Category: Australia

Treading Carefully

~ Steve Fendt ~ Leave a comment

Reflections on a first attempt at writing a historical novel

‘The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.’ 

L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between, 1953

Out of my comfort zone

I grew up an Englishman on English soil. The past of the land I lived on was my past; I felt, rightly or wrongly, that I understood it intimately, intuitively.

These days, I live on the other side of the world, in a country where, until 1788, there were no Englishmen, other than a tiny number of whalers and sealers at a few points around our continent’s vast coastline — and no Englishwomen at all, as far as is known.

Stolen land, stolen history

The ‘settlement’ of the land that I live on, here in Victoria, began in 1835 with the landing of John Batman and his party.

It’s so close that I feel I can almost reach out and touch it. There are still descendents of the first settlers living on the same land their ancestors took possession of. Let’s not mince words: the land that they stole, with the connivance of the British Crown.

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Good Morning, Port Fairy!

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Photographic ramble around a small seaside town

Sea foam and ripples | author photo

My wife and I are regular visitors to Port Fairy, Victoria. As a daughter of a Western District farming family, Susan has connections aplenty there. No less than three of her cousins have holiday homes in the town, including the little bluestone (basalt) cottage on Sackville Street, in the heart of town, that we often stay in.

The cottage, the town and the coast feature often in my fiction, as they do in my life.

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The Power of a Change of Place

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It has happened again. A couple of days away in our campervan, and I’ve come back with a new tale to tell.

It is not something that actually happened – thankfully – but it was definitely inspired by the place we stayed and what we experienced there. It is a unique tale, then, which would not have been conceived anywhere else.

You’ll have to wait a while to read ‘Badger Hill’, as I’ve submitted it for a competition with my local writers’ group and don’t want to disqualify my entry through conflicting ideas about what constitutes ‘prior publication’.

It’s a little darker than most of my output, although it starts off innocuously enough. A woman receives a minor injury at the end of the first stage of a multi-day hike. At least the campground is idyllic …

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Immigrant Song

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Alphons is on the loose

Australia is jam-packed full of spectacular native birds. My wife and I have identified and largely photographed over 130 species, just in our little corner of the island continent.

So why, oh why, would I bother writing about the Common Blackbird – a stowaway from the Northern Hemisphere? An avian anomaly? An incongruous interloper?

Perhaps out of fellow feeling. I too come from a northern land of damp weather and leaf mould, of burgeoning hedgerows and dewy lawns. I too sometimes wonder how I got here.

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Tower Hill

~ Steve Fendt ~ 2 Comments

Photo essay on a volcanic wildlife haven

The volcanic plains of southwestern Victoria sweep down from the craggy Grampians and Victoria Ranges in the north to the Bass Strait coast, where they are abruptly truncated at sandstone and limestone cliffs or hemmed by soft dunes and marshy lagoons.

From east to west, the Newer Volcanics Province extends 400 kilometres from Melbourne to the South Australian border. It contains over 400 volcanoes, of which Tower Hill is one of the newest, having erupted as recently as 5,000 years ago. Tower Hill is one of the world’s largest maar (cinder cone) volcanoes.

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