The Murrumbidgee Kid
(A part of a speech I made at Bryce Courtenay’s house in March 2006).
It has been a fairly long haul this book. About fifteen years ago I wrote and co-produced a mini-series that we filmed in Samoa, and in the cast was that fine actor Bill Kerr, a mate of mine for many years. One day Bill was terribly upset — he’d just learnt his oldest friend Colin Croft had died back in Sydney. He said they’d known each other since they were tiny kids growing up in Wagga. He told me Colin was lucky he reached the age of eight, because they had nearly hanged him when he was about five.
“WHO NEARLY HANGED HIM,” I ASKED.
The ringleaders of their town gang tied him up one day with a noose around his neck, looped it over a tree and went off to play. About an hour later they suddenly remembered . . “My God, Colin.” When they raced back he was on tiptoe, going slightly blue in the face. Bill likes to embellish a story, he’s very good at it and tells it with a completely straight face. According to Bill — they cut him down just in time.
We had a few beers to Colin’s memory, and during the time we were filming in Samoa Bill started telling me stories about his childhood. His mother used to lend him out to touring theatrical companies—tent shows that played everything from Charlie’s Aunt to Shakespeare— and they’d send him home weeks later with a label around his neck. “My name’s Bill Kerr. Please put me off the train at Wagga.” I think he was six at the time.
From this I started experimenting with the idea of a boy growing up in an Australian town with all its tribes and undercurrents, burdened by a mother who believed he could be a star, and how he was torn between these two very different ways of life. I spent about five years getting nowhere with it, invested time and some money into trying to produce it as a film, and finally put it away in a drawer. We all have these bottom drawers where certain ideas end up . . . but this one refused to stay there.
I kept thinking about it, and a few years ago I began to feel the story was better suited to a novel. It took me about 18 months, I got a big writer’s block in the middle of it and nearly gave up a couple of times. I was making a huge mistake trying to adapt my film script into a book. So I burnt the old script and all my notes and began again.
When I finally finished it, I didn’t know what to do with it. It’d been a bad year. After eight years and six novels I’d fallen out with my previous publisher. My agent Tony Williams had just died. One of the best agents, and I decided I didn’t want to take on a new one.
The manuscript was on the verge of heading back to the bottom drawer, when we happened to have dinner with friends not far from here and Bryce Courtenay was one of the guests. He asked if he could read a couple of chapters, and a week later Bob Sessions, publisher of Penguin got in touch and asked if I’d send him the manuscript. It was just before Christmas 2004, and Bob warned me not to expect anything immediate, not with the holiday period. I wasn’t surprised; I knew some publishers were taking six months or more to consider new work. I estimated hopefully, late March, maybe April, at the worst May. Well . . about two weeks after this, January 10th which was my late father’s birthday, there was an email from Bob saying he and Ali Watts liked it and wanted to publish. A delayed Christmas present. And a nice irony about my Dad’s birthday, because when I was 17 and told him I wanted to be a writer, he said I was nuts and sent me to a psychiatrist.
Suddenly I was a member of the PENGUIN family, and it was a wonderful year, 2005. When Ali Watts told me how much she liked it, she also broke the news she was off for a year’s maternity leave. “Don’t go,” I wanted to say, but she left me in good hands. I worked with Kirsten Abbott and my editor Saskia Adams, who were both terrific. Saskia was a real ball of energy. The manuscript by the time we finished with it was truly so much better. We worked by email, we’ve never met on this book, but she’s without doubt the best editor I ever had.
Just one more person to thank. She’s survived a great many years of God knows how many television shows, screenplays, stage plays and finally novels. This is the eighth. It’s been a long and happy partnership of shared humour and love, and I couldn’t have done it without her.
So thank you, Marge. Thank you all for coming. Thank you Bryce for your friendship and generosity.
Bryce Courtenay’s home, March 2006
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