Paula Xiberras
Di Morrissey hasn’t been to Tasmania for a year or so, she tells me, when we chatted last year, but adds she is a regular visitor with her good friend Robert Dessaix, a Tasmanian resident.
Before I have the chance to ask her Di informs me ‘many others have’ asked her my intended question of will she write a book set in Tasmania? Di and her partner may even bring their motor home ‘lady’ to Tassie for her research.
Di is well known for meticulous research and seamlessly incorporating information and history about Australia in many of her novels, making them educative as well as entertaining.
Even so, Di says although she enjoys incorporating history in her contemporary fiction she does so without being ‘preachy’. Di has the knack of travelling to different places and being able to absorb the essence of the places ‘like blotting paper’ and interpret them in the Morrissey way.
In her new latest novel ‘Rain Music’, Di weaves romantic stories around the major focus of the novel, an exploration of the relationship of siblings. It was a challenge for Di who is an only child but one she achieves. Di tells me many readers have already told her of how well she has constructed the siblings story as they encounter some life changing experiences in their travel, one such experience is to catalogue the letters of early settler, Sister Evangelista, a nun sent from Ireland to teach in the new country. Di had the idea for incorporating this young woman’s story into her book after travelling to James Cook University for her research. Looking out from Sister Evangelista’s former convent room at the university, she imagined the thoughts of the young woman in a new and strange land. Later Di was to discover a coincidental connection with the sister whose full name was Sister Mercy Evangelist Morrisey! Sharing a surname as they do, Di couldn’t resist making her namesake a pivotal character in her novel.
Di who has wanted, or known she would be a writer from age 7, has now written 23 books and is warmed by stories of readers who have inherited their collection of her books from their own mums. This familial connection fits in well with the family theme of ‘Rain Music’.
Rain music is out now published by Pan Macmillan Australia.
