I lapped Australia in a caravan and signed a book deal in the same year

After a few weeks in Victoria, we headed west along the Great Ocean Road. We set the kids up with their school work in Barossa Valley wineries while we sampled the offerings. I attended the Adelaide Writers’ Festival and left armed with encouragement from Charlotte Wood and Emily Bitto. “For Claire in solidarity! Keep writing!” Wood had scribbled in the front of her book The Luminous Solution. Solidarity with these icons of Australian literature seemed a benevolent stretch, but I treasured the sentiment, praying the words might be prophetic.

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Onwards! We went noodling in Coober Pedy and chanced a tour deep into an underground opal mine with a bloke who definitely hadn’t ticked any OH&S boxes. We camped on the Bunda Cliffs on the Nullarbor, and I didn’t sleep a wink for the sensation of our van pitching sideways to meet the ocean 90 metres below.

We found sand as fine as icing sugar at Lucky Bay in the Cape Le Grand National Park, and the fam sent me skydiving for Mother’s Day at Jurien Bay. Still unsure what to make of that!

It wasn’t until mid-May, camped at Western Australia’s Wooramel Station on the banks of an underground river, amid swarms of flies and soaring temperatures, that I received the call
I had been dreaming of.

It was 5.45am (my agent hadn’t calculated the time difference!) and the news was that Penguin Random House was interested in my book, The Secrets of the Huon Wren. By the end of that day, I was offered a book deal.

You know when you’ve wanted something so bad for so long and when it actually happens you feel bereft of words or actions? That was me. First I was stunned, then I danced. If you spied one van shaking and jiggling on the banks of the Wooramel River that day, it was me, busting a few excited dance moves between calls home.

A few weeks earlier, I’d heard God say to me, a little whisper in my subconscious, “Put the champagne in the fridge!” And, feeling a little silly and extravagant (fridge space is at a premium in a caravan!), I did. So, after the silly dancing and the phone calls, I toted my beautifully chilled sparkling wine to break the news to the family and a few travelling buddies who were soaking in the on-site artesian baths.

We’d travelled as far as the Ningaloo Coast, about 1200 kilometres north of Perth, when I needed to work with the publisher to brief the designer for the cover. In between days camping on the white sands of 14 Mile Beach and Winderabandi Point with little to no phone reception, but fishing and turtles and snorkelling galore, we bashed along a four-wheel-drive track to the little town of Coral Bay for that important conversation.

And that’s the way it worked, carving out pockets of time for liaising with my editor and doing the work, often in little town libraries, as my manuscript was honed into something ready for the world.

There was a serendipitous circularity when we reached Mareeba, on the Atherton Tablelands in northern Queensland, where The Secrets of the Huon Wren began. Back in 2018, we’d embarked on a shorter, three-month caravan trip. While in Mareeba one night, after the kids were tucked up in bed, we gathered around a campfire and listened to a grey nomad recount her time working at a nursing home, and the soft spot she had for a woman with advanced dementia who had a doll that she cradled as tenderly as a mother with her newborn baby. As the flames of the fire flickered in her eyes, she explained how, in lucid moments, the woman would share chilling lines like, “Daddy took my baby behind the shed …”

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I wrote my novel from that germ of an idea, and the character of Nora emerged as the woman holding a doll with a trauma buried in her past, the story set in the farmland beneath Tasmania’s Great Western Tiers, where I spent much of my childhood. On the last day of our Aussie lap, we dropped into Penguin’s Melbourne offices, where I was surprised with the first printed copies of my book.

I’m not sure if it’s possible to improve on the year of 2022 for our family. That’s not to say it was all smooth sailing. The kids squabbled, just like they do at home. We smashed a windscreen on the Nullarbor, blew a tyre in Kakadu, bent an axle somewhere between Broome and the Bungle Bungles, shared a camp with the stench of a thriving bat colony in Carnarvon Gorge. But even the less-fun times are memories we exclusively share, the four of us. And before you ask, yes, they are experiences that will inevitably write themselves into a novel, probably the one I’m working on now.