Poet’s Manor
Paula Xiberras
I am surprised when as we chat, Josephine Pennicott tells me it has been two years since we last spoke in person in Hobart. Josephine gets back to Tasmania at least once a year and is a former Tassie girl (who has also lived in Papua New Guinea) growing up in Oatlands, attending Oatlands Primary and High School and establishing a nursing career in Hobart.
Josephine tells me she loves ‘Beautiful Hobart’,’the landscape’ and ‘the beautiful purity of air that hits you as soon as you arrive’, not forgetting the ‘pink eyed potatoes’, ‘the definition of the seasons’ and of course ‘MONA’.
Josephine always thought she would make her home in the Tassie bush or country but it didn’t work out that way and she has found herself living in Sydney for 20 years!
Her novel’ Poets Cottage’ was an appropriate title as the name Pennicott means’enclosure’ or’cottage’. Set in Stanley, the story is ‘dictated’ and revolves around a Gothic house with its image of girls playing outside the house opening the novel with Josephine’s storytelling talent telling us something is wrong with the picture, with the house’s cellar holding sinister secrets of the fate of the two girls’ mother.
Similarly, an image of a young blonde girl running near a lake informed the opening of Josephine’s new novel ‘Currawong Manor’. The two books were inspired by Josephine’s interest in new age cinema and films such as ‘Don’t look Now’ and’ Picnic at Hanging Rock’.
The recurring image of innocence in the young girls is a juxtaposition for the less than innocent activities going on in the novels.
Josephine’s latest novel ‘Currawong Manor’ has the beautiful Blue Mountains landscape as the background rather than the house dominated story of ‘ Poet’s Cottage’ and is inspired in part by Josephine’s time as an art student in the Blue Mountains. The book details Australian artistic life with models and mystery!
Josephine’s writing influences are Agatha Christie and Daphne Du Maurier for the crime and mystery content and some Enid Blyton for the very English feel to the time periods she visits cleverly interwoven with mysteries unravelled in the present day.
The opening of ‘Currawong Manor’ with its title referencing the sinister birds that inhabit the manor tells us’the bush keeps its secrets’ and for now it’s probably wise to do just that.
Currawong Manor is out now published by Pan Macmillan.