WordRoom podcast – The Cane – Maryrose Cuskelly – Australian writers on writing
One missing girl. No suspects. A town about to ignite.
The Cane, by Maryrose Cuskelly
Maryrose Cuskelly won the 2016 Thunderbolt award for true crime writing.
Podcast notes
Far North Queensland, 1970: It could be murder. It could even be something supernatural lurking in the smoky wisps of the crop. A girl goes missing and I am dragged into the search along with the whole fictitious cast of The Cane, a novel by Australian author, Maryrose Cuskelly.
The town of Quala might be an invented place, but it is inhabited by real people and gruesome possibilities. Like much of Far North Queensland in the 1970s, Quala is overshadowed by racism, bigotry and slave trading. A burning pyre will soon hide every kind of truth. Real or imagined.
After reading the book I am held by the thought of a bird running the wires in a cage, its defenceless chick lost on the other side. As a multidisciplinary artist, I go into creative mode and respond to The Cane by writing an anthem for a stoic choir of female voices.
Improvised humming holds their grief in a song that has no words. They follow their feet on unfamiliar paths, compelled to join the search for a child who is out there, somewhere. Banding together, the women in the song search for truth in the face of the unknown.
Maryrose Cuskelly is drawn to explore the darker side of rural life, as are other truth-seeking Australian writers such as Helen Garner. When I invite Maryrose to share her creative process she explains how she used real events to inform her story.
The Cane reimagines Mackay, back in 1972. The author makes no attempt to cover up the way Far North Queensland was in that era. She brings real events onto her theatre-stage where her themes of racism, bigotry, and paternalism are acted out.
In Quala, this is not the first time a girl had gone missing without explanation. And this is not the first time Maryrose has laid bare inexplicable loss and crime in rural Australia.
Before writing The Cane, Maryrose unfolded a triple homicide in her nonfiction book Wedderburn. In our podcast conversation, she shares what it is like to write about a community in grief. She explains how she faces the challenge of sensitively moving those stories from real life to the page, either as fiction or creative nonfiction.
When she won the 2016 New England Thunderbolt Prize for nonfiction Crime Writing, judge, Helena Pastor, said, “I particularly enjoyed the passages about the author’s own childhood, and how the disappearance of Marilyn Wallman affected the lives and freedom of children growing up in rural areas.”
The Cane is a fictionalised version of these same events.
Whilst Maryrose grew up in southern Queensland, she felt unsure how her portrayal would be received by locals, despite the depth of her research.
“I didn’t grow up on a cane farm. I had visited North Queensland, I wasn’t from there,” she tells me.
When her research trip was interrupted by the pandemic she had to invent alternative approaches to achieve a gritty realism.
“I had planned to go up to the Burdekin region as part of a research trip, because that’s the only place in Queensland that still burns cane. Of course COVID put an end to that. So I didn’t actually see a cane fire in real life.”
Instead she used archival research from the period, bringing the story to life with details teased out of long conversations with cane growers and friends she met all those years ago at her Queensland boarding school. “They told me how the embers of cane would drift into backyard swimming pools,” she says.
Jump forward to June, 2022, and Cuskelly receives almost a homecoming welcome at the Townsville Festival of Stories. This allays the doubts she has as an ‘outsider’, which she considers herself to be, after growing up in southern Queensland, not all the way up north where the novel is set. The version of events she created in The Cane resonates with the way locals see themselves and their history from that period of time. Yet she still feels vulnerable about her portrayals of Pacific Islanders.
During the 1970s, Pacific Islanders were sent to Australia from Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands and New Caledonia. They were forced into slave labour to harvest the cane, then, under white racist Australia policies, they were forcibly repatriated back to their island homes. Many died in the fields and were buried in unmarked graves. The practice, known as ‘blackbirding’ is now acknowledged for what it truly was: kidnapping.
She wasn’t entirely sure how the novel would be received by South Pacific Islander families in the Far North Queensland community, until one young man came up to say how glad he felt to see the terrible history of cane growing in Australia being discussed on the stage of the festival.
“He thanked me for talking about the way South Sea Islander people were brought to Queensland, to work in the sugar cane against their will,” she says. “I think on a national level, a discussion about that is only just starting to emerge now,” she says.
In a novel that has become the most borrowed book at the Townsville library, Maryrose Cuskelly brings together themes of loss, grief, humidity and heat in a contemporary rural noir. She uses honesty and thorough research to deliver a memorable tale.
Our podcast interview is interwoven with original vocal, piano and forest sounds that invoke my personal sense of the deeply evocative story-world of The Cane.
A word on independent booksellers
Independent booksellers are the lifeblood of the Australian literature. Supporting Maryrose Cuskelly’s work is the Mary Who? Bookshop in Flinders Street, Townsville, where you can order a copy of Wedderburn or The Cane.
Wedderburn
Category: True Crime
Release date: 26 Sep 2018
RRP: $32.99
Paperback ISBN:9781760528072
Imprint: Allen & Unwin
Format: Paperback
Extent: 304pp
Awards:
Longlisted, Best True Crime, Davitt Awards, 2019, AU
Longlisted, Best Debut, Davitt Awards, 2019, AU
The Cane
Category: Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945)
Release Date: 01 Feb 2022
RRP: $32.99
ISBN: 9781760879853
Imprint: Allen & Unwin
Extent: 336pp
