“I’ve always wanted to write a book,” Tanya Sawyer says.
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“They say everyone’s got a book in them, and I went, ‘you know what? Pull your finger and do it!’”
“I just got up one Saturday morning and thought to myself ‘I’ve got a good idea’. And I grabbed a cup of coffee, sat down on the verandah in my jammies and wrote until about 2.00 in the afternoon. And I went ‘I’ve done it! But what do I do now?’”
10 years on, and the local landscaper from Wingham Nursery and Florist has published her first novel.
One Horizon blends the factual story of the shipwrecked Dutch ship, the Zuytdorp, on the Western Australian coast in 1712 with the theory that survivors from that shipwreck came ashore and were helped by Aboriginal people, perhaps even becoming part of their tribe.
“We went to Sydney and I saw this book with all these coins on it. I got home and read it from front to back in no time flat so I researched on the internet and now my whole attic is fully of research material.”
The book that started it all was Phillip Playford’s award winning non-fiction work Carpet Of Silver: The Wreck Of The Zuytdorp.
“I knew I was absorbed with the shipwreck thing, but when I started researching the Aboriginal people it was such an eye opener, because I was reading obscure things that weren’t taught at school,” Tanya says.
After years of research on both the shipwreck and the local Aboriginal people, Tanya decided that she couldn’t write about a place she’d never been to.
Her first visit to Shark Bay in WA cemented her obsession with Aboriginal culture and history.
“That thing that really sparked it for me was I took an evening cultural tour with Wula Guda Nyinda Eco Adventures. I think it went for about two hours. I came back, and I felt like I’d just been reborn and learnt about the universe,” Tanya says.
The result of all of Tanya’s research is a cracking story, full of fascinating details of Aboriginal life in the harsh desert environment.
Her goal was to have it published before the Dirk Hartog 400th Anniversary Commerations in WA in October 2016, so she could launch the book there.
She self-published the book, and picked her 100 copies up two days before she and husband, Chris, left to drive to WA, selling almost half of them at the festival and on the road.
She has a few copies left, and Taree Library has a copy for loan on the recommendation of a reader.
Tanya is now busy trying to find a publishing house to take her book to, and researching ebook options.
She plans to go back to WA, this time to Kalbarri, as she wants to write a second novel that follows on with the Aboriginal side of her first novel.
“It will be another journey. Hopefully it won’t take another 10 years!”
Tanya has some words of advice to others: “It pays to leave your comfort zone behind sometimes. There is more reward in doing just that, than anything else you'll do in your life.”