A FAR-FLUNG LIFE invites you to step out of your busy life. Leave behind your computer, your phone, your mile-long ‘to do’ list. Let the noise of traffic and the uproar of the internet fade away as you travel back in its pages to 1958, to a vast, remote Australian sheep station called Meredith Downs. Settle into a silence so complete it makes music of your heartbeat in your ears. And in this restorative quiet, settle in to hear the tale of the MacBride family, and how fate lies in wait on a straight and lonely road to throw their world off its axis - M. L. Stedman
Goldsboro Q&A on A FAR-FLUNG LIFE
1. What was it like to see the Goldsboro Special Edition of A FAR-FLUNG LIFE?
I’m very fortunate that I can say I like the covers of all the editions – I think it’s in about 25 territories so far, and there are numerous, often very different, approaches. The UK cover is gorgeous, and the Goldsboro edition is absolutely sumptuous – such detail and care in every aspect. It even feels lovely to touch. Truly, it's a thing of beauty – thank you.
2. Please tell us a little bit about the novel.
It’s the story of the MacBride family, who run a very large sheep station (called Meredith Downs) in remote Western Australia, and how they cope with the aftermath of the terrible truck crash with which the story opens. In a twist of unforeseeable consequences, Fate deals them an almost unplayable hand, and yet they have to find a way through.
Anyone who has read my first novel, THE LIGHT BETWEEN OCEANS, will see that it shares some of its DNA, in that it involves characters living in isolation, grappling with a morally intractable problem. It asks many questions, such as whether everyone, no matter who they are or what they’ve done, has the right to love and be loved? Does everyone deserve to belong, or are there some things that doom a person to be an outcast from society forever? Who has the right to keep secrets, and who has a duty to keep them? It’s about memory and forgetting, fate and family, tolerance, resilience and hope.
3. The book is – powerfully – set in Western Australia. Please tell us a bit about the setting and the role it plays in the story and in the lives of its characters.
Western Australia (‘WA’), where I’m from, makes up the western third of the continent, and covers around a million square miles. Beyond Perth, its capital, it’s fairly sparsely populated. Although technology has changed things this century, at the time the story is set, people in remote areas lived very isolated lives. Sheep stations were usually in arid places – high temperatures in summer, low rainfall, and many miles between one property and another. WA has a magnificent, exigent beauty. The scale of it is difficult to take in. Place dominates everything. Living this life, you have to be completely self-reliant. If something goes wrong, you need to know how to fix it. And there’s no such thing as popping out to the shop to get something. You keep months’ worth of stores: you don’t know when a fire or a flood or a cyclone might leave you cut off from the rest of the world.
4. Tell us about your research, and your travels, for the novel.
Research is one of my favourite aspects of writing. For this book, I travelled a lot within Western Australia over many years, read a lot, listened a lot: to people; to the sound of the wind in the trees and the night creatures of the Australian bush; above all, to the deep silence that envelopes the far-flung places I describe. I spent a long time in archives, exploring records that left my fingers covered in the red dust that filled the pages. I was incredibly fortunate to speak to pastoralists and geologists, and people of the generation for which Australia ‘rode on the sheep’s back’, who recounted their stories and guided my exploration. I studied rocks and sheep (I even had a very brief taste of shearing a sheep, under very close supervision!). I visited various stations, sometimes ‘hitching a ride’ on small aircraft travelling to remote places, or delivering supplies to a station cut off by floods.
I found it invaluable to travel around WA as I wrote the book. There’s no substitute for experiencing first-hand the smells and sounds and textures of the place you’re conjuring. A tiny physical detail might spark a whole scene, or inspire a whole character. The idea of ‘forgetments’, a key theme of the novel, was inspired in part by the fact that, over, and over, I came across abandoned homesteads, or once-bustling towns which were now no more that the outlines of a few dirt roads. Fragments of broken china or glass glittered in the dust and hinted at lives long gone, their meaning lost. There’s something both moving and sobering about that.
5. It’s not a spoiler to say that some of your characters die very early in the book. How did it feel to say goodbye to them? What connection do you feel to your characters? Were there any you particularly enjoyed writing?
As I didn’t start out with a plan, and I don’t write chronologically (the opening scenes weren’t the first I wrote), I had no idea who would live and who would die until they’d actually met their demise. I don’t think I ever really say goodbye to characters – they’re always still there in my head, and just as real to me.
I think it’s vital to see the world through the eyes of each character; to know how it feels to be that person. And once you have that inner perspective, understanding and compassion arise, no matter what they’re doing. If they believe they’re doing the right thing, even though it may seem wrong to others, their pain will be in feeling misunderstood. And if they believe they’ve done the wrong thing, then their pain will be in living with that knowledge. Once you’ve got inside them like that, then writing them becomes natural. It can also be a draining and distressing process, as you live through events with them and in them, but I think that’s just a sign that you’re doing something right.
The more you stay with a character, the stronger your connection to them becomes, as they reveal their background to you; their thoughts and motivations. It took a long time before I knew about Myrtle’s early life, for example. Initially, I just saw her like everyone in town did: I knew she was the woman who turned up uninvited to any funeral she could. But there was much more to her than that, I eventually discovered.
Pete Peachey was a particular favourite to write. I find him such a comforting, wise presence, and I’m delighted that he’s a favourite with readers, too.
6. Can you talk a little of the importance of fate in this story and do you, personally, believe in fate?
Isn’t fate one of those things that doesn’t care whether you believe in it or not? What happens, happens. We take our lives for granted, yet anything we have or love could be taken away in the blink of an eye, without warning or reason. It’s a miracle that anyone gets to go to bed at night more or less as healthy and happy as they woke up. I think the story is an illustration of how vulnerable we are to random events – in this case, a split second reflex of swerving to avoid a kangaroo sets everything in train.
7. It’s been some years since The Light Between Oceans was released (amongst other things, it won the Goldsboro Crown Award for Debut Historical Fiction). Could talk a little about the challenges of writing freely and without the weight of expectations after such phenomenal success.
I think it’s wisest not to pay attention to ‘expectations’ – I can’t see how they help anyone. I just write what I’m writing, really for myself. If, by a miracle, someone else wants to read it, that’s great, but for me, it can never be the primary motivation. I had no time restrictions – until very recently, no one had any idea what I was writing – there was no contract, no promises to anyone. There were lots of interruptions along the way – the film of THE LIGHT BETWEEN OCEANS took up a lot of my attention, and then, of course, Covid turned the world upside down. So it just took the time it took.
8. What is currently on your reading pile or are you / have you enjoyed recently?
I absolutely loved THE BEE STING by Paul Murray, and immediately went on to read THE MARK AND THE VOID, for which he won the P G Wodehouse Prize for comic writing. I also loved SKIPPY DIES, his earlier book. I’m drumming my fingers waiting for whatever he writes next. Sticking with the Irish, TIME OF THE CHILD by Niall Williams is lyrical and moving and funny and – this is important, given that it’s set in rural Ireland in 1962 – actually very uplifting.
