• Labor's chickens have come home to roost earlier than they'd hoped. The budget is in crisis, the credit card limit has been increased multiple times and is nearly maxed out at 300 billion. It's ALWAYS the most vulnerable who suffer and Labor's propensity to spend like drunken sailors is the cause. This website is hysterical about the dangers women face under Tony Abbott but the fact is that women are far worse off now than they were under Howard. http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/columnists/desparate-pms-war-has-failed-her-own-gender/story-fn7078da-1226537935706 - Gee
  • I would like to see these companies made accountable for their social responsibilities. Any company making those kinds of profits should be providing and maintaining the necessary infrastructure and social services required by their activities and if they do not then the government should be charging them the necessary royalties to cover the cost to taxpayers. All payments to governments should be disclosed and made transparent. Miners are too rich and have too much power. A breeding ground for corruption. - Rhoda
  • [...] responsibility and unpaid care work. Tara Moss has written an excellent piece over at The Hoopla, The Most Important Job In The World, that explores some of these nuances, including the societal and financial expectations that women [...] - Judging mothers | Australian Feminist Reader
  • We have had several children over a timespan which has seen support for mothers increased, so I agree with Not That Bad in that things are much better now than the were even when we had our first child 20 years ago, however, that doesn't mean that "things" are as they should be! I am slightly shattered that even after all of these years of struggle and work, that the role of men and women is not more equal, and that the gender difference is still so debated. All parents deserve society's support: single parents, fathers, mothers. We should be working towards a society where men and women feel supported whatever their choices, and this doesn't necessarily mean financially. Access to services, education, self-finance. We should all be being encouraged to fulfil our potential as human beings. We have the brains, we have the capacity (economics is, after all, a human invention---not a creature with a life of its own) to make the changes. Attitudes need to change. Colour, race, marital status, having children, not having children.... Children are precious and deserve out attention, and parents deserve society's support. If that is given, then we may get the society we deserve! - Dodieh
  • @Robyn. You're the one with the attitude. Over it! - metoo
  • Yah pronking & smiling - Jay
  • Tony Abbott thinks Superannuation is a confidence trick? So what would he think of the national savings that would have been if this had been allowed to remain Australian Law. At the 1937 federal election, the United Australia Party had promised to introduce a system of national insurance that would provide medical cover and pensions for working people. The scheme was to be funded by contributions from government, employers and employees. Menzies, who had helped draft the policy, was an enthusiastic supporter of the scheme. For him it constituted good social policy and, once adequate superannuation funds had been accumulated, promised to relieve taxpayers of what was likely to become an intolerable burden in the future. Unfortunately the United Australia Party’s coalition partners were not nearly so keen about the proposal. Although a National Insurance Bill was passed, Country Party ministers continued to resist its implementation, arguing that the money was needed elsewhere, particularly to provide for ‘adequate defence’. After a series of stormy meetings, Cabinet succumbed to Country Party threats and decided to repeal the pension provisions of the Bill. Menzies immediately resigned from the ministry. - johnward154
  • Never have and never will purposefully buy a celebrity endorsed product. Make my own choices according to years of experience. I don't watch or listen to commercial tv or radio or read mainstream media . Abc, Sbs plus community radio (bay fm 99.9) are my choice. Find very vacuous the current obsession with all things celebrity! - Robyn
  • Maybe hard to be honest ..... but I think probably most of us are little influenced by advertising especially with gorgeous hot men and sexy women, we would probably all look beautiful even though we get older ..... as Dolly Parton said in an interview, you have no idea how expensive it is to look so cheap.. ;-) - Tone May
  • I have honestly never purchased anything because of a celebrity endorsement. After all, they are being paid to promote the product even if they don't actually use it. If I want to make a decision about a product purchase, I do my research on consumer review sites on the web and then decide whether to purchase or not. - Aeron Winters
 
Categories:  Books, Entertainment, The Book Shelf

MEET THE AUTHOR: DEBORAH BURROWS

The question with Deborah Burrows isn’t so much why did she decide to write a novel but why has it taken her so long to become a writer.

Deborah is a law graduate and has three degrees in history, including a Masters from Oxford University. All of which have come in very handy in writing her debut novel A Stranger in My Street.

Meg Eaton and Tom Lagrange meet on the street on a summer’s day in 1943. One is damaged by love lost, both are damaged by war. When they discover the body of Meg’s neighbour Doreen Luca, and Doreen’s missing husband is wrongly accused of her brutal murder, Meg and Tom unite to find the real killer. Their investigations lead them straight to the American naval base and they unravel far more crime than just a murder.

The Hoopla’s Meredith Jaffé set out to discover exactly how this story came about.

Where did the idea for this story spring from for you?

I was born in 1959, so the war for people of my generation loomed very large over all of us. My father fought in WW2 – he was 20 and was part of a group of commandos sent up to Timor. The Japanese invaded on the same day they bombed Darwin. His group was cut off from Australia for a year and fought a guerilla campaign. At one stage they were the only allied forces fighting the Japanese after the fall of Singapore and even Winston Churchill mentioned them, he said “they alone did not surrender”. So I had this war hero father but it destroyed his health and he died young. He died in 1962 when he was 42 leaving mum to raise four children on her own.

The war took my father but mum used to talk about her war in Perth. She was a secretary (Meg isn’t mum at all but I used some stories that mum told me) and she would tell us about going dancing with the Americans, she had pins they gave her and she had a fabulous time. It seemed to me that there was this really interesting dichotomy between the two wars, of the women and the men who were fighting horrible shocking wars away from home.

Did the characters of Tom and Meg evolve or did they arrive fully formed?

I had a pretty good idea in my head of what Meg was like. She’s no one I know but she has elements of me and my mother and my friends in her. Tom, he developed. I was trying to get all those aspects of the best really intelligent men that I know and he evolved into that.

Tom is a very interesting character because he’s physically and emotionally damaged from his war experiences. Sometimes he seems so much older than Meg , too old to be a potential life partner because that experience had aged him. It must have been hard to keep him in check.

Well I think that’s right. He was socially very top of the tree in Perth and went off to Oxford and had a great time and all of this. Then he came back and joined the army and suddenly he was in charge of all these men.

Here was this very sensitive person involved in fighting and he got the medals and was a good soldier but hated it. Like my dad really I suppose. I’ve still got dad’s diary and you can see in some of the things he says how much he hates killing people. He says, I haven’t written anything here about the battles because more than anything else I hate killing another human being but I have to do it, they are enemies, I have to kill them and I’ll keep killing them until they kill me and then he said something like, I think this will happen.

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3 Responses to this article

  1. Monique (@writenote1) July 10, 2012 Reply
     
     

    Great interview!

    For those in Perth, Deborah is going to be talking at Koorliny Art Centre’s Meet the Author night on July 18 at 7pm. Phone 9467 7118.

    I’ve reviewed A Stranger in my Street on Write Note Reviews if anyone is interested.

     
  2. Deborah Burrows October 25, 2012 Reply
     
     

    I found it very interesting to find someone with my name who was a writer as I enjoy reading. There was a time in my life I liked reading self-improvement books but now I am into romance novels. I am 56 years old and I never thought I would be into reading romance novels but it is intriguing. Just for the fun of it I will try to locate this novel and read it because it is by my name sake.

     

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  • Gee: Labor's chickens have come home to roost earlier than they'd hoped. The budget is in crisis, the credit card limit has b...

  • Rhoda: I would like to see these companies made accountable for their social responsibilities. Any company making those kind...

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