HEATHER EWART has worked as a National Affairs Correspondent for 7.30, specialising in coverage of federal issues and a winner of the Golden Quill award in 2007. She’s covered federal politics in a range of roles for ABC TV and Radio over several years, and has also been a foreign correspondent in London, Washington, and Brussels.
Heather also has a passion for the outback of Australia and gets to indulge this as presenter for the ABC TV series, Back Roads. We asked Heather what books she’s reading and who she wants to invite for dinner.
What are you reading now and what made you choose that book?
I’m lapping up Nick Bryant’s very readable and thoroughly insightful book, The Forever War: America’s Unending Conflict with Itself. It’s so timely and delivers spot-on analysis, given the extraordinary state of US politics right now. As a former highly respected BBC foreign correspondent in the US, Nick so succinctly explores the constant tug of war the US finds itself in, dating right back to its very early days, and helps make sense of the mess it’s in today. I was an ABC foreign correspondent in the ’90s – a wonderful period in my career – and I’m always drawn to well-founded theories on what’s gone wrong in the country I once so enjoyed living in and reporting on.
Normally on busy Back Roads film shoots, I lean towards mysteries as a way to wind down. I recently finished Chris Hammer’s latest book The Seven. Chris is an old Canberra press gallery colleague and I’m delighted his books are doing so well. I love the fact they’re always set in regional Australia and that I can have fun identifying the backdrop. For example, I reckon the NSW Riverina town of Leeton was the scene for The Seven – one of my favourite places filmed for a Back Roads episode a few years ago. Go visit some time!
What have been some books that have made you laugh?
Bill Bryson’s travelogues always make me laugh, even on re-reading. His searing and witty observations of the countries he’s travelling in and their cultures and people, cut straight to the chase with such humour and honesty. My favourites are Down Under about his experiences in Australia, The Lost Continent focused on his road trip across the United States and Notes from a Small Island based on the UK.
Clive James’ mocking autobiography Unreliable Memoirs is also one that never fails to bring a smile when I pick it up again.
What were your favourite books as a child?
My lifelong love of reading began on my sixth birthday when my father gave me the book Now We Are Six by A A Milne – a collection of children’s poems and stories. It was a beautiful crimson leather-bound copy with a gold embossed title on the front and had been given to Dad by his mother on his sixth birthday. I, in turn, passed it on to my daughter Caitlin when she turned six. I can easily recite the words of the feature poem to this day: ‘When I was one, I had just begun. When I was two, I was nearly new. When I was three, I was hardly me. When I was four, I was not much more. When I was five, I was just alive. But now I am six, I’m as clever as clever, so I think I’ll be six now for ever and ever.’
After that first gift, all the ‘Winnie the Pooh’ series followed on birthdays and at Christmas. We lived on a sheep and wheat farm in Victoria and there was no library or bookstore close by, so I often relied on the old classics on the shelves at primary school that would also have been there for the generation before me – Enid Blyton’s ‘Famous Five’ series, Ethel Turner’s Seven Little Australians and Mary Grant Bruce’s ‘Billabong’ series. I especially enjoyed Anne of Green Gables by L M Montgomery. When a book mobile bus finally began making regular visits to school, a whole new world opened up, but I still appreciated the classics I’d started with.
What have been some books that have made you cry?
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, set in Nazi Germany in World War II, was a big tear-jerker for me. It carried such powerful, emotive messages and themes of love and hate, the kindness and cruelty of humans, and the importance of books and the written word in the darkest of times.
What books have you loved that you always recommend to friends and family friends?
I always recommend The Eighth Life (for Brilka) by Nino Haratischvili and tell people not to be daunted by its size because it’s a gripping tale and once they start, they won’t be able to put it down. The book is a beautifully written saga based in Georgia (once a part of Russia) and recounts eight exceptional lives from one family, through the generations, starting at the dawn of the 20th century.
I’ve long been fascinated by Russian history since I first studied it at secondary school, so another one I like to recommend is A Gentleman from Moscow by Amor Towles. It’s set in a Moscow hotel in post-revolutionary Russia and the central character, the dignified Count Alexander Rostov, is under house arrest. Though it’s fiction, this book brought history to life in a compelling way for me.
The inspiration for the series?
Back Roads kicked off in late 2015. We’d started filming episodes in country towns around Australia earlier that year when a small team I put together came up with the format. The precursor was a successful three-part documentary I’d done for the ABC on the history of the National Party, which was set in regional communities and proved popular with city viewers. Based on this, the then ABC Managing Director, Mark Scott, asked me to come up with an idea for a show about the country, and Back Roads was it. Our aim was to show that you just never know what you’ll find or who you’ll meet when you take the back roads, and to highlight the seemingly ordinary country people and communities doing some extraordinary things. Having grown up in the bush, I wanted to give country people a voice and to help bridge the gap between the city and regional Australia. I would never have dreamed we’d still be at it 10 years later!
When planning a route to take, what attracts you to travel certain ways?
As a general rule we fly to regional centres around Australia and then we hire four-wheel drives at regional airports. This is especially important for drives like the Oodnadatta and Strzelecki tracks in South Australia. Sometimes I’ll get around with locals on the backs of their motor bikes, in trucks and farm utes or in vintage cars. Once I did a journey through the Pilbara with a road train driver. Another time I travelled with a fruit and vegetable delivery van in outback Queensland. I’ve jumped in with the driver of a hearse in the NSW opal mining town of Lightning Ridge, and a fire truck chief at Pine Creek in the NT. The goal is to give viewers plenty of variety, and some surprises.
What are some of the most memorable experiences or people you’ve met over time?
Right up there would have to be travelling the Savannah way through far North Queensland in 2016 with the entertaining mobile hairdresser Lyn Westbury and her mate Fil. Crossing the Nullarbor with frequent detours off the main road was another highlight, along with buffalo hunting in the Top End, a private boat trip down the perfectly pristine Gordon River in Tasmania, swimming beneath crystal clear waterfalls at Karijini National Park in the Pilbara and climbing on board a prawn trawler heading for Karumba in the Gulf. I won’t forget attempting to ride a penny farthing bike at Evandale near Launceston, jumping off a bridge into the river at Brunswick Heads in NSW, and searching for dinosaur bones near Winton in western Queensland. Nor will I forget the outback characters who are no longer with us – like ‘Tarpot’, a taciturn retired stockman in Windorah and Lester Kane, the dry-witted former publican at the isolated Middleton pub on the road between Winton and Boulia.
I stay in touch with a lot of the characters I’ve met on Back Roads and it’s been a privilege to get to know them over the years.
If you were hosting a dinner party, and could invite six people, that you have met on the road, who would they be and why?
I’m going go for an all-female table. I’m always on the lookout for interesting and inspiring women when I’m filming in the bush because, for a long time, they didn’t get the recognition they deserved – even though they’re often the backbone of their communities. I’d love them all to meet each other, they’d be highly entertaining, and I reckon they’d have a lot in common.
First, the formidable horsewoman and cattle farm owner, Joan Sinclair from the high country near Corryong on the NSW and Victorian border. She’s still riding horses in her 80s, has a sharp wit and is fiercely independent. Same goes for the Tommy Ellis, who lives alone in the tiny town of Hebel in Queensland, is in her mid-90s, doesn’t ride horses but still tears around in her old ute, is a much-loved pillar of her community and doesn’t mince her words about anything. Then there’s the hard-working mobile hairdressing duo Lyn and Fil from Innisfail who can hold their own with tall tales and true, Pinky from Winton who’s also a hairdresser, dyes her hair pink, is in to everything around town and loves a laugh and chin wag. And last but not least, Heather Jones from Karratha in the Pilbara in WA who set up her own road train business some years back, with all female drivers clad in pink uniforms and driving pink vehicles because she was fed up with blokes running the show.
I’m certain we’d all be chewing the fat around the table for hours – and we all enjoy the odd tipple or two. There’d be no rush to leave. •
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