The Making of The Limestone Road by Nicole Alexander

When my paternal grandfather wrote a letter home to his younger brother from the Western Front during the Great War, he penned this poignant line, ‘Don’t take this on at any cost.’

My great-uncle Dave may well have thought otherwise until my grandfather received a shrapnel wound to the head. One of the lucky ones, he survived and eventually made it home to our family property. My father remembered him staring at the horizon every morning, then raking a good fifty yards around the perimeter of the homestead. He did this every single day for the rest of his life. Dad, a young man eager for the workday to begin, could never understand this time-wasting exercise. I believe that through this repetitive, meditative practice my grandfather was trying to make order of the chaos he endured.

This personal anecdote has stayed with me for many years. How does a returned serviceman or woman overcome what they have witnessed and how do they assimilate back into normal life? I started writing The Limestone Road two years ago and it proved to be the most difficult novel I have attempted. I stopped and started. Put it aside and then began again feeling drawn to the subject matter even though I found it tough to write. For a novelist, war provides a compelling canvas. Within the maelstrom, there is brutal conflict and aching passion, humanity at its very best and its very worst. And with every word I wrote, the beat of history underlined the narrative.

In crafting The Limestone Road I wanted to explore male identity, kinship, the dynamics of family and the trauma of combat through a father-and-son relationship. Selecting the period 1944 for the main body of the story allowed me to weave a tale centred on Canning Christie and his father Michael as they take up a soldier-settler block in the southeast of South Australia following their return from active service in the North African campaign of 1942.

The Christie’s challenging re-entry into civilian life is made more difficult by Michael, a veteran of two world wars and a handsome, guitar-playing, womanising war hero. A man better suited to soldiering than normal society. In contrast, his dutiful, sensitive son Canning still reels from his experiences at the front and his lingering trauma is compounded by direct contact with Italian Prisoners of War (POWs) and a German fugitive considered an enemy of the state.

You can’t write about this period in Australia without stumbling across newspaper articles, letters and diary entries recording the rich history of soldier-settlers and Italian POWs. During World War Two Australia held internees of German, Japanese and Italian heritage as well as Italian and Japanese POWs. Italian POWs captured during the North African campaign arrived in South Australia’s southeast in early 1944 and were assigned to wood camps managed by the South Australian Department of Woods and Forests, where they were sent to work in the pine plantations. Those Italian POWs considered trustworthy were allocated to farms becoming a vital source of labour during the war.

Italian POWs assigned to farms in the greater Penola / Coonawarra district had contact with returned servicemen and women from World Wars One and Two, as well as soldier-settlers and their families. While the Italians were, in the main, warmly accepted into communities – Italy swapped sides and joined the Allies in 1943 – it was difficult for some Australians and veterans to accept their presence, particularly those Australian families who had sons in POW camps abroad or who had lost loved ones. There was also a hardcore element within organisations such as the Returned Sailors, Soldiers and Airmen Imperial League who complained that Italian POWs were forcing able-bodied men and women out of work and were being treated like kings while Australian soldiers held in POW camps overseas were neglected.

I chose the southeast of South Australia as the setting for The Limestone Road for numerous reasons. Firstly, its extraordinary landscape. Thanks to the easily eroded limestone that gives the region its name, the Limestone Coast area is latticed with caves, sinkholes and volcanoes, a feast for any novelist inspired by the natural world. Agriculture was and remains a dominant industry, and in the 1940s viticulture was on the rise with the eventual emergence of the Coonawarra region. A remnant vineyard on the block Canning and his father settle on becomes a link to Canning’s wartime experiences and the event that altered his war and his life.

As part of the research for The Limestone Road, I flew to Adelaide from Moree in northwest NSW via Sydney, then caught another flight to Mount Gambier, where I hired a vehicle and headed north to the Penola / Coonawarra region. Understanding the history of the area, its geology and geography and learning the intricacies of wine production was vital for the novel. Sampling the vintages was a bonus. I visited libraries, museums, historical societies, pine forests, vineyards, sinkholes and underground caves before taking the coastal road to Adelaide flanked by ancient dunes left by a retreating ocean.

Other areas of South Australia highlighted in the narrative include the fringes of the Strzelecki Desert, the Arckaringa Hills (Painted Desert) north of Coober Pedy and the Riverland region, western QLD, Tobruk, Cairo and El Alamein. The fringes of the Strzelecki Desert in far-west NSW is an extraordinary environment made up of quartz rock deposits, gibber plains and rolling red dunes. The light glitters across the landscape. There is a clarity to the air that stuns. Combined with the rich red of the land and infinite space, the spirituality that whispers of those who dwelt in these areas long before the arrival of white man is tangible. This is a place where space takes on new meaning. A rough, desolate land where a man doesn’t need to think too much about his worth.

The Limestone Road is a story of loyalty, love and the importance of memory, where the only way forward is through the past.