Vanessa McCausland’s new book The Lost Summers of Driftwood
Inspired by the NSW south coast, Vanessa McCausland wrote her new book before bushfires ripped through holiday towns. Now, she reveals why it’s such a special place.
Books
Don't miss out on the headlines from Books. Followed categories will be added to My News.
The smell of salt, sunscreen and eucalypt, the hum of cicadas in the trees. Those long hot, January days are etched into us. Australian childhood is shaped and moulded by our summer holidays; our playground under the wide blue sky and searing sun.
My family camped. We set off before dawn with our huge tent and our Tarago and drove into the Barrington Tops national park, north of Sydney. The streams there were cold and swimming with yabbies, which we caught and cooked over the fire along with jaffles filled with leftover spag bol. Sometimes my brother and I met other kids and formed those strong but fleeting friendships born of fending off boredom. Exploring became our common language. We made cubbies in the scrub, climbed trees until we could see nothing but a sea of green leaves. Those days felt like they lasted forever.
Some of us return to the same campsite or caravan park year after year. For others it’s a beloved holiday house that’s revisited every summer.
For me it was a place on the NSW south coast. The drive took an eternity and without iPads or air con we looked out the window and played eye spy, the breeze hot on our faces. My grandparents lived on the Clyde River and here we roamed free. We awoke to the laughter of kookaburras and fell asleep to the sound of frogs chirping, but the drone of cicadas was the soundtrack to those hot, halcyon days.
Memories from that time are etched into my being. And so, when we sold the house on the river, I wanted to capture some of the magic of that place. My novel The Lost Summers of Driftwood is inspired by my own childhood growing up on the river, of summers in the bush. Some of us had our first crushes as teenagers on summer holiday. We formed friendships that picked up where they left off each time holidays rolled around.
That time of childhood and adolescence, when everything feels new and amplified, is saturated in nostalgia now.
Some of my memories have become family folklore. The biggest fish that was caught off the jetty. The worst sunburn. That time someone saw a shark. The south coast beaches we swam at were the same ones my mother frequented with her siblings as a child. Here we roamed the rocks, dared each other to enter the cool caves and didn’t come home until darkness fell and our skin glowed.
The summer holiday spot is so quintessentially Australian. We are a nation of explorers. We think nothing of driving for hours to reach our destinations. And they are places of magnificent beauty - deserted beaches, stretches of wild bushland, untouched places. It feels like this land still has places to explore, even after a lifetime of summer holidays.
Read an exlcusive extract of The Lost Summers of Driftwood here
We have been formed by this vast land in which we live. It is a wild place, hot and dry and unforgiving. Frightening when it catches alight. It is so raw, but so beautiful. It wasn’t until I left Australia to live in Europe at age 19 that I realised what we had. I wept with emotion I didn’t know I would feel as the browns and reds of the soil appeared in the plane window after a year of being away. I was moved again in this way when I visited Uluru and learned more about the people for whom this land is their spirit.
I love this quote from Trent Dalton’s Boy Swallows Universe: “Australian childhoods are so idyllic and joyous, so filled with beach visits and backyard games of cricket, that Australian adulthoods can’t possibly meet our childhood expectations.”
It feels like our summer holidays still hold this lure. This hope that we will feel that freedom, that idyllic place of our youth again. The fish and chips, the sunscreen, the sea salt. That we will pass all this on to our children and it will live like a bright, beautiful beacon in their memories, too.
FOOTNOTE
I wrote this in a time of innocence, weeks before bushfires ripped through the south coast holiday towns and devastated whole communities. My heart goes out to them. Something needs to be done to address what is happening to our country so that we don’t end up in a place where all we have is our childhood memories of carefree Australian summer holidays.
The Lost Summers Of Driftwood, by Vanessa McCausland, published by HarperCollins, available now.
SUNDAY BOOK CLUB BOOK OF THE MONTH
The perfect read for long, lazy summer holidays, Vanessa McCausland’s The Lost Summers Of Driftwood is our Sunday Book Club book of the month for January. You can get it for 30 per cent off by using the code DRIFTWOOD at Booktopia. And don’t forget to share your favourite holiday reads with fellow book lovers by joining the chat at the Sunday Book Club Facebook page.
Originally published as Vanessa McCausland’s new book The Lost Summers of Driftwood
‘Don’t try this at home’: Risk rewarded
Joanne Fedler defied inner fear and official advice, to take a risk at a time of personal loss – and made an extraordinary discovery that brought back her gift for storytelling.
‘What happened? Who is guilty?’
Four girls disappear from a school camp and a male teacher goes after them. The girls return – but the man does not. Wouldn’t you be asking hard questions, writes Nikki Gemmell.