On writing “Fetching the Flame”

by Janeen Samuel

The spark that ignited my story was a theory I had read that the First Tasmanians, isolated on their island for thousands of years, had lost the secret of how to make fire. So if a group’s fire ever went out they couldn’t make more but had to beg some from another group.

This theory was dreamed up by the White invaders after there was nobody left to ask and is quite likely not true. I have camped in Tasmania so I know that in some of the weather you get there it can be pretty well impossible to make a fire even if you have matches. So my story is not about the first Tasmanians at all (anyway, I believe it is up to their own descendants to tell their stories). But the idea of a people who have lost the secret of making fire took hold of my imagination.

I live in rural Victoria and in winter my main source of heat is a wood-burning stove which runs continuously. To make sure it burns through the night, I generally feed it a log around 3 o’clock in the morning. Occasionally I don’t wake up, and I get up in the morning to find the fire is out. That is always a real “Oh no!” moment, even though I have matches and dry paper and kindling, I can imagine, then, what it would be like for someone like Lahana to wake up and find she’d let her group’s fire go out.

That was the beginning of the story. But from that point ... Who knows where stories come from? You start a fire with a spark, but then you need to feed it fuel to keep it alight. So you grab a whole lot of items, pretty much at random, from the scrapheap of your memory, throw them on and see if they burn. In this case, some of the things I grabbed were wet bushwalks, myths about dragons, acts of kindness from strangers, and thoughts about what it might be like to be a girl in different kinds of societies.