The ideas for A Walk in the Dark came from various sources.

A couple of years ago, I read an article in the New York Times about the Dutch tradition of ‘the dropping’.  Children, usually pre-teen, are literally dropped in a forest in the middle of the night and they have to find their way home. It’s a team building exercise that is designed to build resilience, independence and ability to negotiate challenges that a walk in the dark presents!

As soon as I read this article, I thought it was a great starting-off point for a story. And I had been wanting to write an adventure story with a classic structure for a while. When I was young, I loved the books of Ivan Southall. He often pitted his young characters against the elements – bushfires, floods, fog – or he set up physical challenges, for example in To The Wild Sky in which kids have to fly a light plane when the pilot suffers a heart attack. So I think I always wanted to write an Ivan Southall-style plot. Southall also wrote about kids who didn’t necessarily fit in, and that has also been a natural preoccupation of mine.

A Walk in the Dark is set in the Otway ranges, which is a location very close to my heart. I have been holidaying in this area for 30 years, and I love walking the forest tracks behind Lorne and Apollo Bay. I wanted to explore the idea of the forest as a symbol of our own darkness, like in so many fairy tales.

Australian forests have been associated with lost children. As a child, I loved Frederick McCubbin’s painting ‘Lost’. I think I write about loss a lot because to me, the end of childhood, which is the age of the characters I write about, embodies both growth and loss.

 I hope you enjoy A Walk in the Dark!