“Germany
must strike soon, either in England or in Africa. We must have plenty of strong
protection to shelter us from the mad Nazi holocausts…With Australian faith in
Australia, the Gestapo shall not rule us. We, every one of us, are in this war
today. The result of this “Battle for Rights” hangs the destiny of the world.”
A few years ago, my dad received a surprise in the mail. It was
a copy of a little newspaper, the ‘Schoolboys Chronicle’ which he had created
when he was eleven years old, at Neutral Bay Public School in 1940.
I was fascinated by it. To read something your parent wrote as a
child is like looking at a photograph of them at that age – it is undeniably
and intensely them, but how can it be? I
was particularly drawn to his editorial, quoted above. How extraordinary to
have this child’s words from sixty years ago, written with such seriousness and
passion at the beginning of what would be an unimaginably long and horrifying world
war. It was reading what my father wrote as a schoolboy in 1940, that most of
all, I think, led me to write my wartime novel, ‘The Blue Cat’.
I’ve actually included the schoolboy editorial inside the novel,
on page 63. It’s not the only contemporary document in the book – every dozen
or so pages there is something – an advertisement, a photograph, a book
illustration, a government order, excerpts from newspapers and magazines. The
sorts of things that the three children in the story, Columba, Hilda and
Ellery, would have seen and read themselves as they roamed the streets of
Neutral Bay in 1942.
I fell under the spell of contemporary documents as a window
into history when, as a teenager in the 1970s studying Australian history at
high school, my father gave me historian Manning Clark’s ‘Select Documents
of Australian History’. This was a collection of ‘primary’ sources - newspaper
reports, letters, cartoons, speeches - that were written and published at the
time of the actual historical events, rather than the interpretation of those
events by historians afterwards. I was
RIVETED – it was like slipping immediately into the mind of another, past world
in a way my textbooks never seemed to manage. That’s why I wanted to include so
many of these direct documents inside my own novel.
The Blue Cat begins with a changing
of the time – January 1, 1942, when daylight savings was put in place
Australia-wide as the country prepared for what seemed to be the imminent
invasion by the Japanese. The novel is about time, about the past, the present
and the future, and the impact of great historical events on the everyday life
of ordinary people, especially children like Columba, Hilda and Ellery. Like my other novels set in the past, (The
Red Shoe in 1954 and The Golden Day in 1967), The Blue Cat takes place in
Sydney, in a very different Australia. Yet the country we live in now, and which
we will live in tomorrow, has been inevitably and indelibly formed, even if
sometimes hidden from sight, by that Australia of the past.
For more background information on The
Blue Cat including images and videos, visit, Ursula's website: The Blue Cat. Keep an eye out for our review of The Blue Cat, coming soon.
