The Mother Fault - author Kate Mildenhall on what inspires her writing

Writing this from the depths of the Melbourne lockdown, I wonder if I am romanticising my connection to landscape and place. Just thinking about standing on sand, feeling the grain of it beneath my feet and taking in big gulps of ocean air is enough, right now, to make me swoon. Imagining an open road ahead, feet up on the dashboard of the old LandCruiser and the extraordinary vistas of this country sweeping by the windows – I think we are, all of us, experiencing a deep longing for place right now.

Regardless of pandemics, though, place has always inspired me. It is place – the sensory splendour of it, the questions it raises, the secrets it hides – that starts me thinking, and then place which I populate with characters. Place has stories of its own, some of which are not mine to know or tell – but it also inspires new stories and possibilities.

My first novel, Skylarking, was inspired by a grave we camped next to in Booderee National Park. In many ways, The Mother Fault, was also inspired by long road trips around this country. I wanted my protagonist to physically traverse the country in her desperate flight. As a geologist her relationship to place is specific, informed by her knowledge of what lies beneath the surface, but as she speeds over it she is asking questions about what makes a place home, how connections are broken, what it means to belong, to be safe.

While I was writing the book, I was lucky to have residencies at both Varuna nestled close to the edge of a fabulous escarpment in the Blue Mountains on Darug and Gundungurra Country, and at Bundanon in a valley on the curve of the Shoalhaven river on the traditional lands of the Wodi Wodi people. I drove the 900 kms from my home to Bundanon, relishing the chance to do what my character does. I paid attention to the way the land rose and fell on either side of the highway, how fatigued I was, how the mind wandered. More recently, as we travelled to WA on a family camping adventure, I witnessed the astonishing sight of enormous wedge tailed eagles on the side of the road, beak-deep in roadkill, soaring up at the last minute as our car sped past, and was compelled to write the image into the book.

How could I not write the incredible sight of a gas rig lit up like a Christmas tree in the middle of the Timor Sea as we sailed past on the midnight shift? Or the sun rising pink over the open ocean as I fought off tiredness and seasickness but was also thrilled, during my sail from Darwin to Ambon as research for the book.

I’m in the intoxicating early stages of my next novel – an entirely different book again – but one that also has its beginnings in place. An urban factory, and the remnants of it that now stand in place to remind us of what was there, the lives and loves and tragedies that played out between its walls.

Place is at the heart of what I write, and it is what I am taking solace from in the books that I read now in lockdown, where waves keep pounding, the wind keeps blowing and the open road beckons.