Bio:
Gay Lynch works as an adjunct academic at Flinders University, Adelaide, publishing essays, hybrid memoir pieces, novels, papers and short stories. Recent works include Unsettled (2019), an Australian frontier novel, and essays and stories in Best Australian Stories, Bluestem Journal, Edições Humus Limitada, Glimmer Press, Island, Meanjin, Meniscus, Griffith Review, Westerly, TEXT and Sleepers Almanac
Why do you tell stories? Stories shape our consciousness and identity. They disturb and console. Writing is a deep kind of thinking that helps me process fear, joy and wonder. I want to create beauty that disempowers cruelty by calling it out. That celebrates justice and poetic thinking. Writing gives voice to the us that feels disparaged or rendered invisible. I’m interested in how ordinary psychology connects us all.
Describe your novel, Unsettled, in one sentence. Longing to escape the Australian frontier, Galway-Irish settlers Rosanna and her brother become caught up in string of events – throwing a horse race, the allure of a visiting actor, vicious assault, violent threats to Boandik neighbours and the wreck of the Admella – that lead to a reckoning with the land and its histories, and to conflict between new and old stories.
Unsettled is set in the country of your childhood—can you tell us about this landscape and what it has meant to you as a writer? I recently followed my mother’s coffin to the family plot in Penola in south-east South Australia. I am named for the lady of nearby Yallum Park, where, not unlike Rosanna, my grandmother rode her horse to work in ‘the big house’ as a parlour maid. The Galway ancestors of my Lynch husband and children also settled in this district. They lived and worked on Mingbool and Mount Schank Stations near Mount Gambier. In writing my novel and since my mother’s death, I have tried to make sense of this beautiful country. Returning to country rather than reclamation, fed my mother’s longing to lie beside her mother in a paddock of towering red gums, shifting skies and ancient swamps. Settlers unknowingly damaged that fragile environment, cleared it for clovenhooved creatures, diverted potable water out to sea and disturbed – edging towards annihilated – traditional custodians and their ways. My mother remembers Boandik people crossing family land as if she were fixed and they were not.
What was the impetus for telling this vivid story of the South Australian frontier? Hearing family stories about Lynch boundary riders steeplechasing with iconic Australian poet Adam Lindsay Gordon, and arriving first on the beach after the 1859 wreck of the Admella, caught my imagination. The Lynch family stories were all about rebellious men. I love history. How could I resist looking for the women? Unsettled speculates upon why an 1859 real-life, Irish-Australian frontier girl, who read and rode horses, and her fragile brother who loved bats and pond creatures, never married or left home and whether they knew Boandik people.
Rosanna, your protagonist, is a plucky, intelligent and singular character—How did she come into being? In real life, there were two Lynch sisters. Their mother made the front page of the Border Watch negotiating with police after her husband and son resisted arrest. The Lynch girls seemed invisible. Apart from their birth and their death in middle age, I found only one reference to them in church, school and newspaper records. One of them came second in a ladies’ race riding her brother’s famous horse Lucifer. As the mother of two Lynch daughters, I wanted to materialise the 1859 girls. Rosanna carries love of narrative, a melancholic disposition, and rapid-fire response to disrespect – not unheard of, over generations of Lynch families. Forbidden to speak her language, preyed on by privileged white men, a slave to their women, Rosanna is subjected to racist attacks while spiritually disconnected from her homeland. Alcohol and stories bring consolation. Moorecke’s fate is not dissimilar. But Boandik people will tell their own stories.
When and where do you write? Writing begins while I’m reading, usually coffee in hand, feet up on a desk, or passive travelling – that is, when not driving. A back door opens in my mind and images enter. The book is abandoned. Words land quickly on sticky notes or my phone, then the computer. Music speeds the process. Pre-composition begins anywhere and is usually stirred by connections between ideas, memory, nature and people. Solutions to problems with papers and stories appear during my dreamy transition between sleep and awakening.
What are three things that sustain you as an author, or while you’re writing? Reading, of course, and art, dance, music. Running to music, food, wine and good talk about books and writing keep me buoyed up. I am a shock-absorber. The peace and happiness of people around me, frees my head space for fruitful work. 8. Name three books that you couldn’t live without. Unless reviewing, I rarely read books twice, but I dip in and out of favourite works. I read a lot of new contemporary fiction. I’m enamoured with French writing and theory, with Rachel Cusk, Helen Garner, Debora Levy, and Virginia Woolf. John Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg (1994) is my go-to book for literary style. When I moved interstate two years ago, my library survived a massive cull. Errors were made. What could I have been thinking?
What are you reading at the moment? Laurent Binet’s The 7th Function of Language (2017), Shirley Hazzard’s Collected Stories (2020), Alice Munroe’s Dear Life (2013), a backlog of literary journals, and beautiful articles shared by friends online. I read several things at once and bully myself into appearing even-handed.
How have the events of this year affected your writing practice? Covid-19 inflected all my writing – essays and papers and stories. Married to a medico in Melbourne – think 780 new infections per day at peak – the virus was on my mind and I wanted to keep it away from my body. Trying to reach my mother’s side when she lay dying interstate – border closures, lockdowns, medihotels – sharpened my tension. Book promotions for Unsettled were cancelled or deferred but I felt grateful that I sneaked in a launch just before disaster struck. 2020 was the sesquicentenary commemoration of Adam Lindsay Gordon’s suicide. I read his chapters from Unsettled at online events. Death stalked me every day and time felt precious. We were luckier than the rest of the world and I worried about overseas family. Work took my mind off Covid.
What book haven’t you read that you wish you had? I have read seven of the eight books in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (1913- 1927). What is the perverse reason I haven’t read the eighth Le Temps Retrouve (‘Time Regained’)? Perhaps the title says it all. List after list, piles of TBR books, surround me. Some of them, books I missed years ago. What next? Perhaps I’ll read more Turkish novels?