However, room could perhaps be made on the shelves for Storm Boy…’ From The London Times Literary Supplement: ‘No large bookcase is needed for the lasting children’s classics and it is a lucky year that will add one to the number. Storm Boy was published in 1963 and attracted fine reviews. Thiele shot back: ‘A story is as long as it has to be,’ and refused to let him tamper with it. The book was just fifty pages long and Thiele’s publisher said it needed fleshing out. We have to know, to feel in our spirit what we are writing about.’ ‘Then the sea comes rolling across the pages. They have to be fresh and lively: walk when they’re supposed to walk, and run when they’re supposed to run,’ he said. Thiele had ‘to squeeze and wring the words till they do what they’re supposed to do. It is a simple tale, sparse yet lyrical, both intensely joyful and sad.
Further walks in the Coorong had helped form the shape of the story in his mind and the writing came easily. He enjoyed the way that a change in the position of just one word could alter the balance of a sentence. He would shift words and phrases about on the page by targeting them in a circle, indicating their new positions with an arrow. Writing and Publicationīack home in Adelaide he started, writing in his usual longhand as he believed it helped him to see the emerging pattern of a sentence. He had recently read of vandals in the area who had killed birds and smashed their nests, and he thought this would give him the story he needed. He had come up with the title Storm Boy and he wanted to illustrate the book that he hoped Thiele would write.Ĭonservation and protection of the environment were close to Colin’s heart. On the way he shared with Thiele his idea for a story about a lonely boy, set against the vast, isolated stretch of water and sand dunes. From Goolwa they set out on foot to the mouth of the Murray River as Baily, an artist, wished to paint a scene there. In January 1960, Thiele had made a short car trip from his holiday home in Port Elliot to the seaside town of Goolwa with his friend and fellow lecturer John Baily. These 142,500 hectares of freshwater, estuarine and marine habitats comprise one of Australia’s most significant wetland systems, known for its rare birds, fish and plants. The Coorong is in the heartland of country that was dear to Thiele. Today you’ve seen what cruel and stupid men can do.’ Inception of Storm Boy Storm Boy’s father tells him: ‘In the world there will always be men who are cruel, just as there will always be men who are lazy or stupid or wise or kind. On the day when Mr Percival is indiscriminately killed by hunters, a distraught Storm Boy and his father bury him in a high golden sand hill looking out to sea. So Mr Percival stays and a powerful bond grows between the boy and the bird. For an instant it looked like a magic bird.’ As it banked against the western sun its beak and big black-tipped wings glowed in the shooting beams of light. …as if hearing Storm Boy’s startled voice, it suddenly spread out two big wings and launched itself into the air. Hide-Away Tom insists they must be released into the wild to fend for themselves, but Mr Percival returns. One of them, named Mr Percival, is close to death before he nurses it gently back to life. When a band of young men make a raid nearby, killing pelicans and smashing their nesting area, Storm Boy rescues three surviving chicks. These three characters live in harmony with their environment until destroyers intrude with guns and idiocy. This wiry Aboriginal man, with his knowledge of country, shares with Storm Boy the language of the wind and the waves, and the scribbly stories made by creatures trekking across the sand hills at night. The boy grows up supple and strong and spends his days befriending the living creatures, combing the beach for sea treasures, and spending time with their only neighbour, Fingerbone Bill. Storm Boy and his fisherman father, Hide-Away Tom, are dreamers who live in a makeshift humpy in the sand dunes by the sea. Thiele characterises the Coorong as a place that attracts two types of humanity: those who dream and those who destroy.
0 kommentar(er)
