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SUCCESS: Award-winning writer Lorraine Marwood has become a voice for forgotten Australians. Photo: ROSEMARY SORENSEN
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She kept notebooks even as a child, went on to write poems she sent off far and wide, gradually built up her publication list, and has now not only a heap of books to her name, but also Australia’s top award for children’s books.
When she gets asked how she did it, she talks about the networking and the persistence, the need to find your strengths and respond to opportunities – and she describes, too, the “tingling” in her fingers, that, no matter what, would compel her to write.
“I was told very early at school that I couldn’t read or write, that I was a dreamer,” Lorraine says.
“Now I know that a dreamer is a writer.”
Even in her wildest dreams, this woman who spent much of her life around cows, could not have imagined herself standing among some of Australia’s best-known writers and hearing her name announced as the winner of the inaugural Prime Minister’s $100,000 children’s book prize.
Behind that winning book, Star Jumps, is the experience of a woman born and bred in Bendigo who, with her husband and six children, fought for many years against a drought that sapped all hope.
They set up their dairy farm in Dingee, north of Bendigo, in territory long associated with the Marwoods.
With the departure of Kelvin and Lorraine about a decade ago, to a house on the outskirts of Bendigo, that era came to an end.
Lorraine wrote Star Jumps as a kind of “social history”.
“These two,” she says, pointing to Star Jumps and Ratwhiskers and Me, “are a record, my farm books.
“I want them to put the reader in there, to experience life, with all the atmosphere and the details.”
Ratwhiskers and Me is set in what is now White Hills, where Lorraine grew up. It used to be a Chinese market garden, and her characters are a young Chinese boy and his dog.
Like Star Jumps, it is a verse novel – not rhyming verse but rhythmic lines that flow down the page, making it both easy and rewarding for younger readers to follow the flowing narrative.
Star Jumps begins:
Keely feels it first.
“Star jump Saturday,” she calls.
I am Ruby, her younger sister.
I love a Kelly star jump Saturday.
It’s arms, legs wide and jumping
though the long,
thick
wild
weed
of the paddock kept fresh for new calves.
“It would be so much easier if I wasn’t a poet,” Lorraine says.
She only half means that. Although it made it more difficult to find publishers early in her career, her compulsion to write poetry eventually led her to publisher Sarah Foster at Walker Books, whose own passion for poetry provided the perfect partnership.
Her books include two in the highly-contested Aussie Nibbles series (Penguin Books) and several other educational titles with other publishers. They are not all in verse, but it is the verse novels she is now best known for.
“I was up against some very big names – Andy Griffiths, Alison Lester, Leigh Hobbs,” she says, remembering the nervous wait last year at a do in Melbourne’s Federation Square, where the winners of the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards were announced.
“No one knew who had won, and my son recorded the look on my face at the moment my book came up on the big screen.
“We laugh about it now.”
Lorraine’s story about Ruby and her clever plan to help out the drought-stricken farm by creating little feed bales out of the marshmallow grass along the fence-lines, struck a chord with the judges.
The book “evokes a place with warmth and great empathy,” they said.
“It was the surprise package in the list and the voice in which it is written is appealing, authentic and irresistible.”
How close that voice, and that experience, is to Lorraine’s own can be judged from what she says about how hard it was to write Star Jumps, which she completed during a residency at the May Gibbs studio in Adelaide.
“It was really hard to write,” she says.
“It’s not an autobiography, but is based on what you find on a dairy farm.
“I just wanted to convey the idea of drought – rural matters, which just don’t get the attention they deserve.
“I checked with my husband to get the details right, and then asked the children to read it.
“In a way, all books are about what you experience in childhood.”
Before the book was accepted by Walker Books, Lorraine was told writing about a dairy farm, and about the hardship of drought, was “old-fashioned”.
“But I was living it, and my family was here,” she says.
“I think I became a voice for the forgotten Australians.”
Lorraine Marwood will be at Bendigo Library on Monday, May 30, 5pm to 8.30pm, in an evening hosted by the State Library of Victoria.
She will be joined by Castlemaine’s Alex Miller (Miles Franklin Award), New York writer Rebecca Stead (Newbery Award) and Bendigo writer, Glenda Millard (CBCA Book of the Year).
Bookings $30/$20; phone 0415 848 515.
Star Jumps is the Bendigo Weekly’s Pick of the Week: review on page 15.
The shortlist for this year’s Prime Minister’s Awards are due out this week.
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