Author Trent Dalton reveals how newspaper readers played a key role in Boy Swallows Universe
Author Trent Dalton has spent 23 years walking the aisles of a media company. As Boy Swallows Universe is set for its Netflix debut, read his exclusive column here.
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Here’s the truth of it all. I had a wild and ambitious true crime story inside me, and you, the readers of The Courier-Mail, gave me the confidence to share it with the world.
It’s so true to my real life, all that stuff in the narrative of Boy Swallows Universe where the central character, Eli Bell, lands a job at The Courier-Mail writing colour feature pieces but spends his days gazing enviously at the crime writers on the opposite side of the newsroom.
I’ve spent 23 of the best years of my life walking the aisles of The Courier-Mail and The Australian headquarters in Bowen Hills and, to this day, I still gaze wide-eyed at the tireless crime writers who dive headfirst daily into my beloved Brisbane’s dark side. I always carried a few deep secrets connected to that dark side but I rarely got much of a chance to explore them in my journalism.
I genuinely loved writing the Johnathan Thurston magazine profiles and the soft-ish colour pieces about the giant-sized Ekka bulls and the sponge cakes shaped liked the Story Bridge, but the whole time I was thinking about a story from my own life about the first man I ever loved.
A real-life 1980s story about a Brisbane drug dealer who went away to prison for 10 years and the mother who went away after him. A story about the real-life secret room in the house on the fringes of Brisbane with the rotary dial red telephone that my brothers and I found beneath that drug dealer’s bedroom. A story about a boy who dreamed of busting into Boggo Road women’s prison to see his mum on Christmas Day.
In the late-2000s, I started writing a few harder, darker stories for Qweekend magazine on The Courier-Mail.
These were stories that scratched the occasionally dark underbelly of the Brisbane suburbs and the readers of The Courier-Mail started writing the most encouraging letters to me.
They said the most inspiring things. They told me to keep going. They told me to go deeper.
It was you, the readers of The Courier-Mail, who gave me the strength and, more importantly, the permission to share the story of Boy Swallows Universe with the world.
That wild and wonder-filled semi-autobiographical story of love, crime, hope and family spread from Darra to Bracken Ridge to Sydney and every corner of Australia.
From January 11, Netflix will be spreading that story to every corner of the world. Some 247 million Netflix subscribers across the globe will be able to stream the most ambitious and sweeping and colourful and authentically Brisbane story I’ve ever seen captured on television; the kind of Brisbane story I could only dream of seeing on television when I was Eli Bell’s age.
Some of the greatest Australian actors working today – Travis Fimmel, Phoebe Tonkin, Simon Baker, Deb Mailman, Anthony LaPaglia, Bryan flipping Brown – giving the performances of their lives in scenes shot entirely in the greatest city in the world. From Beenleigh to Wavell Heights. From Darra to Spring Hill to the glorious main auditorium of City Hall.
If you lived in Brisbane in the 1980s – or if your parents did – then you will recognise this Sunshine State universe they have captured on screen.
Strong case to be made that I’m the worst person in the world to judge the results of a Boy Swallows Universe Netflix adaptation.
I’m too darn close to it all. Case to be made, of course, that I’m the best person to judge.
I watched the whole thing with my wife, my daughters and my mum beside me on the lounge. I wept and laughed and gasped and wept again for seven-and-a-half hours straight.
For what it’s worth, I think there’s a dozen or so things about the show that are better than the book. For what it’s worth, I think it’s the best bloody thing I’ve ever seen on television. And it all happened because of you.
Thank you, from the bottom of this boy’s heart.
Watch Boy Swallows Universe from January 11, only on Netflix.
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