For authors, the Gold Coast is an inspiring place to write and set work. With surf, estuaries and the cityscape in close proximity, this diverse environment reflects their industry, as they write across genres, forms and media in a rapidly evolving field where boundaries constantly shift.
Meet Tony Cavanaugh and delve into the mind of a serial killer. Investigate noir crimes as a femme-fatale investigator, with Sally Breen. Shudder in the grip of an ancient Indigenous monster with Ray Gates. Walk the East Coast to Sydney with Ben Allmon, with only a guitar slung over your shoulder. Explore outer space with Candice Lemon-Scott. Endure the awkward aspects of supernatural adolescence, with Angela Sunde.
Tony Cavanaugh, crime author and film producer, says the Gold Coast is a great working environment.
“You’re close to the water, there’s great weather and it’s hip,” he says.
“I arrived here by accident, by way of marriage collapse and everything else collapse. It took me about 10 months to get into the Gold Coast but now I totally love it. It has got the best vibe in the country.”
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Cavanaugh based his second novel, Dead Girl Sing, on the Coast, set during schoolies. His most recent novel, Kingdom of the Strong, explores a possible murder or suicide in Melbourne.
“I’m drawn to the dark topic of murder because it’s such an extreme behaviour, especially if one is a serial offender,” says Cavanaugh.
“Getting into the mind of a killer can be grim as an author, but it offers up such rich psychology.”
As a contrast, he’s currently working in film and television on a Chinese romantic comedy and an off-the-map Myanmar musical about biker gangs. This versatility of style extends to his method.
“I can write anywhere and often do,” Cavanaugh says. “I really like writing in restaurants around Southport. Over dinner, vino, my head down and scribbling like a nutter. All the restaurateurs know me and are used to it.”
Cavanaugh’s work often engages with serious topics, yet he cautions that doing so is an art.
“If you’ve got something to say – and you must, as a writer, or else the work will be dead and dead boring – it needs to be said in a way that doesn’t beat the reader or viewer over the head. Message with elegance, maybe a bit of wit and some sophistication.”
Books by Tony Cavanaugh
A writer acquainted with the Coast’s sophisticated side is Sally Breen. When she’s not lecturing at Griffith University or running Small Room Collective, she’s writing on her laptop in bed, or at a desk overlooking the ocean. Her favourite coffee haunts are Paradox Café, Bar Italia and Black Coffee Lyrics.
“I like visiting and spending time in big cities and different kinds of environments, but I need to spend the majority of my days in a place where the elements are a big part of my life – the sea, big sky, warm weather,” says Breen. “I can’t stay long in places which are cold, overcast, too dirty or big-city urban. I can afford to live like this on the Gold Coast – it’s a city that offers an elemental lifestyle more democratically than other Australian cities.”
Breen’s novel The Casuals – a memoir that unpacks the ’90s grunge era – won the Harper Collins Varuna Manuscript Award.
“I wanted to align the big-ticket moments of that time with a more personal story; my relationship with my father and his diagnosis with cancer. The Casuals is a coming of age book that smashes a rock and roll lifestyle up against a profound and debilitating sense of grief.”
Another of Breen’s novels, Atomic City, was nominated for the Queensland Literary Awards People’s Choice Book of the Year.
“I originally wrote it as part of my PHD – a retake on classic noir set on the Gold Coast where the city is a character and the femme-fatale is the main agent and not the victim. I wanted to subvert the macho tendencies of noir and contribute to the evolution of the genre.”
Angela Sunde
Sally Breen
Her new book, The Sea Inside You, has strong ties to the sea.
“I like to keep things interesting rather than write in the same vein. The Sea Inside You – working title – is a literary novel about Sarah, a successful advertising executive who leaves everything in her life in a single day – her company, her partner, the country and the baby inside her. The opening chapter was published as “Sound the Alarm,” in the Women in Power edition of the Griffith Review.”
“The book unfolds over three continents and has a very strong connection to the ocean as a leitmotif. Sarah suffers from Thalassophobia – an intense or persistent fear of the open sea. We follow her from Paris to Vietnam to Indonesia, finding out why. There are undercurrents of domestic violence here and ruminations on excess and globalisation.
“It’s a fierce, dark book about what it means to be a woman in the 21st century.”
Breen says she encourages students to be true to their own voice.
“Don’t feel pressure to conform,” she says. “Challenge your naivety and revel in the fearlessness and energy that comes with your age.”
Regarding industry trends she says genre boundaries have collapsed, both in the migration of some genres into the mainstream, and the hybridisation of others.
“The massive swing towards speculative fiction across all platforms is interesting,” she says. “Its uptake by literary writers has reinvigorated that space. This is also happening in movies and television as writers push the boundaries of genre expectation and try to capture a new slice. I think too, there’s more awareness and more room for writing from a diverse set of cultures.”
Raymond Gates is one author bringing diverse cultural heritage, the Indigenous Dreamtime, to his horror writing. His work has been published in Contemporary By Proxy, Little Town of Deathlehem and the award winning Dead Red Heart, in which his story “Little Red Man,” tells an eerie tale based on an Indigenous forest creature.
“Indigenous cultures are rich, mostly untapped grounds for story-telling,” Gates says.
“Take Aboriginal cultures as an example – you’ve got a wealth of mythology and legends; stories that have been handed down over thousands of years. Then there’s the history of Aboriginal Australia – in many ways a horror story in itself.”
Raymond Gates
Gates says Indigenous peoples are story-tellers by nature.
“It’s in our blood, it’s part of who we are,” he says.
“Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures – in fact, Indigenous cultures in general – are under-represented in speculative fiction. I don’t just mean stories with Indigenous cultures as their basis, but even mainstream stories with Indigenous characters who are not there for colour or to portray a stereotypical image.
“My hope is to be able to use at least some of my writing to educate people on Aboriginal cultures, peoples and histories. I believe good fiction not only tells a story, it also educates – sometimes directly, sometimes on a more subliminal level. A great recent example is Ryan Griffen’s Cleverman. The first season touched on pretty much every issue faced by Aboriginal peoples since colonisation.”
Gates is currently based in the United States but looks forward to returning to the Gold Coast in the future – especially the ocean.
“My favourite thing was to walk along the beach and stare out across the ocean,” he says. “It was peaceful, calming, and always helped me clear my mind. I found a lot of answers to life’s questions on the strip of sand between Kurrawa and Surfer’s Paradise.”
Ben Allmon is an author who almost got to know the ocean too well, climbing cliffs on his way to Sydney by foot, during the journey that became his memoir, Footnotes.
“I was promoting my debut album in the tradition of troubadours and wandering minstrels,” Allmon says.
He suffered storms and starvation, but was saved by, “the incredible kindness of strangers, some of them decidedly strange themselves”.
“Then there was the temptation of a woman who may or may not have been a witch. And of course the lessons life on the road teaches you, like, don’t try to scale snake-infested cliffs with a guitar in one hand. There was the gig for septuagenarian nudists during a bushfire. Different breeds of terror, really.”
Ben Allmon
Allmon writes for Virgin Voyeur, Journeys Magazine, Outback, Jetstar, The Spectator, Tincture Journal and the award-winning Stories of Music Vol One. His fiction has appeared in Aurealis and The Waterhouse Review.
“I write about stuff that interests me and is positive.” he says. “I have a little radar in my brain, always on alert for a good story. I was kayaking on Currumbin Creek when a plane passed overhead and I thought, I wonder if the people up there know how different the five rivers of the Coast are? “Rivers of Gold,” was the result.
“As a freelancer there’s no shortage of interesting people, locations and histories to fire the imagination. For the songwriter, poet or author in me, the Coast is even more inspiring…lookouts, the beach and parks like Cascade Gardens.
“I’ve done some of my best writing on lunch breaks in the concrete and glass arroyos of Surfers and Southport. I used to work in an underground plant room in the small hours of the morning, surrounded by the roar of enormous machinery, and write until the sun came up and the other staff arrived. With such a diverse, ten-cities-in-one nature, the Coast coaxes many different writers out of me.”
Allmon recently settled at Tamborine Mountain to raise his young family.
“It’s a great community in which to raise our four year old son,” says Allmon. “He’s revelling in kindy life, and the schools up here are fantastic. He runs amok over our two acres, with beautiful rainforests, waterfalls and bushwalks nearby. It’s a mellow, friendly and private place to spend our days. We’re still close enough to the beach and all the major infrastructure of the Coast.
“I like the idea that he’ll grow up with a balance of urban, suburban and wilderness. When he’s older he can accompany me on my rambles into the untamed lower half of our property, become this little forest creature who can still work a smartphone. There’s very few places where all that is possible.”
Allmon’s next book, Mr Ordinary Dons a Disguise, is due out in November 2017.
When it comes to books for younger readers, Candice Lemon-Scott and Angela Sunde are snaring different sections of the market.
Lemon-Scott’s Jake in Space books are a science fiction action-adventure series for kids.
“Most of my books can be found on the Premier’s Reading Challenge lists,” Lemon-Scott says. “My novel for adults, Unloched, received a commendation in the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards.”
As owner of the Big-B-Bookstore in Burleigh, Lemon-Scott knows what’s popular in an age dominated by digital media.
“Books need to be fast paced and engage readers,” she says. “My own children like books with illustration or that have a comic book style, because they’re used to the visual medium of the digital world. With my Little Rockets titles Hubert and the Magic Glasses and Silver the Silly Sorcerer, colour illustrations complement the text. This is a first for beginning independent readers – which I think demonstrates that visuals are important in engaging new readers.
“Fantasy and science fiction genres are strong and appealing at the moment too. Horror for middle grade readers is having a resurgence. Also, more realistic and thematically-based contemporary fiction for the older, tween readers.”
Candice Lemon-Scott
Author and illustrator, Angela Sunde, explores that space with her light-hearted fantasy novels, Snap Magic and Pond Magic. Her picture-books and short stories include the award winning Coral Sea Monster and A Summer to Die For.
“My two books, Pond Magic and Snap Magic, are both comedies,” Sunde says. “The fantasy element lends itself to hilarious situations. In Snap Magic black hairs keep growing out of Lily’s chin just like the ones on her old neighbour, Mrs Swan, a witch.”
Sunde is inspired by people, especially local creatives. She’s looking forward to the Arts Centre’s 2017 Playwright season and the library’s Writers Block sessions.
“Besides a number of literary festivals within our city like Somerset Celebration of Literature, there are others within a two hour drive, from the Byron Bay Writers Festival to the StoryArts Festival in Ipswich and Voices on the Coast on the Sunshine Coast,” says Sunde.
“These events are valuable for networking with other writers, connecting with my readers and keeping abreast of publishing developments.”
Highlights of Sunde’s career include working with the senior editor from Penguin Australia on both of her books.
“She really knew how to lift my writing to the next level,” she says. Sunde was awarded a May Gibbs Children’s Literature Trust Fellowship in 2013, and an Illustrator Residency at Pinerolo Children’s Book Cottage in 2014.
Sunde says that being a professional author is about more than just writing, but market awareness and flexibility are key.
“The Nielsen Book Data Summit revealed the children’s share of print markets is almost 50 per cent in Australia,” says Sunde. “Dymocks reports a 30 per cent growth in sales of children’s books since 2010. To fulfill this need, new start-up small-press publishers of children’s and young adult books, especially picture books, are popping up.
“Meanwhile, indie publishing is holding its own against trade; the ability to publish shorter stories – novellas and anthologies – in e-book form has seen some trade-published authors turn indie for particular projects. I call them hybrid authors – I’m one of them. Also, the technology to tell stories through digital narratives (eg. Story City App and Like a Photon Creative) has opened up new opportunities for writers to be read beyond the paper page. Today’s young readers can access story through e-books, audio books, online magazines or choose-your-own-adventure apps. The choice is theirs.”
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