{"id":169794,"date":"2022-09-28T16:00:32","date_gmt":"2022-09-28T06:00:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/?p=169794"},"modified":"2022-09-28T16:00:33","modified_gmt":"2022-09-28T06:00:33","slug":"fiona-mcintosh-tells-us-why-the-orphans-is-set-in-australia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/2022\/09\/28\/fiona-mcintosh-tells-us-why-the-orphans-is-set-in-australia\/","title":{"rendered":"Fiona McIntosh tells us why ‘The Orphans’ is set in Australia"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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An all-Australian story was something I\u2019d avoided my entire writing career. I\u2019ve felt blessed to become an Australian but for 40 years, I\u2019ve still felt my English roots have never been torn up. I must be the only Aussie who detests the arrival of summer\u2026I am a creature of overcast skies, cold, the colour green and pebble beaches. I lust for English supermarkets and English chocolate. I like the normality of places with names like Boggy Bottom or Tiddlywink. However, when we\u2019re on that aeroplane turned towards Australia, few would be happier than me. I love this country but I have not written about it because I feel that people born here understand sun-scorched earth and long summers so much better than I might.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Suddenly there was Covid and I no longer had a choice. Some said, just make up a story, but that flies in the face of everything I\u2019ve built my career upon, which is researching the worlds of my books, whether it\u2019s a tea garden in Darjeeling, a perfume house in Grasse, a WWI trench in Gallipoli, a famous art gallery in Paris, a cobbled lane in Prague\u2026or a cathedral close in England. I go to lengths to ensure I walk in the footsteps of my characters and I will often visit my locations two or three times to get it right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Corralled, I had to turn and look at my own backyard and having just written The Champagne War<\/a><\/em> in Epernay, I couldn\u2019t even work with the most obvious landscape of vineyards. I had to look further afield and it was deeply troubling as I had no immediate inspiration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fate stepped in twice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Around this time, I was grieving the loss of my dad. He was racing towards ninety-four with a sparkle in his eye and a smile that lit a room so it was a shock for all of us \u2013 especially his only daughter – that he didn\u2019t live forever. It troubled me that I didn\u2019t know what happened in between his passing and that final goodbye. A very kind funeral home offered to let me behind closed doors and given the owner was a fourth-generation undertaker and mortician I couldn\u2019t resist. I began to learn the history of undertaking and when I discovered that women were unwelcome in this enterprise, I decided that I would write about a woman pushing back against society and banging down the doors of an all-male \u2013 almost secret \u2013 industry. And my mentor loved this because his mother had grown up as an undertaker\u2019s daughter and so we loosely (very) based the story around her.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Fate\u2019s second involvement was that around the same time my husband was researching his forbears who came from Scotland on a ship and ended up in the far north of the state. One son was a drover of cattle from Queensland into South Australia and finally he became the supervisor of the livestock on the vast sheep station known as Witchelina in the state\u2019s far, far north beyond the majestic Flinders Ranges. Its closest town is the fabulous outback railway stop known as Farina that became a thriving town and home to colourful characters including the Afghan cameleers who would travel for days in a train of slow-moving creatures to deliver water, amongst other important goods, far and wide.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I learned about Ian\u2019s father who grew up on that isolated sheep station and a character began to build about a wool classer who is forced to leave behind the shearing shed and come into the city.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I just knew if I could bring together my mortician, Fleur, and my wool classer, Tom, that something extraordinary might happen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And so began The Orphans\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Orphans<\/a> by Fiona McIntosh (Penguin Australia) comes out on the 5th of October. Order a signed copy today while stocks last. <\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Australian author Fiona McIntosh tells us about her new novel ‘The Orphans’ and why she decided to set it in Australia. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":169800,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":""},"categories":[6677,73,1],"tags":[1974,2003,15205,15204],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/09\/Booktopia-Social-Posts-41.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169794"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=169794"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169794\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":169802,"href":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169794\/revisions\/169802"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/169800"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=169794"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=169794"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=169794"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}