The portions of land were so small that often they could not sustain a family. The father of the family and in due course the sons had to move during winter to the cities as itinerant workers mending shoes or pots and pans. Some went as far as Australia and stayed for up to ten years. They typically went to the country and worked logging forests or in mining. Sometimes they never went back. Sometimes children knew their fathers only from letters if he could read and write, otherwise it was from money sent to the local bank.

Susan visited the Valtellina while researching the book. In the middle of Tirano there is a memorial to the migrants who left their homes to work in Australia. It is a sad reminder of what is left behind when someone has to leave their home forever.

I was given a contact in Tirano, a small town in the very north of Italy on the Swiss border. The idea was to use this as my home town for Giuseppe. My ‘contact’ - Joseph - the cousin of a friend - proved illusive. I had no luck telephoning him from Rome even though he was expecting my call, so I flew to Milan and took a train to Tirano. I reached it in the middle of Sunday afternoon. Joseph was still not answering his mobile phone. It is not a popular tourist town and everything except the railway station was closed. I left my luggage with the station master and went for a walk. I followed the signs to the tourist information office and it was closed. A young man came to the door and asked me what I wanted. He invited me in and sat me down and introduced himself as Alberto Gobetti. I laughed at this. It was just like being back in the Eastern Wheatbelt where the Gobetti’s are a well known farming family. I told him why I’d come and he picked up the phone and said:

"I’ve got someone you might like to meet."

Fifteen minutes later Lazzaro (or Cici as they call him in Tirano) Bonazzi walked through the door. He grew up in Tirano in the thirties and forties and had lived in Australia since the early fifties. He was home to see his ailing father. After a few minutes he stood up and said:

"Where do you want to go?"

I pointed to a tiny village with a church hanging over a cliff half way up the mountain and said,

"Up there."

It was the magical village of Roncaiola and became the home of my protagonist.

For the next three days Lazzaro drove me around and told me what I wanted to know and introduced me to people I needed to meet. As a result I could get a sense of where Giuseppe might have come from and how his childhood might have shaped his personality. Giuseppe has Lazaro for a surname, not only because it suits the story, but because I wanted to pay tribute to Lazzaro Bonazzi who with his wife Myriam has done so much to help me with translations and to reacreate Tirano and Trieste. Lazzaro writes dictionaries and books of poems and collections of proverbs in the dialect of the area, so he was able to provide the translations for me. Myriam grew up in Trieste and talked to me about that beautiful city and described how it felt to be a "New Australian" in the fifties. And Lazzaro or Cici even eventually found Joseph for me, right at the end of my stay. (His mobile phone was out of order). I had just enough time left to consume a quantity of gelato with him on the terrace of one of the towns many gelaterias.

I also went to Israel and walked and walked the streets of Jerusalem following the steps of the Australian army nurses who were there during World War II. One I spoke to told me she had so loved Jerusalem that she and her friends would go there on every leave and walk the walls. You are no longer allowed to walk on the walls. In fact to walk there at all is to take your life in your hands now.

Back home I wrote with an album of tiny black and white photos open on my desk, taken by a nurse during World War II. I was able to piece together the character Eddy or Edith’s activities from the stories told to me by service men and women of that war and to understand their fascination. I stood in the Garden of Gethsemane and felt the magic that they had discovered sixty years ago when the Jews and Arabs were not fighting each other but fighting the Nazis and the Fascists.

People ask me how I came to choose the subject for my novel. When they do I think of something I read that Flaubert said to De Maupassant.

"There is a part of everything that is unexplored, because we are accustomed to using our eyes only in association with the memory of what people before us have thought of the thing we are looking at. Even the smallest thing has something in it."

Writing about the Eastern Wheatbelt was a great example of this. Although Europeans had not settled it until after World War I, there were already ways set down to look at it. The people who lived there were in a constant guerrilla war with it. There were truces – for example when the rain came at the right time and the mushrooms popped up and the dams filled and the wild geese flew in – but on the whole there was probably more hate than love towards it from the farmers trying to make a go of it. Even city people who had never been there had a strong and none too flattering opinion of it.

As children we sat in the fork of a mallee tree and read about England and North America. About the intense attachment these authors felt for hawthorne hedges and breathtaking mountains and icy streams of melting snow – of discovering the mosaic floor of a Roman ruin deep in the forest. In comparison – we had nothing. But I gradually came to know that it wasn’t nothing, it was just unexplored, in terms of words.

In the novel the place is as much a character as the people. I introduce Giuseppe from an opposite geography with fresh eyes to look at it as if for the first time and a captive who could not leave if he did not like what he saw. A good natured person who would look for the qualities of the place and its people.