About

Christobel Mattingley

CHRISTOBEL MATTINGLEY WRITES:

I was born on 26 October 1931 at Brighton, a seaside suburb of Adelaide, South Australia and for the first eight years of my life the sand hills and the beach were my playground, where I learned to swim and to love and respect the sea.  When my family moved to Sydney in New South Wales for my father’s work as an engineer, the big garden around our old house and the bush at the end of our road became my special places.

I began to keep a diary, describing the birds and insects and plants I observed, and by the time I was ten my first pieces had been published in the children’s pages of the Sydney Morning Herald and the nature magazine Wild Life.  I also wrote poems on the coloured pages of the album in which my mother collected recipes.  When my poems were rejected by the school magazine, I produced my own magazine on an ancient typewriter a friend had given to my sister and me.  Nest Egg: A Clutch of Poems was published many years later in 2005.

I was 21 when my first feature article was published in the main section of Wild Life magazine.  Since then many of my 50 books have been inspired by my love of nature and have been about animals, birds or plants.  The feelings for Windmill at Magpie Creek (1971) arose when I was seven and was swooped by magpies protecting their nest – a scary experience.  Much later my efforts to save a historic gum tree led to writing The Battle of the Galah Trees  (1974).  Chelonia Green, Champion of Turtles (2008) was written on an island off the Queensland coast where the turtles which have come for centuries to lay their eggs are now seriously threatened by marine pollution.

In Sydney my father was construction engineer building the first road bridge across the great Hawkesbury River, and its bush and golden sandstone cliffs became another special place for me.  There were Aboriginal rock carvings and caves in the sandstone, and I used to sit in one of the caves imagining I was Aboriginal, wondering what life had been like for those Aboriginal people before Europeans came and occupied their country.

I saved my pocket money and bought books about Aboriginal art and language and culture from the Australian Museum, and used to read the lists of beautiful Aboriginal place names which were like music, before I went to sleep.  And so the seeds were sown for the books I was to write much later on behalf of and at the request of  the First Peoples of Australia – Survival in Our Own Land (1988)  and Maralinga the Anangu Story (2009), both recounting history in South Australia since European settlement, and Daniel’s Secret (1997), about rock carvings in Tasmania.  I wrote Tucker’s Mob (1992) after staying in an Aboriginal community in the Northern Territory and it has the rare distinction of being translated into four Aboriginal languages.

When I was 14 our family moved to Tasmania, again because of my father’s work,  Now he was building dams for hydro electricity and I became very aware of human impact on the environment and the need to live in harmony with nature.  So I have been a long-time supporter of many conservation organisations in Australia and beyond.

This second uprooting and my work at the Department of Immigration after graduating from the University of Tasmania with First Class Honours in German, assisting the post-WW2 stream of displaced persons from Europe, developed my empathy with refugees and migrants.

Again, without my then realising, feelings were aroused which led to New Patches for Old (1977), an adolescent novel about an English migrant girl; The Angel with a Mouth Organ (1984), about a Latvian refugee family, and the trilogy about a Bosnian family: No Gun for Asmir (1993), Asmir in Vienna (1995), and Escape from Sarajevo (1996).  All these books were sparked by people whom I came to know.

As a schoolgirl in 1945, seeing the first photos of the mushroom clouds from the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the newspaper proved to be the beginning of two books on the effects of nuclear weapons on innocent people.  When our daughter was a post-graduate student in Japan we visited her in 1981 and went to Nagasaki for Christmas, as it was the place where Christianity was introduced.  After seeing the little museum with its sobering remnants of the devastation, and the trees in the Epicentre Park bright with thousands of strings of paper cranes, I found myself on Christmas night sitting on a bunk in the youth hostel writing The Miracle Tree (1985) in an old exam book my teacher husband David had used to detail our travel arrangements.

When the war in Iraq began, his experiences as a Lancaster pilot in WW2 and our strong feelings about the effects of war on those on active service as well as civilians, led to Battle Order 204 (2007).

In 2001 after attending the Yepperenye Festival in Alice Springs in the centre of Australia where people from all the First Nations came together to celebrate survival, I had the idea of helping the survivors of the ten years of British nuclear testing on their traditional lands to tell their experiences.  Anangu women worked with me sharing their stories and painting pictures of their life and land, and Maralinga the Anangu Story was published in 2009.  It was my 48^th book.

Altogether I have written 50 books, 45 for children and five adult books of biography and history, as well as short stories, poetry, articles and film scripts.  My 51^st book, My Father’s Islands, to be published in 2012 by the National Library of Australia, is about that remarkable Dutch explorer Abel Janszoon Tasman and his amazing voyages of discovery around Australia and the South Pacific, told from his daughter’s point of view.

My husband and I have travelled to many places, camping in many parts of Australia with our daughter and two sons, later visiting them where they lived in Europe, Japan, USA, India, South Africa and New Zealand, and I discovered that I was a writer not just in Australia, but wherever I was.  We have lived in England, where I wrote Rummage (1981), Munich in Germany, where I wrote Lexl and the Lion Party (1982) and The Magic Saddle(1983), and began writing Ghost Sitter(1984) on the back of a chocolate wrapper in a train in the Bavarian mountains.  We were in Vienna in Austria where I found myself unexpectedly having spinal surgery and writing No Gun for Asmir (1993) in hospital.

As a writer I have spent time in every state of Australia visiting schools, going on camps, giving lectures, speaking at conferences, sometimes a writer in residence, and doing research.  I have also done a month-long lecture tour in New Zealand (McGruer and the Goat (1987), travelled in Papua New Guinea, Korea and Bangladesh living with local families, and visited Canada.  I am so fortunate to have countless friends across the world, many I know, many more among people who have read my books, either in my own words or in translations in Danish, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Basque or Catalan.

To be a writer is to be rich, not necessarily in money – few writers are – but to be rich in sharing and reaching out across the world, touching hearts and minds, making friends, knowing that my books are threads in the fabric of other peoples’ lives.

Thank you, dear readers!

And where do I write now? you may be wondering.  I live in the foothills of Adelaide and my study overlooks our garden visited by many birds – flocks of brilliantly plumed parrots and lorikeets feasting on our plums and crab apples and the nectar of our yellow gum blossoms and scarlet bottlebrush, magpies bringing their young to carol on our terrace, kookaburras laughing at dawn and sunset, and sometimes a boobook owl or a pair of mopokes calling in the night.  Often I can see a koala in the gum trees and always on sunny days, as we walk up the garden path to the compost bins, little lizards skitter and dart away at our approach.

If you want to contact me you can do it through my publisher Allen & Unwin, at 406 Albert Street, East Melbourne, Victoria 3002.  They are very good at sending on letters and emails.  Their email address is info@allenandunwin.com.  I do try to answer every letter I receive.  But you may have to wait a while if I am writing another book and it has a publisher’s deadline.  Or maybe I could be travelling again, far from home and certainly not checking my email!

Your friend through writing, books and reading

Christobel Mattingley