I lapped Australia in a caravan and signed a book deal in the same year

When we bundled our family into the four-wheel-drive, hooked up our 21-foot caravan and set off on the adventure of a lifetime – a year-long lap of Australia – I never dreamed my writing career was also set to soar.

The author and her daughter at Cape Range National Park, WA.Credit: Courtesy of Claire van Ryn

It was January, 2022: Launceston. We won’t talk about COVID-19, other than to say it was still providing some hurdles and an element of unease in our Aussie lap plans, which actually pre-dated the pandemic. Hubby of nearly 20 years, Phill, and I were optimistic and ploughed ahead, enrolling our kids Roman, then 11, and Adelaide, then 8, in home-schooling, renting out our house and boarding the Spirit of Tasmania ferry while family and friends waved us off from the docks.

Like a splinter in my hand was the knowledge that the novel I had written in 2020 was with my agent and was out on submission to publishers.

CLAIRE VAN RYN

My heart felt immediately lighter. Travel does that. It forces you to pare your life back to the essentials, to strip the superfluous. We shed responsibilities like a winter coat and set off on an adventure timed to give us a perpetual summer, hugging the outline of this immense continent we call home.

Our focus was immediately sharpened and we had the spaciousness of time to notice the intricacies of the environment around us; to knit closer as a family unit; to give weight and worth to simple pleasures like bare feet in dirt, birdsong, bralessness, shell collecting, bedtime prayers, campfire conversations and damper dinners.

Like a splinter in my hand was the knowledge that the novel I had written in 2020 was with my agent and was out on submission to publishers. I tried hard not to think about it, to let it sit benignly under the skin of our carefree wanderings, but I’d be lying if I said it didn’t rub occasionally.

Weathered rock at Gantheaume Point, Broome, WA.Credit: Courtesy of Claire van Ryn

Writing a book is largely a solitary experience. The onus is on you alone to punch out those words, to dedicate yourself to the edits, and then somehow position your work so that it piques the interest of the right people. It’s a strange happenstance to arrive, and then have nothing required of you but to wait.

One thing you should know about me, dear reader: I don’t do patience very well. What a blessing it was to have all of Australia’s natural bounty as my distraction for that season.

After a few weeks in Victoria, we headed west along the Great Ocean Road. We set the kids up with their school work in Barossa Valley wineries while we sampled the offerings. I attended the Adelaide Writers’ Festival and left armed with encouragement from Charlotte Wood and Emily Bitto. “For Claire in solidarity! Keep writing!” Wood had scribbled in the front of her book The Luminous Solution. Solidarity with these icons of Australian literature seemed a benevolent stretch, but I treasured the sentiment, praying the words might be prophetic.

Onwards! We went noodling in Coober Pedy and chanced a tour deep into an underground opal mine with a bloke who definitely hadn’t ticked any OH&S boxes. We camped on the Bunda Cliffs on the Nullarbor, and I didn’t sleep a wink for the sensation of our van pitching sideways to meet the ocean 90 metres below.

We found sand as fine as icing sugar at Lucky Bay in the Cape Le Grand National Park, and the fam sent me skydiving for Mother’s Day at Jurien Bay. Still unsure what to make of that!

It wasn’t until mid-May, camped at Western Australia’s Wooramel Station on the banks of an underground river, amid swarms of flies and soaring temperatures, that I received the call
I had been dreaming of.

It was 5.45am (my agent hadn’t calculated the time difference!) and the news was that Penguin Random House was interested in my book, The Secrets of the Huon Wren. By the end of that day, I was offered a book deal.

Cable Beach near Broome, WA.Credit: Courtesy of Claire van Ryn

You know when you’ve wanted something so bad for so long and when it actually happens you feel bereft of words or actions? That was me. First I was stunned, then I danced. If you spied one van shaking and jiggling on the banks of the Wooramel River that day, it was me, busting a few excited dance moves between calls home.

A few weeks earlier, I’d heard God say to me, a little whisper in my subconscious, “Put the champagne in the fridge!” And, feeling a little silly and extravagant (fridge space is at a premium in a caravan!), I did. So, after the silly dancing and the phone calls, I toted my beautifully chilled sparkling wine to break the news to the family and a few travelling buddies who were soaking in the on-site artesian baths.

We’d travelled as far as the Ningaloo Coast, about 1200 kilometres north of Perth, when I needed to work with the publisher to brief the designer for the cover. In between days camping on the white sands of 14 Mile Beach and Winderabandi Point with little to no phone reception, but fishing and turtles and snorkelling galore, we bashed along a four-wheel-drive track to the little town of Coral Bay for that important conversation.

And that’s the way it worked, carving out pockets of time for liaising with my editor and doing the work, often in little town libraries, as my manuscript was honed into something ready for the world.

There was a serendipitous circularity when we reached Mareeba, on the Atherton Tablelands in northern Queensland, where The Secrets of the Huon Wren began. Back in 2018, we’d embarked on a shorter, three-month caravan trip. While in Mareeba one night, after the kids were tucked up in bed, we gathered around a campfire and listened to a grey nomad recount her time working at a nursing home, and the soft spot she had for a woman with advanced dementia who had a doll that she cradled as tenderly as a mother with her newborn baby. As the flames of the fire flickered in her eyes, she explained how, in lucid moments, the woman would share chilling lines like, “Daddy took my baby behind the shed …”

I wrote my novel from that germ of an idea, and the character of Nora emerged as the woman holding a doll with a trauma buried in her past, the story set in the farmland beneath Tasmania’s Great Western Tiers, where I spent much of my childhood. On the last day of our Aussie lap, we dropped into Penguin’s Melbourne offices, where I was surprised with the first printed copies of my book.

I’m not sure if it’s possible to improve on the year of 2022 for our family. That’s not to say it was all smooth sailing. The kids squabbled, just like they do at home. We smashed a windscreen on the Nullarbor, blew a tyre in Kakadu, bent an axle somewhere between Broome and the Bungle Bungles, shared a camp with the stench of a thriving bat colony in Carnarvon Gorge. But even the less-fun times are memories we exclusively share, the four of us. And before you ask, yes, they are experiences that will inevitably write themselves into a novel, probably the one I’m working on now.

The Secrets of the Huon Wren (Michael Joseph) by Claire van Ryn is on sale now.

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