Peter Yeldham: for the love of writing
A Distant Shore is published by Penguin.
In a writing career spanning more than 60 years, award-winning author Peter Yeldham has only once quoted a friend verbatim. “He never spoke to me again.” Peter can shrug it off now, but concedes that he has been wary of basing his characters on people he knows ever since.
Ask most authors if there is a little of themselves, their friends or their despised Grade 10 maths teacher in their characters and they will often say there is. Peter is no exception and admits to modelling the protagonist of his latest novel, A Distant Shore, on snippets of many people he has known. In fact, it seems he took the best bits of everyone he knew to create the perfect woman, whom he called Kate.
“I think I was almost in love with her by the time I had finished because she was a character I admired greatly,” says Peter. “She did keep me interested the whole time I was writing about her, which was about 18 months.”
It may come as little surprise to learn, then, that there is a hefty chunk of Peter himself in the book’s lead male character. “Oh, there is a lot of me in Damien. I had that same battle with my family when I wanted to be a writer. He even lived Coleherne Court in London like I did. He began to get very close to me in the end.”
Like Damien, Peter followed his dream and became one of the most prolific writers of his time. He began his career in Australia at the age of 16, writing radio scripts and short stories. Eager to advance his status, Peter and his wife and their two small children soon found themselves in England - battling to make ends meet on a struggling writer’s wage. But determination and persistence saw Peter’s writing jobs evolve into a successful career that included writing for television, film and the stage.
It wasn’t until he returned to Australia where a long-time friend bet $10 that Peter would never pen a book that he finally sat down to write his first novel, a thriller called Reprisal. Eight books have followed since. Peter says that although he no longer sees writing as the ‘romantic’ vocation he once did through adolescent eyes, he still loves the process of writing.
“It’s working away late at night and reading it the next morning and thinking, ‘that’s not bad, I think I have done something here’,” he says. “I have never had another way to earn a living and never had to, so I have felt rather fortunate.”
Peter believes that as a writer he is also fortunate to have a public voice. As with some of his other novels, A Distant Shore is set against a backdrop of society’s faults and regrets. This time he tackles issues such as the treatment of migrants in Australia in the early 1950s; the surge of anger that fuelled anti-Vietnam War protests on city streets; and the deplorable handling of boat people coming to Australia and the sinking of the SIEVX in October 2001, in which 353 asylum seekers drowned.
“The last two books, particularly, I have written because I’ve felt angry about things,” he says. He takes great heart when he knows he has reached readers’ hearts and minds. His previous book, Barbed Wire and Roses, is an anti-war story about Australians sent to France during World War I. “Just this weekend I have had another 10 letters from people about it. Many of them are those who had relatives who were killed in France. There are hundreds of emails. I find it very worthwhile indeed.”
Peter has seen the writing industry change dramatically over the past six decades. When he started out, writers were ‘odd-bods’ and there were no writers’ centres, writers’ guilds, writers’ festivals; not even many writers. Back then people read Steinbeck and Hemmingway, not Rowlings and Grisham. But when Peter talks about his beloved craft, the power of words and the joy of creating memorable stories, one senses that perhaps there is still a hint of that romantic notion of a writer’s life fluttering within.
Peter Yeldham's awards:
* 2001 - Order of Australia Medal for achievement in film and television;
* 2003 - Centenary Medal for services to Australian writing;
* six Australian Writing Awards,
* a British Guild Award;
* a nomination for an International Emmy for his television drama, Captain James Cook.
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