I have to apologise for the infrequency of posts in my blog. When I’m actively writing or editing, I just can’t think in that vein. But at the moment I’m waiting for my manuscript to come back, hopefully for the last time, from my editor.

It’s been a great learning curve, and I don’t think I’ve reached the top of the curve yet – hopefully that’s where it flattens out and gets easy, rather than running downhill and undoing itself…   This is my first venture into general fiction – my other books were a memoir and three children’s novels – and it’s been a wonderful kind of release to write with so many less restraints.

Ronan’s Echo will be published in March 2014. It’s a story about the knock on effects of trauma through successive generations of one family, stemming from the battle of Fromelles in France in World War 1. I was inspired by meeting a young woman when we were sailing up the Kumai River in southern Borneo a few years ago. Caroline was a forensic anthropologist who had spent most of her career digging up mass war graves, identifying the dead, and compiling evidence for war crimes tribunals. Her next job was in France, working on the exhumation of a war grave which had been lost for close to a hundred years. I’d never heard of the battle of Fromelles, Australia’s first battle engagement in Europe in WW1. 5,533 Australian soldiers were taken out of the conflict in a matter of hours, either killed, wounded or taken prisoner. It was the first time in battle for many of the troops, first time in the trenches. Some of the soldiers had survived Gallipoli, but thousands were straight out of training in Egypt, after enlisting months before at home. Fromelles is credited with having the fiercest barrage of ordnance of any battle in the war in a single day – and the battle didn’t start till 6pm.

I began thinking about the effect that must have had on the men involved, and not least the effect the war had on our country generally. 417,000 men enlisted, or almost 40% of the male population between 18 and 44. Just think about that statistic. Over 330,000 served overseas. 60,000 were killed. 160,000 were wounded, and over 4000 missing or taken prisoner. Those are huge numbers out of a total population of 4 million. The repercussions to Australia from the loss of the men who never came home, and the ones who returned crippled and damaged in so many ways, must have been profound. Who knows what kind of country we might be today, if we hadn’t lost that generation?