Market Blues
Selected by the Australian Centre for Youth Literature as one of 150 Most Treasured Victorian books
Shorlisted for the Aurealis Award 2001
CBCA Notable Book 2002
Things unravel so fast. One day Sam is a kid with a straightforward life, next moment he’s sucked into a time warp and flung back a hundred years. Meeting Flea, Gertie and the gang is just the start of a crazy adventure with Sam on the run from police, sleeping outside the morgue, laying bets on horse races, fighting thieves and larrikins.An accident in a shooting gallery confronts Sam with the hardest decision he’s ever had to make. Can he change the past – and his own future?
The How and Why of Market Blues
I love shopping at the Queen Victoria Markets in Melbourne, especially in the early hours of the morning when everything looks so fresh, cool and colourful. The Queen Victoria Markets is in the heart of Melbourne and is 123 years old so it’s rich in stories and history – just my kind of place!
One autumn morning, a year or so before I started writing Market Blues,
I was shopping at the Queen Victoria Markets and met a boy working on one of the stalls. I don’t think he would remember that first time we met.
I was just another customer for him but for me, he was the beginning of a big adventure. The boy’s name was Callum Keamy and he was working on his parent’s fruit and vegetable stall. I’ve always been interested in the way kids find work in the world and Callum was quick and efficient at his job though he couldn’t have been much more than ten years old at the time.
I started watching the way kids worked all over the market and formulating an idea for a novel about a boy that worked there.
I fell into conversation with many of the stall holders and started asking questions. Earl Hamilton, one of the older stall holders who sells the best, crunchiest apples, told me about his childhood at the market. It was through him that I discovered that much of the market place was built over an old cemetery. That was the moment that I decided that my novel would have to be a time travel story. There were so many fascinating layers of history all over the market that I just had to work into the story – including all those dead bodies right under our feet!
Market Blues took countless hours of research.
I spent heaps of time in the State Library finding
out about the history of Melbourne. I haunted the Queen Victoria Market at all hours of the day and studied their archives. I talked to historians and market workers, musicians and Year 7 students to bring all the different elements of Market Blues together. Fortunately, I was given a grant from Arts Victoria to help me with all the work involved in researching the book.
When I was a kid, I hated it if I found out later that something I’d read in a book of historical fiction turned out to be wrong so I worked hard at making sure Market Blues was accurate in its descriptions of early Melbourne. Like all big cities, Melbourne has intriguing pockets of history that most people aren’t aware of as they hurry past its old buildings.
Because I often wrote about science when I was writing non-fiction, I also spent hours studying all the different theories of time-travel for Market Blues. I love reading popular science. It’s really good exercise for your mind and there is nothing more brain stretching than thinking about quantum physics. Even though it’s not really possible to fall down a wormhole just because you’re standing next to an old tombstone, I loved thinking through the principles of time travel and figuring out how I could make them work for Sam.
Sam was a great character to write about. I took all sorts of characteristics from boys I knew to create him. The boy on the cover of the book is called Matthew Taft. He doesn’t look exactly like I imagined Sam to look but he’s a bit like him. Matthew read Market Blues when it was just a draft and made lots of useful comments about the story and the different characters. Another friend of mine, Petros Miller, who was in Year 7 while I was writing Market Blues, also gave me great advice so when the book was launched at the Queen Victoria Markets in February 2001, Petros read a scene from the book.
Creating the characters from 1900 was a different sort of challenge. Luckily, I had come across a collection of papers from a boy’s club that had been in operation at the turn of the 20th Century. It was called The Melbourne City Newsboys Club and their archives were full of details about how the boys from 1900 lived and worked in the streets. Creating Flea, Boots and all the gang of boys that they mixed with was made much easier through reading about how the real boys of the past had lived. But creating the character of Gertie was much trickier. Girls in 1900 led lives that were very constrained by all sorts of social and economic restrictions and piecing together a true picture of how they lived was a difficult task. Some of the stories I eventually uncovered led me to start thinking about writing the first book in the Children of the Wind series, Bridie’s Fire.
It’s one of the things I love about writing historical fiction; every story leads you to another story. History is woven together by so many incredible strands. When you discover one beautiful coloured thread, you can be sure that if you follow it through, it will lead you to a vast and complex tapestry of stories.
What the critics wrote about Market Blues
"Market Blues is a wonderful evocation of turn-of-the-century Melbourne life, with a time-travelling teenager facing more than his fair share of troubles both now and a hundred years ago."
Judges Comments
Aurealis Awards
March 2002
“In Market Blues, Kirsty Murray imagines a twelve-year-old Greek-Australian boy named Sam (Savvas) Sullivan being jettisoned back in time to Melbourne in 1900. With poetically suggestive chapter titles such as ‘Arc of a Yo-yo’ and ‘Angels and Black Water’, you sense you’re in for something special here, and Murray’s deliciously crafted prose does not disappoint.
This is an action-packed tale in which Federation, gambling, music and poetry each play a part. It also weaves its way around the topic of divorce and broken families, in a subtle and extremely satisfying manner. Murray has created a classic time-slip fantasy which explores Sam’s problems metaphorically, and which ‘tugs at the heartstrings’, in a moving evocation of a bygone era.”
Robyn Sheahan-Bright
Australian Book Review
February, 2001
"Murray achieves this transposition [time travel] without being preachy and with plenty of fascinating period detail. Market Blues is exciting, ambitious and unputdownable for early and pre-teenage readers.”
Mike Shuttleworth
The Sunday Age
February 18, 2001
"Market Blues is an unpredictable and gripping narrative, incorporating a huge cast and research with apparently effortless ease…Murray won me over, drawing complex parallels between past and present that illuminated both eras."
Jenny Pausacker
Weekend Australian
November 2001
"Magical realism in your own back yard."
Education Age
December 2001
Links
The Queen Victoria Market has its own website with information about opening hours of the market and everything else you need to know about how it operates:
www.qvm.com.au
The PLC webquest site has terrific links to great sites that can fill you in on more about the history of Melbourne and the era of federation. Check it out at:
www.kirstymurray.com/mktblues/index.htm