Month: July 2022

My literary remake of Kuranda

There’s something about Kuranda in the far north of Queensland that draws me back every few years. It’s a green jewel of a town up on the Atherton tablelands, peopled by Aboriginal Australians, potters, painters and pie makers. The tiny railway station nestles in a culvert draped in rainforest trees and vines. The miniature St Saviour’s church is built from logs, its delicate stained glass windows recording its history and benefactors.

It’s here that I staged the eccentric romance at the heart of The True History of Jude which reimagines the story of Jude Fawley and Sue Bridehead in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure. Kuranda couldn’t be more different than Hardy’s Christminster (a thinly disguised Oxford), where the naive working-class stonemason Jude travelled to find his cousin Sue and to study theology. My Jude and Sue are part of a remnant population in an Australia wrecked by climate change and abandoned to mineral exploitation. My Jude escapes a government-controlled refugee camp at Orange that has evolved into a matriarchal society with its own creole language; Kuranda is an outlaw community ruled by a patriarchal religious sect. And like Hardy’s Sue, my Sue is married to an old school teacher.

I’ll leave the back story here to focus on my literary remodelling of Kuranda. The BP service station on Coondoo street is now the Blessed Prospect Church where divine singing mixes with the tropical breezes; you can just discern a petrol tanker among a tangle of vines out the front. There’s a train rusting on the railway station tracks, which are boarded over to form the yard of Slab, an odd-job man who employs Jude. He’s the nearest Jude can find to a stonemason, a New Zealander librarian once press-ganged to be trained as a drone operator protecting mine sites in Australia. And there’s the seedy end of town beyond the contemporary Foodworks store, where I located the public latrines and a bar. It’s here where Jude, drunk and despairing, was reunited with his first wife Arabella and his twin daughters Sorry and Anger.

Those familiar with Jude the Obscure will recall the tragedy that took place in the closet-room in Christminster, but I’ll avoid a spoiler for those who aren’t and just mention that I found an excellent location at the Barron Falls lookout.

A friend put me on the spot the other day: Why did you choose Kuranda of all places? I can concoct half a dozen post-hoc rationalisations, but in the end it must have been a mystical intersection of two emotional planes – my inexplicable obsession with Hardy’s novel and my instinctive attraction to Kuranda. The idea just fell into my mind six years ago. And when I sat drinking a coffee in Coondoo Street in June this year, I looked around and knew it was right.

You can find The True History of Jude in ebook and paperback here.

The best or the worst novel I’ve written?

This question has dogged me since I brought the first pages to my writing critique group six years ago. The True History of Jude endured restructures, abandoned endings, a complete change of tense, and deep puzzlement from some of those who read drafts along the way.

The question is perhaps irrelevant. This was a novel I wrote for myself, ignoring advice to cram it into a genre box. I categorise it as ‘coming of age tale’ and ‘dystopian thriller’. I could just as well say ‘epistolatory confession’ and ‘satire on Australia’s elites’. Or even ‘reimagining of a nineteenth century English novel’.

The True History of Jude is now out in ebook and paperback. I’m nervous.

I’m planning six or seven blog posts over the next few months, talking about various themes and motifs in the novel. These are some of the topics I’ll cover:

  • The potential for a tsunami that renders Australia’s east coast uninhabitable.
  • The Macfarlane family, who lease Australia to the international community as the exclusive supplier of uranium for a thousand years.
  • The development of a new creole language among climate change refugees abandoned in Australia.
  • The secession of the southern states of the USA.
  • The community of religious fundamentalists who have taken over the North Queensland town of Kuranda.
  • The fate of a royal historian in the post-truth era in England, where computer generated language technology has eliminated fiction.
  • A main character who believes he is Jude in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure.

If that hasn’t convinced you that The True History of Jude doesn’t fit a genre straitjacket, then I’ll try a little harder: Most of the book is supposedly written on an old typewriter, which is fine in the paperback edition where a suitable font replicates typing; but the robotic flowing text of the ebook neuters the aesthetic effect—technology eliminating art!

The True History of Jude is available here at a promotional discount of $0.99 until the end of July 2022.