All Our Shimmering Skies: An Interview with Trent Dalton

All Our Shimmering Skies

Trent Dalton captured Australia’s imagination with his phenomenal debut Boy Swallows Universe.

In this interview, Mary Martin bookseller and eager fiction writer Cameron Dusting asks the acclaimed journalist and bestselling author about his second novel, All Our Shimmering Skies. Australian history, Homer’s Odyssey, and creative advice – Dalton gives us a generous look into his brilliant writing mind.

Boy Swallows Universe was heavily inspired by your life. To what extent was All Our Shimmering Skies inspired by your own experience?

It’s a deeply personal novel wrapped inside a wild adventure love story ode to this beautiful land of ours called Oz. The book’s deepest foundations were built on very private and profound discussions I would have with the sky, talking somewhat whimsically and mystically and emotionally to what I am only now beginning to realise were the people I’ve loved and lost. The sky can be your best friend sometimes. The perfect listener. It doesn’t respond in nervous nods and awkward glances. It responds in lightning.

This novel is about a 12-year-old girl, Molly. Would you like young adults to read All Our Shimmering Skies?

I think it would be the greatest thing in the world if young adults embraced this book. There’s so much of the good young adult stuff that matters in there. The good lesson stuff. There is no dark destiny that you can’t turn into light. The bad things that happen will not be the destruction of you, they will be the making of you. Never be afraid to step into adventure. Never be afraid to dig for your answers to the questions only you can ask. All you need is love. If you can’t find love in family then go find it in a friend.

Molly is such a strong female character. Do you have any favourite literary heroines?

Rosasharn Joad isn’t the most obvious hero from The Grapes of Wrath but she’s at the heart of the most heroic and the most beautiful moment I can recall reading in all of literature, that great act of kindness that unfolds in the final pages of Steinbeck’s masterwork.

This girl who seemed so superficial, too distracted by her own self to see the things that were going on around her – the world is ending for the have-nots – turns into this extraordinary woman capable of carrying out this great act of selflessness. She wins one back for herself in that moment and she wins one back for humanity. Whatever comes, she reminds us all, be kind.

I wondered whether you intended any connection between the second half of the novel and the Ancient Greek poem, The Odyssey. Or am I just reading too much into it?

Wonderful question because you’re spot on. Absolutely was my intention. The Odyssey narrative was probably the one story, before all others, that hooked my three older brothers and I onto the notion of storytelling. That story is in my blood and in the bones of my writing hand. So it’s there unconsciously in the big picture narrative stuff – piling obstacle upon obstacle before our hero  – and it’s there in the characters Molly encounters. The song of the siren, Polyphemus the cyclops and his cave, and the easy lives of the ‘lotus eaters, who did them no hurt, but gave them to eat of the lotus, which was so delicious that those who ate of it left off caring about home’.

You could say the same thing about all the heroin users from Boy Swallows Universe. Those who ate of it left off caring about home. That’s a human need older than Homer, sometimes we just want to stop caring about home.   

‘That’s the journo in me coming out in the novel…. Interested in everything. The workings of the heart, the flight paths of eagles, the smell of an outhouse in the heart of Smith Street, Darwin, in the heat of February, 1942.’

You seem to have vast knowledge about things ranging from Australian flora, to Aboriginal and Japanese folklore, to World War II technology. Did you do a lot of research when you were writing the book?

That’s the journo in me coming out in the novel. A good longform journalist is a good listener, first and foremost, and after that they must be curious. Interested in everything. The workings of the heart, the flight paths of eagles, the smell of an outhouse in the heart of Smith Street, Darwin, in the heat of February, 1942. Doesn’t matter what you dive into, just make sure you dive deep.

I happen to consider the bombing of Darwin the single most dramatic and, in turn, compelling, moment in modern Australian history. It was a welcome rabbit hole to slip down and I still haven’t made my way out of its labyrinth.

The flora and fauna wonders that Molly sees is just me walking through every park I’ve ever walked through across Australia. I stop and gasp at stick insects and rhinoceros beetles and spider webs just like Molly Hook does in the book. I like to look at the crazy magnificent design of these things like I’m seeing them all for the first time. Like I’ve landed into a strange paradise from a distant planet and I can’t get my tiny brain around the wonder of earth. That also happens to be exactly how that beloved fallen Japanese fighter pilot Yukio Miki sees the magical wilderness of deep Northern Australia. He’s still not sure if he’s crash-landed on Australia or, in fact, the plains of high heaven.

The book is set during the 1942 Bombing of Darwin. Your story features Aboriginal, Australian and Japanese characters. Was it important to you to present a variety of perspectives on our history?

It was essential to me to convey the bustling, frontier nature of this extraordinary place called Darwin at this time. This was, in many ways, a wild west town formed in the northern tip of a most assuredly wild continent.

It was as multicultural as an Australian city could possibly get. Greeks, Italians, Chinese, Filipinos, Germans, Thais, Malaysians, and labourers from New Guinea and the South Sea Islands forced onto boats and sent to work in what some considered hell and what others considered a rum-smelling heaven where work and luck and gold and death and transformation awaited anyone. Nobody ever found themselves in Darwin by chance. You were running from someone or running to something that would turn you into someone else. That’s fertile soil to plant a story in.

What have you been reading during the pandemic?

The Binding by Bridget Collins, The Mother Fault by Kate Mildenhall, Flea’s psychotropic memoir Acid For The Children, a wonderful rugby league trivia book called Stuff You May Have Missed by Andrew Voss, The Truth Hurts by Andrew Boe, which is essential reading for anyone interested in making Black Lives Matter in Australia. I was given a book called Stoner by a very well-read Brisbane book club group that I dropped in on. It’s by a seemingly overlooked genius named John Williams and it’s got nothing to do with pot and it’s magnificent.

Television rights have been secured for your debut novel, Boy Swallows Universe. This is exciting! How do you feel about it?

The boys in that book are essentially a crystallisation of my very real and wondrous three older brothers and a lot of myself. One of the things that always helped those boys escape from anywhere and anything was the hockshop Panasonic television set that sat in the corner of our living room in housing commission Bracken Ridge.

If the universe allows – if the gods of pop culture and Hollywood allow it – there could be some kid on some night in housing commission Bracken Ridge in 2020 who turns on their television and sees the story of Boy Swallows Universe unfolding in live action and that kid might just see their own story in it. And if that kid is watching and if those filmmakers have done their job right then that kid will learn the great secret of that book. It gets good. No matter how bad it gets, at some point, it has to get good. Yeah, I feel pretty good about it.

Do you have any advice for people who would like to try to write their own novel?

Do not think for a second that your voice and your story doesn’t belong on a shelf somewhere. Every black ink letter put on a blank page is more useful to the world than what was there before. Nothing comes from nothing. Finish what you start. Write the first draft with your heart. Don’t let that disloyal and treacherous and scaredy-cat brain say a single word to you until you’ve reached that final full stop.

What are you up to next?

I’m currently sitting in quiet spaces across Brisbane scribbling the bone structure story beats of my third novel.

I got a chill down my spine just yesterday morning sitting inside a café in Woolloongabba, waiting for my Toyota to be serviced. The chill down the spine is a great thing because the spine don’t lie. The brain can lie to you but the spine isn’t capable of it. It can only react. And when you get that chill down the spine that’s when you gotta start diving down the story rabbit hole and chase that feeling. So that’s all I’m doing now, sitting around in quiet places waiting for my spine to talk.

You can read our reviews of All Our Shimmering Skies and Boy Swallows Universe on our Books We Love page.

$29.99