Lucy: Slipping through time …

Paula Xiberras

I recently talked to Kirsty Murray about her new book ‘The Four Seasons of Lucy McKenzie’ published by Allen & Unwin.

Kirsty is a frequent visitor to Tasmania, in fact last month she was with her adult children for a birthday visit to MONA.

Kirsty often visits Tasmania as a guest of the Tasmanian Association of English Teachers and speaks at libraries and schools throughout the state. Kirsty has toured Hobart, Launceston, Burnie and Penguin and is thrilled that Tasmanian students have a wonderful understanding of landscape, a fact very important in her books that showcase the Australian landscape. Kirsty puts the Tassie student’s savviness down to the children having such a wonderful landscape to grow up in.

In her latest and tenth novel for young people ‘The Four Seasons of Lucy McKenzie’, Kirsty is using the genre of ‘ time slip’ to tell her story. Time slip is different from the time travel tardis of Dr Who, in that time slip protagonists have no control over their travel, it is a classical construct that has its challenges. Examples of the genre are ‘Playing Beattie Bow’ and ‘Tom’s Midnight Garden’. In the novel Lucy McKenzie finds herself slipping through time via the paintings in her aunt’s house. The novel on a more realistic level is about Lucy’s relationship with her aunt Big, a character she takes a while to warm to. In her workshops with children Kirsty discovered the worrying revelation that some children are afraid of older people. Kirsty believes children have an affinity with the elderly and her novel seeks to celebrate the multiple connections over generations through the genre of ‘timeslip’ in the story of Lucy and her aunt Big.

The novel was inspired by experiences from Kirsty’s own childhood, and Kirsty is keen for Australian children to not feel bad about writing books featuring their own landscape of the Australian bush instead of thinking the only stories worth telling are those set in American cities and English castles like Hogwarts. This novel is set in a bush landscape which balances nicely one of Kirsty’s previous novels, ‘Market Blue’, her homage to city life revolving around the Victorian markets.

Kirsty believes in Morris Gleitzman’s ‘magic spaces’ and in the idea that every reader brings their life experience to a book and she generously shares an example with me. When she was in India she met a young man, a student who was doing a Ph.D. on her works. He mentioned to her a revelation that whenever one of her characters had an epiphany they were in water. This continues in ‘The Four Seasons of Lucy McKenzie’.

Although Kristy never consciously aimed to do this she now realises that she is a magpie and collects things from everywhere, maybe subconsciously, and these are let to ‘fly’ in her books. Kirsty also believes that a book belongs to the author only until it is sent out to the public and once this phase of transition takes place the book no longer belongs solely to the author.

Kirsty’s book draws on her own life as background. In this case two houses that were important to her but that she had not the chance to thoroughly explore as much as she wished. With Arthur Boyd as an uncle, art would play an important part in her life and novel, as it did in the two houses that inspire the story.

There was the spooky 19th century house belonging to her great great grandfather and close to demolition, called ‘The Grange. Her father took her to see a painting there. Secondly there was the house that belonged to her great great grandmother at Yarra Glen, there a frieze her grandmother had painted of the four seasons is inspiration for the painting of the same name in ‘The Four Seasons of Lucy McKenzie’.

Kirsty always wanted to return to the house to examine the painting more closely but it was lost in the fires of 2009, even as her cousin Lucy and herself were planning to visit it. Cousin Lucy provides the inspiration for the character’s name in the book as does a god-daughter of the same name. It seems fitting that these houses that weren’t completely explored by Kirsty all those years ago,may in the magic of fiction be rebuilt and celebrated. Kirsty doesn’t think that Lucy will have a sequel as she thinks the book is sufficiently self-contained with a satisfying ending.

Kirsty’s next book is going to be set after the great war and follow the lives of four sisters. It has always been an interest of Kirsty’s to imagine and represent the lives of those women whose fiancées went to war and didn’t return and how these woman forged lives for themselves without their men.

Perhaps one of the enduring images of ‘The Four Seasons of Lucy McKenzie’ is the bluebird brooch that finds its way to Lucy. The bluebird is often a symbol of happiness and it is very gratifying after some unfulfilled wishes, that the story achieves a happy ending.