Roger McDonald talks to MQtv about his award-winning book
Recently I had the pleasure of interviewing this year’s Miles Franklin literary award winner Roger McDonald for MQtv. The video is now in production and will be loaded up for viewing soon.
Roger, one of Australia’s most prolific and best-selling authors, was visiting the university to present a guest lecture about his award-winning novel, The Ballad of Desmond Kale, at a function organised by the Department of English.
The novel, Roger’s seventh, is set in the Australia of the early 1800s and at its heart is a story of fierce rivalry over the possession of sheep that produce the best and finest wool.
Roger is the first to concede that people’s eyes might glaze over at the talk of sheep and wool, but then they would be missing something – what he calls wool’s special alchemy.
“If you look at a staple of wool through a magnifying glass it’s like the clouds, like gold, like mist, it’s like the shapes of faces, all sorts of things come up in it,” he says. And in the early days of Australia’s colonial history, wool was the focus for much rivalry and ambition.
He recalls that the Australian historian and “sheep breeder par excellence” – Charlie Massey - referred to the early sheep breeders as “the Michelangelos of the bush”.
“I saw somehow for the first time really that the breeding of a sheep for wool was a cultural statement in this country like music or poetry or painting.”
All of this is a gift, he says, “in terms of characterisation, dramatisation and finding those things that count in novel writing which are always surprises to the author”.
Roger, whose previous novel Mr Darwin’s Shooter won numerous awards including the National Fiction Award, did a lot of reading and “a lot of living” as background to The Ballad of Desmond Kale.
“I was a shearer’s cook in the wool industry. I’ve had sheep on a small farm. I know the sites and smells and difficulties and trials of the industry; [they] have been part of my life,” he says.
He has stopped using the word “research” for his preparations for writing because it has an academic context that does not apply to creating a novel. “I tend to prefer to call it picturing - to get this panorama [and] diorama of imagery and place it onto a convincing screen.
“I got some excellent books and put them up on a shelf in front of me to do some background reading – this one took about a year of preparation. Then as I start writing, if I need something I just reach up onto that bookshelf and bring it down. It’s immediately available. I don’t want to stop writing and head off to the library during the writing process. I want to keep it flowing.”
The past, he says, is a rich source for the novelist. “We can get letters and diaries, we can look at diverse points of view, we can find out the real outcome of events thanks to the hard work of historians [compared with whom] novelists have the easiest job. “I often say that a lifetime’s work of a historian can be the afternoon plaything of a novelist.”
Having acknowledged his debt to the past, he says much of the novel comes out of his experience. One thing he feels very strongly about is the struggles facing people in rural Australia.
“People - and it’s happened in my family –they start off in the rural life with a lot of hope and almost invariably in Australia you’re hammered into the ground. Because of drought, markets that sort of thing … to be able to hope and fail at the same time seems to me to say something important about Australia.”
Stay tuned to MQtv and we’ll bring you the full video interview with Roger McDonald soon.
* The Ballad of Desmond Kale by Roger McDonald (Random House Australia, ISBN 1741661145 $32.95)
By David Myton
Editor, MQtv