Surface Tension: Trivia

• The seed for this story was planted a very long time ago. When I was in about Year 8, my class went on a camp to a town called Tallangatta, in north-eastern Victoria. Tallangatta is near Lake Hume and was actually drowned in the 1950s to make way for the expansion of the lake. When we were there, the water was quite low, and you could see some of the remnants of the old town above the surface, including the beginning of a road that led down into it. I remember being taken by the idea of setting off along the road and following it underwater all the way into the town. It doesn't make sense, but because there was a road, it felt possible somehow. That image sat in the back of my mind for years until one day the line The day that I was born, they drowned my town came to me, and the rest of the story slowly built itself around that.

• My father is an amateur potter and has a penchant for making people's heads, some of which may have ended up in our garden. When Walker Books told me they'd like to publish Surface Tension, I thought it would be a good idea to ring him up for a chat, given the way Cassie's potter father is represented in the story. Luckily he understands that, although stories often contain elements drawn from a writer's life, they spin off wildly from there, and are, in fact, fiction.

• My younger brother is a civil engineer who works with dams and irrigation systems and all that sort of thing. This proved very handy when I was trying to finish up the rewrite of the novel and realised that the way I had set the dam/lake up really made no sense and had to be completely overhauled, which of course sent alarming ripples all through the story. He also told me something I hadn't heard of before writing the story, about a case of insurance fraud which came to light when a flooded town was exposed during a period of drought. The idea of a crime being uncovered under those circumstances, as far as I knew, was entirely my own invention - possible, of course, but a work of imagination all the same.

• In keeping with the idea of the past 'surfacing' in interesting ways, I found some echoes in my writing of other work that I had read. I blogged about the Sylvia Plath rhythms in my opening lines here but as I was rereading the story recently, it occurred to me that the phrase "all the way to the good solid ground", which appears on p. 103, is an echo of Jonathon Shipton's picture book What If?, which I've used many times in workshops on creativity and story building. Our work is nothing alike and I didn't consciously set out to use these phrases or rhythms from other writers but they're there all the same. You have to be careful with things like this of course, but to the extent that it happens unconsciously, and on such a small scale, I love this sort of thing - the way certain things remain with us and erupt, unbidden, into our creative lives. It makes me wonder what else might be in the book that I didn't consciously put there...

• Finally, below is an article I clipped from a newspaper way back when I first started thinking about the story. I particularly love the anecdote recounted by a woman named Anne Kennedy about how her father, opposed to the flooding, tried to chase the authorities with a gun. I don't have an incident like that in the book, but did try, via Cassie, to honour that sense of attachment to place, to point to some of the debates that must have raged around these sorts of proposals, and the ways in which official histories can erase or smooth them over.