The Story Behind the Story with Author Catherine Meyrick of Australia.

 

Let’s welcome Catherine back to the Scribbler.

She’s a wonderful author with captivating stories waiting for you.

She’s been a guest before and if you missed it, please go HERE.

Read on, my friends

 

 

 

I am an Australian and I write historical fiction with a touch of romance. I live in Melbourne, but grew up in Ballarat, a large city in regional Victoria about 70 miles from Melbourne. History is a everywhere in Ballarat with its Victorian buildings and wide streets. It was one of the first places where gold was discovered in Australia the early 1850s, and was the site of the Eureka Stockade, an armed rebellion by gold miners which was a key event in the development of Australia’s democracy.

I have always been interested in history, both the big events and the quieter stories told by family members. I have a Master of Arts in history and am a retired librarian. Also I am an obsessive genealogist and a neglectful gardener.

I research the times and places where my stories are set as thoroughly as I can and try to ensure that my characters are men and women of their time. I believe that despite their different dress, speech and way of seeing the world, they are still like us. They have the same basic human needs, hopes and dreams as we have—for food and shelter, love and comfort, and hope for survival into a better future. I consider it important that my stories end on a strong note of hope.

 

Title: And the Women Watch and Wait. A Novel of the Great War in Australia

 

Synopsis:

November 1914

Australia has been at war for three months. Kate Burke has come down from the country to Coburg, a semi-rural town on the northern edge of Melbourne, to stay with her aunt whose two sons have already left with the First Australian Imperial Force.

Her sweetheart, Jack Sheehan, is four miles away at the Broadmeadows Camp, one of the many who rushed to enlist, fearful that this great adventure would be over before he could play his part.

By the year’s end, Jack is on a troopship sailing towards Egypt. He has promised Kate that the first thing he will do when he returns is marry her. Like all those who cheered their men on their way, Kate waits in hope and fear, holding Jack’s promise close.

As April 1915 turns to May, Australia’s baptism of blood on the beaches of the Dardanelles is gloried in. But in the months and the years that follow, the cost of war is relentlessly counted, not only on the battlefield but in the streets the men have left behind, and in the hearts of those who watch and wait and pray.

No one will be untouched.

Nothing will remain the same.

A heart-rending story of love, loss and endurance during the Great War in Australia.

 The Story Behind the Story:

And the Women Watch and Wait is the result of the drawing together of a number of my interests over the years. It is an Australian story set where I live, drawing some inspiration from family stories, and is an attempt to write what I actually know.

World War 1 was a background presence for people of my generation. Many of us had grandfathers who had enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force. Both my grandfathers did. Although we never met our father’s parents, we were close to our mother’s, visiting them for idyllic summer holidays most years. Over the fireplace in my grandparents’ sitting room was a photograph of my grandfather, John McGrath, in his Light Horse uniform complete with an emu feather in his slouch hat (he said they told the English girls they were kangaroo feathers) and a bandolier across his chest. He told us children what he kept in each pocket of the bandoleer starting with the lowest pocket which held licorice allsorts, then chocolates, bullseyes, cobbers (small chewy chocolate caramel blocks covered in actual chocolate) and so on. Any stories he told of the war were funny, like the time he was lost in a wine cellar with a couple of mates, emerging three days later as if risen from the dead—or so he said. As an adult I heard other grim stories thirdhand that he had told my father, his son-in-law, who had passed them on to Mum, and she to me. One story that he had willingly told to us all was that on his return in 1919, an old family friend had berated him saying that John’s father would be spinning in his grave to know that one of his sons had gone to fight for the English king. That gave me pause as I hadn’t realised that Irish attitudes to the English had been so strong here in Australia as little as fifty years earlier (this was 1970). I was to discover, later, that John’s father and grandfather were republicans, and John’s grandfather Thomas McGrath, a blacksmith, was possibly involved in making pikes for the Young Irelander uprising in 1848. They emigrated to Australia in 1854 as so many Irish did after the Great Hunger. The comment stayed with me.

At the beginning of the Great War all in Australia seemed united in their support, especially as news of German atrocities in Belgium, of the sinking of the Lusitania and of the first use of mustard gas came through. There was a flood of enlistments, all volunteers. Australia’s army was made entirely of volunteers; they were not conscripted. When enlistments began to fall as the reality of the war hit home, calls for conscription of single men became increasingly strident. Australian legislation only allowed for conscription for home service and as Prime Minister WM Hughes, a strong supporter of conscription, didn’t have the numbers to push the necessary legislation through Parliament, he held a plebiscite in 1916 believing most of the country was behind him. It failed, so a second was held in 1917 which also failed. The campaigns opened up existing divisions in society between rich and poor, Protestants and Catholics, and blame for the failure of the plebiscite, even to this day by some, was placed on Catholics of Irish ancestry. Some considered Catholics to be shirkers and even traitors. Yet Australian-Irish Catholic men continued to enlist, including my grandfathers, though at slightly less than their proportion of the population. Their numbers were not so low that they could truly be considered to be shirking. I wondered how those Catholics at home felt who had husbands, sons, brothers and other family fighting overseas when all this abuse was being thrown around.

While practically every township in Australia had a memorial to the fallen men of both World Wars, for some of us children they were almost unregarded parts of the streetscape. Although a service was held at our local memorial every Anzac Day, I never thought in any depth of what it meant to those left to grieve, or of the nature of the men’s deaths. Perhaps that was a good thing for a child not to be weighed down with. I was in my late forties when I took over my mother’s genealogical research and faced for the first time the weight of grief experienced by those who had lost men during the Great War. Year after year, even into the 1950s, ‘In Memoriam’ Notices were placed in the newspapers. It forced me to imagine what it must have been like to have someone so far from home, in mortal danger, in a time when communication was so slow. To have someone die and not be able to follow the usual rituals that brought a measure of comfort. For them to be buried so far away and not be able to visit their graves. And to bear all this, shadowed by ever-present fear, and put on the brave face that a stoic society demanded.

As I was nearing the end of preparing my last novel, Cold Blows the Wind, these ideas and thoughts started to draw together. I wanted to write about these people, the women especially, and their struggles. I decided my novel would be about the ordinary women from that portion of the Catholic community whose men had enlisted—the women who were left to watch and wait and pray. The characters would be fictional as that would give me the freedom to cover a broader story, but I decided to draw on some of the anecdotes from my mother’s side of the family to add depth to the story. It would set here in Coburg where I have lived for thirty-seven years. I knew the geography, the feel of the seasons, the changing light, the sunrises and sunsets. Some of the buildings from the period remain and I had a basic grasp of the history the place that I knew I would most certainly have to add to. And, as we were just coming out of Melbourne’s extensive lockdowns, with its curfews and limits on how far we could wander from our homes, I needed the story to be set nearby if the worst happened again.

So many stories are, rightly, about the heroism of the soldiers and nurses but And the Women Watch and Wait is a story of the quiet women, their friendships, their support of each other and their men so far away, their stoicism as they carried on. It is about the heroism of daily life, so often unrecognised.

 

Website: Please go HERE.

A question before you go, Catherine.

Scribbler: Who was your favourite author, or story, growing up?

Catherine: There wasn’t a single author whose books I always read. Looking back there are three books that stand out. The first book I remember reading when I was very young was a Little Golden Book version of The Little Red Hen but I suspect rather than reading the book, I was able to recite it as I had forced my parents to read it to me so many times. It’s the story of a hen who goes to her farmyard friends for help in making a loaf of bread from scratch—she begins by planting the wheat seeds. They all refuse so she decides, ‘Very well, I will do it myself’. Of course, finally, once the bread is baked, everyone wants to eat it but the little red hen eats it all herself. Which I thought was absolutely fair. I still do.

The first historical novel that I remember reading was The Flight of the Heron by D.K. Broster. My father gave me a copy for my twelfth birthday. It was a book he had read years before and loved, a story of honour and loyalty set in Scotland during the Jacobite uprising of 1745 and its aftermath. It follows two men on opposing sides of the conflict, Highland Jacobite Ewen Cameron and English officer Keith Windham. It is the story of a friendship that could have been but for time and circumstance.

That same year I read The Sun on the Stubble by Colin Thiele. It is the delightful story of Bruno Gunther, the youngest son of a hardworking German immigrant farming family in South Australia in the 1930s. The story follows Bruno’s adventures in his last year at primary school. This was the first book that I embarrassed myself in public with—I laughed out loud on a packed tram on the way home from school!

These last two books have everything I want from a novel. They transport the reader to another time and place and linger in the mind after the last word is read. And all three contain reflections on the human condition, even The Little Red Hen.

An Excerpt from And the Women Watch and Wait.

This scene takes place on 22 December 1914 when the second contingent of the Australian Imperial Force left Melbourne. Kate Burke has gone with her friend Reenie Casey, and Reenie’s mother, to Railway Pier (now Station Pier) at South Melbourne to wave the troops off.

Outside Flinders Street station Mrs. Casey managed to hail a cab, but it was slow travelling; everyone else on the road seemed to be heading in the same direction. Kate’s heart pounded, fearful the troopships would leave before they got there.

Thousands were standing in the sun outside the gates to the pier which were guarded by police and sentries. The mass of women, mainly, pressed close, waiting as the soldiers slowly filed up the gangways into the towering steamships. Kate stood on tiptoes, near to tears, trying to see over the heads and hats of those in front of her. She needed to see Jack—just a glimpse of him. She told herself that if she saw him, everything would be right, he would come back to her.

Finally, the men were on board and the gates opened. Reenie caught Kate’s hand as the crowd surged forward. She led the way, pushing through the press of people until they were standing alongside the Ulysses.

Slowly, through the afternoon, to the cheering of both those on the pier and the men on the ships, the transports moved one by one toward the heads of the bay until, by three o’clock, only the Ulysses remained. Kate stared up at the men crowding the decks, some sitting precariously on the rails. She had not once caught sight of Jack.

Reenie squealed, jumping and waving to Pat who was leaning over the rail two levels up. Beside her, Mrs Casey stood rigid, her eyes wet, fighting to keep control. She blew Pat a kiss. He clearly saw his mother as he blew one back to her.

The sun beat down from a clear sky. The air was humid. Perspiration trickled from Kate’s damp hatband down her neck. She had the beginning of a headache. She was sick with the waiting, the thought that she would not see him.

Reenie pushed a thermos cup of cold sweet tea into her hands.

The headache faded as she sipped the tea. She continued her search for Jack.

She glimpsed Bert and waved to him but she doubted he saw her.

Those on the pier called to the men on board and they answered back, but in the uproar who could understand what was said or who was saying it?

She heard her name called—Kate, Kate—as clear as if the world was silent.

She looked up.

There he was. She could make out every feature despite the distance, even the beautiful blue of his eyes.

He was smiling at her, waving.

I love you.

She heard his voice as if he were beside her and called the words back.

She had seen him. He would come home to her.

Another soldier moved to the front, blocking Kate’s view. She kept calling Jack’s name and waving furiously even though she had lost sight of him. He might still be able to see her. As long as he could see her, they were together in this place.

Streamers of paper ribbon—mainly red, white and blue—fluttered between the ship and the shore. With the slowly setting sun, a lone voice began to sing Auld Lang Syne. One by one those on the pier and the men on the deck joined in until the whole world was singing its goodbye, its promises never to forget.

In a brief moment of silence, the troopship pulled away from the shore.

Ribbons snapped, a band played, and those watching from the pier sang beneath their tears as they followed the movement of the steamer.

The Last Post sounded.

The HMAT Ulysses sailed off, carrying her men to war.

 Buy the book HERE.

 

I truly enjoyed this story. As I have for all of Catherine’s novels.

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