Reviews of Swallow emphasise the first-person voice and a ‘salty’ sailor’s slang. What did you decide the narrator could not say, even in first person, and how did you show those absences on the page? Did you build a ‘voice bible’ or style guide before drafting?

The idea of a 'voice bible’ is really interesting. I came close to that; during my research, I created a document of common phrases, lingo and language of the time, that I could refer back to as a tonal touchstone. This came about from speaking to sailors, curators, and reading books from that time, and books set in that time (Don’t we all love the Master and Commander series). William Swallow, as a character, was the one who needed to be a maritime authority among a cast of characters who weren’t—the opposite of a ‘fish out of water’ story. He’s the expert training men who have never sailed before. I quickly realised that if William, as the ‘point-of-view’ narrator, was to sound like an expert, then I would need to know what I was saying! So creating this ‘library’ of phrases was very important to do.

The earlier drafts of the novel were much wordier than the final version—much closer to how people actually spoke at the time. The verbiage was far more verbose. But to a modern readership, readers of fiction especially, our modern taste does not align with that. It creates the sense that the pace of the novel is grinding to a halt. With my background in screenwriting, I put quite a large priority on pacing. It’s important to me that the story is a page-turner. The ‘language’ of the final novel is this nebulous, ‘in-between’ compromise. It’s not how we speak now, it’s not how they spoke then. It’s a fictitious tone that invokes how they spoke at the time, that uses accurate phrases, without punishing the pacing for modern readers. I would say all historical fiction does this innately, to a degree; all fiction written about the past is ultimately an interpretation. It’s each author's choice to find the right balance between accuracy, comprehension, and entertainment. Our works mustn’t alienate our readers, they must be an invitation to the past.

As for what William couldn’t say—he is a character of many secrets. Which is problematic when writing in first-person. I wanted to keep some things hidden, to reveal later in the plot. The answer came about by exploring William's trauma—William as a character, he doesn’t want to think about certain things because they are too painful for him to re-tread. This ‘blockage’ is what drew me to explore male characters, especially male characters of this time period. The ‘I don’t need to think about that’ or the ‘I won't think about that’. These men are having to deal with their dire problems in the moment, and that doesn’t leave them a lot of space to reckon with the problems of their past, how they got here, and how they are being steered by their past actions by refusing to process their trauma. Now it’s all set to explode once they are trapped on a ship together. Without even needing to spell it out, I think readers will get a sense of how ‘bottling things up’ doesn’t serve these characters well. Makes great fodder for drama, though.

In terms of ‘salty’ slang, I had a great deal of fun researching the swearing of the time period. A lot of documents we have access to—the court transcripts, and the fiction of the time—don’t provide us with a lot to work with. Everyone was on their best behaviour at court, so there is no swearing. And all the fiction is very proper. Swearing is a wonderful oral tradition that is potentially lost through time because of cussing censorship. Where I ended up finding the best examples was in constable reports. It was their duty to write a report of an incident, and a constable was more than happy to say that, ‘they called me “X”, and insulted my “Y” as they placed them under arrest. The most authentic cussing I’ve found of the era, was in constables' reports. 

The book is repeatedly framed as both high seas adventure and a love story that pushes against the moral policing of its era. How did you calibrate tone so that humour and romance do not dilute brutality, and brutality does not flatten tenderness?

When talking writing craft, to write those highs and lows of, say, the starkest brutality or the most tender of love, we achieve this through contrast. If I want a tenderness at one point in the novel to feel like the height of passion itself, I’d surround that moment with the absence of tenderness. Then, by the time a reader reaches that moment, after experiencing a desert of brutality, that one moment of tenderness will be all the more savourful, wonderful, all-encompassing. A moment of brutality can feel all the more shocking when a writer is careful with where they pull and land their punches. A small black dot on a white sheet of paper will look darker than if it were painted on a black page. I don’t believe they dilute—one enhances the other through contrast. They are the opposite sides of the same coin, and through them both, we can explore the full breadth of human experience.

As for the humour—I looked to history for the answer. I can’t speak for everyone, but some of the funniest people I know have been through trauma. I have a lot of nurses in my family; they are incredibly funny people. I also have a few military men in my family—unbelievably quick and cutting senses of humour. It’s a coping mechanism; these are people who have seen the best and worst of humanity. They have been exposed to these extremes, and what is wrought from that is sharp and dark humour. We know the reputation of ‘Irish humour’ in Australia—it gets credited as the origin of Australian larrikinism, born from this very dry and harsh Irish-inherited humour that came out with the convicts.

It felt important, in this novel, to have characters who find the humour and have fun in and around the most harrowing of circumstances. For them, it is an act of defiance. It is the ‘kicking back’ against things that attempt to shackle them, which is a core theme of the book. We have evidence, from quotes, that William Swallow was a funny bastard—that he would say things, just to prod and get a reaction. From that, I’ve extrapolated what kind of personality he must have been: from his consistent ability to talk his way out of situations, we can confidently assume William was charismatic, and humour is a naturally charismatic trait. It is an easy way to win people to your side. He rebelled against his circumstances, and at the time, humour was an act of rebellion. It was a way of holding onto one’s own humanity. Especially if you are a prisoner, your humour is one of the few acts of autonomy you have left, and have control over.

Many maritime books treat the ship as a setting. Your published excerpted language suggests a more intimate relationship with the vessel. What does ‘the ship as character’ allow you to do thematically that a land-based novel cannot? Did you assign the Cyprus a consistent personality, such as temperament, moods or physical presence, across scenes?

It’s been a lot of fun to build upon the personification we already bestow on ships—their she / her pronouns. Throughout the novel, it’s a quirk of William that he reads a personality into every ship he sails. This was useful for me, because there are a lot of ships in this story, and a reader needs to be able to distinguish them apart. If I were to just use visual language, eventually all these ships would bleed together and start to sound the same. So it was a creative tool to treat them like characters: they have different features, different moods, feelings, different attitudes towards William, just as he has differing opinions of them. He can respect the great three-masters that transported him, but not in the same way he is indebted to the brigs and schooners that get him to safety—he respects them, and wants to treat them gently. He will personify the creaking of the Cyprus’ lines, of the rustle of her canvas, he will project moods onto this and guess what she is feeling. It’s a flavourful choice for the novel, but it’s one that many readers seemed to have enjoyed, and I’ve enjoyed writing it.

Each section of the book—there are eight sections in Swallow—are named after a different ship William has sailed, and that section reflects the influence that ship has had upon his life. Echoes of his time sailing that ship go on to inform the choices he makes at that moment in the story. I’ve played with this technique, when I haven’t had access to the easy ‘writer’ alternative—whenever a writer feels the pacing is starting to slow, a writer can shuffle characters off to a different location. I can’t do that on a story that is primarily told on a ship!

I do play with the weather, in substitute for location. I can appreciate how important a sailor’s relationship is with the weather—a lot of my family are farmers, so it's not to the same degree— but I’ve seen that almost ‘sixth sense’ a person develops when their entire life, well-being and livelihood, is reliant on the weather. You do develop a relationship with it. It’s a well-known literary technique that a writer can explore a character’s inner world through the weather, especially when characters, like mine, don’t like to talk about their feelings or emotions with others. The weather becomes an interiority tool—and in my case, so do the ships—to highlight to the reader what a character is currently thinking or feeling. If William is in a certain mindset, he will project it onto the ship. The Cyprus, as a character, is constantly in conversation with his moods, either in harmony or in dissonance.

But I do also lean on this for comedy. William is a lifelong sailor, so he sees the world in a slightly different way than the other characters. They make fun of him for it, but he is unapologetic. These ships are his entire world. They are how he will achieve his freedom, how he will get back to his family, and represent his autonomy over where he goes in the world that is constantly trying to trap him. These ships are almost mythic in their ability to award him freedom over his fate. Naturally, he has an emotional attachment to the ships that the rest simply do not understand.

In interview coverage you describe a timeline first approach and a guiding principle along the lines of ‘if it happened, it goes in’. How did that method shape plot turns that a novelist might otherwise edit out for elegance? What is one real event that felt narratively inconvenient but became indispensable once you committed to it? How do you decide what counts as ‘it happened’ when sources disagree?

I usually joke that I like to have my cake and eat it too. Whenever I do find myself in a narrative knot, I tell myself, ‘no evidence is telling us that this didn’t happen’ either. For example, there is some contradicting evidence around who was the owner of the Seaflower, the ship pirated by William and John from Pirate’s Bay (named after this very incident!). Most sources are pretty clear on who the owner was, so we can assume they are likely correct. But there is the odd document out there that exists that sows just enough doubt—two potential owners of this ship. So as a writer of fiction, I make a choice—I choose one of the names to use. But then I’ll throw in a line, that references the other name as well. William and John also steal another small boat, so I say the name of this boat is this ‘other’ name history has given us. That way, both names have been slipped into the narrative. Both potential ‘truths’ are present in the novel in some way.

It was a tricky restraint, using the timeline of the events of his life as the spine for my narrative structure. Because reality doesn’t unfold in a neat way, with all the highs and lows in the places we need to engage a reader’s attention. But I love the creative challenge of those restraints. It’s like a puzzle. History provides the thread, and I speculate the emotional journey to fill in the gaps.

People who are quite familiar with William’s story have read the book, and it’s been great fun watching them ponder where my ‘stitching’ is. Not being able to fully spot where I’ve slipped from the factual to the fiction. And that’s largely what I set out to achieve. William Swallow researchers will be able to recognise the direct sources I’m quoting, they’ll recognise ‘A’ and ‘C’, and if I can make ‘B’ in the middle, that links them together, as plausibly as possible, then I’ll be quite delighted with pulling that off. Because sometimes history hasn’t given us ‘B’ yet. We simply don’t know, and we have to speculate into that gap.

Many of the newspaper articles written about William at the time, detailing the Cyprus mutiny, and the seizure of the Seaflower—these reporters have speculated and invented their own stories into the gaps. Which is wonderfully ironic. Many articles accuse these pirates of things that the writers had no way of verifying, the articles use opinioned adjectives to describe the people involved, and added details that were ultimately proven not to be true by other sources. We can assume that these articles were sensationalised to sell papers, and are biased in the sense that at the time they had to publicly portray these criminals in a negative light. So if the newspapers at the time can’t be read as strict truth—that leaves a fiction writer like me with lots of room to play. The ‘truth’ has been corrupted through time, and hearsay, just as William himself benefits from obscuring the trail of evidence he leaves behind.

The other example is the Cyprus’ landing at Niua. This is a bit of a spoiler for the book, but I do expand on this in my author’s note at the back of Swallow. I’ve embraced a ‘version’ of the tale that was a more rewarding climax for this novel, while still personally believing that history played out differently from how I portrayed it. Maybe a different writer would have chosen not to land the Cyprus as Niua at all. But it did happen, and sometimes these creative restraints and problems result in exciting and entertaining narrative solutions. Because ultimately, I did not ‘invent’ the narrative I ended up writing around Niua—I borrowed from William Swallow himself, writing the version he told at his own trial. (Even though we know he was likely lying.) He was continuously concerned with changing his own name and adjusting how others perceived him. William himself contributed to the obscuring of his own tale, and while the entirety of his story is not portrayed with facts in my novel, this borrowing and bending of his lies aims to capture the greater ‘truth’ of who he was.

And the reality is, William Swallow's story is still being researched in real time. I am working from the dates, facts and names we know now, but even over the past six years, new facts have come to light—and I’ve had to rewrite my drafts in response! It’s almost certain that in ten years from now there will be new discoveries made that will change the timeline of his story. And that is okay. That is why, I suppose, my emphasis is on capturing the heart of the myth, which will continue to be true and compelling, even as small facts may differ.

I like to think of it as myth-building. Adding to the overall canon of William Swallow. This won’t be a strictly ‘factual’ telling, but it will ‘feel’ true as everything that is associated with William’s story is on these pages. It’s all baked into the pie. All the names and events surrounding him will eventually find their way into the complete trilogy. It’s a reflection of how we tell myths over and over again: how stories exist and evolve as they are handed down. The exact details change over time, but the thread of the story remains the same. It’s a love letter to history, as we are all working from this ‘hearsay porridge’ of our understanding of the past. 

You have described working with difficult handwriting and using transcription support, then comparing testimony across researchers. What did you learn about the story purely from the texture of archival documents, such as marginal notes, phrasing and omissions?

I am currently writing the sequel to Swallow, which will be released at the end of 2027. The sequel follows William’s journey to Japan. Sue Pedley’s exhibit at the Maritime Museum of Tasmania, PREVAILING GALES, is inspired by the reports and watercolours of Japanese samurai Hamaguchi, and Sue’s art demonstrates just how emotive Hamaguchi’s documents are. I was lucky enough to travel to Tokushima last year, to see Hamaguchi’s manuscript in person at the Tokushima Prefectural Archive. Even though I had seen the images online—they’ve been scanned in high resolution and are easy to find—seeing them in person inspired me in a way I wasn’t quite prepared for.

I began thinking about the kind of person who drew these images. His creativity flourished in the only way it really could, a sensible expression of it, within the confines of his profession. Hamaguchi, as a character, contrasted against William—who is himself an escape artist, resisting the binds and structures of his society. They become two players in the same thematic game. Once I latched onto that, I suddenly had the entire shape of the sequel. I wouldn’t have had that revelation without the texture of those preserved watercolours.

The court transcripts are delightful, as they give us access to William’s first-person voice. He’s detail-oriented, and there’s a lot of focus on the ship’s navigation, and wind direction. It’s all very precise, or made to sound precise (as in hindsight we know it's not all correct). Readers have told me how the novel Swallow reads as very detailed-orientated—and I point straight back to the court transcripts! That’s how William spoke; these things were obviously very important to him. I personally believe it’s rooted in misdirection—he is a lifelong liar, and good at spinning story, never will he need to spin a better story than at his own trial. By quoting facts and figures and numbers that no one else can undermine, he goes a long way to painting himself as an intelligent man who knows many true things, and makes it all the easier for himself to slip in the one or two key lies he needs them to believe. I think that’s very clever, and I’ve been able to pull a lot of his personality from that.

He still trips me up on his lies, in his court testimony, when I go back and read it after not looking at it for a while. He explains his visit to a location I don’t recall. I worry I’ve forgotten something from his timeline, dive back into my master document, only to realise that, of course, he was never there. But he needs the court to believe he was if he is to escape the noose. And the small things—he signs his testimony with an ‘X’. When we know he was literate, and could have signed his name if he chose to. Often, William seems to pick and choose when to show off that he is literate, and when he chooses to ‘play down’ his intelligence. He is telling the story of how he was forced to captain the Cyprus against his will—signing with an ‘X’ is very meek and a characterful choice. Likewise, William speaks about his wife and daughter in his testimony. He doesn’t mention his son, his youngest child. We have logical explanations as to why the son may have been omitted—as the man of the house, William needs to provide for his wife and daughter, while his son will eventually be able to find work and fend for himself. William is painting a sob story, and mentioning the women helps with that. But from an emotional standpoint, why not mention his son? Does he have a strained, or distant, relationship with him? And with those questions, suddenly I have character fodder to play with.

Most of all, these physical documents have driven home to me how fallible the system of record-keeping could be. 200 years ago, they did not have official spelling, in the way we do now. A court transcriber would work phonetically, to capture as much information as best they could, as it was spoken in real time. But we can see where the transcriber has made their best guesses, and have sometimes made mistakes. Wrong mutineers getting caught in the wrong anecdote. Did someone misspeak in the court, or did the transcriber mishear? It’s quite easy to access information online, already scanned from these documents, or typed up as quoted text. But quoted, digital text, often gives the impression of firm ‘truth’ and being set in stone. But humans make mistakes, and these records aren’t perfect. Seeing them firsthand, appreciating their tactile nature, makes that plain to see. If a human has written it, we have a duty to question and look for the errors. Not intentional errors, but unintentional biases and mistakes do exist. As a writer of fiction, those moments of ‘humanity’ are my narrative footholds. Humans who make mistakes are the interesting pieces of history to explore.

One account notes you drew heavily on a dossier of clippings and court material assembled by historian Warwick Hirst. How did you translate that kind of archival compilation into scenes that feel lived rather than cited? What was the single most surprising item in the dossier, an overlooked newspaper detail, a courtroom phrasing, a description of an object? Did the dossier change your view of Swallow as ‘hero’ or ‘villain’?

I wanted this to feel like a story—a story that would entertain—that just happens to be deeply embedded in all this research. While I was drafting, people asked me if I was going to use footnotes, to show when I was using directly quoted dialogue from the court transcripts. But no, the research was never the final product. The story is. Those quotes act more as fun ‘easter eggs’ that someone may spot, if they’ve read the original sources too. 

While writing, I had to treat it like a two-step process. I separated the research out from the creative development. I would read and read and read Warwick’s documents, only to then put a firm lid on it. Then I’d create my creative outline, my narrative structure. And that’s the only document I would look at while writing. Only once a ‘top-to-tail’ draft was complete, would I go back and comb through the research again, looking for reminders or things I may have missed. Then I’d rinse and repeat the process!

I would have struggled to look at the research while writing—and separating it out was my way of preventing it from feeling like a dry retelling. If it is to live as drama, as fiction, it needs space to live and breathe on its own.

Nick Russell’s translations come to mind, as an example of this. There is a point in Hamaguchi’s description of the sailors aboard the barbarian ship, specifically of William, where he is referred to as ‘handsome’. Now, I know ‘handsome’ has a different meaning in Japanese, a word that can be used for both men and women. So already we’re lost in translation a little bit. But the word ‘handsome’ has been uttered by a researcher, and as a fiction writer, I’m latching onto that and extrapolating all the possibilities. Sue Pedley, in her exhibit, has also homed in on this word! And I found that wonderfully exonerating. She’s plucked it from Nick Russell’s translations, it is in her paintings, and now hangs on the walls of the Maritime Museum of Tasmania! It’s too evocative not too. Much of William’s journey only makes sense if we’re to understand that he was charismatic leader, funny, and likely handsome.

Is William a hero of villain? What a completely different book it would be if I’d made the choice to paint him strictly as one or the other. I think the truth is far more complex, and I hope, Swallow is a better piece of fiction for depicting William somewhere in between, constantly oscillating between the two. William himself is in conflict. He doesn’t know which he is. He is a man attempting to survive. He has his principles, the things that he loves and motivates him. But sometimes these are at odds with what he needs to do to survive, and that creates tension.

From Warwick’s research, when insight into the Dormer incident on the Merchant Packet. For me, William’s entire personality and struggle hinge on this encounter. Yes, we’ve called William charismatic, humorous and handsome—and now he does this thing to Dormer. He must embody the entirety of all of these complexities. The challenge as a writer becomes: how do I depict this moment and not ‘break character’? I want the reader’s relationship with William to be complex as well. One chapter, a reader may be having fun alongside his antics, and then the next, William does something to put the reader offside, they might say, ‘oh, that’s a step too far, I don’t think I’m comfortable with that.’ And that’s absolutely the point. Then my job becomes to pull the reader back in, bring them back to William’s side. I love this as a ‘meta-narrative’ tool. William has spent his entire life manipulating people, he needs people to like him. At some level, the novel is doing that as well.

Only at the very end of the trilogy will all the chips fall, and the narrative will resolve who he is, and who William thinks he is. I would love for readers to know the terrible things he did, while simultaneously understanding, on a deeply human level, why he chose to do them.

The Cyprus incident has multiple narrative centres: the mutineers, the marooned party, the colonial administration and later the London courtroom. How did you decide which to prioritise?

A very early version of Swallow was written in third-person. As a writer, that gave me a lot of freedom to jump between different character perspectives. I could show the moments William was there to witness—I had written some Carew chapters, some Susie chapters, and was setting up the opportunity to write some John chapters later. But for a multitude of reasons, the third-person perspective wasn’t working. It was running too surface-level on what needed to be a deeply character-driven exploration. But it did mean I had to go back and structurally rework the story—it had to all unfold from William’s point-of-view.

This was tricky for the Cyprus mutiny itself. William is below deck for the beginning of the mutiny—which is true to history, and not something I wanted to change. But this is one of the key moments of the story, and my publisher pushed me to tell this moment through William’s imagination—making sure the audience could experience everything William felt and heard, as if he were on deck witnessing the action. He’s ‘imagining’ what could explain the scuffles and shouts above him—but it just so happens that everything he imagines is ‘correct’ to history, so far as the testimonies given at the trial. So a reader will get a rather genuine experience of the mutiny.

Pobjoy is a fascinating character, and there’s an opportunity to have a lot of fun with him in the third book of the trilogy. There is potentially a version of this story, where I could have cut back and forth between William and Pobjoy, and told their coinciding events all the way up until the end. Likewise, for the sequel, I briefly contemplated how the structure might unfold if some chapters were written from the Japanese perspective. We have the real-world sources to paint a fairly accurate picture of their thoughts, emotions, and the reasons behind their actions.

But for many reasons, I’ve ultimately chosen William’s emotional story as the through-line across all three books. Everything funnels through him; his character is the centre-piece of this story, and first-person perspective ultimately serves this much better.

You worked with a maritime specialist to check terminology and detail. If you could give museum visitors a single myth busting fact about sailing a brig, what would it be?

The big one is not calling ropes “ropes” but “lines” on a ship. Another thing: dinner wasn’t the big meal of the day on a ship, lunch was! They would cook everything from morning, to have it all ready and hot by lunch, when the two watches would break and all come together. I had to go back and correct some of my early scenes—I’d set some gathering around dinner, when it made more sense for them to be lunchtime.

I’m also endlessly fascinated by dead reckoning. The more I learn, the more I wish it was portrayed in media for the sheer artistry it requires—and the knowledge it takes to perform dead reckoning under stressful conditions.

I’ve always been attracted to astronomy. If I hadn’t gone into the arts and become a writer, perhaps there is a chance I would have studied astronomy. The stars, the planets, their movements across the sky, and how they’re used for navigation. These are the means by which sailors, like William, can work out where they are on the globe and avoid becoming lost. Their survival depends on it. I’m invested in myth-busting any misconceptions that you can whip out a compass and simply head to wherever you’re going. Today we have Google Maps; we can know where we are on the planet without thinking about it. Writing about a time when that was uncertain—no GPS, no instant reference—makes navigation itself dramatic, high stakes, and fascinating. There was a lot of math involved. I’d love for readers to be equally impressed by this as I am.

Macquarie Harbour and Sarah Island sit behind the whole story as a threat shaped by geography, policy and reputation. How did you represent that penal landscape without letting it overwhelm the maritime plot? Which Sarah Island fact most changed your understanding of why mutiny felt like the only option?

Sarah Island is indeed a looming shadow over the story. The trilogy will eventually feature chapters set there, but none of Swallow itself takes place at Maquarie Harbour. While I was writing the book over the years, I had a few people ask, ‘how is your Sarah Island book going?’ and I’d say, ‘it a book about NOT going to Sarah Island!’

While I’ve been doing my research, for budgeting reasons, I’ve had to be very astute about where I travel and when. Nearly every location that features in Swallow I’ve visited in person. And I’ve travelled to Japan ahead of writing the sequel. But I haven’t been to Sarah Island yet! That visit will certainly happen before I write those scenes for the third book.

But I’ve leaned into the fear and uncertainty of the unknown. William can’t describe Sarah Island in great detail in Swallow, because he hasn’t been there. He only knows it by reputation. He’s only heard the stories, like I have. And he is quite certain he doesn’t want to go there. He reasons that once you go to Sarah Island, you can’t escape. The stories of escape are largely outweighed by the tales of death of those who tried. At its time, it would have been one of the most remote settlements in the world. That isolation, and lack of resources, make it a horrifying prospect. Mutiny, and stealing the Cyprus, is William’s only option if he is to ever have a life again, to ever see his family again.

Sarah Island exists in this story as an existential threat—framed as a final destination never returned from, equated with death. So when the choice is between mutiny or death, then suddenly it is no choice at all.

Tasmania holds extraordinary convict archives, including records recognised internationally, and family historians are part of this story’s modern audience. How do you want Tasmanian readers, especially descendants and researchers, to use this novel?

William Swallow is one of Australia’s most interesting historical figures. The novel creates an experiential understanding of his life. Being a work of fiction, it has been my goal to take a story that is often larger than life, a story where truth is sometimes stranger than fiction, and write it in a way that readers can believe that these extraordinary things were achieved. I would love for people to use Swallow as a jumping-off point to learn more about the true story.

I’d love for this novel to draw attention and more support to the good work being done by historians and volunteer organisations on the ground. If this book captures the imagination of people, generates interest in William’s story, and those people want to get involved in some way, that resulting ground swell will only help more facts come to life.

For example, William has three transportation records, all easily accessible in the Hobart Penitentiary and at the Port Arthur Historic Site. But these three separate records haven’t been collated to represent a single person—for example, one record states his date of birth, while in another it is ‘unknown’. With more light shone on William’s story, momentum and public interest will help give organisations the resources needed to bring all these documents together, so they tell the cohesive story of William’s life, and so people can learn about William at the historic sites he is associated with. After all, William is buried at the Isle of the Dead at Port Arthur, and the Hobart Penitentiary was being built when William was a convict in Hobart.

It’s amazing how much work has been done to date and is still ongoing. The more support these organisations get from an eager outside audience—and the louder the demand for William’s story—the more progress can be made.

Your background in screenwriting is frequently noted in publisher and profile material. What did screen craft give you in a maritime novel, such as pacing, scene economy, dialogue rhythm or visual thinking? Did you ‘see’ the ship as a set, with blocking and camera angles, while writing? Which scene would you most like to storyboard?

As mentioned, pacing is very important to me. It has to be a page-turner, and writing this book was about finding the right balance between detail—historical, environmental, sensory—while never letting that slow things down. When speaking about scene economy, funny enough, I am an over-writer. In my first-drafts, I put too many words on the page. The majority of my editing process is cutting back and simplifying, to make it as economic as possible. I know some writers work the other way—barebones first drafts that they flesh out later—but I’m most certainly the opposite of that.

Naturally, I love dialogue. When characters get to banter, the work takes on a life of its own. I feel as if I’m simply recording conversations, not inventing them. Dialogue has to be entertaining, it's got to be vibrant, and above all, it should be fun to read. I’m lucky in that I’m married to a very talented actor. I test the first draft by asking him to read it aloud to me. Thankfully, he enjoys William Swallow and gets a kick out of the process. I get to hear when the rhythm isn’t working, and I highlight what I need to come back and fix. It’s an old screenwriting habit—dialogue is always ultimately always performed by actors, so it has to be ‘put on its feet’. I simply brought that same habit to my novel. I’m also fortunate that my publisher at WestWords Books, my editor, he comes from a directing background, both theatre and opera. So he also prioritises the rhythm and lyricism of the prose, and the punchiness of the dialogue. Because we both have a similar craft background, we were able to complement each other as editor and writer.    

Pace, structure and dialogue all come rather naturally for me—writing this book was about addressing and working on my weaknesses as a writer. It was the prose themselves, the interiority, the thoughts and feelings, the minute details of clothes and environment, those were new to me, because those aren’t tools we use in screenplays. So whenever I receive positive feedback on my prose, or those fine details, or William interiority, those make me really glow, because that’s where I put in lots of sweat and tears.

I think I’m a visual writer—I do see everything as I write. I’ve had readers tell me that it reads like a movie, which is a wonderful compliment. I want it to be a visually rich feast: it’s set on the ocean, on a brig, it has big action set pieces, like the mutiny, the storm, and a few other fistfights along the way. But at the same time, I deeply respect and understand the craft of visual storytelling in film, and it is my skill set to write to facilitate that, but the act of ‘directing’ is not where my passion. Filmmaking is collaborative. You invite other experts into the process, like directors and DOPs, and trust their instincts to visually capture the moment. And even then, they get coverage from multiple angles to ultimately tell the visual story in the edit suite. Handing a story over to those experts doesn’t diminish it—it becomes a transliteration, a collaborative interpretation. I love inviting other creatives into that space and facilitating their creativity with my words—it's what I’ve always loved about film. The novel is written. The book is my vision, the most complete and fulfilled version I can create. I am creatively satisfied with it. Anything beyond this is a bonus, a celebration, and a broadening. I am working with my agent—I have written a pitch deck for what could be a television series, but that’s its own long pitching process. The film industry is a completely different beast from publishing. If someone wants to see it on screen someday, the best thing they could do now is celebrate the book—be loud about it, write reviews, buy copies, help create word of mouth demand—and that will eventually reach the right ears of people who can make these things happen.

Museum audiences often like to understand ‘how we know’. Would you be open to a live reading format where you pair short fiction passages with the primary sources they grew from? What do you think fiction can reveal that a document cannot, and vice versa?

This is such a fascinating question—I haven’t considered it before. A lot of the mutiny scene is directly built upon Warick Hirst’s descriptions, as well as the trial transcripts and newspaper clippings. Comparing all the different trial testimonies is an entertaining exercise: everyone is out to paint themselves in a positive light, their memories are fallible, and they make mistakes. The testimonies themselves create this hodgepodge, patchwork quilt, and the truth is somewhere in between it all.

Writing fiction, I had to pick a version of ‘the truth’ and stick with it for the narrative. Obviously, the direction I choose is informed by what may cause the most tension, especially for William. But fiction allows us to explore the thoughts and emotions of these historical characters and understand the ‘why’ behind their actions. They may give their reasons at court, but these words can only be trusted so far, especially William, our notorious liar.

Fiction also makes history tangible. These convicts were reduced to numbers—something William partially rails against. The entire incarceration and transportation system was a mass act of dehumanisation, robbing these men of identity and humanity. William, at every point in the story, is attempting to reclaim his humanity. That is what drives him to do what he does. A novel like this—painting a deeply internal portrait of someone who suffered through this—is in itself an act of rebellion against dehumanisation. If a reader can see themselves in these characters, relate to their humanity—that empathy connects us to the past and teaches us about ourselves in the present. The more novels allow us to exercise our empathetic muscles, to put ourselves in the shoes of others, the more equipped we are to treat one another better. The less likely we are to dismiss people as labels or numbers. Writing and reading about our history makes us more aware of the things we are doing now—it reminds us that some things can’t be easily brushed aside or forgotten. I am quite passionate about that, and it is why I love writing historical fiction.