Perth Words… exploring possibilities.

AUSSIE MONTH with Rachael Johns

Describe yourself in one word:
Excitable

Tell us about The Patterson Girls:
The Patterson Girls is a story about four sisters who discover a family curse when packing up their deceased mother’s possessions. This possible curse affects them all in different ways and causes a little mayhem as various sisters try to prove it wrong.

What inspired this novel?
It was actually inspired by a weed – called Paterson’s Curse or Salvation Jane, which I thought was a beautiful purple flower. A farming friend told me otherwise and then said I should write a rural romance called PATERSON’S CURSE because it was a great title; I agreed and off I went. In the end, it became a little bigger than my rural romances and the focus is more on the relationships between sisters than lovers, but I promise you there’s still a LOT of…

Welcome back to ‘The Story Behind The Story’ series. Today’s post is by Rashida Murphy. I love and resonate with Rashida’s writing on so many levels, and thrilled to learn more about the story behind her novel.

I was born in a small town in India and came to Perth, Western Australia as a young woman with an infant daughter and my then husband, about 30 years ago. I started writing stories as a way of ‘sense-making’ in a new country. My novel, ‘The Historian’s Daughter’ was one such story. It started as a fragment many years ago, but I started to write it seriously in 2011 when I was offered a PhD scholarship by my university in Perth. It is a story about fragmented families and fragments of memory and poetry and for a long time I didn’t actually know what the story was about. Like many writers…

‘… This is a song from the 50s .. It’s been recorded by hundreds of people … But not like this!’

(Van Morrison’s introduction to It’s All In The Game before performing it at The Albert Hall in 2014)

Van Morrison is a dweller on the threshold.

An artist who delights in the sensual world of earthly love and light and linear time while understanding in the very core of his being that we are also citizens of co-existing realms beating to the rhythms of a different eternal drum.

In his art he seeks to demonstrate that there are no walls between these realms but rather permeable membranes we can pass through if we would but release the flickering fires of our imaginative and spiritual nature.

So, when Van heard the song, ‘It’s All In The Game’; bizarrely written in posthumous collaboration by a Noble prize winning Vice President of…