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McFarlane stories inspired by Australia’s past
By Sue Harrison
Banner Staff
Fiona McFarlane writes with such vivid emotional clarity that her stories stand up and walk off the page in what is more like a 3-D recollection than an imaginary tale. She will read from her recent work at 8 p.m. Saturday at the Fine Arts Work Center, 24 Pearl St., Provincetown, with poet Nancy Pearson (see story this page).
McFarlane, a second-year writing fellow at FAWC, grew up in Sydney, Australia. When asked if her family derives from the legendary shiploads of criminals sent from England to colonize the down under, she says yes.
“We are what’s called a First Fleet Family, though it’s a very different connotation from the Mayflower,” she says. “The male progenitor for my mother’s line was a criminal and one of the only ones on the ship who could read and write.”
That ancestor, she says, stole books from his employer in England and pawned them, which landed him in jail and then on a ship to Australia. Later he was one of the first convicts to be emancipated; he got a land grant for a farm and became a constable. He managed to become a solid citizen before he drowned in a river one Christmas day.
With that kind of real story in her background it’s easy to see how McFarlane became a storyteller. And though she sometimes writes fiction based in current times, she seems to have a penchant for stories set firmly in the middle of the last century.
She is working on a novel now based on a small town in Australia during WW II when American servicemen were arriving to be stationed locally. Some of them were African American and that butted up squarely against the White Australian Policy that prevented anyone other than whites from Britain from moving to Australia.
“It’s a book about how ordinary Australians responded to the black troops, sometimes in a welcoming way in contrast to the Australian treatment of its own aboriginal people,” she says.
It was the time, she says, when Australians were losing their insularity as the world changed around them.
She has a recent short story, also from WW II, that chronicles an Australian town, Merrigool, hosting American paratroopers during their training. As the young girl narrator lives out her small-town life of cooling off in the swimming hole and haircuts on the front porch, Americans float down through the sky in their training, a sight that goes from amazing to merely quizzical.
“We watched the morning jumps from our cloudy kitchen windows until our eyes tired from the light and we dragged through our chores. Our mother was never interested. Men fell in the yard and tangled in our washing. They scared her hens. One skimmed our roof and floated away down the gusty drive, his slim legs dancing,” McFarlane writes. “With the sky full of Americans, I didn’t fear the war. I didn’t fear the Germans or the Japanese. I didn’t fear the return of Jesus, though the Baptists prayed for it, wading in the pond, and I didn’t fear my father’s ghost staggering in the hallways with his missing arm and scratched face.”
But the tenor changes after a training plane crashes nearby. The narrator’s stepfather has the unenviable job of reassembling the bodies and a darker note joins the song of life in Merrigool.
“I’m attracted to historical fiction because I’m fascinated by Australian history,” she says. “It’s not written about that much and there are lots of things Australians don’t know about their own history. There is a lot to be drawn from the past like the White Australian Policy.”
McFarlane will take the summer off and return to Sydney, and this fall she will travel to New Hampshire where she will be the writer-in-residence at Phillips Exeter Academy.
artseditor@provincetownbanner.com
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Apr 17th, 2008