Monday, February 15, 2016

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.”

16 comments:

  1. YEEEEESSSSSSS. can't wait to read.

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  2. That's fantastic, Sarah. I really hope it comes to Europe - I'm sure it will. X

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  3. Congratulations. Can't wait to get a copy. Crispin

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  4. Awesome Sarah. All that hard work is paying off.

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  5. WOOT! So great to hear! Extract here on TWDS, please, if they let you...

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  6. Wow indeed!! Congratulations and can't wait to read it.

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  7. The cover is gorgeous! Can't wait to read it x

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  8. There is something to be said for talking one's self up. Still, it's a strange process to go through ... and my rather ridiculous internal 'fraud' radar is always firing.
    Thanks for your comments, bloggers. They are heartening.

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  9. wow! looks great! Do you have a Noongar name for Breaksea Island?
    (I was researching Breaksea because there are karda mias (lizard traps there) An Aboriginal man Johnny Cudgel (Johnny Cadgill) escaped from Breaksea Island in 1892 - I followed his adventures from old newspaper stories http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/3038710?searchTerm=breaksea&searchLimits=l-state=Western+Australia|||sortby=dateAsc - He was sent to Breaksea Island on work detail in 1892 for stealing a pair of boots and escaped by taking the lighthouse keeper's boat and reached Nanarup before being recaptured by police.. quite a story - after being imprisoned and escaping more than once, rescuing a white man from drowning on Rottnest Island http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/69943679?searchTerm=white%20rottnest&searchLimits=l-state=Western+Australia|||sortby=dateAsc|||l-title=175, he became an artist painting the ship wreck of the City of York as an eye witness and also entering a competition to draw a cartoon of Kaiser Bill in 1914 http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/57785105?searchTerm=johnny%20cudgen&searchLimits=l-state=Western+Australia|||sortby=dateDesc
    Maybe Johnny built some of the karda mias (lizard traps) on Breaksea...)

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  10. or maybe the Aboriginal women built the karda mias on Breaksea...it doesn't seem like Johnny Cudgel was there long enough

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  11. Hi Sheila, thanks for those great snippets. I didn't know that story, or even that there were lizard traps on Breaksea. How excellent.
    I reckon the women would have built some traps. They did sell a sack of black skinks to the Frenchmen on the Astrolabe. Whether they trapped them on the mainland or Breaksea is uncertain.

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  12. OOh do you have a copy of the translation of Dumont D'urville's Astrolabe voyage ? I bet there's black skinks on Breaksea! I have some of Ellen Hickman's photos of the karda mia (lizard traps) on Breaksea. Ray Garstone also mentions the Johnny Cudgel story in his booklet Noongar wongi ( booklet in Albany library). I was talking to Ray about fishtraps at Wilson inlet the other week, when I was on a festival of birds event. Also, I was out at Broke Inlet the other weekend checking out the fish traps - they seem relatively unchanged since last recorded in 1976. We met Penny Bird at her shop in Walpole - Penny said you were living out at Broke Inlet - is the bar closed at the moment? any fishing? Apart from the 4WDs and the burnt stuff on the opposite shore, the inlet and the surrounding veg looked almost pristine to my undiscriminating eye

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  13. D'Urville's voyage accounts is available at the Albany history collection upstairs at the library, translated by Helen Rosenman.
    Excellent that you were at Broke, you bush magpie you :-)

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    1. Thanks - I'll go look in Albany library for Helen Rosenman's translation!

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  14. Congratulations Sarah. I'll check if Avid Reader have it in stock. Are you doing a tour East to promote it?

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