Imagining The Past: In conversation with Jock Serong and Fiona McFarlane
Writer and critic Stephen Romei is in conversation with Jock Serong and Fiona McFarlane.
Jock discusses part three of his Furneaux trilogy, The Settlement, which was short listed for the 2023 ARA Historical Novel Price. Part two of the trilogy, The Burning Island, won the ARA Historical Novel Prize in 2021.
Fiona discusses her second novel, The Sun Walks Down, which was shortlisted for the 2023 Walter Scott Historical Fiction Prize.
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About The Settlement
On the windswept point of an island at the edge of van Diemen’s Land, the Commandant huddles with a small force of white men and women.
He has gathered together, under varying degrees of coercion and duress, the last of the Tasmanians, or so he believes. His purpose is to save them—from a number of things, but most pressingly from the murderous intent of the pastoral settlers on their country.
The orphans Whelk and Pipi, fighting for their survival against the malevolent old man they know as the Catechist, watch as almost everything about this situation proves resistant to the Commandant’s will. The wind, the spread of disease, the strange black dog that floats in on the prow of a wrecked ship…
But above all the Chief, the leader of the exiles, before whom the Commandant performs a perverse, intimate dance of violence and betrayal.
About The Sun Walks Down
In September 1883, the South Australian town of Fairly huddles under strange, vivid sunsets. Six-year-old Denny Wallace has gone missing during a dust storm, and the whole town is intent on finding him. As they search the desert and mountains for the lost child, the residents of Fairly - newlyweds, landowners, farmers, mothers, artists, Indigenous trackers, cameleers, children, schoolteachers, widows, maids, policemen - explore their own relationships with the complex landscape unsettling history of the Flinders Ranges.
The colonial Australia of The Sun Walks Down is unfamiliar, multicultural, and noisy with opinions, arguments, longings and terrors. It's haunted by many gods - the sun among them, rising and falling on each day that Denny could be found, or lost forever.
About the podcast
The Imagining the Past podcast series features authors appearing at the Historical Novel Society Australasia biennial conferences or who have been recognised in our $150,000 ARA Historical Novel Prize.
Our hosts, Kelly Gardiner and Greg Johnston, discuss researching, writing and publishing historical fiction with acclaimed writers of the genre in its many forms from crime to fantasy to literary fiction, set in eras stretching from ancient times to the Swinging Sixties, and for readers of all ages.
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