Mystery, myth and the 1920s: Camille Booker's latest novel dives into fictional Wollongong

Author Camille Booker’s latest historical novel, The Woman in the Waves, blends 1920s coastal life, an Aboriginal Dreamtime story, and the haunting impact of a mother mysteriously disappearing in a gripping new tale set in a fictionalised Wollongong.

Inspired by Illawarra’s rich history and her own pandemic-era reflections, Camille’s novel follows a lonely 19-year-old fisherman’s daughter whose mother vanished into the sea when she was just a toddler — mirroring elements of an ancient legend of the Five Islands.

Camille, who previously worked as a high school French teacher, said she originally found solace in writing as a creative outlet to escape the pressures of her teaching job, prompting her to pen her debut novel, What If You Fly?

“I came straight out of uni and was offered a really prestigious position at an exclusive boys’ high school in North Sydney,” she said.

“It came with a lot of pressure, and a lot of added time restraints – I had to do the debating team, coach rugby or basketball, and I had no idea how to do any of this.

“I was thrust into this world, and I was like, oh my goodness, I can’t handle this.

“So it was like my creative outlet and I used it as a little escape from all that responsibility and pressure.

“I just had it as my little daydream, fantasy world that I would go into.”

Camille said the idea for her second novel, The Woman in the Waves, came to her during the COVID-19 pandemic, when she spent time with her young son at the Wollongong beaches and lighthouses to keep him entertained.

“With the pressure of being the mum and holding the family together during this time and how central that role is, I had this thought that, imagine if I just walked into the waves and disappeared and didn’t come back,” she said.

“What would that fallout be like for my husband and my son, and what would that impact be on the family?

“How would my son grow up and what would he think of me leaving at such a young age?

“That’s really where the heart of the story came from.”

Camille said the book explored the ripple-effect impacts of those absent women in people’s lives.

She said it also wove in elements of the Aboriginal story surrounding the creation of the Five Islands, and she had consulted an Indigenous cultural sensitivity reader to ensure respectful representation.

“There’s a whole story around how the Five Islands came to be, and it involves Mount Keira and the West Wind blowing his daughters out to sea and becoming mermaids, and then becoming islands,” she said.

“I tried to read as much of that as I could find, and incorporate that into the novel too, because I thought it was so beautiful and it tied in so well to the story that I was trying to tell.

“I’d never worked with a sensitivity reader before, so that was a really new experience but really beneficial because it made the story so much stronger.”

Camille said some elements of Wollongong had to be changed to fit the story, such as Wollongong Head Lighthouse being featured despite not being built until 1936.

“I tried to set it in real Wollongong, but I changed the name to Widows Peak just to fictionalise it,” she said.

“But I think anyone from Wollongong would be able to recognise famous landmarks really easily.”

She said she was drawn to the 1920s era because of the idea of bootlegging and the Prohibition.

“I’ve always loved the 1920s too – The Great Gatsby and all of those beautiful stories,” she said.

“But I really wanted to explore the darker, grittier side of that time period.

“In my research, I came across this fascinating piece of history that Canberra did have a period of Prohibition as well during that time, which I didn’t know about.

“So I wanted to weave that in too, because I just thought it was fascinating.”

Camille, who is enrolled at UOW, where she is doing her PhD and has taught creative writing, said the book had already garnered recognition, winning awards during the unpublished manuscript stage.

She will celebrate the official launch at Harry Hartog Miranda on 26 March, before an author talk at Shellharbour City Libraries in May and an appearance at the South Coast Writers Festival in July.

The Woman in the Waves is available for purchase through Hawkeye Publishing, as well as bookstores.