Wanting is inspired by true events in 19th century Tasmania and England-the intersecting lives of polar explorer and Van Diemen’s Land Governor Sir John Franklin, the Aboriginal girl Mathinna and the most famous British writer of the age, Charles Dickens. What first drew you to their stories?

Books begin for me in very simple ways. Sometimes it is just a picture in which I sense is hidden an entire universe of meaning. When I was about 20 I came upon a simple colonial watercolour of a small Aboriginal girl in a beautiful red dress, cut in an elegant Regency style. The picture’s oval frame, when lifted, revealed its particular purpose-it neatly cut off the sight of the girl’s two bare feet. Her name was Mathinna and that image and those hidden feet and what little was known of her story stayed with me, growing over many years into a feeling, an emotion about life that I wanted to tell as a story.

Was there a lot of research involved in the novel?

No. It’s not a history, nor should it be read as one. I was writing a novel, so my obligation wasn’t to historical veracity, but to create a readable and hopefully interesting story. My labours, such as they were, were given over to making things up, to the long, slow crafting of character, voice, and story.

The men in the novel are powerful and wellknown figures, yet deeply unhappy with the direction of their lives. Through their experiences with Mathinna and Ellen Ternan, they change. The implication is that wanting--emotion-defeats reason. I thought that was a really interesting approach to a story set in the middle of the Age of Reason. But there are also some darker possibilities of wanting: cannibalism, rape, brutality. Do you think that reason and wanting are exclusive?

I don’t view the men as you do, but then, as Chekhov wrote, it is not the writer’s job to judge his characters, but simply to report what they do, say and think. Some will think as you do, others will arrive at an entirely contrary understanding. I once overheard a woman in a bar boasting of how she had an affair with the hero of my first novel and what a loathsome man he was. Until that point, I had thought this character a poor invention cobbled together from several obvious tics and an implausible head of hair, but likeable enough. After that day I realised the truth of Chekhov. As for the second part of your question, perhaps life is ever a war waged between bare brown feet and wooden picture frames. That war is ceaseless, it is beyond judgement, and we cannot presume that the victory of either is to be celebrated. Rather, we journey all our lives, bewildered, sometimes ecstatic, often lost, through the rubble of that terrible conflict.

The novel touches on a very contentious subject-the extermination of the Tasmanian Aborigines at the hands of the Van Diemen’s Land colonists. Whether this was a deliberate program of genocide or perhaps ill-intentioned experiment in ‘civilising’ them is still debated. How conscious were you of trying to balance the perspectives of the colonists with contemporary feelings about history?

I was a historian before I was a novelist. No one can read the primary sources of Van Diemonian history without seeing that a war, often pitiless, was waged against Tasmanian Aborigines. Documents of the period are clear about what was happening: at the time it was referred to as a war of ‘extermination’. I wasn’t trying to balance past or contemporary feelings about what happened, because I have no doubt what went on. There will forever be a debate about the particular nature of the evil that befell the Tasmanian Aborigines, its causes, its particular nature, its consequences, and such a discussion, such questioning, is a good thing. But only in the distortions of those pursuing ideological vendettas is it possible to claim it did not happen.

Were you aware of the risk of creating a typical Aboriginal character? In presenting a different view of history, was there a danger of idealising the Aborigines-the Rousseau idea of ‘noble savage’? There are risks in creating any character, as there is in making anything. The only certainty is that to seek to create a ‘typical’ character, be they Aboriginal, European, or book reviewer, is to condemn yourself and your story to failure. There is not one typical person or thing on this earth. If a novel achieves nothing other than to remind us of this truth, it has succeeded. (See review, page 36.)

Tags: richard flanagan