Jock Serong is a multi-award winning author. His book, Quota, was the winner of the 2015 Ned Kelly Award for Best First Fiction and On the Java Ridge won the Colin Roderick Award. As his new novel Cherrywood hits the bookshelves we caught up with the author to find out what inspired the story and he tells us about his favourite books he has read lately.
What was the name of the street you grew up on?
There were many, many streets – we moved around.
Favourite memories there?
Probably being about six, playing cricket in the backyard in the endless sun on my father’s perfectly-mown lawn and thinking, as you do at that age, that life was summer and it would never change.
Did you visit the library as a child? What memories do you have of that?
School libraries, mostly. Quiet places, strict places which in those days didn’t give a very good account of how much joy there was to be had in books (they’re miles better now). Although I was so hooked that it didn’t matter.
Do you still have any of the books you read as a child?
Almost all of them. My mum hoarded the books from when we were very small, and the rest of them I kept myself. Wherever I’ve moved to, I’ve lugged them around, and although I never seem to open them – most of the books we’ve read to our children have been modern ones – I need to know they’re around, or in some strange way the experience of reading them mightn’t exist anymore.
What was your first job?
There were the paper rounds, Saturday afternoons when people used to burn leaves in the gutters and I spent most of the money on Hubba Bubba. But the first real one was cleaning out a butcher’s shop in Hampton. It was beyond hideous: caustic soda, grease and occasional maggots. I don’t know why I’m not a vegetarian.
When did you first think you would like to be a writer?
Very early on. I bought myself a typewriter at about ten, but all the clackety-bang was for show – I don’t think it turned out anything of value. But as a kid I could never understand why you would take in stories if you didn’t then recycle them somehow as other stories. It seemed a natural exchange.
Can you tell us a bit about your latest book, Cherrywood?
It’s a significant departure from what I’ve written before, and although it’s created using some of the historical thinking that informed the Furneaux trilogy – which has filled the last six or eight years of my life – it’s much less concerned with verity, with truth about the past. I deliberately tried the whole time to let go, to just make it all up and see if the made-up story struck upon anything universal. That turns out to be a strange delight: what if the slightly mad stuff deep inside me resonates with the mad stuff in you?
But I should be more direct, shouldn’t I? Cherrywood is two stories that are wrapped around each other. One is the story of a man named Thomas Wrenfether, who in the early 20th century finds himself caught up in a mad scheme to ship a load of beautiful timber from Scotland to Melbourne, where he will build a glorious paddlesteamer to cruise on Port Phillip Bay. The timber gives him ample warning, but nothing is as it seems, and nothing goes to plan…
The other story is about Martha, a young woman living alone in Melbourne in 1994: ambitious, troubled, lonely and intensely curious about the world around her. One dark winter night she finds herself in a pub in Fitzroy where everything is slightly … askew. There are no customers, no straight lines. But there’s a mad old lady, an intriguing bartender, and everything’s made of old timber. As Martha tries to unravel the mysteries of the hotel, the riddles and contradictions take her back into another time, and completely upend her world.
What was the inspiration behind the story?
Lots of things that I gathered up in a wild rush and then pored over. Some dreams, some memories of working in Fitzroy pubs and in Melbourne law firms. Impressions of the city in winter, the hallucinogenic effects of Italo Calvino, songs that made me happy or melancholy. There’s a biography I like which is entitled Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, and I think there’s a powerful idea in that, about how love and time intersect with each other, how they dance around the inevitability of death.
Has there ever been a character in your books that you can’t seem to let go of, that stays with you more than others?
I got rid of him in the end, but Mr Figge/the surgeon/the Catechist from the Furneaux books was giving me nightmares long before he did the same thing to readers. I had to work him through my system like an illness: he was very persistent.
Best books you’ve read recently?
So many. James Bradley’s Deep Water, Melanie Cheng’s The Burrow and Peter Robb’s M are three that I’ve loved. And I’m currently re-reading Gideon Haigh’s The Brilliant Boy, a perfectly-executed biography of Doc Evatt. Also packed for a holiday tomorrow is Andrew O’Hagan’s Caledonian Road.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jock Serong grew up in the suburbs of Melbourne, and like a poorly-tied dinghy, he’s been drifting away ever since.
As a student and young lawyer he volunteered with the Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service on the Bringing Them Home inquiry, and did a stint in the Western Desert building a native title claim with the Martu people.
He drove a ‘73 HQ panel van around the country, spent some time sorting frozen prawns in Carnarvon and changed lightbulbs in Darwin Casino for seven bucks an hour. He fetched up on Victoria’s west coast in the mid-nineties, then left again and became a criminal barrister. He worked with asylum seekers back when detention centres were onshore.
And he never wrote a word of it.
As Senior Grump in a young family he moved back to the coast, and something about the kelp and the storms and the long nights kicked him into gear: writing for Surfing World and other publications, he began trying to tell stories that weren’t sports-writing so much as people and place-writing. Environments, First Australians, mental health, forgotten histories, the tiny miracles of life on a reef. As surfing itself expanded beyond 20th century stereotypes, Jock’s writing kept pushing into new corners of the experience.
Alongside Mick Sowry and Mark Willett, Jock edited and published Great Ocean Quarterly for two fraught and wonderful years, and has produced five novels: Quota (2014), The Rules of Backyard Cricket (2016), On the Java Ridge (2017) and the Bass Strait historical novels Preservation (2018), The Burning Island (2020), The Settlement (2023), and Cherrywood (2024).
He divides his time between Port Fairy in western Victoria and Flinders Island in Bass Strait’s Furneaux Island group.
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