The fig tree

I made a sling with my hands for my daughter’s small foot, and she pulled herself up into the fig tree, a mighty, decades-old tree with buttress roots bunching up above the ground. For many years, Amelia and I have come to this tree and sat up high in its broad, generous fork – looking out to the green mown lawns of the Mullumbimby Showground, looking over the ring where horses and cattle parade at the Show every year, looking over to the shed where the fancy chickens are shown.

And it’s to this tree that I took myself while writing Big Magic. It’s one of the trees my main characters, Tulsi - and her friend Kit - sit in to watch the world of adults below.  

I should say that the showground in chapter one of Big Magic is not strictly Mullumbimby’s showground. I needed to alter a few things: put a mountain right beside the showground, for instance. So I called the town Millimba. But it’s Mullumbimby in every other way – the bats flapping silently overhead at dusk, the wide main street with palm trees and chattering lorikeets, and the bridge over the glinting river. Every book I’ve written – three for adults and now, Big Magic for readers aged 9 + - features Mullumbimby.

When I moved here from Sydney twenty-odd years ago, I had the feeling that I was coming home.

I can still conjure clear memories from my first January up in the hills outside Mullumbimby. I remember walking down to the waterhole each afternoon, along the winding dirt road, past the hillside of palms, to the boulder-strewn creek. Sweaty and tired after working on the house, we would sink into the cool, earthy-smelling water. The creek rushed over a lip of rock into the pool where I floated, looking up to the trees circling the waterhole, their branches silhouetted against the sky. I felt protected and contained by the trees and the valley walls, and by the quiet. It was unfathomable that my friends and colleagues were – at that very moment - driving through traffic in Sydney, and rushing to story deadlines at the ABC. Up in the hills, I felt outside time. Like I’d entered a magical realm.

When the rains came, we learned to keep working outside even as it bucketed down, we learned to navigate the slippery red mud, and to stock up the pantry in case the creek crossings went under or a tree fell over the road. Neighbours told me stories of having to walk for hours through the bush to reach town for urgently needed medication, and I heard of flying foxes used to cross flooded creeks and cars washed off the causeways. There was something thrilling this heightened awareness of the weather and landscape.

Living around Mullumbimby, I have felt in contact with the weather and landscape in a way that I’d not experienced before. Nature is dramatic and unavoidable up here. Rain pelts down for days on end, pythons sun themselves on the verandah, transparent geckoes dash across ceilings, and all around are leeches and ticks and spiders. Before my eyes I see nature trying to reclaim its land, land that had long ago been cleared by white settlers for logging, then banana plantations, cows and houses.

It’s the most exhilarating landscape I’ve lived in, and I think I continue to write about it because when a landscape exerts a powerful influence on a character (as it does on me), the writer has more scope for drama and tension. And if you read ‘Big Magic’ you will see that nature plays a central role.

I like the idea that readers of ‘Big Magic’ – young and old - might press an ear to a tree trunk, listen for the worms in the soil or climb a tree to watch the world go by.