Treading trampolines in Tasmania

Paula Xiberras

I am talking to Frances whiting the author of ‘Walking on Trampolines’ a suitably metaphorical look at the ups and downs of relationships. That even when we walk carefully we can be flung high and bounced low.

Frances, a former journalist has been to Tasmania ‘a couple of years ago’ where she did some interviews in Bicheno. Like many mainland visitors she comments to me on the unbelievably clean air and beautiful natural landscape.

Frances Whiting’s book is as she describes it, a surprising and layered book, and one could add unusual and unpredictable, in it’s depiction of relationships.

This is the story of the strengths of friendships that can survive hurt and a lesson on how to forgive because ‘you would miss more staying angry’.

The novel also shows that there can be platonic friendships between men and women even from a man that is very much a lady’s man, that he can, in a particular instance, learn to love a woman in a pure way. Her characters, the protagonist, Tallulah or Lulu and the platonic male friend Duncan, says Frances, are basically decent people.

The novel also examines the very fragile subject of mental illness but as Frances says it doesn’t look at it in a depressive way and seeks to show that a mental illness need not define the total whole of a person, demonstrating her character has many aspects in her trait of giving her dresses different female names.

The two friends Lulu and Annabelle (her name means favour, grace and loveable…and it seems the latter is correct) game of combing two words and making another original word, reminding us that a friendship is made up of sometimes two very different personalities but when they are true friends they fit together perfectly.

Frances is not averse to having her original and quirky novel turned into a movie(and it may well translate into a Tassie setting!) so lets hope Screen Tasmania might be reading this!

Perhaps the last word on the book is to repeat the phrase mentioned in the novel ‘”a garden in the pocket”, reminding us too, that we can carry beauty and delight wherever we go.

‘Walking on Trampolines’ is out now published by Macmillan Australia.