ODDFELLOWS
Nicholas Shakespeare
Vintage, $14.99
Few English authors have been so in love with the Australian landscape as Nicholas Shakespeare. The award-winning author stays every year with his family at the place "where he wants to die" - a beach house overlooking the Freycinet Peninsula in Tasmania – and he has devoted years to writing about Australia, including a non-fiction work, In Tasmania, as well as his 2007 novel Secrets of the Sea, which is set in the island state.
Shakespeare's third book about Australia, Oddfellows, a novella based on the real-life attack by two Indian immigrants on a train near Broken Hill on New Year's Day in 1915 that left four dead, considered to be Australia's first terrorist attack, marks the centenary of the event on January 1 this year.
Shakespeare was told about this little-known story by his friend, the Australian novelist Murray Bail. "Murray thought it was a story that would suit my writing and suggested we go and investigate it," Shakespeare says.
The two authors spent three days in Broken Hill in May 2013. "We stayed at the Palace Hotel where the film Priscilla, Queen of the Desert was made, and I had just published a biography of my aunt called Priscilla, who lived in occupied France."
Coincidentally, the name Priscilla also comes up among the real-life characters in Oddfellows. "I took it as a sign I was on the right track," Shakespeare jokes.
Shakespeare researched the history of Molla Abdullah, an Indian cameleer, and Gul Mehmet, an Afridi ice-cream seller, who had come to Australia in the late 19th century. Both were persecuted by a local sanitary inspector during a time when Australians were leaving to fight in World War I, the community was rife with racism and the Gallipoli campaign was just months away.
Then, on New Year's Day, 1915, the two Muslims, inspired by the Turkish sultan's call for jihad against the "Entente Powers", attacked the annual picnic day train and shot dead two passengers, including a 21-year-old woman. The Indians were killed by a vengeful mob.
Shakespeare has drawn on official records to write a fictional story, focusing on a relationship between Mehmet and a young woman, Rosalind, who is based on the real-life Alama Priscilla Cowie.
Shakespeare says he was interested to know what drove people to such an extreme position. About the same time he was in Broken Hill a British soldier was killed by two men with a machete in a London street and the Boston Marathon was bombed. Attacks continue in Sydney, Paris and elsewhere.
"I thought if you can explain what drove those two men to do such an extraordinary thing in Broken Hill, you can explain what is happening now around the world."
Shakespeare, 57, is chief book reviewer for London's Telegraph newspaper and lives in Oxford with his wife, children's author Gillian Johnson, and their boys, aged 11 and 14. The son of a diplomat, he was raised in Asia and South America, and has written more than a dozen books, including an award-winning biography of travel writer Bruce Chatwin.
Shakespeare's says his bond with Australia began in 1994 when he attended the Adelaide Festival along with English author Matthew Neale, who had just visited Tasmania and planted in Shakespeare's head "this idea of Georgian buildings on quays and amazing rainforests".
So in March 1999, Shakespeare went there and was "mesmerised by the light and beaches with no one on them". He found a two-bedroom shack for sale on a nine-mile beach on Tasmania's east coast. "It was everything I had dreamed about," he says.
Shakespeare and his wife rented the house for six months and decided to buy it. "My father came out to try and stop us from buying it, but by the third day I saw him on the beach he had tears in his eyes and said he had never been anywhere more beautiful."
Nicholas Shakespeare will be a guest at Perth Writers Festival, February 19-22, and Adelaide Writers' Week, February 28-March 5.
