My new book is on pre-order!
Sisters of the Southern Cross, or as it’s become known among my lovely reader family, ‘the one about the nuns!’
So, for anyone in a rush, here’s the link: mybook.to/SistersSouthernCross
Please note this is a pre-order – so if you buy today it will deliver automatically on release day 20th of May.
And for anyone else who has time for a chat, make a cuppa and off we go! (Let’s face it, for most of us these days all we got is time…)
Warning this is a long tale so be prepared.
Isn’t it weird how the days fly by though? Nothing to do, all day to do it, and yet my daughter’s bedroom still looks like chimpanzees had a tea party in there!
So, I promised I would tell you the story of how this book came about.
Well, one fabulously hot tropical day last year, (very few Irish stories start like that) my family and I were knocking about in Cooktown, in Far North Queensland, Australia.
A wild, dangerous, and breathtakingly beautiful place, steeped in Australian history, for it was there that a very worried chap called Captain James Cook realised he had a massive hole in his boat, The Endeavour, in the year 1770. Luckily for Cook, unluckily for the native Australians, they welcomed him ashore and helped him repair it.
First contact was cordial and relatively successful. However as you probably know, the white man’s occupation of Australia after Cook is a sad and brutal story of the attempted destruction of the Aboriginal people’s way of life. 40,000 years of living as they did, deeply connected to country, (their phrase) annihilated.
If you haven’t read about it, I suggest you do. We all should know.
So, there we are, The Graingers in Cooktown and the Piper takes the kids off to the museum while I caught up on some writing. A couple of hours later, himself arrives back and says to me, ‘you have to go there, its an intriguing place. It’s in an old convent and they have all kinds of things that you’d find fascinating.’ – he knows the kind of things I find fascinating after sixteen years together – not what most people find fascinating admittedly, but anyway – I digress.
So off I go down to this old (for Australia) building. It’s on a hill in the town and instantly recognisable as a convent. The ground floor is dedicated to the Captain Cook story, and the first contact and so on, but as a visitor to Australia for twenty years, I’m fairly familiar with that. so I wander upstairs where one of the curators has directed me, to the ‘nun’s section.’
Upstairs in this building it is absolutely roasting hot. Now, they have added air con but still, wow. Hot. So I said, as I perused the many perplexing items they thought necessary to bring from County Waterford in the early 1900s, and saw the photos of the nuns with their long black habits and starched veils, ‘What on earth was going through their heads I wonder?’
Now, it was hot for me, with air conditioning and wearing shorts and a t-shirt, so no air-con, and in that rig out, I just could not imagine.
‘Well,’ says the wonderful lady running the whole show, ‘I can take you upstairs to the third floor to show you where they slept if you like? Its a bit of a store room, but you can see it?’
She didn’t need to offer twice. So together, we climb a narrow stairs and soon we’re under a tin roof. The air con isn’t getting as far as here, the humidity is so bad my shirt is stuck to me and my hair is wet, and this is the dry season.
During the wet, when the temperature is just as hot but the humidity is so much worse, well the mind boggles.
I see the little iron beds, each nun with her own tiny space, a curtain separating one from the other. All manner of intriguing things are just stored up there, I’m like a kid in a sweet shop. By looking at their possessions, I get a sense of them, who they were, but it was nebulous, fleeting, like someone you see for a second out of the corner of your eye.
And then she tells me.
In the 80s, a man met these very nuns, in a nursing home in Brisbane and he interviewed them. They were all over ninety by now. The interviews were recorded on cassette tape, and were in a box, beautifully stored and I suspect, never listened to, in the storeroom of the museum.
The curator bemoaned the fact that they weren’t digitalised, of course, it was all to do with funding and red tape, and the slow moving wheels of government administration of museums.
‘Could I listen to them?’ I ask, holding my breath, waiting for her to say it wouldn’t be possible. But in that wonderful ‘can do’ spirit that is so much part of the Aussie psyche she said,
“we don’t have a tape player but if you can get one…I don’t see why not!’
I contacted my brother-in-law’s sister Karen, a lovely person who lives in Cooktown, who dug out an old tape player her daughter had used for distance learning, and delivered it to the museum for me.
I spent the rest of the day, sitting in the curator’s office, blissfully engaged in the stories of the Irish nuns. What it was like, seeing snakes and crocodiles, dealing with the heat, learning to live in the tropics, the children who attended the school, the families who lived there.
I was mesmerised, and after several hours of testimony, (they all sounded like they left Ireland last Tuesday – not seventy years earlier by the way) a story came to me.
So there are nuns, and a very, very strange man, a group of Aboriginal people, a Catholic bishop, a Seventh Day Adventist pastor, crocodiles, snakes and children, and all manner of shenanigans in which all of the above become entangled.
I absolutely loved writing this. I wrote it in a caravan in Australia, and so much of the story is informed by those I met in the nine months I spent travelling in that wonderful country.
I spoke to an Aboriginal man called Russ, who showed us the bush, opening our eyes to a landscape so diverse and incredible, we just bumped into him one day in the outback, a place with red dirt as far as the eye could see.
I met more animals in nine months than I did in the previous forty eight years.
Kangaroos, wallabies, koalas, echidnas, quoles, Tassie devils, possums, wombats, snakes, crocs, spiders, so many birds, became the characters of my daily life.
I spoke to toughened farmers, trying to survive the drought, firemen and women battling the bush blazes that ravaged New South Wales and Victoria. I met with descendants of settlers, convicts and universally, to a man and woman, it was a fantastic, never to be forgotten experience. Thank you Australia, I will never ever forget it, this book is my love letter to you.
I really hope you enjoy it too.
That link to preorder again – mybook.to/SistersSouthernCross
My advance team will be working their magic in the coming weeks and hopefully all will be revealed on May 20th!
In the meantime, stay well, stay safe, this virus is no joke, don’t underestimate it,
Le grá agus buiochas,
Jean xxx