Historic Port Of Echuca

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historic Port of echucaI’m up the Murray again on a research trip. This time it’s a houseboat from Echuca on the Victorian-NSW border, up to Torrumbarry Weir. Today I spent a fascinating day exploring the historic port of Echuca, Australia’s paddle steamer capital. The river precinct is an authentic working steam port, home to Australia’s largest fleet of steam-driven paddle steamers. It still operates much the same as it did in days gone by, with shipwrights and steam engineers providing a vital role in the port’s operations. Echuca holds a place in history as Australia’s busiest inland port during the late 1800′s, handling cargo from hundreds of riverboats annually. It’s still the centre of steam boat activity. Wander down the Murray Esplanade and you can almost smell the wood smoke from the old paddle steamers as they unloaded wool, timber and wheat, and took on stores, shearers and machinery for remote stations along the Murray and its tributaries.

Star HotelWe had lunch at the Star Hotel built in 1867, and explored the underground bar and tunnel. The bar lies twelve feet underground. After being de-licensed in 1897 due to the rowdy nature of the establishment, the underground bar became a ‘sly-grog shop’. An escape tunnel led to an outside alleyway, which was used in the event of a police raid. The underground bar and tunnel was only rediscovered in 1973. Previous owners had lived there for forty years, unaware of its existence.

Murray 3 001Unfortunately, my trip up this part of the Murray only confirms what I’ve found in other places. Too many people wanting a piece of this majestic river. Giant river red gums losing their grip on degraded banks. Old jetties jutting out twenty meters above the current river level. The health of the Murray-Darling Basin is failing. Ecosystems which Murray 4 017rely on the water flowing through the Basin’s rivers and tributaries are under great pressure, due to unsustainable extraction levels for irrigation and other uses. This problem is likely to become worse as water availability declines, due to climate change. We must act now, to restore the balance. Our children won’t forgive us if we don’t.

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Wombats In Trouble

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wombat 1Last week, on a late night bus trip outside the Murraylands town of Mannum, I was thrilled to see several Southern Hairy-Nosed Wombats. Here at Pilyara, Common Wombats are thankfully just that – common. But I’d never seen their much rarer western cousins. Southern Hairy-Nosed Wombats (Lasiorhinus latifrons) are one of three species (The Northern Hairy-Nosed being the rarest, and close to extinction). They’re found in scattered areas of semiarid scrub and mallee from the eastern Nullarbor Plain to the New South Wales border. They are the faunal emblem of South Australia, and the smallest of all three wombat species.

wombat 2Currently, Southern Hairy-Nosed wombats are being affected by an unidentified disease outbreak. The most obvious symptoms are hair loss and emaciation. Internally the wombats are anaemic, and in some cases there is liver damage and heart disease. In many parts of their habitat, very few native grasses remain. Instead, the habitat is dominated by onion weed, horehound, and potato weed. It’s suspected that more frequent droughts and an increase in toxic weeds is causing many animals to starve to death.

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Brigitte Stevens drove 25 hours to rescue Twinky. Photo Darryn Smitha

Wombats are an Aussie icon, but few people realise all the perils these gorgeous animals face: drought, floods, climate change, loss of habitat, disease, cars and culling – both legal and illegal. It’s not rocket science to see these animals are in trouble but thanks to the Wombat Awareness Organisation (WAO), there is hope!

wombat 4WAO is a wonderful charity established to help save the Southern Hairy-Nosed Wombat from extinction. Until WAO began in 2007, injured or distressed wombats were ignored or shot. Now WAO’s rescue service is available to every wombat in South Australia. Their rehabilitation centre is the largest wombat facility in the world, with the world’s largest free range wombat enclosure spreading over eleven acres. Wombats are nursed back to health and released into the wild if possible. Those requiring long term care can stay, digging burrows and sleeping in temperature controlled beds, in lush surrounds with ample native food in a supported environment. Donate to help the wombats here!

PS I’m heading off again tomorrow on another research trip up the Murray. This time, it’s a week on a houseboat, leaving from the historic port town of Echuca.

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Murray Magic

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Proud Mary 1I’ve been up the Murray in South Australia, on a research trip for my new novel. Am only home briefly, and will be going back up the river again in a few days. It’s been a marvellous and enlightening experience. First, a few facts. The Murray is the third longest navigable river in the world, after the Amazon and Nile, stretching 2,520 kilometres from its source to the sea. The mighty Murray-Darling basin is the third largest water catchment on earth. During my trip this grandeur was very much on show – the river remains stunningly beautiful. But the Murray faces many threats today, and these were on show as well. I was surprised at just how in-your-face the river’s problems are, in South Australia at least. Take the levees. Hundreds of kilometres of levee banks were built after World War One to ‘reclaim’ wetlands for soldier settlers. The once fertile river flats either side soon turned into dry wastelands. The farmers gave up, but the levees remain, protecting a dead landscape from life-giving floods.

carpEuropean Carp (actually from Asia) are another example. Old-timers remember a crystal clear river, abounding in aquatic plants, brim-full of Murray Cod and Perch. Millions of carp have actually changed the colour of the river, from clear to muddy. They hoover up the bottom and banks, sucking up water weeds, roots and all, then discharging sediments through their gills. The few plants that survive this treatment, still die because sunlight can no longer penetrate the cloudy water. Native fish and herbivorous water birds such as ducks, swans and spoonbills, have nothing to eat. There were no swans at Swan Reach when I was there. Only pelicans and other fish eating birds, which are thankfully making a small dent in carp numbers.

WillowsProblems go on and on. The most common trees along the Murray aren’t River Red Gums anymore, but English willows. They were planted along the river to mark its course, during the early years when the natural flood plain extended many square kilometres. Willows choke banks and channels, out-competing native species. They cause algal blooms by dropping leaves in autumn. And they are thirsty trees along an even thirstier river. CSIRO research shows an extra five and a half megalitres of water per year could be returned to the system for every hectare of willow canopy removed! And every drop counts in a country like ours. Incredibly, in the last twenty years the Marne River, (once a major contributor of water to the Murray) has completely dried up, due to dams in the Barossa Valley.

River Red GumThe Murray River has a mysterious allure. As far back as 65 million years ago, it was flowing westwards from the Great Dividing Range. Yet in a mere 200 years we have caused so much damage to this beautiful and ancient wonder of the world. Let’s hope Australia can work together to protect the Murray-Darling basin, truly the lifeblood of eastern Australia. In the meantime, I can’t wait to head back on up the river …

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Book Giveaway Winners

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Murray 1I’m currently on a research trip for my new novel. I’m on a boat going up the Murray, where internet reception is patchy. This makes blogging tricky, but I’ve found reception at Swan Reach for long enough to make a short post announcing the winners of Aussie Author Month’s book giveaway. The winners of the draw are Mary Preston (Wasp Season) and Theresa Lauf (Brumby’s Run). I’ll email both of you privately in order to get your mailing address. Thank you to all the other commenters. It’s great to see so many people appreciating home-grown Aussie fiction!

Any commenter who missed out can have a signed copy of Wasp Season for $10 or Brumby’s Run for $15 and I will pay the postage. Just drop me an email at jennifer.scoullar@bigpond.com.

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Happy Earth Day – The Canopy Project

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Canopy 1

Every year on April 22, more than one billion people take part in Earth Day. Across the globe, individuals, communities, organizations, and governments acknowledge the amazing planet we call home and take action to protect it.

Canopy 2One fabulous Earth Day initiative is the Canopy Project. It aims to plant trees that help communities – especially the world’s impoverished communities – sustain themselves and their local economies. A wonderful by-product of this project is that so many animals have their habitats restored. Trees reverse the impacts of land degradation and provide food, energy and income, helping communities to achieve long-term economic and environmental sustainability. Trees also filter the air and help stave off the effects of climate change. That’s why, earlier this the year, Earth Day Network made a commitment with the Global Poverty Project to plant 10 million trees over the next five years, many of them in the world’s most impoverished places.

Canopy 3Wonderful examples of The Canopy Project can be found all over the globe, including here at home. Landcare Australia worked to help restore vulnerable areas of metropolitan New South Wales and Victoria, focusing on places with unique and threatened animal species. In Brazil, the Canopy Project worked with local communities to plant native trees to help restore the Atlantic Forest, one of the most biologically diverse and severely threatened forest ecosystems in the world. Tree Canada joined the Avatar Home Tree Initiative to restore 800 hectares of pine forest that was devastated by hurricane-force winds in 2005.

Tree cover around the world has never  been more important. Congratulations to the Earth Day  Network! They have made a commitment with the Global Poverty Project to plant 10 million  trees over the next five years in impoverished areas of the world. Please join  them to help make this commitment a reality

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A Pantster And Proud Of It

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PlotterWriters all fall somewhere on the continuum between ‘plotter‘ and ‘pantster’. I’ve written a couple of posts about how screenwriters can teach authors a thing or two about plotting. How to use the three act structure. How it helps to plan out your inciting incident, your midpoint, your protagonist’s ‘dark night of the soul’. In fact my enormous corkboard has plot points pinned all over it. However I feel like a bit of a fraud in this regard, because when it comes to the crunch, I’m a pantster.

Save the Cat 233,000 words into the new novel, and my corkboard is struggling to keep up with the unexpected directions my narrative keeps taking. I’m cheating by updating my index cards as I go, pretending that character A was always going to be a pilot, and that character B was always going to have a ten year old daughter. It’s like forging a path into the unknown, and making the map afterwards. But that’s okay, because often it’s only in the writing of the story, that its direction becomes clear. Novel writing is a mysterious and deeply organic process, and it would be boring to always know exactly what was going to happen next.

magic of writingThat doesn’t mean an initial planning phase is wasted, however far the evolving story may depart from its original concept. A plan sets a writer off in the right direction, with a sense of purpose. That much updated, unforgiving corkboard will still shine a glaring spotlight on any ugly plot holes. And the final narrative must still contain every element of a rip-roaring yarn. Just remember that all the possibilities of a story might not show up until you’re well into the journey. Sometimes you need to throw away the plan, and let the magic happen!

Why Themes Count

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Themes 1I confess that for a long time, I didn’t quite understand the significance of theme in novels. And that was because I didn’t really know what a theme was. I couldn’t point to it or pin it down. If it was so important, how come it was so elusive?  But now I understand that its very mystery is the key to its importance. The central theme of a novel is not presented directly at all. It’s subliminal and must be extracted from the characters, the plot, the setting … in other words, as a reader you need to figure it out for yourself. And what’s more amazing, most of the time, you don’t even know that you’re doing it. That’s where the magic lies! You know intuitively what the story means. You think about it and ask yourself questions. You want to discuss it. The story may haunt your heart and mind long after you close the book.

HemingwayBestselling novelist Larry Brooks puts it like this. ‘ … without strong thematic intentions … a novel is just a sitcom, literary junk food, a quick hit of cheap-thrills genre that you read to pass the time on a flight.’ That’s not what I want for my books. I don’t expect them to win the Miles Franklin, but I do expect them to have emotional resonance. So I’ve learned to think long and carefully about theme.

Theme 3Maybe your book is about the dangers of ignorance, or change versus tradition, or the circle of life. How do you help readers connect with this? Repeating patterns and symbols are good. Allusions can help too. Have characters face the consequences of their behaviour. Have them think aloud. Let them learn a lesson. Serve up views on both sides, so your reader is faced with a dilemma, and must choose. Sometimes, in those marvelous stories that almost write themselves, the theme evolves organically along with the mounting word count. You know perfectly well what the story means, and you trust the reader will know too. This of course is the dream, and it happens more often than you might think. But a powerful theme is too important to leave to chance. It can make the difference between publication and the bottom drawer.

Aussie Auhor MonthIn celebration of Aussie Author Month, I’m giving away a copy each of Brumby’s Run and Wasp Season. Just leave a comment saying - if your WIP or favourite novel had a theme song, what would it be? Winners announced April 30th. Aust & NZ residents only.BB2013_Nominee