The final journey: writer Susan Duncan dies at 73

A flotilla of boats accompanied writer Susan Duncan on her final journey from her water-access-only home to the mainland north of Sydney.

The much-loved writer Susan Duncan has died after a lengthy battle with cancer. Picture: David Hahn

The writer Susan Duncan has made her final journey back to the mainland, from her beloved water-access-only home.

Duncan, 73, died peacefully on the weekend in a place called Salvation Creek, which was also the name of her best-selling memoir.

Her body was placed aboard a barge operated by the Rural Fire Service and carried back to the wharf at Sydney.

A flotilla of smaller boats, ­carrying friends and neighbours from the Pittwater area, followed her back to the shore in what was a fitting tribute to a woman who adored the peaceful community she not only found at Pittwater, but nurtured, championed and shared with readers in many books and novels.

A flotilla of boats carrying friends and neighbours accompanied Susan Duncan’s body on her final journey back to the mainland.

Duncan wasn’t always one of the “saltwater people” of Pittwater. She spent her childhood in country Victoria. Her father was a ­supply officer at the Bonegilla Migrant Camp, and her parents later owned a country pub in Melton.

She became a successful journalist, travelling the world as a feature writer, and she was a former editor of The Australian Women’s Weekly and New Idea.

She escaped to Pittwater after the death of her first husband and her brother in the same week. Her first stop was a shack she called The Tin Shed. She later married a widowed neighbour, Bob Story, and moved with him to a home called Tarrangaua, built in 1925 for the poet Dorothea Mackellar.

She used the house – with its magnificent front deck, spacious rooms and large garden – as a venue for fundraisers, parties, and community events.

The annual Tin Shed Dinner, which she started, raised more than $2000 this year for the rural fire service, which had the honour of ­repatriating her remains.

In Susan Duncan's book, The House at Salvation Creek, she restores the old Pittwater house built in 1925 for the poet Dorothea McKellar.

She also started “carols afloat” for an audience of neighbours in boats, off the local wharf.

Duncan was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 1999. She fought mightily, continuing to write even through brutal treatment. Having explored grief, loss and renewal in her two memoirs (Salvation Creek and The House at Salvation Creek), she turned to the themes of community and ­belonging. In recent years, she was also kept busy raising cattle at Wherrol Flat.

Her final novel, Finding Joy in Oyster Bay, which will now be the last in her Briny Cafe series, is ­published this week.