Louis Nowra

Louis Nowra

About Author

Louis Nowra is a critically acclaimed and multi-award-winning writer of plays, film and tv scripts, non-fiction, memoir and fiction. He was born in Melbourne and lives in Sydney with his wife, Mandy Sayer, also a writer, and their Chihuahua, Coco, and Miniature Pinscher, Basil.

Interview

INTO THAT FOREST

PUBLISHED BY EGMONT BOOKS

JANUARY 2013

Award-winning author and playwright Louis Nowra has turned to young adult fiction with this startling and intense story, set in Tasmania, about two young girls who are brought up by a pair of Tasmanian tigers. The story is narrated by 76-year-old Hannah, who was one of the two girls, reminiscing on their life in the wild. While it is categorised as YA (young adult), Into that Forest would be enjoyed by many adults as well.

Louis Nowra says that the original story came about when he was on holiday with the New Zealand film director Vincent Ward, travelling through tropical far north Queensland. He says, "We talked a lot about our mutual interest in 'wild children', as we both liked such films as Truffaut's The Wild Child and stories about children been brought up by wolves, as happened in India in the early 20th century.

"I had always been intrigued by the story of Tarzan and an image painted by the modern Australian painter, Sidney Nolan; Mrs Fraser, which is of a naked woman on all fours in the Queensland jungle. It was based on a woman who had been rescued by Australian Aborigines in the early 18th century. She had lived with them for several years before returning to civilisation.

"My fascination with such themes is obviously related to the fact that I had a severe head accident when I was eleven and had to learn to speak and think properly again. It's a theme I visit in some of my early plays.

"Vincent didn't want to set such a story in the tropics and, as he had never seen Tasmania, which is a different landscape from mainland Australia, I suggested we visit the island. I had set my play The Golden Age in Tasmania. It was based on a group of people discovered in the wilderness who, through interbreeding, has lost the ability to speak proper English and founded their own small, strange society. We drove throughout the whole of the island studying areas where Tasmanian tigers used to roam.

"We eventually concocted a story about two girls brought up in the wilderness by Tasmanian tigers. Somehow two girls seemed more vulnerable than two boys, which is why we centred the story on Hannah and Rebecca. It's natural for me to write about women. I was brought up in a world of women, my play mates on my public housing estate were girls (one of whom, a Tomboy, I based Hannah on) and as for violence and women being a part of it, I didn't have to go far to find such an example my mother shot dead her father.

"The film was never made and for over a decade I thought about writing a novel loosely based on what Vincent and I had come up with. I read many books about Tasmanian tigers that were published during that time. I also kept up my research about Tasmanian flora and fauna and whaling. I wanted to make sure that information was factual so that the story would seem real, and I hope convincing enough that some readers might believe the events actually happened. I used my experience hunting seals with the Eskimos and the taste of seal is pretty much how I describe it there is definite adrenalin hit when you eat the gristle/blubber.

"But I didn't know how to write it until I began to 'hear' Hannah's voice. It wasn't until I did a public reading of an early chapter that I knew I had found her natural voice and that gave me the confidence to complete the novel.

"One of the things that preoccupied me was how to give her a language that was a like pidgin English and yet could be understood. In The Golden Age I had invented a language that was at times incomprehensible - I didn't want to go that far for a novel as it would have tested the reader's patience.

"Into That Forest is different from the story that Vincent and I made up. What happens to the girls, especially Rebecca, is very different, as is Hannah's voice and many incidents.

"One of the reasons why it took me so long to write it was that I struggled to make it work in the third person. It sounded too remote. I realised that if I wrote it in the first person then it would have the quality of someone talking directly to the reader as they would to an interviewer. The aim was to make it was if it were a piece of oral history direct, unadorned and reflective of a speaker with a unstable grasp of English.

"Of course, I had to make the tigers as real as possible and besides research I spent a lot of time studying dog behaviour, as dog's DNA is 99% that of wolf's - I assumed that a tiger's behaviour would be similar to that of a wolf. I didn't want to anthropomorphise the tigers but keep them as animals, rather than humans wearing animal skins. I also tried to avoid sentimentality about animals and nature.

"I was keen to follow the girls' transformation from moral creatures to amoral animals, where survival is paramount to any sense of morality. Life for the girls is reduced to the basic elements and instincts. There were some areas of behaviour (sexual and violent) that I only hinted at because they may have overwhelmed the story.

"One of the elements that became important was how difficult it was for Rebecca to bridge the two worlds. She is caught between the world of tigers and that of her father whom she adores. Hannah, who has lost her family, has no such conflict.

"Strangely I wasn't aware of any environmental message [Tasmanian tigers are now extinct] as I don't think like that. I don't like a writer lecturing me, so I don't want to lecture the reader. I don't like novels with messages. It was vital that the story had no sense of my morality but was seen through Hannah's experience of a world. If readers want to see an environmental theme in the story then that's fine by me. Every reader has a different interpretation of a novel.

"I write plays, novels and screenplays and all three have an impact on each other. Plays are where character determines action, screenplays are the opposite - action determines character - and novels allow you inside the head of characters. One of the crucial influences of plays on my novels is trying to get character right and make sure the dialogue seems real and natural. Too much dialogue in many novels is stiff and unreal.

"Screenplays help my novel writing because of how movies accentuate the narrative so that I try to make sure the novel has a vivid and engrossing story. So in a way, whatever form I'm writing in, helps the others. To give one example; I write radio plays but I try to make them as visual as possible, and write them as if they were screenplays, rather than just plays with words.

"Although there is a sense of loss running through the novel, especially that of the extinction of the Tasmanian tigers, I wanted the reader to see the world through the eyes of two girls who needed the tigers to survive and in so doing discovered a world than other humans would never experience."

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