are jumping ahead and embracing renewables. We need to change everybody’s thinking.
I grew up in a family of journalists. Phillip Knightley, who wrote The First Casualty, was a wonderful journalist. He lived in London of course for so many years, but he said truth is the first casualty and that unfortunately still applies.
Truth ‘the first casualty’
Jenny Wheeler: Your books are the sort that originally might have had trouble being taken seriously. Very recently there was a Weekend Australian magazine story, and for those who aren’t aware of it, the Australian is a major national newspaper in Australia.
Di Morrissey: Even if it’s a Murdoch paper.
Jenny Wheeler: A Murdoch Flagship. There was this sneaky little thing that was said in that article that caught my eye. They called your books “mass market catnip,” and I thought, what a way to describe your books!
Di Morrissey: I don’t know what that means. I mean, catnip either turns cats on, and I don’t have any sex in my books because readers don’t particularly want it, or puts them to sleep, which is the absolute opposite. People sit up all night reading my books. So I don’t quite know where the catnip came from, but in the beginning, that was a very big issue.
Fighting to be taken seriously
I had two things going against me. I was blonde and I’d worked in television. I was a breakfast television host. I have wanted to write books since I was seven. I’ve now had a big career as a journalist, a big career as a diplomat’s wife, living all over the world. I’ve raised a family,
I’ve been in breakfast television. I got that job because I thought you start at 2:00am and you’re on air from seven to nine, and then you go home. But of course, I was there all day and had to go and see movies and interview people at 11 o’clock at night.
After eight years I went, you know what? I’m going to be 40 in a couple of years. This is ridiculous. What happened to the dream of the seven-year-old? So, I just quit. Then in the press it’s like, oh well, she’s too old for television now, the poor girl is going to try and write a novel. At that point, Australia was and to a certain extent still is, quite literary snobs and serious writers from Patrick White (a Nobel Prize winner – ed note) on were not taken very seriously.
Mr and Mrs Popular Fiction
My friend Bryce Courtney – we were Mr and Mrs Popular Fiction as Bryce used to call us, and we were never invited to the literary festivals to speak. We did sell ten times or more what a literary writer might sell, so there was another reason to be viewed with some suspicion and envy, I suppose. It can’t be any good if it sells a lot of books. It was very outrageous.
There is a wonderful agent here called Selwa Anthony, still going on. Selwa had some wonderful clients, she looked after Colleen McCullough for example. She started a campaign with my first book of trying to bring down the barriers from popular fiction. The first one I went to was so uncomfortable, I mean, people were frankly downright rude. So I ignored that and said I’m never doing one again.
Breaking through big satisfaction
But after a number of years, I think I was earning my stripes and I did get to go to the very impressive, popular, wonderful, literary festival in Adelaide, and I’m standing on the stage next to Margaret Atwood and Isabel Allende. Take that, folks!
Jenny Wheeler: I have arrived.
Di Morrissey: Yes.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s great. Your friend Thomas Keneally, the Booker Prize winner, says of you that you know you only live once and so you’re packing two lives into it. Do you think that’s fair comment, and have you always lived life at full tilt?
Di Morrissey: I don’t think so, I just take every day as it comes. I grew up very poor. My father and baby brother drowned in a tragic accident when I was nine, nearly 10. We had no money and my mother had never worked. She had driven a truck in the war or something, but she was a great example.
I was working as a journalist and then I married an American diplomat, and we were posted all over the world. I had that life, and then I came back and had the breakfast television life and then the novelist life. I’m now grandmother and I’ve got this life.
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I’m running a newspaper, I’m publishing and editor of a newspaper. It’s free because that’s how it reaches lots of people, and it goes all the way up the mid coast of New South Wales from Port Macquarie down to Bulahdelah, so 8,000-10,000 copies. That’s a lot every month.
(There is a great video on Di’s website about the newspaper but Facebook has made the decision to block the sharing of videos on website posts like this one so I can’t show it to you. If you are interested here is the link…. https://www.facebook.com/DiMorrissey/videos/436993284126752/)
Pandemic and bushfire disruption
And I’m making serious inroads with being an investigative reporter and I’m holding a few people to account. I’m doing that, plus I’m trying to get my books on television and we’re moving in that direction. I don’t know what I’ll do next.
Jenny Wheeler: That raises a couple of things. You do like to travel around the country and sometimes overseas. How has the pandemic affected you in that regard?
Di Morrissey: I normally go and do my research. My books come out in October every year or November for Christmas. I generally tend to have it finished by July, so there’s a bit of a gap there. August, September, I normally know where I’m going because a place chooses me, I don’t choose the place. Off I go to live there and research and my partner Boris and I spend time there and we wander around, talk to people. You get the atmosphere, the history – you have to be in a place.
Adapting research process to fit
Anyway, this year as I was about to set off to go into the small coastal town on the south coast of Victoria – it’s one state I haven’t set a book in, so I was going down there – but the bushfires started, those tragic, awful months and months.
We are still suffering from the bushfires. I didn’t go to do my research until February-March and then Covid hit just as I was leaving, so I had that little tiny window. Now I should be researching next year’s book, but I can’t go anywhere.
Bushfire koala sheltered in a pond… photo Daily Express.
I sit in this room, still writing and doing a bit of gardening and not going anywhere, which is fine. My life hasn’t changed, but what I’m doing is I’m going mentally, I’m traveling back to a place I know and love very much, which is the area of Pittwater outside Sydney, very extraordinary area where I grew up. I’m trying to marry it then and now.
Transferring books to TV
Jenny Wheeler: That’s going to be the next book, is it?
Di Morrissey: Yes. Well, it’s the setting for the next book.
Jenny Wheeler: You mentioned about trying to get your books on TV and I did read somewhere that you were working on a TV version of one of the Broome Trilogy books, Tears of the Moon. How is that coming along?
Tears of The Moon – destined for TV
Di Morrissey: The wonderful producer David Jowsey is doing it. He did Mystery Road and Sweet Country and he’s absolutely wonderful. He’s got a new movie coming out – juggling a lot. He knows Broome and the Kimberley very well – the old pearling industry, incredibly romantic and interesting. It’s the most amazing place.
Unfortunately, like everywhere else in Australia, they’re putting a cement road that goes all the way to the tip of the Cape. You’ve got that romantic red dust road going into nowhere and now a cement road with truckloads of overseas tourists is going to destroy some of the romance.
Broome trilogy’s stellar success
But David knows the area well and Tears of the Moon is still my most popular book. I didn’t plan to write a sequel, but it was book number five, and it was my breakout book.
Jenny Wheeler: Yes, I noticed that the Broome Trilogy, which has been very successful in its own right, wasn’t written consecutively, and I wondered if that was because it was either publisher or reader demand that you came back to it.
Di Morrissey: It was readers. Tears of the Moon was so spectacular, it’s sold hugely all around the world. Broome owes me heaps because all the tourists came there. A couple of years down the track the demand was there, so I wrote Kimberley Sun. Some of the main characters but in a different timeframe and setting, so you don’t have to read them in order.
Then more recently, the huge fights over development and mining and the pristine waters of the Kimberley coast. It was an issue. The Red Coast is set up there. There are such colorful characters, and the country is amazing and so much indigenous history and romance and art. Extraordinary. It’s a wonderful dreaming place.
National honours for her work
Jenny Wheeler: You have made it clear that you’re passionate about the environment, and in 2019 you were made a Member of the Order of Australia for significant contributions to literature as a novelist and to conservation and the environment. For listeners outside Australia, give us a very quick resumé of the importance of that honor, and what did it mean to you personally?
Di Morrissey: I was absolutely gob smacked. It is, I think, Australia’s most prestigious award. There is the AO and the AM, which is what I have, a Member of the Order of Australia, and then there’s an OAM, Medal of the Order of Australia. It is a recognition. It is apparently a very extreme process to look at your body of work.
It a huge honor and it is given by the Governor General of Australia. It’s a massive award which meant an awful lot to me, because my publisher had said you are never, ever going to win any award because people are snobby and they only give them to literary people, so don’t ever get your hopes up.
All the hard work pays off
Anyway, two years previously I also got the Lloyd O’Neil Award from the Publishing Association of Australia. Very few women have been presented with that – Ruth Park I think was the last one, so that was a massive honor. I feel I’ve arrived in that I am taken somewhat seriously. I also give talks at the National Library of Australia and it’s very nice to do that, to feel you have something people want to hear.
Heart-felt tributes – Booker Prize winner Thomas Keneally and Di Morrissey at the Lloyd Neill Awards
Jenny Wheeler: That’s fantastic. Turning to your wider career, is there one thing you’ve done more than any other, that’s the secret of your success? Would there be something other people could take the lesson from your experience?
Di Morrissey: When you get knocked down, get up, because women get knocked and mocked and we are still not paid equally. There are still so many issues. When I was a diplomat’s wife, I lived in a lot of Third World countries, and you learn there’s a compassion and a need to help and do things.
Venturing into Asia
In Burma, Aung San Suu Kyi had just come out from house arrest and she told me that education was going to be the key to the future. I happened to run into a monk outside Mandalay and he pointed to this hill and said, I want to build a school there. He said, could you help me? I went, yeah, clearing? What? Pick up a spade and start?
The Golden Land – A voyage to Mandalay
Anyway, I did go back and plant trees, I do have to say. But I raised funds and it’s now an incredibly successful village school that is sending children everywhere. That has been a lovely achievement – to know I’ve done that. I watched how my mother suffered so much and we are still too, in a man’s world.
And television. It was a wonderful crew when we started Good Morning Australia, but over the years, because after eight years producers come and go, and in those last years I had a horrible, chauvinistic, misogynistic little bloke – he was little, he would sit on the desk so he could look down on you while you sat on the lower chair.
Goodbye to Good Morning Australia
I went, why am I doing this? Whatever happened to the dream to write a book one day? So on Friday I said, well, folks, I’m not coming in on Monday. I had no money, I was on my own, I was divorced, and everyone said, what are you going to do? I said, I’m going to write a book. How are you going to live? I don’t know.
I was living with my mum, I had come back home. Then Selwa Anthony saw that I had written a little outline for a television theme a couple of years before. She had a bookshop and she used to bring people in to be interviewed on TV because I would always promote people who were writing.
The producers hated it, they thought they were just talking heads back then. Anyway, I ran into her and she read this, and she rang me up a couple of months later and said, that thing you wrote, I took it into Pan Macmillan. They want you to turn it into a novel. You’ve got a year and $5,000.
The gamble that paid off
I moved to Byron Bay and rented this little shack and when I ran out of money, I ate the avocados and mangoes and whatever was in people’s backyards. Fortunately, the book worked, but if you don’t take the gamble, you never know. You’ve just got to give it a go.
Jenny Wheeler: That was Heart of the Dreaming, wasn’t it? That was the famous Queenie character who stole people’s hearts.
Di Morrissey: Yes. She’s great.
Heart of the Dreaming – First book – The gamble that paid off
Jenny Wheeler: 22 years old and her life’s already over, sort of thing.
Di Morrissey: Yes. She starts over running a huge station in the Outback. That came about because I went overseas to become a women’s editor and a journalist in London right after I graduated from the Women’s Weekly.
I had traveled all over the world with an American diplomat husband. I’d never been out of Sydney. I’d never seen my own country, so when I came back to morning television, I asked if I could have a cameraman and a sound man and I’d go around Australia and find fantastic stories, which is what I did.
Finding stories in outback places
At one point I was out with the wonderful, legendary RM Williams. He was raising money to build the Stockman’s Hall of Fame at Longreach. At one point this very fancy 4-wheel drive Land Cruiser drove up – this was in the eighties, so this was a big, fancy car, they weren’t very common – and out got this amazing woman all in white with her well-worn boots and Akubra hat, in her Broome pearl earrings. She looked amazing.
I said to RM, who’s that? He gave me the name and said, she’s running a property on her own. She’s a fantastic horse woman and she does this and she does that. He said, do you want to meet her? And suddenly I said, actually, no. I felt like I didn’t want to spoil the image if she had bad breath or was nasty or something. I just kept the image of this wonderful woman and that became Queenie.
Jenny Wheeler: I’ve always wondered whether there was any hint of Sara Henderson from Bullo station in Queenie.
Remarkable pioneering women
Di Morrissey: No, this was before Sara. Sara’s book came out later. Sara was a generation older and very tough, but she’s another typical strong woman. You find extraordinary women in Outback Australia. The women are amazing. When we look back at the pioneer women, they were the ones who did the work, stayed at home, had the babies on their own, while men were out doing whatever they did.
I think I have a record of having the women in my books always very interesting and strong. There are no wimps.
Jenny Wheeler: Turning to Di as reader, because this is The Joys of Binge Reading so we like to promote the sorts of books you like to read, the ones that might be regarded as entertainment, but still very skilled in the way they’re presented and have lots of good messages. If you’re binge reading, who do you like to binge read?
What Di’s reading now
Di Morrissey: I don’t really have anyone, though I’m just starting the Robert Galbraith series of JK Rowling’s. I’m told they’re fabulous so I will start with book one this Christmas. But I read anything and everything. I also read a lot of older books. I’m a great collector of books.
I have a massive library. All my family were readers, from my grandfather who came out as a 14-year-old boy with all his father’s books of Thackeray and Dickens. I grew up with my uncle’s books, the William books, Biggles and all of that.
Shirley Hazzard – revered Australian writer
I love children’s books and I find that I just pick things up and read them. I started to read Shirley Hazzard, I hadn’t read her for years because reading, as much as I love it, I don’t have a lot of time for it. Like a lot of people, that’s my holiday time out because when I’m writing, which takes up so much time, I’m reading maybe research books or stuff like that.
Then I’ve got all my mates’ books. Tom Keneally and now with Meg. (Thomas Keneally’s daughter is now writing). There are so many Australian books, and my daughter is living in America so she keeps telling me about books she wants to read that I should read.
Some excellent fellow Australians
I’ll read anything. It’s a bit like a movie. I could never walk out of a movie. If I’m not really enjoying a book, I’ll still keep reading. I might skim a bit, but I will finish it. I think that’s only fair because I know the blood, sweat and tears that’s gone into this book.
Jenny Wheeler: Do you read any of the more contemporary Australians like Michael Robotham, for example? (Hear Michael on the Joys of Binge Reading here.)
Di Morrissey: Haven’t ever read Michael. I have his new book because I know he’s good and he seems such a nice guy, so I’d really like to read that. Jock Serong I discovered in Victoria and met him. Gorgeous fellow, fabulous writer. I tend to read my mates’ books – Robert Dessaix and of course Richard Flanagan is amazing. But it’s hard to keep up.
I’m very happy for recommendations because I have book reviews in my newspaper. I generally get other people to do them, but occasionally I’ll do them too. I read a lot of nonfiction.
Celebrating Australian talent
Jenny Wheeler: At the latest Auckland Film Festival there was the Ned Kelly movie from Peter Carey, the very famous Australian writer who did the Ned Kelly biography, The True History of the Kelly Gang. That film is just fantastic, it really is.
(Ed note: Carey is a two-time Booker Prize winner, one of only five writers to have this honor, and the most recent in 2001 was for The True History of the Kelly Gang.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtGlll-I_n8
A brilliant film from a brilliant book – The True History of the Kelly Gang.
I could recommend that. There is a slight fantasy edge to it. At the beginning when I read about it, I thought, I don’t know if I’d quite like that, but they integrated it into the movie so well that it’s just fantastic.
Di Morrissey: Oh, yes, it worked fabulously. I thought The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith, Tom Keneally’s novel, was way ahead of its time in the film. It was extraordinary. David Gulpilil has been an amazing force in Australian filmmaking. I think our films have had, and still have, a depth and a quality, and they’re brave. They don’t pander to commercial issues of Americana or whatever.
Advice from a doughty godfather
I’m very proud of our Australian film industry because Chips Rafferty, the old Australian actor who was our first major Hollywood star in a way, he was an old stockman, and he was my godfather.
Chips always said to me, whatever you do with life kid, you make bloody sure it’s Australian. That’s why I’ve kept my books centered around Australia. Because of my film background, I support the Australian film industry and this government, the cutting of arts funding across the board is appalling. They’re a bunch of Philistines. You’re nodding. I hope.
Jenny Wheeler: I felt like saying, tell it like it is Di.
What is next for Di, the writer? When you look ahead over the next 12 months, can you tell us anything about the book that’s in its conception at the moment?
What’s next for Di, the writer?
Di Morrissey: Well, you see, I don’t plan them. They’re inspired by a place, then the characters. I go to the place and a place chooses me. I don’t put a pin in the map and say, I haven’t been to South Australia or somewhere. I just have to wait. My publisher rings up and says, has anything happened yet? Where are you going? I don’t know. Something will happen.
It’s funny how things do happen. For example, one time I walked out of a shopping center on the Gold Coast in Queensland, a very tourist place. I’d been up there visiting my daughter who was living there at the time.
Susan Bradley – Kimberley Station and one of the country women who inspire Di Morrissey’s books – Pic Credit Farm Weekly.
I walked out of the store and passed in the doorway this woman I had interviewed for Good Morning Australia years before, who was like the pastoralist queen of the Kimberley – Susan Bradley. She’s a legend. She’s amazing, she’s wonderful, and she’s the funniest storyteller. She’s just great.
When serendipity strikes. . .
I said, Susan, what are you doing here? She said, I’ve just got a couple of hours. I’m flying up to Darwin and I had two hours at the airport, so I thought I’d come and shop for a bit. As you do.
We had a quick cup of coffee and I said, what are you doing? She said, funny you ask. One of my elders – this is in the early eighties – wants to find a way for black and white Australians to move forward.
The Songmaster – inspired by a chance meeting
I want to find a bunch of influential Australians that can sit around the campfire at the summer camp up at Murumbabidi on the Mitchell plateau and we sit down and we work out how we go together, black and white together.
I said to Susan, man, how are you going to find them? She said, well, yeah, that’s what Mowaljarlai said to me. But he says, oh Susan, don’t you worry, they find you. So Susan said, you found me, you coming? A week later I was on a plane to the Kimberley and out of that came The Songmaster.
‘Hairspray on paper’ putodwns
Jenny Wheeler: How fantastic. I gather you have an unusual relationship with your publisher in that regard, that it’s a little bit of to-ing and fro-ing and discussion, is there?
Di Morrissey: Well, no, he doesn’t interfere. He doesn’t ask where I’m going or what the book is about. Sometimes I tell him, sometimes I don’t. But the system to be able to produce a book a year is a massive undertaking – to do a good book a year. In those early days, every time I brought a book out those girls in the press would go, oh, she’s got another book out – just like hairspray on a paper.
What I do – normally an author sweats over the book and they might get halfway or finish it. Then it goes to their editor at the publisher who will go, you know what? You should have gone in another direction in chapter three, so start all over.
Getting a book out takes a team
That is part of the process quite often. But what I do is – and I have been a journalist and I’m very disciplined, very conscious of deadlines – I write a chapter and I have an editor, sometimes in-house and sometimes an old friend I have had for years.
She’s not an editor but she’s a teacher and she ran a bookstore. She’s very knowledgeable about all kinds of things, so I write chapter one, and I send it to Liz. Liz starts editing that. I write chapter two and then she sends chapter one back. I send her chapter two. I take in her changes and write chapter three as two comes back.
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We do this backwards and forwards and backwards and forwards process together, so the book is drafted about four times and is finished within the seven months. It has had all of that constant rewriting and pulling apart.
Being open learning new things
Liz also is my age and has children, whereas a lot of the new editors are awfully nice, sweet 25-year-old girls who won’t say to me, like Liz does, “oh God, this is a pile of shit. What are you doing with this?”
They won’t say that to me, whereas Liz will. You need that. “You don’t need all this research. We don’t want to know how to build a bloody lugger. Just send it out to sea.” Stuff like that.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s gorgeous. We’re starting to run out of time. You obviously have a whole tribe of fans that follow you. How do you keep in touch with your readers and where can they find you online?
Where to find Di online
Di Morrissey: It’s www.dimorrissey.com and there’s a Facebook page that everybody can contribute to. But most people email me, and the lovely older readers still write. I get this wonderful spidery writing in letters. I’ll tell you an example.
If you look at the cover of Before the Storm, it’s a girl on a lonely beach with thunderclouds and she’s got her black labrador beside her and the black labrador appears in the book. I had given him a name, and he was a very minor character.
I was about two months into the book when I got an email one morning from a gentleman who lives in Port Kembla, which is the old steelworks, very interesting, tough, now terrific area. He was my age, maybe a couple of years younger than me, and he said he was moving his wife’s library and he saw all these books.
Making friends of your readers
He is now retired. He was a garbo, he worked in the steelworks, but he’s always wanted to write, he’s educated, and he started to read one of my books. He was just gob smacked. He emailed me and said, I’ve started to read because I didn’t know anything about you, unfortunately, and girly books.
He said, “I’m over the moon.” Then he emailed me every morning to say, I’m now up to this part and this, that and the other. He was so enthusiastic. He had a black labrador, he walks on the beach with Sam every morning, and then at 5.30 he sends me an email.
Every morning now for the past 18 months, 5.30 in the morning, I sit there with my cup of tea, because I’ve just got up, and read Dan’s email. Now we share stuff that we don’t tell anybody else. It’s a sort of a writing thing, but never met him, never spoken to him, we just bond.
Then halfway through, towards the end of the book, his dear old dog, Sam, who was 15, died. He sent me a photo of his ashes at the pool at the beach where they walked every morning, and I was devastated and I was crying.
How a friend’s dog made the cover
Boris came in and said, what’s the matter? I said, “I’m so worried about Sam.” He’s going, who the hell is Sam?
“He’s my friend’s black labrador.”
What I did was I changed the name of the dog in the book to Sam, and then I asked Dan to send me some photos, sentimental photos. I went through all these photos and we picked out one that we photo-shopped onto the cover of the book. So that is Dan’s dog, Sam, on the cover of the book.
Jenny Wheeler: What a gorgeous story!
Di Morrissey: I didn’t tell him. When he got the book, he just burst into tears. You make wonderful friends through books.
Jenny Wheeler: You are an amazing person, you really are. That story just caps it because most people wouldn’t be bothered taking the time to receive and answer all those emails.
An army of whistleblowers…
Di Morrissey: Well, it just takes a few minutes and sometimes people share a lot of things, and there are an awful lot of lonely people out there. There are a lot of people who don’t email or Facebook but send heartfelt notes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0iKTrpdZI0
Di Morrissey on 60 Minutes talking about her local community newspaper.
Of course, now with my newspaper I have the whistleblowers. I have all the people who have nowhere to turn when terrible things are happening. We have massive issues with our hospital, and they had to come to me because no one else would do anything about it.
Every morning I never know if it’s going to be, I loved your book, or I know what criminal activity is going on in the whatever. It’s fun.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s a great place to stop. All the very best with the next book, wherever it’s going to take you, and thank you so much for being on the show.
Di Morrissey: My pleasure, Jenny. It has been lovely and lots of love and good wishes to all your listeners.
Jenny Wheeler: Thanks so much.
If you enjoyed Di’s Down Under fiction you might also enjoy Annie Seaton’s Eco-Adventure Australian mysteries..
LISTEN TO ANNIE ON BINGE READING
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