Really? The Astonishing Side of Research
Thanks to Skye for another intriguing blog hop challenge! This time, it’s about the research that has been most surprising to us as writers.
I love research and have been doing it since the 1970s.
Over time, I have evolved several methods of finding what I want. The first and
best way is to go to an original source.
When I was researching my Depression era book The
Powerful Pickle Problem back in the 1980s, I found very little helpful
information in books. There was plenty written about experiences in the UK, and
plenty about what the political and economic climates were doing, but almost nothing
about how country kids in Tasmania might have experienced the times.
Luckily, I had original sources. My grandmother and great
aunt (born in 1899 and 1903) and my parents and parents-in-law (born between
1921 and 1933) and their friends were a goldmine of information. They had all
been born and brought up within a 200 km stretch of country Tasmania, so I was able
to build a cohesive picture of how kids lived in that place at that time. The
picture was oh, so different from what I learned from other more
conventional research sources.
Other forms of original sources, used for writing Anna’s
Own and Heather and Heath and Gold’s Bride were equally surprising
and enlightening. Unlike The Powerful Pickle Problem, these were not set
in living memory (and to be fair, neither is The Powerful Pickle Problem set
in living memory now. Only one person is left to tell me about life in the 1930s
from her own experience and you may be sure I mine diligently for information
when I go to visit her. She was born in 1929 and only this week she told me
about the victory parade she witnessed after the war.
For the other books mentioned, which are all set in the
19th Century or early 20th, I found old newspapers, memoirs
and surviving letters. One thing that surprised me was that finding the dates
of inventions or of town settlement is not very helpful. The town of Deloraine
was settled in time for my fictional Anna Kelly and Ness Campbell to have known
it, but it was nothing but a scatter of huts. The city of Launceston was
settled, and it’s not too far from Deloraine, but my assumption of travel time
was horribly wrong. I was basing it on a horse’s walking pace whereas it was
very much slower because of the rough terrain. There was a mine at the Blue
Tier near Weldborough but it opened a few years too late for Jack Kelly to have
worked there. Similarly, the fact that inventions had been made a decade ago didn’t
mean they’d arrived in country Australia. Indeed, Anne and Robert were
surprised enough to stare at a car driving into Copper Creek in The Powerful
Pickle Problem, although cars had been around for quite a while. They just
hadn’t made it to country Tasmania.
Because of this lag between invention and adoption and
settlement and amenities, I invented my own towns and put them in the real
landscape. Could I not have moved the setting a couple of decades later? Not
really, because I needed Transportation and the convict system. I also needed
Ness Campbell’s great-granddaughter to be born in time to be 21 when the first
world war rolled around.
Since the internet came on line, research has become a
lot easier. I find Trove is an excellent site because it reproduces whole
newspapers. It’s so much more interesting to find out what prices really were,
what goods were available, what people really did and what they really wrote
about current events, large and small.
An afternoon spent at Trove gave me all sorts of details
I wouldn’t have found in any published history. Attitudes and opinions and
terms might not be what we would like to think they were, but they are
authentic for the period. I discovered, for example, that one of my dad’s elder
brothers was put in the watchhouse for the night for being drunk in charge of a
bicycle. I learned that my paternal great-grandmother was the recipient of
charity raised by a concert after her husband died, leaving her with a lot of
children and not much else. The money raised was considerable, and it was
agreed that a gentleman of standing would pay her a monthly sum. There are lists
of gifts given to bridal couples, and I found out what my grandmother wore to
my eldest uncle’s wedding in 1903. I discovered that my grandmother, born in
1899, wrote letters and sent comforts to a man in the trenches. She didn’t know
him; it was part of an initiative for the war effort. And yes, it was reported
in the newspaper. Here’s the report from March 1916.
Miss Elsie Bonney of Latrobe, has
received the following from "One of
the boys in Egypt" :— "I received your
“billy can," for which I thank you very
much. I would have had a very rotten Xmas,
I can tell you, if it had not
been for your kindness. There was
many a soldier that blessed the Tasmanian
and Australian women and
girls on Xmas Day.— Yours, etc.,
Trooper G. H. Clark, No. 1276, D.
Squadron, 9th Light Horse, 3rd Brigade, Egypt.”
The billy can mentioned was
a small tin can with a lid, which held knitted goods and non-perishable foods.
Had it not been for Trove, I would never have known this small piece of history.
The most surprising things in my
first-hand research are the very facts that the lives illuminated by the chatty
style of those old newspapers are not the way they would be presented on
film, TV or in most novels. Writers tend to filter their information through modern
sensibilities, either whitewashing or demonising the past to suit dramatic or
aesthetic desires.
I could go on and on, and probably would, but it’s nearly
midnight and I need to get this posted! Please visit my blog-hop friends to
find out what they’ve dug up that surprised them.
Bob Rich https://wp.me/p3Xihq-3Df
Anne Stenhouse http://annestenhousenovelist.wordpress.com (Graham)
Connie Vines http://mizging.blogspot.com/
Diane Bator https://escapewithawriter.wordpress.com/
Helena Fairfax http://www.helenafairfax.com/blog
Victoria Chatham http://www.victoriachatham.com
Sally Odgers Behind Sally's Books Mark 2
Skye Taylor http://www.skye-writer.com/blogging_by_the_sea
Your research into Tasmanian life sounds fascinating to me, Sally, as I write this from a wintery Yorkshire. I so agree that we learn lots more from history by listening to people who actually lived through those times, or by reading their personal records. I only wish I'd talked to people in my own family, before it was too late.
ReplyDeleteI've really enjoyed this month's topic. Thanks for the great post!
I'll have to look into Trove. Sounds like an awesome source. I recall as a kid discovering that old copies of the Sears & Roebuck catalogue in outhouses was a thing - because they were outdated they became toilet paper (how uncomfortable that must have been.) But someone reproduced an old catalogue and my mom bought a copy to put in our camp outhouse for the amusement factor not the original use. And it was interesting to see that a budget friendly suit for a man was only $3.75 and a kitchen sink around $3.00. We loved scouring that reproduction catalogue. I sure wish it had survived to now.
ReplyDeleteLike you, I had live resources to inform me about the depression era. Nothing I read could have been more eye opening than my mother's stories of how her older brother would bring home discarded pallets from behind the grocery store to burn in their furnace to stay warm in winter since they couldn't afford to buy coal.
Old newspapers and magazines are wonderful sources of information, especially the ads that show which products were available and how much they cost. I only recently read LM Montgomery's The Blue Castle and loved it. Valancy was such an honest character.
ReplyDelete