The Inheritors was published in 1988, when I was in my second year of university. I wrote it in my last two years of high school.
It wasn’t my first book. I’d been writing since age six or seven, after consolidating my literacy by wall-to-wall reading of Enid Blyton novels. My father used to bring me a batch from the Mary Martin bookshop in Sydney every time he came home from sea. We lived inland, in a country town with one small bookshop that I can remember (an Angus & Robertson, or perhaps a Dymocks). There was often a lacuna of several days between Dad signing off and getting home, either calling Mum from the little airport or falling out of a taxi without any prior warning. I was always eager for him to open his big leather suitcase and rummage until he produced the familiar paper bag, and then I’d let him go to sleep.
I was a stereotypically nerdy kid, bookish and socially awkward. (Honestly, how many writers claim to have been extraverts who never picked up a book and felt more comfortable in the Real World?) The genesis for The Inheritors, set in a post-apocalyptic totalitarian society under a huge dome, was a perfectly average teenage party.
I didn’t go to parties very often and invariably felt out of place. In the social hellscape of high school, I was a fringe dweller. When I wasn’t lurking in the library, I bounced between groups without belonging anywhere. I was tolerated by the ‘alternatives’, a group adjacent to but distinct from the popular, sporty kids. The lead ‘alternative’ boy found me entertainingly odd, and I was, occasionally, invited to his parties.
On entering the house, from which the host’s parents were conveniently absent, my first thought, accompanied by clenching inadequacy, was, when did everyone start drinking without me, and why did nobody tell me?
Getting drunk had never appealed to me. I’d had enough experience by proxy, and it wasn’t something I associated with fun. But I felt left out, all the same.
Corey Hart’s ‘Sunglasses At Night’ was playing, along with Duran Duran’s ‘Wild Boys’. Both tracks were on bestselling compilations, CHOOSE 1985 and 1985 COMES ALIVE, which I owned on cassette tape. The dark, minor-chord tone of mid-1980s electropop, enhanced by several Bundy & Cokes and my imagination, transformed an unexceptional scene of teenage drunkenness into something degenerate and sinister. I was that innocent, even without any parentally imposed religion.
(My younger brother was more worldly. In his teenage party years, he used our middle brother’s ID as a matter of course. Our brother, who has an intellectual disability, did not frequent Coles Liquorland.)
I was so socially gormless that I didn’t know you were supposed to bring your own drinks to a party. Anyway, I was underage. How was I even supposed to buy the stuff? All my mother kept in the house was sherry, in a twee wooden barrel on top of the fridge, and a cask of Coolabah Moselle or Riesling in the fridge. My father, a beer and spirits man, didn’t drink wine, although he occasionally drained off the sherry in times of need.
I have no recollection of how soon after that party I began to write The Inheritors. It opens with a party, but instead of a suburban house, the teenagers are in a dingy, utilitarian residential unit. In the aftermath of nuclear Armageddon—because I was writing in the mid-1980s—the survivor community was fragmented and traumatised, and parents were notably absent. Instead, black-suited enforcers dropped by to hand out drugs and make sure everyone was having the right kind of fun. Nobody was playing ‘Sunglasses at Night’ on a cassette deck; in the original version of The Inheritors, there was no music. Instead of Bundy and Coke, the kids drank ‘synthanol’, because everything in their world was ersatz and nasty, a weak imitation of what had been destroyed.
The first draft was by hand, on lined foolscap paper, which I kept in an old school folder. I wrote first thing in the morning, in the evening and on the weekend, around homework and music classes. One party had given me enough to go on, a whole novel. A little experience went a long way in my overpowered, hungry imagination.
During my last two years of school, the stress of exams and the emotional turmoil of home, I inhabited a parallel universe of my own making. Often, it seemed more real.
Creative writing was not part of the English curriculum at this time, and I never announced to any of my English teachers that I wrote.
I typed up the final MS on my manual typewriter—I was very fast with two fingers—and posted it to various publishers. The answer was negative, but they all replied. I still have the sheaf of typewritten and signed letters.
A friend of the family found a small ad in the newsletter of a Victorian writers’ group. The University of Queensland Press had just started up a Young Adult fiction list, the first in Australia, and were looking for authors.
By the time the editor got back to me to express interest, I’d already changed the ending. The new, correct, ending had revealed itself to me out of nowhere, without any head-scratching or brain-wringing. Subconsciously I must’ve known the first ending wasn’t quite right, and this knowledge had worried away at some deeper level until the problem resolved itself. I went from not knowing to knowing in an instant. Such moments of creative magic confirmed that writing was my life’s purpose, quite aside from the issue of being paid.
I can’t remember the original ending, but the new one was dark and ambiguous, taking the novel to a whole deeper level of serious. Even though I was ‘only’ writing YA fiction, I still aspired to be serious.
On a summer visit with my mother and brothers to a great-aunt who lived in the Blue Mountains, we went to see the editor, who had not yet moved up to Brisbane. She was only in her 50s at the time, although she seemed very old to me. She had a waspish, patrician English manner. I was lucky to be chosen: ‘You know, I almost sent it back to you. I’d even put it in the envelope, and then I decided to take another look.’
I don’t know how she expected me to respond to this. I said nothing, which was usually safer.
At university I chose not to study English Lit, because I could read novels in my own time, for pleasure rather than analysis. The 1987 Arts Faculty Handbook had more fascinating possibilities that could be contained in one Arts degree (I ended up with two).
I studied Soviet politics, medieval European history, the Roman empire and the industrial revolution, and got on with writing my second novel. Not surprisingly, it was a piece of social realism about gifted teenagers escaping country town life for the city, where life was obviously so much better, although I was finding it quite tough myself.
I had no expectations of making a living from writing. My advance was tiny, and I don’t remember getting any royalties. There was no negotiation over the (single-book) contract. I was sent the final version of the cover as a courtesy. The protagonist, Claudia, was shown wearing a bizarre hat, but nobody asked my opinion.
Novels, even ‘teenage’ ones, were more widely reviewed back then. I had good reviews, but I didn’t win any awards or become famous. It never occurred to me to apply for a literary grant and set myself up in inner-city Melbourne as a ‘writer’, although rooms in decrepit nineteenth-century worker’s cottages were cheap to rent back then and the dole was much easier to get.
‘Send us the next one when it’s ready,’ said my editor.
And that was it. I was a published writer, but my main concern, as a future Arts graduate, was how I’d ever get a ‘proper’ job and make a living.