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Good Reading : April 2012
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good reading april 2012 11 cover story Money isn’t everything and I think that a lot of us are on a treadmill, thanks to all the advertising and marketing we’re bombarded with every day.’ In Fiona’s third novel, Wattle Creek, psychologist Jacqueline Havelock moves from Adelaide, where she was working in a prison, to the town of Wattle Creek, hundreds of kilometres away. A shadowy man in the city had been harassing her, so the town of Wattle Creek seems like the perfect refuge. She meets kind and generous people, such as her elderly neighbour Ethel, who plies her with a casserole and a fruity jubilee cake on her first night in town and brings a homemade morning tea to her workplace the next day. There’s also Doris at the hardware store, who arranges for Jacqueline’s office to be painted free of charge. But life in the country isn’t the complete rural idyll that many people imagine. Jacqueline learns that her actions never go unobserved and that her presence provides plenty for the town gossips to talk about. When she sets up practice as a psychologist, she finds that some of her patients just want to pump her for information about her private life, or they present with the most trivial problems, which does nothing to challenge her professionally. Then Damien McAllister walks into her office. He’s a young farmer who is genuinely depressed and on the verge of suicide. It’s miraculous that Damien has reached Jacqueline’s office, given his fear that the whole town would find out about his problems through the bush telegraph. I wondered what prompted Fiona to write about depression in rural areas. ‘It’s widely reported that there’s a very high rate of suicide in rural communities and among young farmers in particular,’ Fiona says. ‘I’ve known five people who’ve committed suicide. Not all of them were farmers, but they are all people I’ve spoken to during my life. And that doesn’t include the friends of friends that I’ve heard about who’ve taken their own lives. ‘When you live in a small community, as much as everyone comes together when times are tough, it can also be quite a lonely place, with everyone knowing your business and everyone judging you. And if, like poor Damien in my story, you front up at the doctor, everyone wonders why you’re there if you don’t have half your arm hanging off with blood pouring out.’ The lack of privacy, however, is only one of the problems that farmers have to deal with. ‘Businesspeople have all sorts of problems to contend with, such as the GFC,’ Fiona explains. ‘But farmers are also businesspeople and they have to contend with Mother Nature. When you’re out there on your own a lot of the time, which many farmers are, you think too much, and those thoughts are often negative, which can be dangerous. If you’re expecting a great harvest and then you get wiped out by flood or frost or hail and you couldn’t afford insurance cover because you’d had a drought the year before, then that has the potential to send you over the edge. ‘Like many people from country areas, I was raised not to discuss things, to be stoic. There’s still a stigma around depression and getting help, even though there are great organisations like beyondblue and Lifeline out there. And country people are slower to adopt new ideas, I think. So it’s going to take quite a bit of time for them to embrace the idea of seeking help.’ The traditional practice of handing the farm over to a male rather than a female heir could also contribute to the sense of isolation. If young women aren’t going to inherit the family farm, then they are much freer to just get up and go wherever they wish to pursue their dreams – and often this means moving to a city. This leads to a shortage of potential partners for male farmers, which could explain the popularity of websites such as farmdating.com.au and the reality TV program The Farmer Wants a Wife, in which a group of farmers get to choose a potential partner from the city. I suggest to Fiona that watching this program must be an essential part of her job description. She laughs. ‘Yeah, let’s call it that! I do watch it, but I just like a bit of mindless television that frees my brain after writing all day.’ Fiona thinks, however, that the odds are stacked against relationships working out between farmers and born-and-bred urbanites, or even with ‘townies’, people who grew up in rural areas but in a town rather than on a farm. ‘What you quickly learn, if you’ve been raised on a farm, is that every cent goes back into the farm. Often the townies go out there and they want a new kitchen and they end up in fights because they want their farmhouse renovated. What farmers need in a wife is a woman who has been raised on a farm, who has been out there with her brothers and her father and worked the land and totally gets it. ‘You don’t go to the country – to a place like Wattle Creek – to have everything exactly the same as you would have back at home. If you did, then why would you bother? The point is to experience a different culture and see how other people live.’ But is there anything that Fiona would like to change about people in the country? ‘I think I’d like them to be less judgemental about things they don’t understand. For example, my upbringing was very much about “You fit into this particular box,” and if you don’t then there must be something wrong with you. They give you a wide berth because they don’t understand you. My being a writer is just so foreign to my mother and my brother. They just don’t get it. Up until only a few years ago my mother told me this idea of being a writer was a pipedream of mine and that I should get a real job.’ Now, however, Fiona doesn’t have to get a ‘real job’. Her first two books have been so successful that she has been able to give up her bread-and-butter job of writing and editing for the corporate sector. ‘I’m writing full-time now,’ Fiona says, ‘which is my dream come true. I honestly feel like the most blessed person in the world.’ Fiona mentions that the next book after Wattle Creek will be the first part of a trilogy. ‘I’ll be sticking with similar themes of a journey of self-discovery and a rural setting. They seem to be the things I need to write about. I guess I’m still dealing with my thwarted ambition of wanting to be a farmer. At least writing about it is cheaper than years and years of therapy!’ Wattle Creek by Fiona McCallum is published by MIRA, rrp $29.99. April 2012 main 10_11_cover_story_a.indd 11 7/3/12 8:27:03 PM
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