Paula Xiberras
In the palm-er of her hand, is what many fans of Fiona Palmer would say the rural romance writer achieves.
When I talk to Fiona Palmer she recalls to me her experience of touring Tasmania for a week on ‘a Casey Australian tour’ some years ago and that it was ‘gorgeous’ and she ‘loved it’. Particularly, for this country girl, it was the ‘greenness’ of the ‘trees and moss’, the waterfalls, The shot tower and Tassie farms’ that inspired her.
The derivation of the name Fiona is ‘fair’ and ‘Palmer’ means ‘pilgrim’.
It’s fitting then that Fiona’s new book ‘The Sunnyvale Girls’ is a story of three generations of ‘fair’ or ‘beautiful’ women on a pilgrimage. The matriarch Maggie, her daughter the very able Toni and Toni’s daughter Flick are in a sense on an emotional and physical journey or ‘pilgrimage’ to discover the men in their past, present and future.
Fiona has carefully crafted an historical tale in her fiction. Maggie tells us the story of Italian prisoners of war who came to work on the family farm when she was a young girl. The story of their work is historically accurate and detailed, describing their accommodation into the new community, their gruelling work schedule and ‘the rabbit and roo stew’ they sampled. The character of Giulio was in fact based on a real person. Ironically demonstrating just what a small world it is, Fiona had heard that Guilio had worked on a neighbouring farm. In her historical pilgrimage Fiona went to Italy where she met Guilio’s two daughters and while she was in Italy, Fiona with her farmer instinct ever present took back important knowledge of the deeper farming practices of the Italian farmers.’
Just as in her book of third generational family farmers, Fiona herself is a product of a third generational family, following in her father’s footsteps becoming a speedway driver, a practice she took up as a 16 year old but has since given up on having her own children.
Fiona Palmer’s book ‘The Sunnyvale girls’ is out now published by Penguin.
Purchase the book at the following link …
http://www.penguin.com.au/products/9781921901454/sunnyvale-girls
