The weather in the Illawarra last Thursday was biblical. It was kind of appropriate, seeing as though the search for a missing woman in Holly Throsby’s latest book, Clarke, is hampered by torrential rain. But that was fiction and this was me, trying to find a park in Wollongong, thankful that I had indeed worn my gumboots as the sky rolled with thunder and the streets around me started to flood.

I was making my way to a literary luncheon hosted by the Friends of Wollongong City Libraries to hear Holly talk about her fabulous new book, a "story about family and violence, of identity and longing, of unlikely connections". And if it meant getting soaked to the bone to do so, well, that was the price I was willing to pay.

Holly had been a mainstay of the Australian indie music scene, with five solo albums and two with her band Seeker Lover Keeper under her belt, prior to turning to fiction writing. 

“After a long time of song-writing, I began to get a little bit frustrated with the form. I felt that there’s only so much you can say within one verse, or one chorus,” Holly told the audience. “And so the idea of a blank page was kind of exciting and the idea of fiction was exciting… I wanted to write in different voices and explore different perspectives so I thought fiction might be a good way to do that.” 

For those of us in the Illawarra and for those from regional Australia, there’s a real familiarity to the landscape in all three of her novels. Clarke, Goodwood and Cedar Valley are all located in the fictional wider Gather Region, an area that draws inspiration from several real-life places, including Lismore, Maitland and the South Coast.

And Holly, who recently moved to the area, has a lot of history with the South Coast and surrounds. She said, “Even though I’m from Sydney… I’d never spent a huge amount of time on the South Coast until as a musician I started recording music. I recorded my first two albums on Saddleback Mountain… and I did another record in a house at Kangaroo Valley and two other records in Wildes Meadow in the Southern Highlands, so I’d spent all of this time recording music in this area and I’d started to conflate my creative experience with this landscape. And so when I started to think about writing fiction, I was already there in my mind.”

As she spoke, about the writing process, about her plans this year to record some new music “for the point of nothing really except for the love of doing it”, and her hopes of beginning work on a new book, the storm continued on its relentless path. Roads were closed due to flash flooding and at home, unbeknownst to me at the time, water was pouring in through my bedroom ceiling. 

Ironically, this is exactly the sort of story that Holly excels in telling; the stories of our small lives, in our small towns dotted with the occasional moment of interest, to keep things exciting. And, really, these are the most important and interesting stories of all. 

Holly Throsby is a writer and musician living on Dharawal Land. 

You can follow her on Facebook and Instagram and visit her website.

The Friends of Wollongong City Libraries hold regular literary lunches