RAPID FIRE QUESTIONS WITH: Elizabeth Hutchins
In our author interview series RAPID FIRE, we’re getting to know our authors a little better by throwing a few quick questions at them. Next up to the plate is Elizabeth Hutchins, author of Troop Train.
Troop Train is a moving and uplifting family saga, inspired by the stories of those who lived through the war in the Adelaide Hills. It is based on Elizabeth's careful research studying newspaper articles, books, memoirs and historical collections – and talking to those who were there.
What are you reading right now?
I’m just finishing local author Lainie Anderson’s fascinating and beautifully written Long Flight Home. I picked it up in the WP bookshop (because I can’t help buying a book when I visit) and have chosen it for my book club. The 1919 England to Australia Air Race is a part of our history about which I had only a hazy knowledge.
What book has had the greatest influence on your work?
I’ve been devouring books for way over 70 years now! It’s impossible to choose among all the pleasure and experience gained from reading. Two special books from my childhood came to mind when I began writing Troop Train: Kate Seredy’s The Singing Tree (in which a Hungarian father goes to war and the mother and children have to run the farm) and the heartbreaking Diary of Anne Frank.
What do you wish you’d known about writing when you first got started?
I wish I’d had a role model as a young adult to tell me it’s okay to make your long-held passion for writing a priority. I was nearly forty before I made space in my life to branch out beyond short articles and a poem or two. Three successful short stories down the track a work colleague said to me, ‘Isn’t it time for your first novel?’ It was.
What do you wish you’d known about being published when you first got started?
How was I to know it’s a topsy-turvy business, with no single recipe for success? I didn’t fit the mould of emerging writer because in my day job I was already doing some editing, proof reading journals and liaising with publishers and printer. I became an obsessive self-editor and am a bit embarrassed to admit that nine of my first ten manuscripts were accepted straight away. The exception was A Matter of Cats – which was to become my best-selling book! Plenty of rejections have come since then of course.
Best piece of advice you’ve ever been given?
After an Anzac Day broadcast I heard a woman ask an old Digger how she should go about starting her autobiography. He replied, ‘First get down the stories that you’re always telling everybody.’ I’ve been doing that ever since.
What book do you wish you had written?
My next one! I’ve been fictionalising some family history forever. My life as a carer doesn’t currently lend itself to intensive writing – but now that I’m experiencing what an American friend calls my re-blossoming, I have to believe I’ll finish it.
Troop Train, Elizabeth's moving coming-of-age saga set against the backdrop of the Second World War is now available. Find out more, or purchase the book here.
It's February 1942 and the Second World War is raging.
Japanese planes are bombing Darwin, Australia fears an invasion, and the train track leads straight through the desert to Adelaide. Fourteen-year-old Rosemary Lister begins a diary to share the upheavals and tensions of her new life in the country, storing memories for her father, missing in Singapore.
Nearly four years later, after war's end, she has learnt of love and grief and her book is full – but one troop train has yet to arrive.