Paula Xiberras
Fiona McArthur author of ‘The Homestead Girls’ loves Hobart and remembers visiting here when she was 17 on a ‘young people’ tour. Nowadays. Fiona finds herself in Hobart once a year for camping and catching up with friends. Fiona herself has a background as a midwife for the RFDS and so is well experienced to write about the situations her characters are confronted with in the novel.
I ask Fiona what she suggests are the reasons behind the growing popularity of the rural romance genre particularly that of medical rural romance. Fiona denies it’s to do with the global financial crisis and so a turning away from a life of excess to a more simple life, although that may be part of it but instead Fiona believes the attraction is fuelled by the TV shows that feature ‘gorgeous doctors’ and Fiona lists ‘Offspring’, ‘A Country Practice’ and ‘The Flying Doctors’ and the movie ‘Australia’ that have inspired the interest in rural fiction.
Fiona’s rural romance is unique in that it emphases the strong bond between very different female protagonists as they move in together to a homestead at Mica Ridge in Broken Hill. There is Billie (Green- a surname that is indicative of her ‘tree – change’) a doctor whose dream has always been to work in the outback, Mia her sometimes rebellious teenage daughter, Soretta the young woman that is, with her grandfather, running the farm adjoining the homestead, Daphne the nurse who has romantic feelings for the RFDS pilot she works with and matriarch and former nurse Lorna. We also learn more about the RFDS such as when up in the air the nurse is in control of the set up and controls the situation, even though the doctor supplies the medical direction.
In the course of the novel Fiona showcases some medical emergencies that you might find in any hospital, ie foreign bodies – read jelly beans, stuck in infant noses and ears, snake bites and baby births, all becoming potential medical emergencies with the added dimension of distance and time to gain necessary medical attention.
The novel also includes some bites of medical knowledge such as that it’s important to fly at lower altitudes for head injuries. Fiona says the mother’s like the one in the novel who must deal with the emergency of her daughter’s snake bite do manage to hold themselves together in such emergencies and she has much praise for them.
Fiona calls the people who work for the RFDS ‘great, amazing people’ and her aim is not just to entertain but to inform readers of the tasks the RFDS do every day and never is she happier than when someone comes along to a book event saying they enjoyed her books and that it inspired them to make a donation to the RFDS.
Homestead Girls is out now published by Penguin Books.
