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Gail Jones admits that she is bound to the past. Which seems appropriate for a writer who has won this year’s $50,000 ARA Historical Novel Prize for Salonika Burning. In her writing she is “preoccupied with narratives both of one’s individual past, the past of nations – the past of history”.
Amelia Mellor won the prize in the children’s and young-adult category, worth $30,000, for The Bookseller’s Apprentice, a prequel to her multi-award-winning The Grandest Bookshop in the World, which is set around the legendary Cole’s Book Arcade.
Amelia Mellorwho has won the children’s section of the Historical Novel Prize.Credit: Justin McManus
Jones’ novel takes place during the First World War at the time when Salonika (now Thessaloniki) experienced an accidental conflagration that destroyed much of the city. She began it during the pandemic when she was looking after her dying mother in a small town in Western Australia.
“Olive King, one of the historical characters on whom the narrative is based, was a possible relative of ours and my mother was very interested in genealogy. At a certain point, I wondered who witnessed the burning of the city. So this sort of labour of family history in a sense triggered this unusual topic.”
What she discovered was that in addition to King, an adventurer who drove her own ambulance during the war, Australian writer Miles Franklin, British painter Stanley Spencer and British surrealist and surgeon Grace Pailthorpe were all there at the time of the fire.
Jones says she was interested in ideas of witness and trauma prompted the presence of those four, although, as she points out, she doesn’t know if they met. But, of course, as a fiction writer, it’s her prerogative to ensure they do.
Gail Jones was vexed by the responsibilities to the real characters she was writing about.Credit: Dean Sewell
“The historical imaginary is a kind of ethical skill and a necessary task,” she said. “I do think about what obligations we owe to those in the past. Novelists have these kinds of facilities – of projection, identification and transfer – that can be ethically complicated or even compromising. So the obligation to imagine backwards and fulsomely the lives of others seems to me just a fairly urgent historical task.”
Although she points out in her author’s note in Salonika Burning that she is writing fiction, she says she was still vexed by the responsibilities to the real characters she was writing about. Her next novel, One Another, is about the novelist Joseph Conrad, and she says she has tried “perhaps in a more metafictional way, to consider those elements of what it means to invest in a life … There is of course a real man here, and I don’t want him or them to become just tokens.”
Like Jones, Mellor worked on her novel during the pandemic and had to do most of her research online. “It was a bit tricky,” she says, “because it was the height of lockdown. Luckily, I found lots of really useful stuff on Trove from the National Library of Australia.”
The Bookseller’s Apprentice is set in the early 1870s in Melbourne’s Paddy’s Market (also known as the Eastern Market) when E.W. Cole is selling books from a stall – before he had opened his arcade – and 12-year-old Billy Pyke starts working for him. Mellor found the personal diary of the real William Pyke, who worked for Cole for most of his life, in the State Library of Victoria.
She was delighted to win the award, she said, because it granted her “a sort of legitimacy” as a historical fiction author.
“To me this series has always been historical fantasy. So it’s wonderful that it gets counted with historical fiction because I do add many extra bits and bobs to it. But I’ve put in a lot of work to make sure that what I’m capturing is mostly true to the time and the place.”
While she loves writing the history, what she really wants is for her young readers to be interested in it: “The adventure sweetens the deal a little bit. So it’s education by stealth, which is similar to what E.W. Cole used to write in his books. He basically said give kids something that interests them and they’ll love to learn.”
So she includes magic and a sinister magician, the Obscuromsmith, who plays a substantial role in the two books, and will return in the final part of the trilogy, The Book of Obscure Magic, which will be published next October.
But she tries to inject contemporary values into the books.
“I don’t see any reason to perpetuate the racism of the 19th century or anything like that. So my characters do have unusually enlightened views for their world.”
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