India Dark
NEW!
BASED ON A TRUE STORY
Daisy opened her mouth and lies flew out. Her face so pink and white, her lips so plump and sweet, her lies so vile. I had to cover my ears.
I shut my eyes, wanting to block out the courtroom, to neither see nor hear the evil; but Tilly grabbed my arm and twisted the skin on my wrist in a Chinese burn.
‘Poesy Swift,’ she whispered, her breath hot against my neck, ‘open your eyes and take that look off your face. We will never get home if you ruin everything.’
MADRAS 1910: Poesy and Tilly are caught in a scandal that will change their lives forever. Singing and dancing across a hundred stages as members of a troupe of Australian child performers, they travel by steam train into the heart of India. But as one disaster follows another, money runs short and tempers fray. What must the girls do to protect themselves and how many lives will be ruined if they try to break free?
India Dark is a story of things kept secret, of conflicting wills and desires, set against the heat dust of a lost Empire.
The How and Why of India Dark
In July 1909, twenty-nine young Australian performers, aged between seven and eighteen years of age, boarded a steam ship at Port Melbourne. They were meant to be setting out on a two-year world tour but eight months later, the tour ended in scandal in South India.
The children were members of Pollard’s Liliputian Opera Company. The first version of the Pollard company was formed in Tasmania in the 1870s. It began as a family troupe of eighteen brothers and sisters and their parents. Many of the children of the original family troupe grew up to form their own versions of the company and they toured the world for decades. From the 1880s onwards, the Pollards began recruiting children from working-class families and training them to sing, dance and perform ‘Lilliputian’ versions of famous music hall hits.
Piecing the story of the 1909/10 together was like assembling a jigsaw puzzle when half the pieces are missing.
I decided to ficitonalise the story because I knew I could never be sure enough of every detail to be able to confidently declare it fact. There were so many conflicting versions of what happened reported in the press. I hope the novel captures what it meant to be a child involved in the troupe in a way a strictly factual account could never achieve.
I first came across the story in 2002, when I was researching the first book in the Children of the Wind series, Bridie’s Fire.. I wanted my character, Bridie, to be involved in a tent theatre company so I drove up to the gold fields to interview Peter Freund, a theatre historian and archivist at Her Majesty’s theatre in Ballarat. At the end of the interview, Peter opened a drawer in his desk and drew out an essay that he had written entitled ‘Children Half Price – An account of the demise of Pollard’s Lilliputian Opera Company . “Someone,” he said “Should write a children’s book about these kids.”
It was a long time before I took up Peter’s challenge but after reading his essay, I knew he was right. There was an epic story behind the basic facts. Peter had presented his paper at an historian’s conference but the story was not well known. So much of the detail had been lost in the course of a century.
When I finally completed Children of the Wind in 2006, I fished out Peter’s essay from my files and read it once again. It was a story that wouldn’t leave me alone. Despite how daunted I felt at the prospect of researching such a complex subject, I began gathering research material and mapping out what I would need to do in order to understand the story.
I spent hundreds of hours at the State Library of Victoria researching Melbourne in 1910, the theatre scene in the Edwardian era and everything I could find about Australia’s historical connection to India. I poured over maps to clarify my understanding of the geography of the children’s journey and read every newspaper report that I could find about what had happened to them during the tour. Thankfully, the SLV gave me a creative fellowship that allowed me to fully explore their collections, including the wonderful William Alma Magic Collection. I found so much treasure the novel started to sprawl in all directions. There was almost too much to embed in one story.
There are few secondary sources (history books) about the Empire theatre circuit in Asia. From the 18th Century, British and then Australian theatre troupes toured every corner of the British Empire. When I first heard about the Pollard’s, I thought they must have been unique. But as I began to study some of the primary sources (newspapers and theatre magazines) I discovered they were only following the example of other performers and theatre companies. There were dozens of troupes that toured Asia, India and South Africa, many of them children’s troupes. It was a lucrative route for many companies and performers as audiences in colonial outposts were hungry for European, British and English-speaking entertainers. Australian companies were particularly keen on touring South Asia as it was so close to home. Children’s troupes were economical to tour as the children’s wages were relatively low and they were cheap to feed and house as well as being subject to less expensive fares.
New Zealand theatre historian, Peter Downes, in his book ‘The Pollards’ details the history of a New Zealand branch of the Pollard Lilliputian Opera Company. It proved a valuable resource. Peter was endlessly helpful in providing material to help flesh out the story of the Pollards and without his assistance, my novel would have been much more difficult to write.
In February 2007, I traveled to India to take up a three-month Asialink residency at the University of Madras and begin the Indian leg of my research. Madras has become one of the biggest cities in India and in 1996 its name was changed to Chennai.
When the children visited there in 1910, there were 500,000 people in the city. Now there are over six million. Despite the huge growth of the city, it retains much of its historic charm. A wonderful local historian, S. Muthiah, helped me understand the history of Madras/Chennai and I also managed to access original court records at the High Court of Madras. So much research for fiction involves envisioning sensual detail, trying to evoke the living experience of a time and a place that I could never have written the book without visiting India.
In the course of two years, I visited most of the places that the children had stayed both in India and across Southeast Asia including Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia. Many people opened their homes to me and shared their knowledge of their cities and the history of their homes. I was very lucky to be shown so much hospitality and support. And every person I met added something else to my understanding of the story I was trying to write.In many ways, India Dark has been the most difficult book that I have ever written. At times I thought I’d never be able to pull all the different threads together. Stories based on fact aren’t easier to write than those that are totally made up – sometimes the truth is so huge and shapeless that it defies anyone who attempts to understand it.
As Mark Twain once wrote: “It's no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.”
Writing India Dark took me to places that I never dreamt I’d visit and forced me to think about the world in a very different way. Every book I’ve ever written has led me to new stories, other projects and other places. I suspect the things I learned and the stories I heard while researching India Dark will generate more books than I will ever live long enough to write.
What the critics wrote about India Dark
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