Paul Jennings has just finished writing a new children's book while recovering from a quadruple bypass. He spoke to KATRINA LOVELL about his passion to return his property back to native bush.
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When Paul Jennings first started writing children’s books, he would handwrite them on paper and get the office ladies at the former Warrnambool Institute to type them up so he could send them to the publishers.
“I was really poor. I had six kids. I was paying them one dollar a page, which still seems fairly reasonable to me,” he said.
Jennings eventually borrowed a typewriter and spent two hours a day over six weeks learning how to type.
When he sat down to write his latest book, which is due out at Christmas, it was at his computer in his office which overlooks his 52-acre property on Hopkins Point Road he simply calls ‘The Forest’.
“It sounds like a fairly uninteresting name for a writer to come up with, not all that creative. I didn’t want the name to be gratuitous or too flash. That’s what I wanted to do, plant a forest, so I called it The Forest. Simple.”
When Jennings first purchased the property it was bare paddock with nothing growing on it except Kikuyu grass and a little Soldier Settlement house which had been moved there.
“I thought I would like to put it back to native bush, what it was like before white settlement, and as far as we could work out, the trees and shrubs and grasses we’ve got on here now are all indigenous to this area,” he said. “I’m sort of hoping that when I drop off the twig that whoever gets this place will leave it intact and not subdivide it all. It would be nice if it ended up being a park in amongst all those houses.”
He started the project about 16 years ago and completed it in three stages. The front of the property now has fully mature trees and the windy drive from the road to the house is just like driving through a forest.
“At first it was a bit disappointing. You could just see these little plants come up and get eaten by the rabbits, or died. But eventually it’s come up to a very mature and successful forest,” he said. “People told me it wouldn’t work because it was so windy and salty, but it has eventually become very successful and I’m very proud of it.
“It was a very therapeutic thing for me to do over a long period of time when I lived here on my own and to get out and work with your hands and to see nature regenerating. We’ve got scores and scores of birds here that were not here before.”
Jennings used to wake up to the sight of starlings on the powerlines and he used to put rubber snakes out to try and scare them away. But since his forest has grown, the starlings have disappeared, scared off by the birds that now inhabit the property which includes owls, eagles, fairy wrens, black parrots and New Holland honeyeaters.
Hesitant to reveal how much the project has cost for fear of putting people off doing it, Jennings said the initial outlay was about $60,000 to kill the grass and do the seeding. All up he has spent a “couple of hundred” on it.
“I did have a lot of help with it from the Hopkins River Landcare Group and even a bit of money from the government. All that helped. It is quite a big job because you’ve got the rabbits, the weeds,” Jennings said.
For years he worked alongside a contractor who would come out one day a week. Four other property owners in the area have done a similar thing to their land. “A lot of the species are very hard to find around here because all the original forests have been removed by farming, but you find remnants along the river banks where nobody’s bothered to get rid of them or along the coastal strips,” Jennings said.
“I’m totally passionate about it. It’s really good for your general health and feeling of wellbeing to have something you’re really passionate about. I’m really passionate about my writing of course. That’s very indoors and very solitary. This is a different type of thing. You’re using your hands as well as your mind.”
It was while working out in the garden about 16 months ago that he noticed he was unwell. “The only symptom I had was fatigue. I’d just get to lunch, I’d be so tired and I’d have to go and have a rest and I thought: ‘it’s old age’.”
His doctor ran tests and found he had five potential blockages in his heart. Within days he underwent a quadruple bypass. Jennings said he was lucky he didn’t have a heart attack. “I was pretty laid low by the bypass,” he said. “Writing is really fatiguing work. You don’t just sit and look at the nice view. You do actually use up physical energy when you write. It’s just like digging a hole or something.”
While he was recovering from the major surgery, Jennings wrote his latest novel – The Unforgettable Whatshisname – which he describes as whimsical, sad and funny (in a Charlie Chaplin kind of way). “It took me a year to write and I’m really happy with it. I think it’s probably the best book I’ve written for primary school children so far,” Jennings said.
The inspiration for the book came from a conversation with his wife, actor/author Mary-Anne Fahey, about shy and introverted children in a world that is dominated by social media and the ‘look at me’ pressures of Facebook. “Mary-Anne said that why don’t you do a boy who is so shy he blends into the environment like a chameleon. I said: ‘that’s a fantastic idea’.”
Aside from the one he has just finished, his first book Unreal! rates among his favourites - “because it was such a big wonderful thing. I used to think I would die before it was published. I used to carry it around with me.” Unreal! was published in 1985. “It was a really thin book - what my editor later told me was the toilet paper in the publishing game.”
Jennings said that he had vowed he would never use an exclamation mark in his fiction writing believing they were overused and a sign of weak writing. He would even make a point of it when lecturing at the Warrnambool Institute (now Deakin Uni). “When the book came out they put one on the cover, a dirty big one,” he said with a laugh.
When the book was first published, Jennings would ask shops if they had a copy – they never did. He finally found one in a shop in Apollo Bay, and then gradually they started to appear in shops. “My kids used to go around turning them face out,” he said.
“Then after a year it went on the bestseller list. I was quite gob-smacked and amazed. I started getting letters. In those days you got fan mail. These days you get emails and things. I’d get a bunch of letters from Perth or Cairns. I knew something was going on….”
Then the Children’s Television Foundation asked if they could use his stories for a TV show.
Despite not having written scripts before, Jennings convinced them to allow him to write the series – all 26 episodes of Round the Twist. “They wanted to do more but I dropped out then. I’d had enough. It’s incredible work. Draft after draft after draft.”
Jennings set the series in Port Campbell, thinking they could build a fake lighthouse for filming. But the cost of getting the whole cast and crew there meant that it was eventually filmed at the Aireys Inlet lighthouse.
The ladies who had typed up his original stories ended up playing extras in some of the episodes, and Jennings himself played some bit parts as well.
“They said I could be a ghost. The story was Without a Shirt. The story was the original story set in that little house in the middle of the Warrnambool cemetery about a kid whose dog digs up bones in the cemetery.” Most of Jennings’ scenes ended up on the cutting room floor.
“That was the end of my acting career,” he said.
After the series ended, Jennings worked on some cartoons and with a movie producer on a script. “The whole idea was I’m telling stories for our kids about our country. The Americans would put some money into it, but only if it had an American lead. So I said ‘no: ‘it’s got to be an Australian lead’.
“The producer said: ‘We’ve got an idea for you, Paul, which you’ll go for. We’ll use an African-American and he’ll be the lead of it’. So I said, ‘No. You can have an Aborigine but you can’t have an American’. Anyway, the whole thing ended up falling through.”
Jennings decided to stop writing scripts and go back to writing books.
