Join Emily Conolan as she
celebrates a personal writing milestone – 1 year as a published author – and provides
behind the scene insights into research and investigation to underpin her next work
in The Freedom Finders series.
I’m now coming up for my one-year anniversary of being a
published author: my first two books, Break
Your Chains and Touch the Sun,
were published by Allen & Unwin in April 2018. Releasing these two books
simultaneously was a huge milestone for me, personally and professionally. But
now there’s a third book in The FreedomFinders series on the way – due for release in August this year. It’s
called Move the Mountains and, like
the first two, it’s an immigration story with an interactive structure, where
readers can make choices that direct the plot as they go along.
This book opens in the final months of WW2, when our
protagonist – simply known as ‘you’, because the books are written in the
second person – lives in the small Italian town of Lenola. You are only eight
years old, and one night you wake to see a plane shot right above your village.
You glimpse a person parachuting out of the flaming wreck. What you choose to
do next will determine the course of the rest of your life.
Researching this book has been unexpectedly rewarding. World
War Two is, of course, a fascinating and well-documented time in history, but
my new book mostly takes place in the decade that follows it, when Australia
began to accept new migrants en masse from war-ravaged Europe.
I was very fortunate to receive a grant from Snowy Hydro to
travel to Canberra, Cooma, and the Snowy Mountains to interview some of the
first migrant workers to contribute to this extraordinary project. Most of them
were barely out of their teens when they left Europe behind: now they are in
their nineties. They had very little idea of what to expect from their new
lives, yet they met their challenges with an incredible level of tenacity and
enthusiasm. The theme that kept coming back was how happy they were to be able
to bury the hatchet of WW2, and throw themselves into a nation-building project
on which former enemies could work side-by-side. The Snowy Hydro Scheme itself
is an engineering wonder.
I was also able to connect with my extended Italian family
through writing this book. My Auntie Rosella has been a wonderful proof-reader
and cultural consultant, and I’ve gained so much pleasure from getting to know
her better and working with her. She was actually the one who told me of the
plane that was shot down over Lenola, and of my distant relative Dan Quinto,
who saw the parachutist falling and, along with his family, saved three
airmen’s lives by keeping them hidden in the caves nearby until the area was
liberated some months later. In Rosella’s version of the story, the airmen were
Australian and, when the war was over, they wrote to Dan’s family and invited
any fit young men to come and work on their farms.
Once I spoke to Dan’s son, Joe, I found out that the airmen
were American, and after the war they never heard from them again – the offer
to come and work in Australia came from an entirely different quarter. But by
that time, the die was cast, the story was too good to let go, and so it became
the genesis of Move the Mountains.
Immigration stories are all around us – and they are rich and delightful to uncover and share. That’s what I’ve learned from writing The Freedom Finders, and it’s something I hope will be passed onto readers, too.
Emily Conolan
Author
