The beauty of Lake Illawarra inspired Eugene Von Guerard to paint it in 1860, and now the saltwater lake has inspired Jamberoo author and playwright Catherine McKinnon.
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Her second novel, Storyland, is set on the banks of Lake Illawarra and spans four centuries. The web connecting the five storylines is the lake’s natural environment, including the abundant wildlife. McKinnon weaves together her stories up to a climatic event – starting in the present, travelling into the future and skipping back to the past.
Von Guerard’s painting shows much of the lake’s surrounds stripped of their cedar and used for farmland almost 80 years after settlement.
McKinnon’s work stretches back even further, to Matthew Flinders’ exploration of the area in 1796. His account of that journey is the only historical record of the first encounter with the area’s Wadi Wadi people.
In researching the book, McKinnon explores the validity of Flinders’ two accounts of the journey and examines the influences and pressures he may have felt in writing them.
Flinders describes how they struggled to find fresh drinking water, had difficulty landing the boat and traded goods with two Koori men, who guided the explorers to Canoe Rivulet, a stream off Lake Illawarra, where they met with more locals. At some point Flinders believed the Kooris began to act suspiciously. Fearing for his life, he decided to use deceit to retreat back to the boat.
In Storyland, McKinnon challenges Flinders’ accounts by offering an alternative, imaginary perspective, from the point of view of an English servant, taking the reader on the same journey as they sailed up Lake Illawarra in the small boat, the Tom Thumb, through to Canoe Rivulet.
‘‘The book is partly based on real, historical events and part imagination,’’ explains McKinnon.
‘‘I didn’t want to alter the context, but I wanted to tell another narrative, a fictional tale.’’
The novel, which is yet to be published, also tells the story of a convict working as a cornfield overseer in 1822 and then moves to the 1900s, when a woman who runs a dairy becomes the central character.
‘‘I chose Lake Illawarra because it’s a fascinating body of water,’’ says McKinnon.
‘‘A lot happened there, a lot of early history. The changes in the area over time are fascinating. It’s like a microcosm of Australia.
‘‘There’s that first early colonial contact, the manufacturing history, the fantastic beautiful landscape and the rich, diverse transformation.
‘‘There’s also such a wide group of people who have lived around the lake. I find it a really interesting place.
‘‘There’s been such a huge cultural shift that it’s been fascinating to think of the differences – particularly the expectation on women and the shift that occurred in the 19th century.’’
McKinnon once lived around the lake but has since moved to Jamberoo, where she is surrounded by the Minnamurra rainforest.
A lecturer in creative arts at the University of Wollongong, she has workshopped several of her plays with acting students, which helps her to develop more complex characters and scenes.
Earlier this month she workshopped Out There, Wild, Wild World, part of Hurt Trilogy – three plays set in the Illawarra.
The plays are about ordinary people doing not so ordinary things as they ‘‘debate the best way to die, wrangle with life support issues and stuff up falling in love’’.
‘‘The characters are all on the sidelines of death,’’ McKinnon says.
‘‘I really wanted to examine the dynamics of how people deal with death at the same time as trying to negotiate the mundane of everyday life. For example, what happens when someone is forced to cope with a loved one who is in a coma at the same time as a wayward child.
‘‘I wanted to write about the feeling we get when we’re faced with death and how everything else loses importance. I also wanted to understand why we only get that feeling in times of crisis and how we change as people as we go through those times.’’
As writer-director, a week before the performance McKinnon cut a scene from the play, which threw some of her acting students.
‘I knew it’d be difficult for them, but it’s important to cut and edit scenes if we are to have better Australian works,’’ she says.
‘‘As actors they also need to learn how to adapt quickly. It’s important for them to understand how a play is developed and how as actors they can contribute to its development. They need to know what’s expected.’’
A blue flannelette shirt peeks out from McKinnon’s long black leather coat and she looks much younger than her 50-something years. She has a youthful spirit about her that comes, she believes, from having worked so long in theatre.
‘‘I am actually older than some of the parents of my students,’’ she says.
‘‘But because acting involves a lot of physical movement and as a writer I need to know and understand the lives of all ages, I can relate to them on a different level. So at times I may appear younger to them than I really am,’’ she says.
The trilogy of plays is funded by the Australia Council. Two of them are three-act plays, which allow McKinnon to explore greater depth of character.
McKinnon began to think about issues surrounding death when her own father was in intensive care.
‘‘Suddenly the things that I had thought were important to me, the things people had said to me which may have upset me, suddenly weren’t that important to me any more,’’ she says.
‘‘I wanted to know why. I wanted to know why we don’t feel like that at other times in our lives.’’
McKinnon has been writing plays since she left university and started her own theatre company, Red Shed, with a few fellow graduates in South Australia.
‘‘We did new Australian works. Over about 10 years we built it up into a professional theatre company,’’ she says.
McKinnon likes to develop strong, complex characters in her works – both for the stage and in her books.
‘‘We all stumble through life, which is a mixture of being flawed, bad and good,’’ she says.
‘‘Everyone experiences a spread of good and evil and we have to negotiate our way around it, to find a way through. Sometimes we stuff it up and sometimes we do well.’’
She is often torn between being a novelist and working in theatre.
‘‘Theatre is a collective experience. There’s immediate contact with the audience. It’s less lonely.
‘‘It took me four years to write my first novel. So it can be hard to make a living from it. Some people write television series to get by or they find other work.’’
McKinnon’s first novel, The Nearly Happy Family, published by Penguin in 2008, had a second print run the next year.
‘‘I grew up in a big family with eight kids. So there was a lot of action, but we had fairly traditional parents,’’ she says.
‘‘My dad was an orthodontist and my mother was a milliner before she became a mum. One of their favourite pastimes is watching other people – more so than landscape.
‘‘They’re great observers of life. They loved telling stories around the dinner table about how the people they had met or had heard about had overcome some great obstacle in life.’’
That love of people rubbed off on McKinnon, who says that part of her success as a writer has been her ability to imagine herself in other people’s shoes.
‘‘I often imagine what it would be like to have another job. What it would be like to be a journalist, for example, or a mechanic.
‘‘I believe every character you create is made up of little bit of yourself, a little bit of the research that you do and a little bit of your imagination.
‘‘When you get the chemical mixture right, you get a well-rounded character.’’
McKinnon, who has a practice-led PhD from Flinders University, says she became interested in American philosopher Mark Rowland’s theory that it’s not language that makes humans different from other animals, but rather our ability to make up stories.
‘‘I found that argument really compelling. I think it’s true that it does separate from other animals. We are guided by stories. We tell stories about ourselves, creating our own persona. And then we learn how to present it to people. ‘‘We develop our own narrative of who we are and we work on it until we’re happy. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that – I think it’s all part of how we understand ourselves.’’
McKinnon met her partner Gary Christian, an artist and sculptor, 15 years ago at a playwrights’ conference in Canberra.
‘‘It was pure chance that we met,’’ she says. ‘‘We are from different parts of the country and we just happened to be at the same conference at the same time. He was there to watch a friend’s play. If we hadn’t been introduced, we would never have met each other.’’
Christian’s sculptures can be seen around the Illawarra and in Sydney, including an exhibition at the Corrimal Cokeworks and a recent commission at the Mt Annan Botanic Gardens.
McKinnon’s second novel, Storyland, is yet to receive a publishing date.