The Sound

LOOK!!!

Wow, things are moving fast now. That book with my name on it, now titled The Sound, has winged its way across the world to be printed. It no longer belongs to me; it belongs to whoever chooses to pick it up, I guess. A strange feeling, it is ...

So now, my attention turns to making the minor changes to the PhD thesis so it can be passed by the uni next month, and then that's it too. What a trip.

Hey, here is my graduation statement:

Sarah Drummond’s thesis ‘Exiles and Island Wives: history, fiction and the Breaksea Islanders’, explores the lives of a community of sealers who lived on Breaksea Island, King George Sound, in 1826. The thesis uses fiction, and historical biographies and discussions to examine the community’s interior lives and the external conditions that contributed to a series of violent events, just prior to the colonisation of Western Australia.

The novel, published by Fremantle Press in 2016 as The Sound was described by examiners as possessing an “elegant architecture, the harmonious arrangement of fact and fiction,” “epic in scope”, and that the main force of the novel lay with “the clever and forceful way the candidate presents the ever present violence”. The general thesis writing was said “to be of an exceptional quality” and that “fiction and nonfiction are married here with consummate skill and Sarah has created in the end something much bigger than either component could hope to achieve on its own.”