Only twice have I been more than a few car-hours from the sea. It’s not such an aberration as in Tasmania you can’t really get more than that from the sea. But having lived in Sydney for over thirty years, perhaps it is a bit remiss, clutching with almost religious fever to the coastline. What is my fear? I’m sure Freud would have insights…
But in the novel Lady Bird & The Fox, Kim Kelly takes the reader along the roads and by-ways, deep into the dusty west of 1860s New South Wales. The gold rush was in full, glittering swing. Towns and populations swelled with hope, new money, new life, new possibilities. But in all this colonial newness, the imperial still reigned. The disjuncture between what was and how it could be seen reminded me of pre-Streeton attempts to paint the Australian landscape, rendering it as almost rolling green fields.
Into this setting, two outsiders with disparate lives and aspirations are thrown together. The stage is set for a wild ride.
But apart from the rollicking story and spicy setting, I was intrigued by the interesting technical decisions Kim made to tell the story. So, to celebrate the triumphant release of Lady Bird & The Fox and all these things, I was prompted to share a cup of Jarrah with the author and have a chat.

What was the first whiff you got of Lady Bird & The Fox?

I had just completed the first draft of my fourth novel, Paper Daisies, a cicada-pitched Australian gothic exploring the abuses of women in our bright-dark past, and I’d begun a little car-chase spy story set in Canberra during the Cold War while I was waiting for feedback, as you do. I didn’t know it at the time, but this was the beginning of the end of my relationship with the mainstream.
‘At this stage in your career, you really should be looking to write a dual time-line narrative – you know, like Kate Morton,’ was pretty much the feedback I got. The direction I was heading was not romantic enough for the discount department stores who would ultimately judge whether or not my novels would cut the mustard, or at least cut a fine enough figure wedged between men’s underwear and the deodorant aisle. ‘Your work is becoming too masculine,’ I was told.
Once I’d stopped laughing and crying, I turned my mind to how I might best steer my work back towards more commercially acceptable tropes, but fate intervened. I was trawling Trove when a newspaper clipping of a woman called Mary Ann Bugg – the real-life bushranging wife of Captain Thunderbolt, little-known and a thoroughly intriguing person – fluttered onto my desktop. Almost immediately, Annie Bird appeared, a fictional character who gathered up a swagful of the bold love and strength of the thoroughly excellent Aboriginal women in my own real life, and who suddenly wouldn’t hear of me not writing a story about her.
The Australian gold rush period had fascinated me since childhood – since John Waters appeared on our TV screens in sweaty neckerchief as Sergeant Robert McKellar in Rush, to be precise – and so of course I wanted Annie’s romantic hero to be a strapping chap, perhaps a miner gone rogue, or even a handsome copper. But I got Jeremy Fox: an overindulged and indulgent rake, son of a prominent Sydney Jew, who stepped straight out of my own long wonderings about my Jewish heritage. He arrived half-drunk and brushing the dust from a new set of tweeds.
‘No!’ I said to these new imaginary friends. ‘You’re not right for each other!’
‘Oh, but yes, we are,’ they told me.
And that was that.

You tell the story using two separate POVs, almost drawn out to two separate narratives. What were some of the difficulties with this structure?

It’s a structure that seems to come naturally to me: two lovers, two people questing for the same thing but from different places. I’ve experimented with other forms of multi-narrative – three voices in Jewel Sea, one of which is a magical pearl (yes, and don’t you mock it, for this pearl is cursed as well), and a collection of historically interlinked vignettes in Wild Chicory – but the form I keep returning to is this entwining of two.
Dual first-person narrative lends itself to the lines of love I love to travel but I guess the greatest challenge of this kind of structure is that you really need to know your characters very well from the outset: you need to be able to hear them. This kind of storytelling is really tight-focussed, too, so I need to be careful not to witter on too much inside the characters’ heads, and I need to be able to draw the big events and themes of history into small spaces without the information seeming forced or out of place. But I revel in these challenges. I’m always searching for the personal inside history, the people who loved and lived inside the social and political waves of the past, so this approach just makes a bundle of sense to me.

Do you write them as they are, consecutively? Or do you write two separate complete narratives and then fold them together?

I always write chronologically, and in quite a rush, because the characters drive the story – and they don’t let go until I’m done. I set out with a bunch of themes, though, to stop me careering too far off track. For Lady Bird & The Fox, those themes included identity, home, belonging, family, bigotry, and anything outside of them I’d try to block out in the rush of writing.
Of course, once I’ve finished that first splash-down draft, I then have to go back and horrify myself at how bad the writing is. It’s like listening to some endless recounting of a dream – because that’s exactly what it is, I suppose. I have to sharpen the mechanics of story at this stage, enrich the history with further research, and fine-tune the voices. For example, Annie’s voice was much harsher and Jem’s much more camp in that very first draft; their voices didn’t change in any essential way in the rewriting but they toned down and slowed down so that they could be heard more clearly.

And you are also jumping between two worlds, divided by gender, social class, race and religion. Was it difficult to find and maintain these two distinct voices?

Because hearing voices seems to be a blessing and curse of mine, I don’t find maintaining consistency on the page too difficult. Once the characters reveal themselves to me, they are who they are – and they are forever. I never have to say goodbye to my imaginary friends. (In this respect, I often think I might be an entertaining nursing home inmate, when life takes me there: as I dement, I’ll be talking to and of so many people that never existed except in my heart, rambling of times we shared during which I never existed myself). Probably the key here is, for me anyway, that I don’t try to write voices I can’t properly hear in the first place.
I’ve always had a diverse bunch of pals – of different cultures, religions, sexuality, political positions and experiences of being; some of them are even men – and taken an interest in the quirks of character and idiom that come from the way life shapes us. None of us has just one voice, either, but several, depending on where we are. I love the dynamism of language at that personal level and I love to play with it in historical contexts. Also, because novel-writing today, more than ever, is such a preserve of the middle-class, I’m conscious of giving power to voices that are often shouted over or thought unmarketable or unrelatable. With Annie and Jem, I had to spend a lot of time learning about not only their cultural influences and histories, but about how racism is received by those on whom it’s inflicted. I did a lot of listening to people who know things I don’t.

At times the change of batten in the narratives is very close to the action. Literally something dramatic has happened, even happening, and we switch to the other narrative. Does this help to create dramatic irony in that what one character thinks the other supposes is often confirmed or refuted in the other character’s narrative, but often remains unsaid? Only we, the reader, know the truth.

Yes indeedy, I have a lot of fun with these shifts in perspective – comedically and romantically. For example, Jem loves his horses and loves riding at speed; Annie, not so much. And in human love, Jem is hopelessly besotted with Annie; Annie, not so much with Jem.
At other times, the switch is essential: for example, when Jem is beaten unconscious, Annie has to take up the narrative, and show the reader what has occurred. Or sometimes it can deepen an insight: when Jem wonders at Annie’s longing to find her grandfather and her Aboriginal heritage, he is asking the questions as an outsider, signalling to the reader that it’s okay not to know these things, but wonderful to discover them; if Annie had given us this information herself, the reader might have felt lectured, or somehow distant from her experience; Jem leads us to into the heart of her sorrow with love and a desire to understand.

Was there a real WOW moment in all the research?

There are always lots of wows along any research trail. Sometimes I think I only write novels to do something constructive with all historical trivia I collect, but one standout was discovering, about halfway through writing, that the far-flung town in central New South Wales my heroes were heading for, Wellington, used to be called Montefiores – named so after a Jewish banker who selected this district for his squattorial sheep run. One of my quests in writing this novel was to discover the contribution of Jews in mid-nineteenth century Australia – et voila. I laughed so much at that strange-but-true wow.
More sweetly, I always get some personal wow in writing any story, something that gives me an inkling my ancestral ghosts have been along for the ride. This time, it was discovering the early-nineteenth century London stage career of my great, great, great grandfather Benjamin Woolf – apparently, he’d been quite a famous performer at Drury Lane, singing the popular songs of the day. This snippet had no bearing on the story I was writing, but it gave me that magical shiver of connection across time, a tether to my Jewish heritage, and a whisper of why I needed to discover it: here was a man, like Jem, treading that line between being Jewish and making it in a world often violently dismissive of Jews – both of them Londoners, too, in a London I could never know.
Still, it was a few months before I realised I’d unwittingly named my character Fox when, all along, I’d known my family name was Woolf. I laughed at that, too – mostly at how slow I can be sometimes.

With the whole “go west” flavour of the narratives, there are allusions to the Western Genre. This seems new territory for Australian stories. How did you work to forge this genre in an Australian setting?

I think it forged itself, really. I pay shameless homage to the old TV series Rush and to that glorious bag of cheeseballs, The Frisco Kid, but that’s about as far as the pop culture allusions go. Australia’s gold rush had its own distinctive Wild West flavour, but it did flow on from America’s. The American influence in early Australia is little talked about but fascinating to me – that direct shipping connection between Sydney and San Francisco especially. Few people seem to realise, for example, that our iconic Cobb & Co stagecoaches were the brainchild of a Yank. In this sense I wasn’t thinking genre at all, I was just thinking history, and having some fun with it, too – good excuse for making a few timeless gags about imported corporate capitalism. Besides, in California, the gold rush towns have such cliched names, like Rough and Ready, and Fiddletown; while in Australia, we have Teapot Swamp and Blathery Creek – now, who wouldn’t want to go there?

Well, yes, now I would and shall. I will have to Go West, as the anthem goes. Thank you Kim for your time and insights into your unique voice(s) and writing. I wish you all success with Lady Bird & The Fox and all your writing.

Visit Kim Kelly here

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