A 19th-century bushranger is our newest heroine Darry Fraser’s new book Elsa Goody: Bushranger
Our horror summer of bushfires has helped to spawn a new Australian heroine in the form of a 19th century bushranger.
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A 19th-century female bushranger is her newest heroine — but it was the modern double-whammy of bushfire and pandemic that underlined to DARRY FRASER the common thread in all our best stories.
I’m looking out of my front window across the road at a young woman and her partner walking along, his arm slung across her shoulders.
They lost everything in the recent firestorms on Kangaroo Island where I live.
The night the fires approached my little seaside town I remember thinking that I hadn’t experienced this type of fear before. There was an enormous red glow growing ever larger in the post-3am sky, but I couldn’t smell smoke, didn’t have embers or ash raining on me.
Could it be real, this thing I was looking at, approaching at ferocious speed, unstoppable and merciless? I wanted to feel where my fear resided, to know what sort of fear it was. I had a fire plan but was it enough? What was I frightened of? My house could burn down, I was insured. Although there were things I loved that I would leave, they weren’t really important. I had my car packed with what really mattered and my dog was by my side. What was I frightened of? I’d find a place to live until I could rebuild.
But the fear was a physical presence in my chest, it went deep, beyond the shakes and the hammering heart of a sudden fright. It was visceral, built into my DNA, the same fear my ancestors would have experienced for thousands of years ahead of the threat of fire.
Luckily on that night, the wind turned and the flames rushed back over themselves. I wasn’t one of the burnt-out, but I didn’t breathe easy. You can’t help thinking “thank God it wasn’t me”, but my fellow Islanders were hurting, and the collective hurt threw a pall over all of us for many months to come.
The island was just inviting people to visit again when this new dread spread effortlessly across the world — pandemic. We bunkered down. Livelihoods were doubly hit, everyone leaving the island and returning was suspect, friends distanced themselves. This threat was less tangible than bushfire but all-pervasive.
I am an author, but I couldn’t write, I couldn’t create. I hadn’t experienced the losses many had, and yet I was numb: stunned into silence by the destruction. In my day job, there had been many people coming in telling me their stories, giving shape and form to what they had experienced. Storytelling. The only thing I wanted was to do the only thing I’d ever wanted to do, the one thing I couldn’t lose, the one thing on which I could only improve — write stories.
My female protagonists live in a time when their voices wouldn’t be heard, not by their society, not by the government, sometimes not even by their families: nineteenth century Australia. The character I began to write at this time was female, young, unmarried, disenfranchised, alone and homeless. In those days that was a death sentence, so Elsa Goody sets off across country to try to save herself and her sister, and accidentally becomes the ultimate anti-authoritarian figure; a bushranger.
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The women in my books are always independent: do it yourself, no one else will do it for you, and always resilient. The pioneering women (and men) of Australia dealt with fire, flood, poverty and loss on a scale that suddenly became imaginable to me. The women of our past can teach us valuable lessons, and it is perhaps no surprise that I felt this spirit of resilience and independence seep out of the pages and into me.
Suddenly my writing was back on track.
It took some weeks but I forced myself back to my desk, got back to my thing. I took refuge in it; I had to refill my own well. My characters are tested, their characters, their values, beliefs, their convictions. Their fears are sometimes visceral, sometimes intangible but how they go about meeting the challenge is what makes the stuff of their story. It’s what makes the stuff of everyone’s story.
I look back at the couple crossing the road. She’s laughing, he has a smile on his face, his arm still around her shoulders. She thought at one point she’d never recover from what they lost. Now they are rebuilding their lives, keeping their heads down as another hurdle (for the whole world) is put in their path. They’re just going about it their way, going forward, using what they have now that their tank has been refilled. Telling their story.
IT’S OUR GOODY READ
Darry Fraser’s Elsa Goody: Bushranger is our Book of the Month, which means you get it for 30 per cent discount at Booktopia with the code BUSHRANGER. And please drop by the Sunday Book Club group on Facebook to share your views on what makes a book unbeatable.
Originally published as A 19th-century bushranger is our newest heroine Darry Fraser’s new book Elsa Goody: Bushranger