Victoria Purman is a USA Today and Australia top ten best-selling historical fiction author who loves to tell the stories of the forgotten people – the mothers and wives, the wharfies and land girls and nurses who pitched in for their country during a war and then were forgotten when the peace came. Hi there, I’m your host Jenny Wheeler, and today Victoria talks about her latest book, The Women’s Pages, reflects on the moment when she knew her time to write had come and tells us what she tells young writers who are just starting out and want to know how to do it. Six things you’ll learn from this Joys of Binge Reading episode: A start in romance served well Historical fiction first love Telling overlooked stories Advice to young writers – don’t do it alone The writers she admires most What – if anything – she’d do differently second time around Where to find Victoria Purman: Website: https://www.victoriapurman.com/ Facebook: @VictoriaPurmanAuthor Twitter: @VictoriaPurman Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/VictoriaPurmanauthor/ What follows is a “near as” transcript of our conversation, not word for word but pretty close to it, with links to important mentions. But now, here’s Victoria. Jenny Wheeler: Hello there Victoria, and welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with us. Victoria Purman: Hi Jenny, and hello Kiwis. Jenny Wheeler: You’re in Adelaide if they can’t already tell. Introducing Victoria Purman Victoria Purman: Yes. I’m sorry. My accent is probably very strong. Yes, I’m in Adelaide. It’s a very cold winter’s day here for us. It’s 10 degrees today, and raining. Author Victoria Purman Jenny Wheeler: Oh gosh, that is cold. You are a former journalist turned fiction author, and I know people always like to know the answer to this question. What made you change from nonfiction to fiction? Was there any moment of realization, an epiphany about it? Victoria Purman: There was for me actually. I started as a journalist in broadcast, I worked at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. I had left mainstream journalism and worked as a media advisor and did all sorts of communications jobs, anyone who’s a journo will know them. I wrote, I provided advice on how to deal with the media to a whole lot of people – government ministers and clients and departments and things like that. But I did have an epiphany. I call it my midlife crisis. I was in my late forties. I was about 47. My husband and I have three sons and anyone with more than one child, probably even one child, knows that your time’s not really your own when they’re little. But my youngest one had turned 12. They were 12, 15 and 18. Taking her chance to dream They don’t need you as much at that age and so I had time to reflect about the dream I had put away when I was 15 years old. I had always loved reading and I always wanted to be an author. I thought, if I don’t take it seriously and start now, I might lose my chance. I was too old for the Miles Franklin, the Australian literary award. Not that I write literature, but I always thought, I’m going to enter the Miles Franklin. Then I got to the 35-year age cutoff and thought, well that’s closed to me. I saw it as a ticking clock in a sense, so I decided I would sit down and write a book. Coincidentally, a really dear friend of mine got a job as the director of the SA Writers Center and that spurred me on too, because it opened me up to that whole world of authors. Adelaide has a vibrant, literary scene and I think probably per head we have more published authors than anywhere else in the country. So I started meeting people and thought, right, this is the time to take that leap into the great unknown and jump off that cliff. That’s what I did. The Three Miss Allens – Victoria Purman’s first historical success Jenny Wheeler: Fantastic. Now you’ve got a new book out, The Women’s Pages, and we will be getting on to that very soon. But you started out with historic fiction, didn’t you? It was a USA Today bestseller, a dual timeline story, The Three Miss Allens, set in the 1930s. Could you tell us about how you got started and why you chose historical fiction right at the start? Victoria Purman: I’d actually written four or five romances before that. That was my entrée into the world. I’ve always done really serious jobs, been a journalist and I’ve worked in government and worked for ministers and everything was complex and heavy and when I got home, I didn’t want to read those sorts of things. I wanted escapism. Beginning with smart romance I read a lot of romance and I started to read some Australian authors who wrote really gritty, mystery or suspense, romantic stories, and then others who wrote what I would call smart romance as opposed to purely escapist romance. They really attracted me, and they had smart characters and women that I recognized in them. I wrote four or five of those and then I had an idea one day about this beautiful beach side location that I know very well, that I’d set some of my books in. I thought, what would it have been like here in the thirties? That part of Adelaide around Victor Harbour, if anyone knows it, was a very big holiday destination for the well-to-do in Adelaide. Before motorcars, people would catch the train down to Victor Harbour during the height of the summer and the really fancy people would take their servants with them. It was a very hoity toity place, so I thought, who were these people and what was it like? It peaked my curiosity, really. Victor Harbour, South Australia… popular holiday spot And then I liked that juxtaposition of the role of women in the thirties and the role of women and the status of women in the modern day. I set those two things against each other because the restrictions for women back then were mind boggling. Not that things are perfect now. But that was the fun for me, juxtaposing the social order of the thirties and the 2010s, as they were, when I wrote that book. Jenny Wheeler: You are a USA Today and Australian top ten bestselling writer. Are you still doing the contemporary romance as well as the historical fiction? Switching to historical fiction Victoria Purman: I’ve run out of time. Historical fiction, which I really love, is much harder to write for me. I need much more time. My last three books and the one I’m just finishing now are all set historically, so the research is pretty intense. I still love reading a contemporary romance, I think it’s great to see modern contemporary issues reflected in books like that. But I’m obsessed by history. I think in another life I should have been an historian. I’ve stuck to historical for that reason. I get a kick out of the research. I love weaving facts into my stories and that’s where I’m firmly going to stay. And I was rewarded because The Land Girls, as you mentioned, was a top ten Australian bestseller. That was really rewarding. The Land Girls by Victoria Purman Jenny Wheeler: The new one, The Women’s Pages, is very much embedded in the journalism world of the 1940s in Melbourne. It’s set in World War Two and it traces a young woman called Tilly who starts out as a secretary, a very smart young woman, who gets a chance to become a reporter because so many of the men folk are away at war. What attracted you to this story? Victoria Purman: It flowed from the end of my previous book, The Land Girls, which was set during World War Two about the Australian Women’s Land Army, and I understand New Zealand had a land army too. Lots of countries did. The concept originated in England in World War One and Canada adopted the model as well, and the Americas. That book ended at the very end of the war when victory was won. When I was touring with that book, I heard so many stories from people who came along to my events about what happened after the war. I always used to say that the idea behind The Land Girls was that it wasn’t just a man’s war, and people really warmed to that idea. The Post-War years for women They would say, I remember when my father came home or my grandfather, my uncle, and it made me start thinking about what happened after the war in Australia. What was it like to recover from that six-year period of huge uncertainty and sacrifice and loss? How did the country recover? That’s where the idea of The Women’s Pages came from. I use the device of seeing it through a female journalist’s eyes because she could be the eyes and ears of the curious, she could go into different parts of society and ask questions and wonder why, and uncover the truth of the way those postwar years were starting to develop, especially for women. So I created Tilly Galloway. I did lots of research about female journalists of that era in Australia. That was really fascinating too. Australian war correspondents were not allowed to go near a soldier. Their role was as part of the propaganda machine of the army, to go and interview land girls and women who worked in munitions factories and signalers and all those amazing jobs that women did in Australia during the war. Some Australian women did get to cover the war – Tilly Shelton-Smith in Malaysia That was seen as a booster to women. They were not allowed to go anywhere near troops or interview a soldier at all. There was a freedom and a confidence in being appointed a war correspondent, and then they were brought back down to earth very quickly. They weren’t happy about it and I reflected that in my character, Tilly Galloway. They fought and fought, but no. Then when MacArthur and the Americans arrived, they were even more stringent about not letting female journalists because they saw them as a nuisance and a distraction. Where would they accommodate them? Where would they sleep? They would distract the men with their beauty and their wiles. Nothing’s more blokey than war. They were confined to Australia, and I reflected that frustration in Tilly’s career through the book. The complexity of waging war Jenny Wheeler: It’s interesting because I have recently interviewed a New Zealand historical author called Deborah Challinor. She did a PhD here in New Zealand on the New Zealand Vietnam vet, so she’s a PhD in History and she said something that struck me. She said wars are not won on foreign fields. They are won at home. I was thinking about that as I was reading The Women’s Pages because I thought maybe you would have some sympathy with that statement. Victoria Purman: That’s a really interesting observation. The book I’m writing now is set in World War One. It’s a really interesting juxtaposition to look at. If you ask your average person about why World War One started, people didn’t really understand back then. I think we all know about someone being shot in Sarajevo, but how did that lead to Australia going to war? It was very murky and it was ancient, these alliances in Europe. But World War Two was really obvious. Australia saw itself under actual physical threat, as well as existential threat. Jenny Wheeler: Because of the bombing of Darwin. Darwin bombed, 1942 – a day that changed Australia Victoria Purman: Exactly. The Japanese moving down, and the war in the Pacific was very real. But she’s absolutely right in saying that if you don’t win the hearts and minds of people at home as to why it’s a just cause. Vietnam is a perfect example. It seems so far away and ridiculous. Why are we in Vietnam? What’s that about? It was about the spread of communism. That’s really hard to understand in a country so far away. World War Two was much clearer. So yes, I think that’s right. Experiencing war at home What changed things in Vietnam was the TV footage every night. For the first time the war was televised, and people saw the death and destruction and the utter stupidity of some of what was going on. A picture tells a thousand words as they say, so if you don’t keep people convinced of the rightness of it, I think Vietnam is a perfect example of that. Jenny Wheeler: The Women’s Pages very poignantly portrays these women who live in hope and faith all through the war, some of them not receiving any word from their husbands, some knowing their husbands have become prisoners of war but still hoping they’re going to come home. And then some of them come home and some of them don’t. News reporter Lorraine Stumm in Singapore “stuck in the craw of the military” with her tenacity We won’t have any spoilers on who that is, but then you get the irony that the ones whose husbands have come home are perhaps no better off and maybe even worse off than the ones whose husbands don’t. It’s a very poignant story, isn’t it? It doesn’t necessarily have the wonderful, happy ending they’ve all been hoping for. Victoria Purman: So true. That came out of my research. It’s interesting to compare it to coronavirus at the moment, in the sense that people are separated and we don’t know how long it’s going to go on for. I was only reflecting on that this morning. I’ve got very close friends in Melbourne and family in Melbourne, and we’re saying things like, surely this will be over by Christmas and you’ll be able to come over for Christmas. The peace that never came And we don’t know that actually. That was what was said during the War. It will be over by Christmas. Christmas was that time when family was so important. I don’t know how those families back here coped for six years, I really don’t, and I tried to explore that. As you mentioned, there were all sorts of circumstances the women faced. Some whose husbands came home changed men for very understandable reasons about having been a prisoner of war and having been tortured. Others came home untouched but didn’t want to come back to their wives. Those wives were abandoned. The War Widows Guild was established for widows but there was also a huge cohort of women whose husbands left them with nothing, ran off with other women, or became so unwell, were so affected with what we would call war neuroses and shell shock in World War One, PTSD, we would now say. Australian POWs in Japan Many of them drank as well, I’m certain to cope with the aftereffects of what they had seen and done. The aftereffects lived on for a very long time. I use this story in the book, I heard it from the lips of the man it happened to. It was at a library talk in New South Wales and I was talking about that idea when I toured with The Land Girls about what happened after the War and people were told to get on with their lives. But we know that wasn’t as simple as it sounded. There was one man in the audience who shook his head and afterwards he came up to me and said he was 14 at the end of World War Two. His uncle came back from the Pacific. He’d been a prisoner of war and they shared a bedroom. Memories linger 75 years later There were housing shortages after the war, so everyone bunked in together. He said, I’ll never forget the scars on my uncle’s back. He was tearing up telling me this story and I thought, this is 75 years later. How did those men cope? How did families cope with the knowledge of what had happened? We tend to think now that people didn’t know what was happening during the war, it was all a big shock at the end. But looking at newspaper reports at the time, which I did, news was leaking out about some of the terrible things that were happening. Australian Land Girls’ Army at work Whether people didn’t want to face it, or they did really know what was happening and just didn’t talk about it, is another fascinating part of that history for me. I did try to reflect in the book all those circumstances women found themselves in Jenny Wheeler: Yes, I think you did that well. Was there one thing that surprised you in the research that you did, that stood out, that you were shocked by or hadn’t expected? Victoria Purman: The way war widows were treated was pretty shocking to me. They were almost abandoned. Back in the forties in Australia, there was no supporting parent’s pension, for example. Those women whose husbands dumped them were on their own. There was a very small child endowment supplement and that was it. That really surprised me. In Australia we did have big social changes in the 1970s. I don’t know about New Zealand’s experience but under Gough Whitlam here in Australia, the supporting parents benefit was introduced and that was life changing for women who could leave violent relationships finally knowing they had, even though the bare minimum, some support. The wishful view of history I wondered if war widows were treated that way, and those who were left, because it was a nasty reminder about the downside of the war. We tend to think that everyone came home from the war and they created the baby boomer generation. Everyone was happy and they all bought houses and Australia blossomed and everyone had kids and things were great. But I always ask that question, who were they great for? I’m interested in navigating and excavating the stories of those who continued to suffer, whose histories we don’t know. Jenny Wheeler: Yes. It comes through very strongly how almost as soon as the war was over, in fact probably even before the men landed back on Australian soil, women’s autonomy was sharply restricted and they expected women to drop everything and go back to the way things were. They were told to go home and be good little wives and it’s your job now to look after your husband, that kind of thing. If you were a single woman and you had no particular reason to stay home, too bad because a man needed your job. Happy little Australian in her kitchen – selling housework to housewives… Victoria Purman: Absolutely right. There were moves that went all the way to the High Court in Australia after the war, to cut the wartime wages of women who had been working during the war. It was across lots of industries because the war was a great economic booster, sadly, the way things work, that’s true. The ports were busier than ever, manufacturing was busier than ever. Feeding the war effort was an enormous task and transport and logistics of getting things to the war effort were too. After the war, everyone faced the prospect of having their wages cut. Personal history as inspiration Jenny Wheeler: You’ve got another historical bestseller tucked away, The Last of the Bonegilla Girls, is that how you say it? Victoria Purman: BON-a-gilla. But actually you’re not wrong because there are three established ways to say that. Jenny Wheeler: It was a post war migrant camp set up on the banks of the Murray River. We’re talking now into the early fifties, but you have a very personal connection with that story, don’t you? Would you like to tell us about how that one came to be written? Another best seller I gather? The Last of the Bonegilla Girls by Victoria Purman Victoria Purman: Yes. There was a personal connection to that one. Ask any author where the idea for a book comes from and sometimes you have an idea that has always been in your head and at other times you have no idea. This was one I had always had in my head. I’m a first generation Australian. Both my parents came to Australia from Europe after the war in 1949 and 1954. My father was a refugee from Poland and my mother came in 1954 with her four siblings and her mum and dad. She was 14. Australia had a big post-war immigration program to populate Australia with, let’s be frank, white people, to ward off any threat of Japanese expansionism. Because my parents were middle European, white, blonde at the time, they were readily accepted. Both of them were at that camp, Bonegilla, which had been an army camp and still is, but after the war it was wound down because we didn’t need to train soldiers anymore. Accommodating migration waves It had lots of accommodation, it accommodated 9,000 people so in that post-war migration boom, it was used as a temporary housing camp for the waves and waves of migrants who came to Australia. There were no locked gates as we might think now of internment centers but because there was (i) a housing shortage and (ii) so many people coming, there were a few of these around Australia in various towns – in Sydney, Villawood was one too – where people were accommodated, fed, inducted into Australia if you like, given rudimentary English lessons until they were assigned work. Dinner time at Bonegilla – army type kitchens That’s what happened to my grandfather. He was given a job in Adelaide in a factory. That’s how the whole family came to be in Adelaide. I’d always known that name Bonegilla growing up. It was always when we were at Bonegilla or we met people at Bonegilla. It was always there in my family story. One day I thought, I need to write that story because we don’t know those migrant stories. Fascination of ‘ordinary’ stories Again, it’s part of social history that I’m really fascinated in – the ordinary stories of working people and those migrants who came over, worked in factories, cleaners, cooks, sometimes they were domestics in large houses, they set up fish and chip shops, grocers. They were an industrious lot of people who had never read about their history and that book has resonated with so many people. I still get messages today about that one, two years later. People have said, this is my mother’s story, or this is my grandmother’s and grandfather’s story. They were at Bonegilla too and I’d always heard about it. The people who were there said you created it in such a way that brought back memories for me. That was a real honor, to tell those stories. Jenny Wheeler: It sounds like your book tours have been a great moment of exchange of knowledge and perhaps helped you with understanding future books. Victoria Purman: Absolutely. By the end of the Bonegilla Girls tour, I did an introduction about me and my family and then I handed it over to the audience, and the stories I heard, I wish I had heard them before, I’d have written a book because everyone had a story. Personal stories pour out One woman came and said, I was on the Skaubryn with my family. We came from Holland and the ship sank in the Indian Ocean. She showed me on her phone, a photo of their rescue made the front page of every paper in Australia at the time, and she said, there’s me, I’m in the photo. It was incredible. At the beginning, when I did those events I would say, who has a connection to Bonegilla and usually 75% of the room has a hand raised. As an author, I find that absolutely fills my well and that’s why I wanted to tell those stories. Skaubryn sinking makes front page news Jenny Wheeler: Moving away from the specific books and turning to your wider career, is there one thing you’ve done more than any other that you’d see as the secret of your success? Victoria Purman: I think reading. Reading in both ways, one is for enjoyment and one is for research. I’ve always been curious. I think most people who trained as journalists are there because they’re curious. You see something and you say, why did that happen? What’s going on? Who made that? Who said that? Why did they say that? It’s those questions that a journalists we know, it’s the who, what, why, where, when and how. I still go back to those questions. I think it’s my curiosity. I always gave into that curiosity and I still do. I love hearing people’s stories and I love finding out how people think and how they work. So I guess two things – reading and asking questions. Jenny Wheeler: What would be your advice to young writers starting out? I imagine that you probably get quite a few young writers who ask you what they should be doing. What do you tell them? Advice to young writers Victoria Purman: I do tell them to read. There are a lot of young people who want to be writers but they don’t read. In a purely professional sense, reading gives you an idea of what’s being published. It also helps you learn technique and story and plotting. When you read a book, you say, I didn’t expect that to happen. How did they do that? Where did that idea come from? Where did they get that research? How did they find that out? As well as the pure enjoyment in being swept away in a story, which is also a really important part, I would say read and connect. Connect with a writing community. I think that’s really important. Find your local writing center or a book club or a writers’ group and connect with other writers. Share success and rejection I did that at the very beginning of my career here in Adelaide and I’ve made some of my best friends through that community. You share your successes and your rejections as well, and you know that you’re not a crazy writer. There are a whole lot of other crazy writers out there too. Jenny Wheeler: One of the things that a lot of those crazy writers say is that practically every book has its dark moment when they are convinced that it’s nonsense and they’re not going to be able to finish it. Would you sympathize with that? Victoria Purman: Oh, absolutely. I’m right in that moment now with my book for next year. I’m at 130,000 words and I’m thinking I’m not finished yet. When is it going to end and also that doubt about, is it any good? I think every creative person thinks that, at the end of that creative process. Jenny Wheeler: You get so close to it that you lose your objectivity, don’t you? Victoria Purman: You really do. It’s not until I get feedback from my editor and my publisher that I know if it’s good or not. She’s my first reader and I wait for that critical feedback. That’s nerve wracking too. What Victoria likes to read Jenny Wheeler: This is The Joys of Binge Reading so we do like to touch into what you like to read and particularly what you like to read for relaxation, for your binge reading. What are your current favorite reads in that area? Victoria Purman: When I binge read, I tend to go outside my genre. I’m too worried that I will inadvertently steal a plot or a name or a device or something, so I tend to read crime and a bit of literary fiction too. What have I read lately? I loved Normal People by Sally Rooney. I love Dervla McTiernan’s books, Jane Harper’s books, Hannah Rochelle, and then a bit of nonfiction as well. Christina Lamb non fiction I have one on my pile which is right next to me. It’s called Our Bodies, Their Battlefield by Christina Lamb and it’s about the widespread use of rape as a tool of war. I try to read escapist and then also to fill my creative well about what I might write next. I have done my World War Two trilogy, The Last of the Bonegilla Girls, The Land Girls and The Women’s Pages, and as I mentioned, I’m writing about World War One at the moment and nurses in World War One so I’m trying to take myself back into that era as well. I wish I had more time for reading. Every author probably says that. I juggle. I work part time as well and I have three kids and a five-month-old puppy and a bathroom renovation. I try to do all those things in a balanced way, probably none of them very well, but that’s life. Jenny Wheeler: Looking back over your very long and successful career, is there anything you would change if you could, looking back over that tunnel of time, and if you could, what would it be? Anything Victoria would change? Victoria Purman: I don’t think I would change anything. I didn’t start writing until I was 47 and it might be tempting to say I should have started earlier, but I don’t think so. I think it happened at the exact time it should have. I don’t know what I would have written about if I’d been much younger. I don’t think I was ready for it then or maybe I would have done it when I was younger and ready. But I don’t think I would, actually. If you find your dream job, you’ve only found your dream job because you were in a job that wasn’t your dream job and you decided to move on. It’s a bit like that for me. All the things I’ve done, even the ones that haven’t been successful, have built onto the next thing. To me, it’s like building a wall with bricks. You look back on some and go, that didn’t work out, but the next thing was great. And if that had worked out, I wouldn’t have done that thing. It’s just building and the more you do, the more people you meet, the more ideas you’re exposed to, and that all feeds that curiosity of mine about people and stories. So, no, I don’t think I’d change anything. Jenny Wheeler: That’s great. You’ve mentioned this World War One book. What are your plans for the rest of 2020 and turning over into 2021? What is on the cards for Victoria, the writer? What’s next for Victoria, writer Victoria Purman: This book comes out and I have a schedule of events around that, cross fingers, coronavirus pending. Then I will begin the editing process for next year’s book, that’s for 2021. At the same time, starting to write a 2022 book, and hopefully do some reading in the meantime. I have a book a year, with release schedules and the lead times are quite long so I will submit next year’s book a year in advance. That’s my plan, so I’ve got some writing to do and a puppy to raise. Jenny Wheeler: Any ideas about what the 2022 one is going to be at the moment? Victoria Purman: I think it’s going to be about women’s suffrage in Australia. That’s my idea. Any more than that, I don’t know. South Australia and I know parts of New Zealand were the first in the world to grant women the right to vote. In Adelaide women won the right to vote universally in the State elections and were the first place in the world. There were some fantastic women who fought for that and in fact, they then went over to the UK and advised the UK suffragettes about their campaign. Romance beginnings… Funnily enough, because I’m writing World War One one at the moment, the suffragettes’ campaigning stopped during World War One but at the end of the war they were granted the right to vote over a certain age. There were qualifiers, of course, but the war did have a profound change for women in the UK. We, of course, had won the right down under and across the ditch way before. Let’s not take benefits for granted I think there are stories there that most people don’t know. I worked with a couple of young women and I mentioned that back in the old days, if you were married you lost your job in the public service. They were really shocked. They just didn’t know. I said, yes, it wasn’t that far away either. I think there’s lots of that history that deserves some airtime, to remind us how far we’ve come and the really huge battles. We tend to think that just happened, all these things that are good just happened. But they don’t just happen. They have to be fought for. Jenny Wheeler: You’ve mentioned the pandemic. Is it going to interrupt your launch of The Women’s Pages very much? Victoria Purman: Yes, it has meant I haven’t been able to travel interstate. I don’t know if your listeners are aware but Victoria the State is completely locked down. There are quarantine arrangements in place for people going to New South Wales, Queensland, everywhere really. So everyone is staying home, which of course is the right thing to do. But it means I haven’t been able to travel and no one has, and that’s a First World problem, I understand. I’m still hoping to do events in Adelaide, I have a number of bookings, six library visits and things, and do lots of interviews and zoom calls and meetings and online things. Pivoting to deal with pandemic Everyone has had to pivot in a really interesting way and some of that is good because not everyone has the ability to get out in the evenings to go to a book launch, especially if it’s a long distance away. By being able to zoom in, you open up an experience to people who might not have been able to do that before. So there are upsides. I think it’s been a difficult time for a whole lot of people, authors and booksellers. Everyone’s trying to make the best of this situation. Jenny Wheeler: Do you see it having any long-term impact on your work? Victoria Purman: It has been very difficult to concentrate. Everyone is waiting for the daily figures out of Victoria to see how they’re going, and we all hang on that announcement every morning. I found it difficult to concentrate and it seems trivial to be worried about a book coming out when people are dying and very sick. It’s been hard, and because I talk to a lot of writer friends as well, I think it’s a very common thing. I can’t concentrate enough to read at the moment either. That usually happens when I’m on a hard deadline and I’m near the end of a book, but that’s what I hope to do over the summer here, just dive into my pile of books, which is growing enormously. Maybe that will get me back into the mood. It’s an unsettling time for everyone and that has affects for the way we do what we do. Where to find Victoria online Jenny Wheeler: Yes. We are coming to the end of our time together so tell people where they can find you online. There’s certainly no doubt that you sound as if you enjoy interacting with your readers. Where can they find you? Victoria Purman: People can find me on Facebook as Victoria Purman Author. I’m on Instagram as @VictoriaPurmanAuthor, on which you’ll see lots and lots of photos of my golden retriever dog, because she’s so beautiful, and at my website victoriapurman.com. I love to hear from readers. It fills my well and it helps when you sit by your desk for long stretches of time and you hear some kind words from someone. Jenny Wheeler: That’s lovely, Victoria. Thank you so much for your time today and all the very best with this launch. Victoria Purman: Thank you so much, Jenny. It’s been a pleasure. If you enjoyed Victoria’s historical fiction you might also enjoy Tricia Stringer’s Australian women’s fiction. Tricia Stringer – another popular author of Australian rural fiction On The Joys of Binge Reading podcast. Thanks To Our Technical Support: The Joys of Binge Reading podcast is put together with wonderful technical help from Dan Cotton at DC Audio Services. Dan is an experienced sound and video engineer who’s ready and available to help you with your next project… Seek him out at [email protected] or Phone + 64 – 21979539. He’s fast, takes pride in getting it right, and lovely to work with. Our voice overs are done by Abe Raffills, and Abe’s another gem. He got 20 years of experience on both sides of the camera/microphone as a cameraman/director and also voice artist and television presenter. Abe’s vocal delivery is both light hearted and warm and he is super easy to work with no matter the job. You’ll find him at [email protected]

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