Beneath a Rising Sun
Peter Watt
Pan Macmillan, $29.99
Peter Watt comes on the line from his home in the Clarence Valley on the New South Wales north coast. "I'm just wondering what you did wrong to get an interview with an unknown old author," he says straight away. "I don't come under the category of literary writers, I've discovered, so I very rarely get any attention from the media."
And then he laughs uproariously. It's classic Watt, who could never be accused of having tickets on himself. But if he doesn't often get noticed by the literary establishment, he certainly has been by readers.
According to his publisher, Watt's historical thrillers have sold more than half a million copies in Australia and New Zealand alone over the past 15 years.
Not bad for a bloke who turned to writing in his early 40s, because he'd "run out" of other careers to try. By that stage his resume listed occupations ranging from soldier, policeman and prawn trawler deckhand to real estate agent, legal clerk and builder's labourer.
However, Watt was far from an overnight success as an author.
"I had always wanted to be a writer and I knew it would only take one year before I was a multi-millionaire, internationally known author," he says. "But it was a bit more involved than I thought. About seven years later I was still writing a book, and working as a labourer in Aboriginal communities in the Gulf of Carpentaria. It took a while to get there."
His first book, Flight of The Curlew, a page-turning saga set in the Australian frontier of the 1800s, introduces the Macintosh and Duffy families. The two clans have continued to be the main protagonists in his Frontier Series, of which Beneath a Rising Sun is the 10th instalment.
But his manuscript was knocked back initially for being too "long-winded".
"Like most first-time authors, I made the mistake of thinking I had to describe everything and explain everything."
After extensive pruning and rewriting, Cry of the Curlew was enthusiastically accepted by Pan Macmillan.
War and conflict are the constant dramatic backdrop to Watt's novels, which he attributes in part to the tales he heard as a youngster west of Griffith in country NSW.
"I grew up in the 1950s in a soldier's settlers block so you can imagine I was surrounded by men who fought in the Boer War, World War I, World War II and Korea," he says. "I can remember the Boer War veterans sitting around having a beer, but today if you mention the Boer War, people say, 'What's that?'"
Watt delights in the lesser known details of Australia's military past (he studied Australian history in the 1970s at the University of Tasmania), looking beyond high-profile engagements such as Gallipoli and Vietnam.
"One of the things the readers do take away is learning a bit more about the history that we don't talk about much," he says. "For example, the Australians who fought in Russia in 1919 and won two Victoria Crosses or the 3000 Australians who went to New Zealand in 1864 to fight in the New Zealand wars. Or our first official military commitment in 1884 in the Sudan as the Army of New South Wales."
Research takes up at least 40 per cent of his time, mainly based on primary sources such as diaries and autobiographies.
"The study of old photographs relevant to what I am writing about can also be very useful as they show clothing fashions, etc, of the time," he adds. "I use the internet on subjects to chase up primary sources and it's also great when it comes to choosing foreign names.
"Put it all together and I have a canvas to paint my fictional characters on."
When he's not writing or researching, Watt is fully committed for about half the year as a volunteer firefighter.
"Fire fighting is very rewarding, especially when you save people's houses," he says. "You finish your shift that day and you think, 'I've done something good'."
It's just another part of what keeps him and his writing grounded. "I'm no great writer," he says. "But what I do at least is to entertain and educate people."
