SOMEWHERE SPECIAL

Because I needed Romy to be both mentally and physically apart from her family at the beginning of the novel I decided that she would be working in Australia, on what’s known as an urban dig, which means that they were excavating in a built up area. I also thought it would be nice to include Australia in a book as I had such a great time there when I went on an author tour a few years ago.

Usually my author tours are far closer to home (I spend a lot of time on the M50 in Ireland and the M25 in the UK) so it was great to have the opportunity to meet readers on the other side of the world for a change.

I arrived in Perth, Western Australia, which is a probably the cleanest city in the world and where the air is very fresh and clear. Keith, Romy’s boyfriend, travels to Perth while she’s home in Ireland and I think it’s a city that definitely suits his laid-back personality. I was scheduled to do an event with local booksellers that evening and everyone kept worrying about the traffic. Clearly they were never stuck in Dublin or London in rush hour! Their idea of a traffic jam was having to wait for the lights to go green.

I was astonished when, the next day at another event, a reader came up to me and told me that she’d driven for over three hours to get there. I was thinking that she was a very devoted fan until she added that she can drive up to eight hours for a pizza. For those of us living in the UK and Ireland, where nobody would travel eight hours for a pizza (unless you were whisked away to Italy for a romantic night in Milan) it’s hard to really get to grips with the immense size of the continent.

Easier for me to get my head around was driving to Fremantle, a mere 30kms from the city to take part in the St Patrick’s Day parade. I hadn’t been to a St Patrick’s Day parade since I was very small and certainly never actually paraded in one. The Aussies are just as good at the partying as the Irish and so there was a fair chance, having downed a few beers and stayed up well into the night, that I wouldn’t be able to get up the next day for the flight to Melbourne.

Once again, I was struck by the distance I had to travel. The flight took four hours which is about the same time as it takes to fly from Dublin to the Canary Islands. And most of that time we were over flat land where there was absolutely nothing man made.

Melbourne – where Romy was offered the job she couldn’t accept because she had to go back to Ireland  -  was a very different city. It was colder, for a start, and seemed more European. It was there that I first thought about the concept of urban archaeology as a possibility for Romy in Australia because some of the people I met were very interested in the history of their city, even though the original settlement is as recent as 1835.

Sydney, my next stop, contains two of Australia’s most iconic images – the Opera House (where Romy goes for drinks with Keith the night before she leaves) and the Harbour Bridge. It’s a really buzzing place with a young, energetic feel to it and I loved it. And although I first got the idea for urban archaeology in Melbourne, it was reading about the discovery of an old burial ground when upgrading was being done to the Town Hall that made me realise that this was something that would interest Romy and that she’d like to be involved in. The cemetery was in use from 1790 to 1820 and both convicts and the free population were buried there. Once it was no longer used the cemetery was neglected and, according to records became a ‘resort for bad characters at night’. I thought that a similar dig would be very interesting for Romy to work on and so that’s what she was doing in Sydney. You can read more about the Old Sydney Burial Ground on the City of Sydney website www.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au

The last leg of my Australian tour took me to Brisbane, Queensland. If it had been cold in Melbourne it was tropical in Queensland. (One of the things about touring Australia is having to bring clothes for more than one season!) We didn’t stay in the city because it was very much a flying visit but I met some lovely booksellers and readers at an outdoor lunch overlooking the sea. I would have loved the opportunity to go scuba diving as Keith and his friends did (or at least swim in the ocean, I’m not good at diving) but there was no time. Like Perth, Brisbane is very much an outdoor city and I can see why tourists, both Australian and from everywhere else, flock there.

At the end of Someone Special Romy has returned to Australia. I think that it’s a country that suits her character and her temperament although I’m pretty sure that at some point she’s going to travel again. She’ll definitely visit Egypt as it was reading about ancient Egypt that fired her initial interest in archaeology and I think she’ll probably visit Mexico too. But there’s no doubt that Keith will either be with her when she travels or waiting eagerly for her to come home….

You can see pics of me on tour in Australia in the Gallery