Trevor Shearston's Mountain Home

TREVOR SHEARSTON’s Katoomba home, set on an acre in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, is a haven for his family and his writing. With his new book, BEACH CAVES, released this month, gr visited his hideaway to take a sneak peek into the award-winning author’s world.

MY OFFICE 

Children very often determine how and where a writer works. From 1997, when my son was born, to when he was about 14, I worked - when off parenting duty, then when he was at school - in a brick-walled room under the house which had been roughly carpeted and partially soundproofed by the previous owner as a music room (complete with piano, which took months to be collected). I halved the space with a heavy curtain. The room was cool in summer, and warm enough in winter. Best of all, it was quiet, and further away than it seemed from whatever was happening above in the house.

At 11, my son began playing drums. His kit was on the verandah outside his bedroom. He proved to be a fast learner and a good musician, and - if not happily, at least willingly - my wife and I read and cooked and worked through the beat of the skins until he began needing friends over, with guitars and amps. So my office under the house became a music room again, my wife moved her office into her photography studio, and I took over her office, in the centre of the hou

That arrangement worked until he finished the HSC and chose to do a gap year. The house is too small, and he was too big a presence, for me to go on trying to work a wall away. Nor was it fair to him to insist he accommodate his rhythms to mine. It was time to move out.

We live on an acre, so, being a reasonably handy builder, the best solution was to build an office on our block. The following January, over the space of two weeks, my son and I built the ‘cell’ you see in the photograph. It is between the end wall of my wife’s studio and the chook yard. A friend was unkind enough to call it a writers’ dunny, but that accurately describes its size. Half the materials I had already, and the rest I bought from a small inheritance left me by my godmother (yes, they used to exist). It’s a great place to work, snug, quiet, sealed off - and with not enough room for distractions like a coffee machine or a comfy armchair. 

It will be my last office.  

MY DESK

The top of my desk is a pine packing crate. I ran power from my wife’s studio and can use my laptop as a desktop. I never got the hang of touchpads and stuck to my old mouse. The mousepad was a gift from my son, to his old folkie of a dad, a shark in a suit and sailors’ beanie playing an accordian.

I don’t work at night, so why the lamp? Well, on a midwinter’s day in Katoomba, especially with a heavy mist, it can feel like night at three in the afternoon.

All my note-taking for a book is still done in longhand on used paper. The sheets are collated by character or subject and held separate by a paper clip from the blue dispenser. The notes I need for where I’m up to are the larger sheets on my left, beneath the Blake. I am currently on first draft of a novel with the working title Drummer. The poems are there because one of my characters is a singer-songwriter who reveres Blake’s songs and lyrics and has set some to music. The pad with the pen is for jottings that occur to me as I’m working. The sheets on the right are a running log of questions to myself regarding a fact, or a name, or anything at all I need to come back to and check.

To the left of the laptop is a thumb drive on a cord on which I back up everything daily, and which goes with me everywhere, even for a walk round the block. Fifty years ago, a house burned down leaving me with no possessions but the clothes I was wearing. The memory remains.

At the wall is the now foxed and worn Roget’s Thesaurus I bought new when I started university in 1963. I might open it only once a month, but I like to have it handy.

In the corner is a topographic map of Katoomba and surrounds.

Drummer is set where I live, as was Hare’s Fur, and the map can sometimes tell me what I need to know about a location without my having to leave the desk.

No longer on the desk, but present throughout the writing of The Beach Caves was a small collection of Aboriginal stone tools. Earlier this year, in the short window between the bushfires and coronavirus, I returned the tools to a beach on the South Coast, where they came from. 

 
THE VEGETABLE GARDEN

Without pushing the analogy too far, there’s a similarity between gardening and writing. You see a garden, too, in your head, and then have to create the reality. It never goes to plan, things die, or grow in ways you hadn’t anticipated, the weather, or life, play havoc.

My working day begins in the vegetable garden, and I’m generally there again when I knock off. It’s big, and we eat many of our meals from it, especially in summer. There’s always something that needs a drink, or weeds to be pulled, and if the next sentence won’t come, or a bit of dialogue needs to be worked through, I leave the office and head to the garden. Ten minutes with the hose, or tying up a tomato, is often enough to clear the blockage, or hear what the characters need to be saying to one another. Then it’s a dash back to the chair to get it down.

Splitting firewood is another activity that concentrates the mind, but also allows it to wander over the day’s work, or to where the work needs to go tomorrow. It also keeps us warm. There are a few winters left in the roofed pile at the top of the photograph.

There are no houses behind our block. The bush in the photograph runs to the Upper Mountains catchment area and then into national park. A lot of my thinking also gets done on foot, on daily walks on the tracks and fire trails running up behind the house.

I’m not a social animal, as my wife and son will testify. When finally I decide I’ve written my last novel, I’ll quietly slip the bolt in the office door and head to the garden and stay there all day.

Beach Caves by Trevor Shearston is published by Scribe Publications