Emily Brugman grew up in Broulee, on the far south coast of NSW, on the lands of the Yuin people. Her writing has previously appeared in literary journals, magazines and anthologies, including Tracks, the UTS Writers' Anthology and Lines to the Horizon: Australian surf writing. She currently lives in Mullumbimby, on Bundjalung country, and works at Byron Writers Festival. The Islands, her first novel, is inspired by her family's experiences living and working on the Abrolhos Islands between 1959-1972.
Why do you tell stories?
I tell stories in order to better understand myself and others. In the case of The Islands, I am interested in reaching into the past in order to better understand the present, from an individual and a collective point of view. An interviewer described my book as part social history, and I think that hits the nail on the head.
Describe your debut novel, The Islands, in one (or two) sentence(s).
In the late 1950s, newly arrived Finnish migrants Alva and Onni Saari arrive on the Abrolhos Islands, WA, where the crayfishing industry is in its infancy. We follow the Saari’s for an entire lifetime, as they attempt to build a life in a place vastly different to the one they left behind.
As a family saga The Islands spans several generations. Something that struck me was the time jumps and 'passing' of the story to each character, as if passing a baton. Did you always have this structure in mind, or did it develop as you wrote? The Islands began as a series of five interlinked short stories. There was a period of time when I was quite uncertain about what it was I wanted to create. I tried to hone in on one particular generation, working towards a more traditional novel-like structure, but I later abandoned this. I read two books which helped me to see that my original structure could work. These were Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout, and Drylands by Thea Astley. Both of these books use a similar structure, offering snippets of characters’ lives to paint a picture of a whole community. As my own novel developed, and more and more characters came into being, I thought it could be interesting, and perhaps surprising for the reader, to explore this fictional world from the perspectives of some of the minor characters, such as Helvi, Latvian Igor and Mika. Now that the novel is complete, I see each chapter as an island within the larger archipelago of the book, which together tell the story of a people, place and time.
I was transported while reading; I felt I knew the Albrolhos Islands intimately. Similarly, there’s a strong sense of Finnish landscapes, lost to the characters through migration and time. What was your approach to writing landscape and place, both present and absent? Landscape is central to this novel because it plays such a profound role in the lives of the characters. In both Finland and WA, the characters are truly at the mercy of the elements. To live in Finland is to be a captive to the seasons, and to live as a crayfisher is to be governed by the sea and weather. I was able to get a sense of the Finnish winter (I have only visited in Spring and Summer) through interviews with my family, and of course I recalled my own experiences in snowy, frozen settings. While I have not had the pleasure of calling the Abrolhos home, and am not a crayfisher myself (my grandfather fished these waters from 1959 – 1972) I did visit the islands in 2016. I stayed for five days in a fisherman’s shack on Little Rat, just a few doors down from where my family’s camp once was. This was an incredibly rich sensory experience – listening to the wind whistle through the walls of the tin hut at night, the water lapping just metres from the door. I could not have written the book without this immersion in landscape, but I also used my knowledge and experience as a surfer to inform my writing. As a surfer I have known the feeling of being wet for hours on end, of bearing the brunt of a southerly buster, of skin dry and caked with salt. In addition to this sensorial detail, I have been writing about the paradoxical nature of the ocean for several years, and I took some of that scholarship and incorporated it into this novel – ideas of the ocean as a place of solace and safe harbour, of freedom and potential riches, yet simultaneously a place of great danger, where terror and even death are a real possibility, a place ultimately unknowable, even to the most experienced of fisher-people.
You incorporate Finnish elements: snippets of folklore, poetry, songs, superstitions, sayings. These elements add mesmerising depth to the family’s story. What inspired this intertextuality? I love books that use intertextuality – it adds a layer of meaning to any story. I learned about the Finnish folk epic The Kalevala early on in the book’s development, when I was researching Finnish culture and history. I was intrigued by the Sampo, a key motif within the poems. The moment I resolved to incorporate the idea of the Sampo in the book, which comes to represent Onni’s quest for ‘the good life’, I felt that the whole purpose and meaning of the novel fell into place. Other elements, like idioms, proverbs, poems and songs, were incorporated to help bring out the distinct Finnishness of my characters – these are the details that ground them firmly in their culture.
While there are moments of uncertainty and mistakes for the Saari family, each member is fiercely independent and self-sufficient, especially in the face of the unknown. Where did you draw this strength from? Is it something you identify with? In the chapter ‘Finch’ I write about sisu, a Finnish word that translates to something like grit. Grit, or perseverance in the face of hardship, has come to be thought of as part of the Finnish national character (certainly it exists in many other cultures too). Pre-1900s Finland was an agrarian society, in which the majority of Finns lived as peasants, working under colonial rule. Life as a crofter, or lot farmer, was incredibly difficult, with little opportunity for improvement, and I think this history, coupled with the harshness of the climate, has produced a stoicism and hardiness within the people. In the book, I like to think that Alva especially embodies sisu – she comes from a life of extreme poverty in Finland, and struggles all her life to find a sense of belonging in Australia – and yet she perseveres.
One of my favourite elements in the story is an unexpected camaraderie between Hilda, a young girl, and Igor, a hulking middle-aged fisherman with a mysterious past. Throughout the book there are several relationships which surprise and delight but also those which unnerve and unravel. Tell us about crafting these complex relationships. Did any of them spring from ‘real life’? The friendship between Hilda and Latvian Igor was one that developed over time along with the plot. It is completely made-up. But there’s another significant relationship in the book that did spring from ‘real life’. I like to think of the true love story of the book as being between Alva and her best friend Helvi. This thread was partly inspired by the friendship my grandmother had with her best friend, a fellow Finnish-Australian woman who still lives in Perth today. My grandmother’s English language skills remained poor throughout her life, and this meant that very few people saw her full humanity. Her best friend was one of those few people, and with her my grandmother spoke of culture, politics and ideas, all the things she was unable to discuss in her stunted English. I wanted to examine the nature of female friendship, and how connections with friends can deep and profound, complicated and difficult, just as they are in romantic love. After my grandparents relocated to Canberra, my grandmother and her friend wrote letters to one another regularly. On publication I sent a copy of the book to my grandmother’s best friend, and she told me, upon reading the first lines: ‘It was like a message from Maila, reaching through time.’
When and where do you write? I write at home, at a small writing desk, mostly in the mornings.
What are three things that sustain you as an author, or while you’re writing? Reading, walking and cups of tea.
Name three books that you couldn’t live without. The Harp in the South by Ruth Park, The Tree of Man by Patrick White, The Golden Age by Joan London.