I go to visit my mother in San Francisco every couple of years. In anticipation of one of my visits, she had cleaned out her closet and sorted all the things she had kept from the growing-up years of her four children. My pile of memorabilia was a treasure trove to me: all the letters I had ever written to my mother, photographs, a music box, a necklace that I had made in second grade for her, and two very special books.

The first book was one my mother must have read to me a thousand times when I was little: a pop-up edition published by E.P.Dutton & Co. (no date) of Winnie-the-Pooh and Eeyore’s Tail by A.A.Milne. It has a spiral binding and cardboard covers and boasts that it is a “new full color [sic] edition with four pop-ups”. It begins: “The old grey donkey, Eeyore, stood by himself in a thistly corner of the forest, his front feet well apart, his head on one side, and thought about things. Sometimes he thought sadly to himself, “Why?” and sometimes he thought, “Wherefore?” and sometimes he thought, “In as much as which?” – and sometimes he didn’t quite know what he was thinking about.” I love that beginning. It makes me wonder how much that book has to do with how I write now.

I suspect the second book my mother saved for me has even more to do with how I write now. It is the first real book ever given to me to read to myself. It was Christmas 1953 and I had only just turned eight. I remember distinctly that I was not overly pleased to get a book for Christmas, a book 238 pages long with hardly any pictures, certainly nothing in colour. I was not a precocious child. I could read perfectly well, but I avoided it as soon a something better came along. Even though I knew that the author of this book was my grandmother’s friend, whom I had met several times, I couldn’t give two hoots about it or her. Finally, my parents made me sit and read non-stop for at least a half-an-hour every day until I finished the book. after the first few forced sessions, I was sucked in and didn’t need to be reminded to read. The book was Little House in the Big Woods, originally published in 1932. It was the first of the Little House series that made my grandmother’s friend, Laura Ingalls Wilder, famous. But, the only thing I remember about the author was that she was very, very old. In fact, Wikepedia says she was almost 90 in 1953.

For a person who remembers being ambivalent about this book, I was amazed to find, when I re-read it last week for the first time since 1953, that I remembered almost every word of it.  And I was amazed to see how important the detailed stories about a small family surviving pioneer life in Wisconsin were to me. One reason may be that we had a pioneer log cabin just like the little house in the book in our back yard. It had a heritage trust covenant on it and we were not allowed to touch it, except to protect it. I longed to play in it, but I was really only allowed to look. Ms Wilder’s book allowed me to put people into our little house and to imagine the life there. It allowed me to imagine bears and wolves and deer and even Indians, who I already knew about since another of our friends had an Illiniwek burial mound in their back yard. The stories in the book were so vivid because they were real. In fact, they were exact descriptions of how to do things like make a hat out of straw, or stick a pig, or smoke venison, or churn butter, or make soap, or, best of all, tap a tree for maple sugar. It does not matter than none of the trees in our yard were maple trees, they all got tapped by an eight-year-old to see if sugar would come out.  This book taught me to imagine the lives of others, and it made me infinitely curious about the way people lived and the way they did things.

Other authors, who came much later into my consciousness, and whom I have always assumed were of great importance to and influenced me more than any other authors were Hemingway, Steinbeck and Faulkner. The things I like most about all those writers are the details with which they describe the lives of their characters, the way they revealed the characters by showing what they can do, how Nick, for instance, could spin a fly in “Big, Two Hearted River”, how Ma made the stew in an unemployed workers camp in Grapes of Wrath, how Uncle Buck and Uncle Buddy went after Tommy’s Turl in “Was”. These authors show. They don’t tell. And, whole worlds are revealed.

When I work with people, I get them talking by asking them to tell me how they do something. With Daryl Tonkin, who wasn’t sure he was so good at telling stories, I put him at his ease and at the same time learned how he organised a story and what words he used, by asking him to explain the skills and tools needed to be a tree faller. With Bette, who did not see the reason for telling much about her mother since her mother had no real interest in politics, I asked her to tell me what her mother cooked her large family for dinner during the depression, where the food came from and how she got it when there was no money coming into the household. Bette gave me enough information for three chapters without realising it. It is the detail of people’s lives that make the stories of these two characters so readable and full of meaning.

Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder was the beginning of this great curiosity for me. Once I read her book, I became an enthusiastic reader and read every pioneer and Indian book I could get my hands on as a kid. And there were plenty. Two years later I read Gone with the Wind, which I thought was the fattest book ever written, and after that I felt I could read anything put in front of me. Which I did.

But, when I began writing my own books, I went back to the lessons I learned about writing in that very first book my parents gave me in 1953. Isn’t it a wonder that my first real book set me on a path from which I never wavered? I would not have discovered this if my mother hadn’t saved Little House in the Big Woods for me and if I hadn’t picked that old book off my shelf to read when the State Library’s Summer Read program encouraged me to think about my first book.

The other day, when I was being interviewed by the local paper covering the Summer Read event I will participate in at the Botanical Gardens in Cranbourne, the reporter asked me how I became interested in writing about the people I write about.

“You mean ordinary people?” I asked.

“Well, yes,” she said not having read either Cups with No Handles or Jackson’s Track.

“Because ordinary people often live extraordinary lives,” I said.

“Oh, that’s good. I’ll use that,” she said.

As a writer, I work with real people who tell me their stories. Usually, they are people I know, country people, far from the madding crowd. I consider the work I do collaboration and both my subject and I are always listed on the cover of our books. The people I work with tell me as much of their story as they think is important and then I draw them out. For instance, Daryl Tonkin, who was the storyteller in Jackson’s Track, only wanted to tell campfire yarns about the feats and skills of men at work in the bush falling trees. He didn’t think he was important enough to be part of any story. His daughter and I convinced him otherwise and I set to work asking questions that allowed him to delve deeply into his own life with the Kurnai people of Gippsland. In Cups with No Handles, the book that is one of the Summer Read books this year, the subject, Bette Boyanton, wanted to tell me a linear tale of how she became a political activist and what she achieved. The only stories she was ready to tell were those that lent themselves to her political education. But her family wanted me to find out more than just that. Her niece said to me, “She needs to say something about our grandmother. We don’t know about her. We need to find out.” Her daughter said to me in a fit of anger over a confrontation she had just had with her mother, “She’ll never talk about us [her kids]; you have no idea.” I thought, there is a story in the personal here that will make this woman’s memoirs dynamic. Feminist that I am, I thought, the personal is political. Bette didn’t really believe that, but I felt that to be true to the emerging character, she would have to learn. As she began to respond to my questions, she learned.

So, it’s my job as a writer to find the extraordinary in the ordinary. Maybe by extraordinary, I mean the truth. It is my job to find the truth in people’s lives. But, truth is a tricky business. Many people believe that memoirs are like a biography or a meticulously researched kind of history. Many people mistook Jackson’s Track for history. Bette herself in Cups… thought that it would be good if we included historical accounts of World War Two or the Great Depression or the Menzies Referendum against Communism. I told her history books were for that; ‘we will only tell the parts that you experienced, the thoughts you had about your experience, and how historical events moved your life along’. Because they are about experience and are narrative constructions based on memory, Memoirs are closer to Fiction that they are to the Record, to History. How, then, can it be that I think I am finding the Truth?  (I could go on forever about Memoirs, Biography, History, The Record, Oral Testimony, Truth. In fact, I have written a thesis about it. It’s called Jackson’s Track Revisited and can be accessed for free and downloaded in Pdf version from Monash University ePress.)

In one of John Barth’s books – I think it might have been End of the Road – there is a scene where a fellow is sitting on a park bench reading Dostoyevsky. Another fellow comes up to him and asks him what he is reading.

“Crime and Punishment.”

“What kind of a book is that?”

“It’s a novel; fiction.”

“Oh, I don’t like fiction. I only ever read the truth.”

“This is the Truth.”

It’s that kind of truth I am looking for. I am looking for a true character, the complexity and intricacy of a human being and the way she/he live her life.  It’s a universal thing. A Universal Truth. And it is endlessly fascinating.

I reckon I have finally found the key to the truth when my subject experiences a kind of epiphany, the kind of thing that happens when they see how history played upon their lives and made them do the things they did or see the things they saw, when they say, ‘I never knew that about myself!’ In Daryl’s case, it came when he realised how his brother’s behaviour made him think things that weren’t true; or in Bette’s case, it came when she saw how her grandmother’s rejection of her mother’s choices in life was even more of a motivator for Bette than her political beliefs. Once the storyteller gains insight, the story comes pouring out. It is my job to listen and listen well. Then everything falls into place.

What I look for is that core truth that lets the character emerge. It’s Literature. It’s Truth in the Dostoyeskian sense. That’s why my books read like novels.

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.