Author's Notes
‘An essential element of historical fiction is that it is set in the past and pays attention to the manners, social conditions and other details of the depicted period.’
Encyclopaedia Britannica
I’ve researched and studied Word War 1 for many years. I have always been and continue to be fascinated by the subject. My library is full of books most of which I’ve read several times and my collection of documentaries is huge. And I’ve taken many trips down the YouTube rabbit hole where there resides some of the most amazing lectures, hours of surviving Great War film footage along with hundreds of interviews with the survivors themselves - the veterans.
SOURCE: Anzac Day Commemoration Committee
In secondary school we watched and studied ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’. It sparked in me a passion for fiction set against the First World War. There have been many films made on the subject including Oscar Best Picture Award winners ‘Wings’ in 1929 and ‘1917’ in 2020; I’ve have watched them all. There have been many novels written too – Graves, Remarque, Hemingway, Barker, Elton, - and the wonderful Australian novel ‘My Brother Jack’ by George Johnston. All have inspired my writing.
Peter Weir’s movie ‘Gallipoli’ struck a more personal nerve when I learnt that my grandfather William Maddern had served with the 10th Lighthorse Regiment during WW1 – the same regiment featured in the film. Thankfully for my grandfather and his descendants, he was not there at the 10th’s disastrous charge on The Nek, the scene depicted in the final moments of the film,
where the hero Archie Hamilton, runs unarmed and hopelessly across no-man’s-land towards the Turkish trenches and his comrades in the 10th are mown down by machine-gun fire.
I always imagined if I were to write about the war it would be a non-fiction text but as time passed and writers such as Les Carlyon and Jonathan King produced their definitive their works, I wondered what undiscovered focus might be left to explore.
And then, unable to sleep one night, the seeds of a story floated through my semi-wakeful thoughts and the lead characters for ‘The Scent of Eucalyptus’ emerged in a kind of ‘two worlds collide’ scenario. I’d had this type of sleep-deprived epiphany before but had completely forgotten about it by the morning. This time though, when I awoke, the characters and the scene was still clear in my head and I made a bee-line to my lap-top to get the crux of it down!
- Geoff Maddern