Gwen Wilson has launched her debut historical novel, Louisa. Photo: Supplied.
When Wollongong writer Gwen Wilson went digging into her family history for her memoir, she uncovered a courageous woman long buried in the shadows of her family tree who defied Victorian expectations to forge a new life in colonial Australia.
That woman, her great grandmother Louisa Whitley, would become the beating heart of Gwen’s debut historical novel, Louisa.
It tells Louisa’s story and others of her era, from a daring departure alone on the emigrant ship Leicester Castle to the harsh realities of a colonial life full of betrayal, heartbreak and societal judgement.
“When I was writing my memoir, I Belong To No One, I discovered this great grandmother that no-one knew about,” Gwen said.
“I discovered that her 1854 birth was the last legitimate birth on my maternal line.”
She said it sent her down a decade-long road of research through archives, court files and microfilm.
“The more I dug into her life, the more it seemed there was an explanation in there about the intergenerational trauma that followed,” she said.
“So that’s what I originally set out to do, to explore the effect of her life on the generations that came after that.”
Gwen admitted even getting basic information like births, deaths and marriages on her great grandmother “was not a straightforward matter”.
“Her death, for example, was registered under a surname that she was never married with,” she said.
“But one of the keys was discovering she’d been divorced in the 1890s.
“On [newspaper archive site] Trove, just randomly looking at people with the surname Staples that she had through marriage, I came up with this newspaper article about divorce.
“In that time, divorce was so rare that it got written up in the newspaper.”
Gwent said she wrote to the Supreme Court in 1992 for the 1892 original papers, only to be told they were restricted to “only the parties to the divorce or their solicitors”, despite the case being a century old.
She said it was many years later that the Supreme Court sent their paperwork to the NSW archives and she was able to gain copies.
“It showed that the divorce was because he found her in bed with a jockey from Randwick,” Gwen said.
“You just can’t walk away from that.
“Quite apart from the intergenerational trauma and the lofty ambition, it’s also a darn good yarn.”
Gwen said when it came to writing she didn’t come through the usual routes of a creative writing background.
“I worked in shipping and logistics. I moved cargo,” she said.
“I’m not trained. I left school at Year 10.”
However, she did have an instinct for story and an ability to flesh out a story from the limited information she had into novel form.
“On the one hand it’s agony, and on the other hand words pour out of me and my problem is to bring them back to a coherent summary. Why use five words if 50 will do,” she said, laughing.
She said she was a “plantser” rather than a planner, despite spending her entire career relying on good planning skills.
“I refuse to plan. I let the story emerge and on account of that, you have to do so many rewrites,” she said.
“It took me 10 years for I Belong to No One.
“I didn’t think Louisa would be quite that long, but it has been. It is split into three books, two of which are unwritten at this moment.”
For Gwen, Louisa goes beyond being a family saga, contributing to a wider push to reclaim women’s stories from Australian history.
“Louisa is part of the canon of untold women’s stories,” she said.
“We’ve all grown up with these heroic male pioneering Australian stories and the anti-hero bushranger stories.
“So Louisa was written as a novel and, even though it includes a lot of things that didn’t happen to the real Louisa Whitley, they happened to other women.
“For example, there was such a thing as the Female Middle Class Emigration Scheme thought to bring some governesses to Australia.”
Many of those women would arrive but be assigned as servants instead.
The Louisa book launch, an In Conversation With-style event with former Wollongong-based award-winning author Suzanne Leal, will be at The Links Seaside by Warrigal in Wollongong on Friday 29 May, from 2 to 4 pm. Or order a copy of Louisa online.
