As a part of my research for an upcoming two-part article on Australian YA fiction's boom in the 1980s and 90s, I had the honour of speaking with Nadia Wheatley last month. Here is the transcript of our conversation below. Nadia shared so much knowledge and terrific insight into an array of subjects like her reading influences, reflections on the publishing scene of the 80s, censorship of stories, the importance of place in writing her books, and why it's been 10 years since she has written for children.
Interview with author, Nadia Wheatley On Wednesday 24th August 2022, Brenton Cullen interviewed Nadia Wheatley at the Madison Mill Tower Hotel in Brisbane, and enjoyed the privilege of a 90 minute in-depth, retrospective chat with Nadia on her YA fiction, the importance of place in writing, censorship, what makes a picture book, reflections on the publishing scene of the 1980s and 1990s, and why she stopped writing children’s fiction. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. Q: The label of YA referring to teen fiction – do you recall when you first became aware of this term? Intimately. I wrote an article commissioned by Agnes Nieuwenhuizen for a book she edited (The Written World, published in 1994). Agnes asked me to write an article, broadly, about teen fiction. By that time I had already begun using the term ‘young adult literature’. I remember I rang up Julie Watts, who was one of my publishers, and I discussed the term ‘YA’ with her. That was just when Penguin Australia began using it. The article was, I think, the first publication in Australia that talked about the use of the term ‘Young Adult’. In the article, I argued for the use of that term as opposed to ‘teen fiction’. I guess I had a vested interest in the issue of labelling because when The House Was Eureka had been Commended (the term that later became Honour Book) in the CBCA Awards in 1985, Walter McVitty, the critic for The Australian, had said The House that Was Eureka wasn’t a children’s book. Ridiculously, for some reason, that year the CBCA had announced that a children’s book had an upper limit of age 14. Then dear old Laurie Copping, the president of CBCA at the time, had to write a letter to The Australian in response to Walter McVitty’s article. I kept out of it completely and made no public statement about it but I felt very wounded, as writers do when they find their book at the centre of a controversy. So I personally felt I had a stake in the matter of how we were defining and recognising the phenomenon of YA that was clearly happening in the United States and in Britain. When you’ve got things like Alan Garner’s Red Shift and ‘issues writers’ like Judy Blume and S.E. Hinton, clearly you couldn’t any longer be referring to these books as children’s literature. So yes, I was very much in favour of using the term ‘young adult’. As time went on, did the YA label become accepted? Did other people jump to your defence and agree with the label after you wrote your article for Agnes? Well, by the time the article was published in Agnes’ book, the controversy over Eureka was over and, once Penguin started using the term, it was soon accepted. Of course, why it was important was not just because it distinguished between books for younger children and books for older readers, but because of the ‘issues’ that our generation of writers were writing about – sex, drugs, unemployment, the environment, and political issues. We needed to be able to make it clear we were not forcing these things on 8 year olds, that this was fiction for mature readers. Sex, drugs, unemployment, political issues … were they the qualities you personally identify with YA fiction? When I think of ‘our generation’, the group of people I think of as comrades, I think of Jenny Pausacker, Libby Gleeson, Gillian Rubinstein, Victor Kelleher, basically the people who are featured in my edited anthology Landmarks. I see them as being my generation of fellow writers — the baby boomers who went through the 1960s, who were changed by the transformative era of the 1960s. I draw a distinction between us and the slightly younger crowd of writers who grew up in the 70s or 80s, and also between us and those who grew up during the 30s and 40s. Basically each generation of writers had a different transformative experience. I think our generation of YA writers in Australia were at the forefront, in English language fiction at least, in terms of bravery of subject of matter, but I think also that we were more innovative in form than most of our British and American colleagues, leaving aside certain other writers such as Alan Garner or Margaret Mahy. For example, the innovative blend of realism and fantasy that you find in Gillian Rubinstein’s books, and the combination of social realism and gothic in The House that Was Eureka, marked what was going on in Australia in that period, roughly from the mid-80s. Certainly I had comments from writers overseas saying ‘Gee, what you people write in Australia is amazing, we can’t write like that here’. So yes, it was innovative YA fiction we were producing at the time. Where do you think that came from? Was it from writers like Patricia Wrightson or Nan Chauncy of the 60s, specifically, or did it grow in the 80s, where the authors of that time found it was possible to become braver and courageous in writing certain YA themes? I see the 60s as an absolutely transformative decade and I think that for those people who had been young through the 60s, who had had that experience, this made them braver and more willing to take risks in their forms of writing as well as in their subject matter. Circling back to the qualities of YA fiction, other writers I’ve spoken with say teenage fiction didn’t necessarily need to focus on a teenager character, as long as the themes could be relevant somehow to a young adult. Other writers say YA is for readers of 12 and up, while some say 16-18 and even older. Does YA fiction have a target age in your mind? No, no, possibly after the issue of the CBCA saying children’s books were for under 14’s – putting an age cap on something seems ridiculous. But for me, whether I’m writing Lucy in the Leap Year or Vigil, the characters just develop themselves, and while I am writing I don’t think about the reader. The reading age of the reader tended to be around about the age of the main character I was writing. That changed later with the ‘dumbing’ down of reading. So that for example I’d always thought Five Times Dizzy is a book you read in Year 4, 5 or 6; the age of Mareka isn’t stated, but I think she is in Year 5, which I think is a terrific primary school year. So I was shocked and horrified when I found Five Times Dizzy being set for Grades 7 and 8 and I think this did the book and its readers a disservice. Certainly Year 8 kids would rightly think Mareka was a wimpy wuss because she was so pre-pubescent. Are books being set for these wrong levels by the teachers, or by publishers and marketing people promoting the books incorrectly? No, it’s not the publishers, I think it’s definitely the teachers and librarians setting books at a certain level, because I’ve never really felt much age-related marketing in regard to any of my books. But as for whether a book should be for readers who are the same age as a character — Maureen McCarthy with Queen Kat, Carmel and St Jude Get a Life (a very good book and a landmark book) had characters who had left school and were at university, but I still saw that as something which was very much YA fiction. It was something that someone 13 or 14 would be reading, because they would be interested in that age group. Similarly in my book Vigil, the boys in it had left school, were about 19, but the issues they were dealing with were things that 14 or 15 year olds at that time might have been interested in reading about. Kind of reversing that, in Robin Klein’s Came Back to Show You I Could Fly, the main character is quite young but we are looking at the much-older girl Angie in the story from his point of view, so that is definitely for older readers. With the themes of The House that Was Eureka and The Blooding, did censorship occur? From your publishers or book reviewers or …? Weirdly, the biggest censorship or resistance I had from publishers in terms of subject matter was for the book Five Times Dizzy. Publishers to whom I submitted it over the course of five years in the late 1970s and early 1980s did not want to publish a multi-cultural book: the comment by an editor at Penguin was that ‘There are too many Greeks in it’ and ‘There are not enough Greeks in Australia to warrant publishing it’. It was a turnaround, politically, that enabled that book to be published. Because Five Times Dizzy did very well and its sequel Dancing in the Anzac Deli did very well, Kay Ronai at Penguin then accepted The House that Was Eureka 24 hours after I submitted it. And there was no pushback on the subject matter of Eureka from anyone, anywhere, until Walter McVitty panned it when it was Commended by CBCA. I got no pushback from publishers on Vigil, or on the stories in The Night Tolkien Died dealing with drugs or gay characters. So really, I didn’t suffer any censorship from publishers. I never had any political editing; nobody ever asked me to change anything in the subject matter. But I was constantly asked to speak on panels on censorship along with Jenny Pausacker, so ideas of censorship floated around, but in practice we had enormous freedom. I spoke to Jenny Pausacker about her novel ‘What Are Ya?’ which was the first Australian children’s book to feature a gay main character and I asked her about censorship of that book, and she said people often asked her about her book being censored and she was invited onto panels as well to talk about it and the notion was all built up but there wasn’t really any censorship at all. Yet people assumed that there was outcry and so much censorship because it was a book with a gay character. Jenny’s right — there wasn’t censorship. In regard to the publishing companies, I would say that even though some of the editors were a bit younger than us, they too were part of the generation that came from the transformative era of the Sixties, and as a result, they were brave about what books they chose. Yes, publishers were brave. When I published The House that Was Eureka, Brian Johns was the publisher at Penguin and he went out of his way to say to me that he never thought he’d publish a children’s book with an epigraph by Karl Marx. When he said that, he said it in a way that made it clear he was proud. So I also felt that, from the publishers’ point of view, there was a sense that we were doing something fantastic in Australia. When I talked on panels about censorship, the examples I was giving were from America, there weren’t examples from here. And if and when the subtle pushback began, it wasn’t in my opinion coming from publishers but more from librarians, who in turn said the pushback came from the parents of the kids reading the books in their schools. But that’s the reason always given when schools push back on having authors do workshops on certain books or on stocking certain books in the library — that it’s the ‘parent base’ that is the reason, and they say: ‘You wouldn’t understand what our parents are like’. But in the 1980s and 1990s, I was never asked not to talk about something in a school. It has been more recently that schools or libraries have pushed-back like that. The Blooding is one of my favourites of yours… Thank you. Nobody seems to like The Blooding these days! I think it’s a great book. Col is a fantastic character. I’ve been re-reading it and your other YA books lately, and delving deep into them. I know that ‘place’ is always the starting point for your work, so can you tell me the genesis of The Blooding? In 1983 I moved from the city to Apollo Bay in south-west Victoria. I was living on a farm on an isolated road, and right at the end of the road there was the forest — this amazing virgin forest with massive mountain ash trees in it. In fact on my land, the gullies had never been cleared. I was only just getting accustomed to that landscape and feeling a part of it when the battle for the Franklin River was going on. I couldn’t get down to Tasmania where it was happening and take part in it, but I was very aware of what was going. One day there was a photograph in the paper of a bunch of young men in the town of Strahan in Tasmania, they were anti-environmentalist, but they were just a bunch of young kids. One of the young men in the photograph in particular — his face caught my imagination. I’m not usually caught by a character first off so it was the place where I was living, and then this particular boy, that caught me. I had just bought my first computer, and I didn’t have anyone to help me learn how to use it, and anyway you can’t learn how to use a computer without putting something into it. I had already been fiddling around with the idea for The Blooding —I still have some handwritten drafts — I had drawn maps of the land and made notes of the landscape — when first line came to me: ‘The lawyer said to write down everything that happened’. That was my ‘in’, so I started typing blindly into the computer. The printer was one of the early dot matrix kind, where the paper came out like a toilet roll — out and out and out — and the computer didn’t tell me when I had come to an end of a page, and so I sat there alone in my farmhouse with my dog and just typed, typed, typed, typed. I was printing out at the end of the day because I was so scared of losing what I had written, and thirty bloody pages were rolling out. From one day’s work. So it actually was just seventeen days of writing time for that book, with a couple of days off for sleeping in the middle. It kind of came amazingly fast — once I had Colum’s voice it came —and it’s the only time I ever did that sort of crazy automatic writing. It was also the first time I had a major male character, which was an advance for me. In the story, you can pick out a lot of duality in regards to sexuality. not to mention the issue of unemployment versus the environment, so I was really playing with the concept of Col being ‘on the horns of a dilemma’. Of course, that book didn’t get short-listed for anything. Possibly, you could say that was censorship. It was one of very few of my books not to hit any short-list, so perhaps that was censorship, but I can’t say that for sure. Anyway, it was put on the VCE syllabus list, and then it just sold through the roof. It sold to the exactly the right sort of boys, because schools would be set for it for ‘lower-academic’ boys, who were exactly the boys who needed to read The Blooding. I did school visits to country schools where the kids were just like Colum or like his mates in the book, and they had no resistance to the book. They identified with and related to Colum and the book was a match for them. Responses like that from the boys who resonate with the story must make up for the book not being short-listed for prizes? Oh, absolutely, because I never particularly wrote for awards and I never saw it as an ‘awards’ sort of book. It was just something I wanted people to read for political reasons, so it did exactly what I wanted it to do. The Night that Tolkien Died – did you write that purposefully as a collection of stories, or did you have the individual stories already? I had quite a few stories already, because it was in that period when writers were getting invited to place stories here, there, and everywhere, so I had about six stories that I decided to start putting together. But others I deliberately wrote for the collection. The one I really love, about the Greek girl (‘Melting Point’), I wrote specifically for it. Also the ‘coming out’ story, ‘The Most Unforgettable Character I Have Ever Met’ Do you see your novel Vigil as YA? Yes, I saw that as YA fiction as I wrote it, unlike The House That Was Eureka, where I didn’t know what it was while I was writing it. While I was writing Eureka, I wasn’t yet reading what we now call YA fiction. I had read SE Hinton’s That Was Then, This is Now and Alan Garner’s The Owl Service and I’d read a couple of Judy Blume novels but I hadn’t yet discovered what was going on in teen fiction. But by the time I wrote Vigil, I could see myself as a YA writer and I knew that book was specifically young adult literature. You have not published a YA novel since… Not since Vigil. Is that intentional? It wasn’t a conscious decision. From 1997 to 2001 I was going to the Aboriginal community of Papunya in the Northern Territory and that eventually led to the six Learning from Country books. And at the same time I was finishing the biography of Charmian Clift, seriously finishing it through 1998 to 2000 — by that time I had to finish the bloody biography or die. So that was taking time. But also after Vigil there weren’t young adults in my life so I wasn’t connecting with young adults except when I went to schools. And I was finding a different attitude, in terms of dumbing down of YA, and the reading level was dropping down so much and I wasn’t interested in writing books where the prose was ‘Then I went.. then she went … then I went… then she went…’ – I just found I had a lack of interest in writing YA books like that. And once the biography of Charmian Clift was done and I was working on the Learning from Country books, I was also working on my memoir Her Mother’s Daughter, in which (among other things) I explored the grief I had experienced when my mother had died, when I was nine. I’d always had a belief that if I examined myself seriously, if I went seriously down into my subconscious, I could lose the ability to write for children. And I did. So since then I haven’t written YA books, but I haven’t written children’s books either, except some non-fiction. Because that’s the sacrifice that happened. The part of me that was a child had to grow up to write the memoir, and once I had written it I wasn’t that child anymore. I could no more write Five Times Dizzy or My Place now than I could — well, fly to the moon. Do you feel that’s permanent for you? I don’t know. It’s not a rational decision but stories for children just no longer come to my brain. Child characters no longer come into my brain. Are there more non-fiction ideas bubbling around? Or adult fiction? Oh, both. I’m writing all the time. I have an adult novel for which I’m trying to find a publisher, and some adult non-fiction. When Australians All came out in 2012, that was the last non-fiction for children. A year or so later, there was Flight – but that took seven years to find a publisher. Flight and Five Times Dizzy were the hardest to get published, with political resistance. Flight eventually won CBCA Picture Book of Year in 2014, but I wrote it in 2005. It kept getting rejected — here, and in the United States, in Canada and in Britain. I rewrote it every time it was rejected.. I actually see Flight as a YA picture book, although younger children do read it. But apart from the non-fiction books Australians All and Playground, Flight is the only book for young people I have written for years. My Place is such a famously well-known title. Is there a book of yours you wish more knew of and asked about more often? I was asked at a school visit today about a favourite book — children always ask that, and I say that it’s like asking a mother to name her favourite child. But I also always say that The Papunya School Book of Country and History is very special for me. The experience of working with 40 astonishing Aboriginal young people and elders on that book was a privilege that artists don’t often get. That was an exceptional thing to get to do, and the boo received an exceptional acknowledgement. It may be forgotten to some degree now but it was a ground-breaking book when it was published in 2001 and I think it’ll remain a ground-breaking book forever. In terms of other favourites, Lucy from Lucy in the Leap Year is the nicest character I have ever written but I’m closer to Mareka from Five Times Dizzy – I’m not like Lucy at all. But maybe The House that Was Eureka is the book that’s closest to my beliefs. Is writing a ‘need’? Do you NEED to do it? If I don’t write I die. I have to get up at five in the morning and write, even if I have no readership. Economically-speaking no, with the old age pension and the small additional amounts I get from ELR and PRL, I can get by without releasing a new title, but in regard to writing I am like exercise junkies who, if they don’t run their five miles, can’t survive. I hate holidays because I need to be writing. If I go away I take editing or proofreading or something that needs to be done so I have something I can work through. I don’t get the buzz out of writing non-fiction I get from fiction. Writing fiction is what does it for me What is your process of drafting or re-writing like? Do you start second drafts completely over or re-write as you go? I re-write little bits along the way in the first draft, I get second thoughts about things all the time. I have no idea how many times I do miniscule edits or get new ideas or how many exact drafts there are. With my current adult novel, there are ten printed out drafts. I wrote that from 2014 to February this year, so there’s boxes and boxes of notes and drafts. Writers felt it was a golden age because they felt they had more creativity to write original and expressive ideas, publishers were more supportive and took more risks on different kinds of works, and literati treated children’s writers better than they had once been treated. Did these things happen to you in the 80s and 90s? Absolutely. I ran the Children’s Literature portfolio of the Australian Society of Authors for a number through the 1980s and 1990s and made enemies for myself in the adult literary world because I saw my role as speaking up for children’s and YA literature and equal treatment and space for children’s writers. As a result of that, we got proper sessions at festivals and weren’t quarantined to just children’s days. That’s over now. We complained about the small space for children’s book reviewing then, and things got better for a while — and now there’s nothing, really. A lot of those opportunities have gone away. Why did that happen? People stopped fighting. I burned out. I thought the next generation would pick up the fight. And frankly I haven’t seen the current generation fight for their rights as children’s writers, but I don’t know them or what they do. We had collegiate connections, meeting up together and writing snail mail to each other and even staying at each other’s houses, and calling on the telephone, and we saw each other and supported each other a lot. I don’t know if this new generation do that together, or not. Writing is an individualistic and competitive sport in which you can tend to think that, if another person’s book gets ahead, yours will sink down the pile, so I don’t know what the attitude of new children’s writers are, I don’t know them now. But in the 80s and 90s we fought and stuck our necks out and talked about censorship and argued for opportunities, but now I see none of that going on. I see in acknowledgements in some of your books, you often mention colleagues like Jenny Pausacker and Libby Gleeson and thanking them for reviewing drafts of your manuscripts. Jenny and Libby and I had a triangle going. We’d send manuscripts to each other— not work in progress, but work when it was nearly ready to submit. I have a superstitious belief that if I talk about fiction in progress, I won’t be able to write it, but once stuff was ready, Libby and Jenny and I would send things to each other. Jenny and Libby were helpful in saying ‘I want to know more of this character’ or ‘Tell me more about that point’. It was never suggestions of ‘You should write this or that’, but they were able to say ‘This was left out’ or ‘Can you dig deeper into this?’. Is it important to have advice from them, since being writers they will understand the core experience of wanting feedback and advice on improving manuscripts? Well, theoretically, but they were the people closest at the time. It’s a big ask, to ask someone to read a whole novel, and so I’m prepared to read someone’s story if they read mine in return. It’s got to be give and take. You have people giving feedback on a manuscript but at the end of the day… It’s still my book. Exactly, so how do you know if somebody’s piece of advice is useful or not? It’s depends if I agree and see their point — if they can make me see their point. You’re pretty generous and gentle with your friends but nobody ever says what you should do, they just say what their reaction was, without giving specific advice on what to change or do. For my current adult novel, Isobelle Carmody offered feedback: she thought one character wasn’t heard from enough, and she was right. She didn’t say how to change it but I agreed with her point and so I rewrote parts. Is there one highlight for your from your career in the 1980s? Whether it’s of personal achievement such as being proud of a piece of writing or a more public achievement among the publishing industry? There were many highlights I suppose, but probably writing The House that Was Eureka because it was an exhilarating time, not knowing from day to day what was going to happen as I wrote it. I guess getting Five Times Dizzy finally published was a highlight too. I began that in the Easter of 1977 in Greece, and started submitting it towards the end of that same year, and it came out about November 1982. I suppose when it was hailed as a multicultural book, to me it was a validation politically. For Jenny and me, more than the others, there was an overt political agenda going on in our books, which we discussed. I didn’t see it as a matter of writing in a proselytising way to put my politics onto 11 year-old readers, but because I came from my political background — I saw myself as a socialist and feminist — those politics manifested in my stories. With The House that Was Eureka, I was on the dole while I was writing it. I was going down to the central dole office in Melbourne where security officers with guns patrolled in case we became stroppy about waiting for our dole checks. I’d been arrested in an Unemployment People’s Union demo and gone to jail. The politics of unemployment was close, and I had also written my thesis on the subject of the Unemployed in the 1930s. It was incredibly close to me, so getting The House that Was Eureka, with those themes in it, published was really important to me. I love your picture books like Luke’s Way of Looking and Highway… Highway… that’s a beautiful book. It’s fantastic. Picture books seem notoriously difficult to write. What makes a perfect picture book? How difficult are they to write, compared to nonfiction or novels? Writing a picture book is the hardest literary form. I once lived for a few years with a good poet so I know a bit about what is involved in writing poetry. Writing a picture book is like writing a sonnet because you have to write within the framework a 32 page book. I have written some illustrated books that aren’t true picture books because they’re 48 pages, like My Place or Papunya. The perfect picture book is a sonnet because it’s about 14 pages of text. You have to leave out so much to allow space for the illustrator. For me the perfect experience of writing a picture book was working with illustrator Armin Greder on Flight. It’s sad when children and teenagers are given a school assignment to write a picture book, as though that’s where you should start before going on to write a Miles Franklin-winning novel. I get emails from retired brain surgeons or lawyers who think now they’ll have time they’ll write a picture book… Writing a picture book text is intensely difficult but working with a really good illustrator is again an exhilarating thing. Of course, to bring off My Place is something that happens just once in lifetime. But you would not believe the number of people who say ‘I could have written My Place’ and my answer is ‘Yeah, but you didn’t, did you?’ (laughs) because the trick with My Place was making it look deceptively simple. There’s huge structuring going into making a picture book text like that. Vast amounts of research was needed too, but the main trick was to make it look effortless. Any last words on the Golden Age – what do you want people to know about the 80s and 90s time of publishing? It’s hard to date this Golden Age — It’s a bit like the decade of the 60s, I see it as a slice of time not a chronological thing. It was a transformative experience for book creators and publishers — I must pay tribute to the publishers who were fearless and innovative too. Maybe you only get something like that once in a lifetime, and maybe a time like that won’t return. But, I live in hope. read more about Nadia at www.nadiawheatley.com This interview transcript is ⓒ Brenton Cullen and ⓒ Nadia Wheatley and may not be shared or reproduced without permission and copyright credited.
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