Twice in the last week Black Jack Ander­son has come out of hid­ing and made his pres­ence felt.

On Mon­day 26th March there was an arti­cle on page nine of The West Aus­tralian show­ing a photo of a cave on Mid­dle Island where archae­ol­o­gists are hop­ing to even­tu­ally find the valu­ables Ander­son left behind when he was mur­dered in 1835.

And on Tues­day 27th March Lor­raine Hors­ley from ABC Regional Radio, Kal­go­or­lie con­tacted me about a seg­ment she was prepar­ing for her Morn­ing Show the next day. Lor­raine had not seen the arti­cle in The West, but had been told about death adders on Sandy Island, in the Recherche Arch­i­pel­ago, whose pres­ence had been attrib­uted to Anderson.

Coin­ci­dence? Or has our elu­sive pirate been vis­it­ing us again?

If you are in Albany any time in the next week or so, go to Dolly Pettit’s house (located in front of the Police Precinct on Stir­ling Ter­race) and walk up the wooden stair­case to the land­ing. I would not be sur­prised if you were to find Ander­son there, vis­it­ing Dolly. She will be  in her chair wait­ing for him, doz­ing in front of the fire­place, in her bed­room on your right.

The stair­case in Dolly Petit’s House. The ghost of Black Jack Ander­son walks up these stairs to make sure that Dolly is safe.

This week I have had a wave of con­tacts from both stu­dents and teach­ers, mostly from New South Wales and Vic­to­ria. It is always great to hear from peo­ple. One stu­dent had just read, and loved, Graf­fiti on the Fence. He then went off to the library and found Wild Wind and Some­one Like Me.

A teacher who read Some­one Like Me to her class last year con­tacted me to see if there was an audio ver­sion avail­able. She is plan­ning to read the book to this year’s class and thought some of her stu­dents might ben­e­fit from being able to hear as well as see the book. The Asso­ci­a­tion for the Blind in WA is nego­ti­at­ing with Pen­guin at the moment to pro­duce CD and Mp3 ver­sions so we have our fin­gers crossed that an audio ver­sion will become avail­able again soon. If not she will use the paper­back, as she did last year.

It is great to know that there are still peo­ple dis­cov­er­ing my books for the first time and really enjoy­ing them. I am always happy to reply to emails and to answer any ques­tions that read­ers might have. So con­tact me and make my day!

Cover of Some­one Like Me by Elaine Forrestal

Cover design by John Canty

Fol­low­ing on the suc­cess of Deep Water and Leav­ing no Foot­prints, eText Press has now pub­lished Wild Wind: An Eden-Glassie Mys­tery. I am par­tic­u­larly pleased about this because it means that two of the four Eden Glassie Mys­ter­ies are now avail­able as eBooks. All those teach­ers who are using the series in their class­rooms will now be able to access the whole quar­tet again.

Stone Cir­cle and Black Earth are still avail­able as print copies, but as the rights revert to me, they will also become avail­able as eBooks.

Deep Water is also avail­able in CD and Mp3 for­mat from the Asso­ci­a­tion for the Blind in WA. Wild Wind is being pro­duced as I type and the other titles in the series are due to fol­low shortly.

What an amaz­ing vari­ety of ways we have to tell our stories!

Enjoy!

On Sun­day Black Jack Ander­son and Straggler’s Reef were fea­tur­ing in a Writer’s Fes­ti­val ses­sion where par­tic­i­pants got to peep into the inner work­ings of the Bat­tye Library. For writ­ers like me the Bat­tye is the first place I go to check out facts and learn more about a char­ac­ter or place that I think I might write about.

When I needed details of the wreck of the Lancier on Straggler’s Reef in 1839, and the loss of the chest that con­tained 7000 pounds Stir­ling worth of sil­ver coins, the Bat­tye revealed just what a price­less trea­sure trove it is.

Almost ten years later, when all I had was the name Black Jack Ander­son and a pass­ing ref­er­ence to Mid­dle Island, the Bat­tye again came up trumps. The Bat­tye com­puter ran rings around Google and instantly came up with five ref­er­ences to West­ern Australia’s own pirate who was ‘the scourge of the South­ern Ocean’ from 1825 to 1835 and could ‘dis­ap­pear with the speed of a west­erly wind’ when­ever he was being pur­sued by the law.

Of course I wrote many other books dur­ing the ten year period between Straggler’s Reef and Black Jack Ander­son. And every one of them required research into some aspect of the story. The Bat­tye Library is almost a sec­ond home to me. All my archives are now kept there and it is always a great treat to be able to spend a day immersed in its fas­ci­nat­ing col­lec­tion of West Aus­tralian history.

Elaine For­re­stal sign­ing copies of Black Jack Ander­son at the State Library where the Bat­tye is housed.

Rose de Freycinet going ashore in Dili with her hus­band, Louis

The mod­ern day jour­ney of Rose de Freycinet has become almost as event­ful as her orig­i­nal voy­age around the world in 1817. Her story has been to Mel­bourne, to France, to Fre­man­tle and yes­ter­day she returned to Mel­bourne, albeit to a dif­fer­ent location.

And she still has a long way to go.