Catherine McKinnon lives in the Southern Highlands on Gundungurra land with her partner, painter and sculptor, Gary Christian. She teaches creative writing at the University of Wollongong. Her novel Storyland (Fourth Estate, Harper Collins 2017) was shortlisted for five literary awards including, in 2018, the Miles Franklin Literary Award, the Barbara Jefferis Award and the Voss Literary Prize. Merrigong Theatre has commissioned an adaption of the novel, to be co-written by Catherine and Aunty Barb Nicholson. Catherine is one of the authors of 100 Atmospheres: Studies in Scale and Wonder (Open Humanities Press, 2019) and was co-winner of the 2015 competition that selected five novellas for publication in Griffith Review 50: Tall Tales Short—The Novella Project 111. Her first novel, The Nearly Happy Family, was published by Penguin in 2008. Her plays have been produced nationally and her short stories, reviews and essays have appeared in Griffith Review, Text Journal, Meanjin, Narrative, the Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian.
CONVERSATION
Congratulations on your new book. What inspired you to write this book? Where did the idea for To Sing of Warcome from?
It is like chasing gossamer threads, looking for where a story begins. Is it a feeling? A subject? A character? I do know this. The first hints of the novel began with an interest in writing about our planet, and about climate change. My last book Storyland attempted to convey changes to the land across time, as part of its story. After I finished writing Storyland (and before it was published) I looked about for what to work on next. At that time scientists were talking about the Anthropocene, proposing it as a new era of man-made destruction. There was an article by one scientist speculating on the date when the era might have begun. Various dates were proposed: the industrial revolution was one; the first atomic test and the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, another.
I grew up in an era of nuclear fear, so thinking about this, I decided to learn more about the first atomic test, and started reading Richard Rhode’s wonderful (lengthy) book, The Making of the Atomic Bomb. I had in mind to write a long short story. I had always remembered Jim Shepard’s story about Chernoybl, ‘The Zero Meter Diving Team’, in his short story collection, Like You’d Understand, Anyway. (You can find it here in Bomb). Shepard’s narrative had a lasting effect, the story stayed with me. I thought to myself, maybe I could write something like that?
At the same time my father had just come out of the hospital where he’d been in the Intensive Care Unit. (I’ve written this story in The Australian, 23 April, 2024). We were talking on the phone and he kept mentioning the noises he’d been hearing in the pipes at night. The noises brought back to him haunting memories that disturbed his sleep. We began talking about things connected with death. To change the topic, he asked me what I was working on. I told him about what I’d been reading, a little about Oppenheimer and the making of the atomic bomb. That reminded him of a particular time when he was in New Guinea, and he was on a ridge, dug in with his platoon, and there were Japanese on the other side of a ravine, in caves, and no one was shooting, because no one had much ammunition left.
This conversation went on, and led to more conversations, and the long short story I intended to write became the novel To Sing of War.
Is it too cruel …What is your favourite character?
They are all important to the story. Characters grow with you as you write. For some writers, and I am one of them, they are ‘alive in your mind’ all the time, even after the book is finished.
Can you tell us what you wanted to convey?
That is such a hard question. Stories make you feel things, think things. What readers take away is up to them. And stories have so many different themes embedded in them. To Sing of War is a braided narrative, so the themes all plait together. There is something in To Sing of War about connection that is important—the braided structure conveys that; and there is something about wonder, mixed in with the tragedy of that time.
The past is always with us. It tells us where we have been, what shaped us. If we look at it clearly, it can help us think about the future too. I guess on a practical story level, I wanted to take my readers into the last months of the war, when decisions about the atomic bomb were being made, and bring to life what it was like then. To consider what people were doing and speculate about motivations. To remember how young so many of those involved in the war, and in the making of the atomic bomb, were.
The reasons for our actions are always complex, and very often reason is not ‘reason’ but something charged with emotion. This is as true for small personal decisions as it is for big political ones. (Think of Trump talking with Putin, then think of Biden talking with Putin, then think of anyone else talking with Putin. It is not the same story.) Personality and emotion charge things up in particular ways.
I also wanted to put women into the Second World War story in a different way; to place domestic situations of violence alongside violence between nations. To look at how violence exists in the relationships between men and women. The past is always with us. But why is it, that women always get raped in war? Why is it that there is still so much domestic violence in our society? What are the connections that draw together violence between nations and violence between individuals?
I work in story. What I aim to do, always, is to create an interesting yarn that people want to read, but in that yarn, if I do my task well, there are heaps of things for readers to ponder on. There is no set message, but with luck the story gets people talking to each other about a particular thing. Maybe it is a time and place and set of events, or maybe it is a feeling, or maybe it is a speculation of what could be, or maybe it is something that cannot be reached in any other way, than through story.
One thing my father said to me was that he was always amazed, even when he was fighting in a battle, at the beauty of Papua New Guinea. He could never get over the fact that three countries—Australia, America and Japan—had bought war to this place, a place that to him felt like it had been as it was since the beginning of time. Their fight had nothing to do with the people of PNG but they were caught up in it. This land with its abundance of plants and birds and insects. A land that has over 700 languages. A land owned by the people. So I wanted to bring into the story a little of my father’s wonder for Papua New Guinea, and my own wonder for the planet and for life itself.