Felicity Pulman

One of the questions authors are most frequently asked is, 'Where do your ideas come from?' 

I have always been fascinated by the unknown in our world, and enjoy exploring the idea of knowledge travelling through time, time slip and parallel universes, reincarnation and ghosts.  This all came together when I started asking myself: what if a ghost from the past could bring information into the future, information which helps to solve a family mystery?

The next questions I had to answer were:  Who is the ghost?  Where does he/she come from?  I had in mind a ghost from a shipwreck, either the Dunbar or the Catherine Adamson, both of which came to grief in 1857. So I went to my local library at Manly to do some research.

Once there, I came across the report of a Royal Commission held in 1882, investigating circumstances surrounding a smallpox outbreak and the mismanagement of the Quarantine Station at North Head in Sydney in 1881.  I began to read it, and was immediately hooked as all the grisly details began to unfold.  There was evidence of families (not necessarily even sick with smallpox) who were taken from their beds in the middle of the night and transported to the Quarantine Station in a motor launch, the Pinafore. (Some were even towed behind it in an open boat!) 

The Hughes family was a case in point.  The wife and children were taken first and Hughes followed later.  The family were inoculated (with serum taken from a sick child) and one of the daughters contracted the disease.  Hughes, along with all the other men at the station, was housed on board a hospital ship, the Faraway.  He was denied permission to visit his daughter, so he jumped overboard and swam to shore.  He was allowed to see his daughter so long as a peeled raw onion was placed between him and his family, presumably to stop the disease from spreading. His daughter subsequently died, and Hughes was placed in leg irons for five days for disobeying orders.  And the raw onion found its way into my novel.

Another grisly piece of evidence concerned a man called Hutton.  A witness spoke of seeing him shortly before he died; how he lay naked on the floor beside his bed, 'tearing his arms and the blood was running down his face.'  There were other reports of patients wandering naked on deck, and all this is in Ghost Boy, along with a description of patients left 'to lie for days in their evacuations' which was also mentioned in the Royal Commission.

I'd found the source of the 'ghost boy', while the apparent chaos and mismanagement of the station at the time fitted perfectly with the plot now taking shape in my mind:  a boy, Tad, is snatched from his home in England by his father and brought out to start a new life in the colonies with his father's mistress, Mary-Anne, and their child, Joseph.  But the boy's father and stepmother die at the Quarantine Station, leaving Tad solely responsible for the care of 2-year-old Joseph.  Tad drowns while trying to hide 'the family treasure', to keep it safe so that he can look after Joseph once they leave the station.  And Joseph is then 'adopted' by a woman who has just watched her own baby die. 

So the family mystery begins, along with Froggy's drowning dreams and a meeting with Tad, the ghost boy. This is a novel about courage, about overcoming fear, about solving a family mystery, about friendship and trust.  As I began to weave the storylines together:  Froggy and his family, his problems at school and with the popular Cassie, so I came to understand what had happened at the Quarantine Station in the past to bring about the family mystery. 

The Royal Commission formed the basis of my research, and was a wonderful primary source of information on what the Quarantine Station looked like in 1881, how it operated, how patients were treated, what they were given to eat, where and how they were housed, and so on.

I very quickly realised, however, that to write the scenes with any authenticity, I would have to visit the station and walk in the footsteps of my characters.  And I was absolutely blown away by what I found there.  After the Royal Commission, a major building programme commenced at the station, which continued over the years of its operation.  The class system of the time becomes immediately apparent when contrasting the opulence of the first class quarters for the healthy passengers with the sheds and bunk-beds available for 4th class passengers.  The hospital and isolation quarters bear testimony to the station's real purpose, as do the numerous rock carvings down by the wharf, including a sad message in Chinese characters: 'If you ask me the feeling about the voyage I shall persuade you never to come here for pleasure.'
 
Down by the wharf are the autoclaves for steaming clothes and other possessions to sterilise them.  There is also a shower block, where passengers were forced to shower in a solution of phenol (carbolic acid).  This is a genuinely creepy place.  Nearby is the 'gas chamber' where people suffering from Spanish flu were herded into a closed room and forced to inhale sulphate of zinc which was pumped through to 'cleanse' their lungs.

At the time of writing my novel, the station was managed by National Parks and Wildlife Service and two of the guides, Belinda Elliott and Brian McDonald, allowed me to wander where I would and kindly answered all my questions.  Subsequently, Brian devised a Ghost Boy tour plus information pack for schools studying the novel, and this operated through NPWS.

The Quarantine Station is now under the management of Mawlands, who have it on lease from NPWS, and a new tour based on Ghost Boy is now available, see www.qstation.com.au for details.  Students follow a guide to the various sites and experience the events of the novel as seen by Tad, the ghost boy, learning about early immigration and the treatment of diseases, the class system and the function of a quarantine station as they go.

As an author, I found it very exciting and very moving to watch Ghost Boy come to life.  For students, and reluctant readers in particular, combining the book with the tour gives them a walk through history plus adding a deeper meaning to the story.

At the time of writing Ghost Boy I hadn't realised that if you can tie your novel into some aspect of history (and for the Australian readership, especially Australian history) this is a good selling point for the education market - which will make your publishers very happy and help to keep your book in print, particularly if you add an author note giving historical details at the end.

Note:  Quarantine stations were built in all states around Australia in the 19th and early 20th centuries.  Some of these may still be open for visits today, making Ghost Boy relevant to other states as well as NSW. 

copyright Felicity Pulman, 2008