Inspiration
Mavis Thorpe Clark welcomed all experiences as potential background for her books - context and character; environment and setting; issue and adventure. During her lifetime she travelled extensively in Australia, Asia and Europe, recording her impressions in notebooks as she went. She could weave her experience of a forest, an isolated railway siding, a remote Aboriginal campfire or a news clipping into a story, giving it a breadth and depth celebrated by her readers.
While each story is unique, there are a number of enduring themes in the fictional work by Mavis Thorpe Clark:
- Recurrent themes - historical or contemporary setting, female and Aboriginal characters, search for identity and the dilemma of conservation vs development
The background for a number of books including The Min-Min and Spark of Opal unfolded during her travels in outback South Australia in the 1960s:
- Harold Darwin, Library Man - with whom Mavis and husband Harold Latham travelled in 1960, 1963 and 1966
- Outback South Australia - where Mavis fell in love with the "red earth" of her country
- Pastoral properties of South Australia - where Mavis made life-long friendships with families who lived there
Upon her return from her first trip to outback South Australia with Harold Darwin, Mavis wrote "Books in the Outback", an article which appeared in People magazine, 15 March 1961.
Inspiration for The Min-Min
- Railway siding - small community in the desert
- Outback school - one of the toughest in South Australia
- Sylvie - main character
- Min-min lights - mysterious and evocative natural phenomenon
- Knobby - Aboriginal character
- Tucker family - living in an isolated out-station
- Kingoonya - "capital of the north-west" with just 14 houses
Inspiration for Spark of Opal
- Coober Pedy - an opal-gouging town in the South Australian desert
Inspiration for Blue Above the Trees
- Gippsland - cleared of native forests during the 1850s
Inspiration for Pony from Tarella
- Bungle Boori - a Central Victorian farm
Inspiration for Iron Mountain
- Outback Western Australia - a bogged vehicle and the ladies who stopped the iron ore train
Inspiration for Pastor Doug: The Story of an Aboriginal Leader
- Doug Nicholls - who grew up on an Aboriginal reserve and became the only Australian Aborigine to be honoured with a knighthood
South Australian gibber country, 1960.
Saltbush, 1963.
Mavis and her husband Harold Latham travelled with Harold Darwin during the 1960s - this photo taken on their second trip in 1963.