Featured Book- Against the Tide

Research is never wasted. Before I went to England I was a 23 year old radio writer concerned with shows like “Nightbeat”, “Famous Trials” and a thriller called “The Long Shadow”, when out of the blue came an offer to write the script of a musical. It was to be a story of the Snowy Mountains Scheme and a convoy of cars containing production crew, technicians, director, composer and me; we drove to Cooma on the first stage – research for a musical about the greatest project since the construction of the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

Glad to leave my desk where I slogged non-stop on radio scripts, it felt like a huge adventure. The first calamity was the producer offering to take me as a passenger in his car. His new, expensive Jaguar had a series of punctures. This produced a second calamity – lost in Canberra. We arrived at night, and went round and round, unable to find a hotel or an open restaurant. Canberra of 1955 was more like a village than the city it is today.

However, we finally reached Cooma and began research, meeting migrants who’d come to work here, seeing Jindabyne and Adaminaby, towns about to be flooded, and hearing the angry protests of those due to lose their homes or farms. Back in Sydney I started work on the script; the composer got busy, and then came the third calamity. The promised money to fund the show had fallen through. The musical about the Snowy was cancelled.

When things like that happen in our business you shrug and get on with something else. Little did I realise at the time how valuable that few weeks of research would be. About six years later, now living in London, I was asked to write a television play for Armchair Theatre. I wrote “Thunder on the Snowy” drawing on the miners and characters I’d met at Guthega.

Then long after that, now back in Australia and writing novels, I started a story about immigrants. Inevitably two of my characters were sent to work on the Snowy and almost half the book, “Against the Tide”, was set there. Memories came back, that research was many years behind me, but the clarity was surprising. I did not have to return to places like Cabramurra or the tunnel at Tumut. It would not have been possible, for the work was long since done, and the migrants either settled here or returned to their homelands.

But for me, the research proved a valuable asset – twice. A play and a novel were made possible by the musical I never wrote.

An overview of Against the Tide:

A compelling saga of friendship love and survival.

They came from the ruins of the war in Europe: Sarah Wiseman, the survivor of a German concentration camp, Michael and Helen Francis, a brother and sister fleeing from the Russians in Budapest, and Neil Latham, the young English soldier who broke the rules to help them all survive. The four arrive in Australia seeking a new start in the lucky country.

But life in post-war Sydney, amid the gangs and corruption, and in the high country of Australia’s Snowy Mountain Scheme, is hardly an idyllic existence. And the past, left so far behind, threatens to jeopardise all their futures in unexpected and terrifying ways. It seems only a matter of time before buried secrets will be revealed . . .