I had a wonderful compliment yesterday. A person recognised me as the author of Cups with No Handles and came up to tell me that she thought it was a wonderfully Australian story told in the idiom with a kind of freshness and accuracy that she doesn’t come across often. Well, my buttons nearly popped because I am not a native Australian speaker.

I first came to Australia from Chicago in 1968. Although I wasn’t a backpacker for I had landed a job at a private school in Ballarat, I was on an adventure fresh out of university travelling as far away from home as I could get. When I disembarked from the BOAC aeroplane and stepped onto the tarmac at Essendon Airport, I heard myself being called a Yank for the first time in my life. So naïve was I that I wondered how the stranger speaking to me knew I was a Yankee from the North and not a Rebel from the South. (I blush to think of that now.) I was called luv and thought it was a compliment; I heard the word sheila used in such a way that I didn’t know what it was; I heard phrases: too right, bewdy mate, she’ll be right, no worries, flat out, fair dinkum, fair go – all spoken in the broadest accents; I heard the upward inflection at the end of sentences that made me think people were asking me questions at every turn; I heard strange syntactical constructions that made the English words of my own language unintelligible to me. Rather than despairing, I was excited to realise that Australian was a different language from mine and that the dynamics of this new language – the syntax, the inflections, the words and phrases – were fascinating. I set about learning it.

As much as by speaking with new friends, I learned the language by immersing myself in the literature. At first is was the books that my friends threw at a ‘new chum’: Randolph Stowe’s To the Islands, Tourmaline, Merry-Go-Round in the Sea; Henry Lawson’s short stories, especially “The Drover’s Wife;” Joseph Furphy’s Such is Life; Henry Handel Richardson’s The Getting of Wisdom; A.D. Hope’s poems, “Australia” then “Death of a Bird” and through him Judith Wright. And then I found books for myself: Manning Clark’s histories were coming out volume by volume and then came a new re-print of The Fortunes of Richard Mahoney, all three volumes in one paperback with a gold cover. I remember lugging that around for weeks so I could read it on the train going to and from work. It was when I discovered Patrick White and read The Tree of Man that I felt I was beginning to know this country and its language.  I wrote my first play using Joseph Furphy’s Such is Life to guide me. I wasn’t conscious of it at the time, but I know now that I wrote No Place for a Woman, based on a Henry Lawson short story, in order to learn the language and discover the ethnography of the original Settler Australians. By that time I wanted to know not only the language but the past so I could plant my own roots here. I knew I had begun a project that was never going to end and leaving this new place I had found to live in was not an option. Interestingly, an American woman named Lucy Frost who teaches at Tasmania University and must have come to Australia about the same I did, must have been doing the same thing I was. I discovered her book, No Place for a Nervous Lady; voices from the Australian Bush, years later.

Of course, I read many, many Australian books other than those I have named. Dame Leonie Kramer (for better or for worse) was spear heading a push for recognition of Australian literature back then and I dove in headlong. Publishers took her up on it and there have been so many great books… How can I begin to name the ones that influenced me over the years? Anything by Christina Stead or Helen Garner or Kate Jennings, Inga Clendinnen’s Dancing with Strangers or Tiger’s Eye, Kim Mahood’s Craft for a Dry Lake, Tim Winton’s Cloud Street, Rodney Hall’s Island of the Mind, Lionel Fogarty’s poetry. I have to stop; I’ll keep going forever. My favourite right now is Alexis Wright’s Carpenteria. I think, in that book, she has stretched our language, made it more Australian (Aboriginal) than ever. I love opening it on any page and reading passages out of it. It is a masterpiece.

Oh, dear, I haven’t said anything about Australian film (Peter Weir) or Australian theatre (Jack Hibbard’s Stretch of the Imagination), which was also coming into its own in the seventies. What a dynamic and expansive time it was to be learning this language.

When I moved down to the city from Ballarat, I found an evolving language that was wonderful. It had an international lilt, with clipped pronunciations and clever constructions. In St Albans, where I taught, my favourite sentence, usually spoken by boys in the back row was, “I didn’t do nuthin, yeah but, Miss.” I got along with the kids I taught and was invited to their houses to have dinner with their migrant parents. Because I was a migrant myself, I had much in common with them. My interest in their life before Australia and their reasons for leaving the old country plus their struggles with the Australian language meant that I was constantly having people tell me stories.  I became a good listener: a person will tell a story if there is a listener. I found I could write their stories if they wanted me to – say an explanation to a lawyer or a letter describing a situation – and they felt as if they had written it themselves. “How do you do that?” they asked. Well, I didn’t know. But, I reckon being tuned into the sounds of words had a lot to do with it.

When, almost thirty years after my study of the language had begun, I was asked by his daughter to help Daryl Tonkin tell his memories of life on Jackson’s Track, I knew I could do it. I tuned in to his way of speaking very quickly. That book, Jackson’s Track, Memoirs of a Dreamtime Place, was a sensational experience for me. Cups with No Handles; Memoirs of a Grassroots Activist came next and I am getting lots of great feedback from readers; the Life of Eileen Harrison, Kurnai artist, is almost finished and a couple of new ones are on the boil.

The project I began that February day at Essendon Airport is certainly not yet finished.