Ash Road

 

 

 

 

IVAN SOUTHALL was born in Melbourne in 1921. His first published story appeared in the children's pages of the
Herald
newspaper in 1933. Southall left school at the age of fourteen, following the death of his father, and worked in various jobs, including as a copy boy at the
Herald
. He captained a Sunderland Flying boat in the RAAF during World War II and was awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross after sinking a German U-boat. (Southall was always grateful that forty-one members of the crew were rescued.) Many of his early books were based on his wartime piloting experiences.

Southall met his first wife, Joy Blackburn, in England, and the couple returned to Australia after the war and lived in various semi-rural Melbourne suburbs. They had four children.

Southall's first children's book,
Meet Simon Black
, was published in 1950, and he went on to write more than thirty works for young adults and several for adults.
Ash Road
, published in 1965, followed
Hills End
in exploring realism and a stream-of-consciousness style of narration—a new direction for Southall and for Australian children's literature.

Southall's books were published widely internationally and he won more than twenty international awards including the Carnegie Medal in 1971 and four Children's Book Council of Australia awards in the 1960s and '70s for
Ash Road
,
To the Wild Sky
,
Bread and Honey
and
Fly West
.

In 1976 Southall married Susan Stanton. In 1981 he was awarded an Order of Australia, and in 2003 the Dromkeen Medal for services to children's literature. He died in 2008.

 

 

 

MAURICE SAXBY is recognised internationally as an authority on children's literature. He was the first national president of the Children's Book Council of Australia and has won numerous awards for services to children's literature including an Order of Australia in 1995 and the CBCA's Nan Chauncy Award in 2002. He lives in Sydney.

ALSO BY IVAN SOUTHALL

Simon Black series
(nine books)

Hills End

The Foxhole

To the Wild Sky

Sly Old Wardrobe,
pictures by Ted Greenwood

Let the Balloon Go

Finn's Folly

Chinaman's Reef is Ours

Bread and Honey

Josh

Benson Boy

Head in the Clouds

What About Tomorrow

King of the Sticks

The Golden Goose

The Long Night Watch

Rachel

Blackbird

The Mysterious World of Marcus Leadbeater

Ziggurat

Fourteen works of non-fiction

Seven novels for adults

 

 

 

textclassics.com.au

textpublishing.com.au

The Text Publishing Company

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22 William Street

Melbourne Victoria 3000

Australia

Copyright © The Estate of Ivan Southall 1965

Introduction copyright © Maurice Saxby 2013

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

First published by Angus & Robertson Publishers, Australia, 1965 This edition published by The Text Publishing Company 2013

Cover design by WH Chong

Page design by Text

Typeset by Midland Typesetting

Primary print ISBN: 9781922147493

Ebook ISBN: 9781922148537

Author: Southall, Ivan, 1921–2008 author.

Title: Ash Road / by Ivan Southall; introduced by Maurice Saxby.

Series: Text classics.

Subjects: forest fires—Australia—Fiction.

Australia—fiction.

Dewey Number: A823.4

 

 

CONTENTS

 

Baptised with Fire
by Maurice Saxby

 

Ash Road

Baptised with Fire
by Maurice Saxby

IN January 1962 the Southall family, living at Blackwood Farm, near Monbulk to the east of Melbourne, was imperilled by a bushfire that threatened their lives and forced them to flee.

Three years later, in 1965,
Ash Road
was published. The suffocating midsummer morning, the terror and sense of helplessness in an exploding world, and the frantic scramble to escape to a creek or a bare ploughed field described in the novel are drawn from Ivan Southall's experience. So too are the protagonists. Southall knew each farm and person in the area; from these lives and from a deep insight into what motivates and drives human beings he created the characters of his story.

Ash Road
was received with great acclaim, following the success of
Hills End
in 1962, and was awarded Australian Children's Book of the Year in 1966.

Southall already had a large following of loyal fans. The nine air adventures of Simon Black, a kind of Antipodean Biggles, written in the 1950s, were very popular with young, mostly male readers. Ivan was in demand for school visits and was increasingly being asked to talk to teachers, librarians and students of children's literature. On such occasions he could disarmingly mock his own persona by describing Simon Black as tall, dark and handsome—‘the heroic version of me'. He would act out a series of disasters, escapes and last-minute rescues to the delight of his audience, young or old. I was present on one such occasion and afterwards wrote a note of appreciation. He replied immediately, and we became lifelong friends.

In those early talks and lectures he spoke of his time as a bomber pilot with the RAAF, based at Pembroke Dock in Wales during World War II, and he was especially candid when describing the fear brought on by combat operations. Fear is a dominant theme in much of his writing and is a looming presence in almost every chapter of
Ash Road
, from Grandpa Tanner's first sniff of smoke in the hot early morning air.

Ivan also described the difficulties of life as a soldier-settler farmer after the war. Crops were often destroyed by natural disasters, rabbits, or by plagues of insects. The episodes in
Ash Road
when old man George tyrannically drives both himself and his conscientious daughter Lorna in their desperate efforts to save the threatened raspberry crop and the sprouting baby carrots are taken from life: ‘It was a frantic season, a frantic struggle,' he said.

In a lecture he gave at the University of Washington in 1974 titled ‘Real Adventure Belongs to Us'—a version of which I have heard him repeat locally—Ivan told of the epiphany that led to his exploring the inner strengths of kids in his writing. On a wet Sunday he and his wife Joy and their children were visiting his brother and family. With a head throbbing from the noise Ivan asked, ‘What would happen to these kids if we were not here to pick up the pieces, say, for a year or a month—or even a week? What would happen if they were left?'

‘They'd die,' replied Ivan's brother.

Ivan pondered; then came the lightning bolt: ‘Real kids, a group of kids like ours, as we used to be ourselves, would confront all the hazards, all the wonders of being alive.'

This was the genesis of a new direction in Southall's novels. In
Ash Road
,
Hills End
and
To The Wild Sky
children face adversity on their own—not as super-kids, but as real children with strengths and frailties. The three boys, Harry, Graham and Wallace, who have set out on a bush camping trip in
Ash Road
are ‘old enough, surely, to take care of themselves and to keep out of trouble for a few days'. But before long they face an inferno, not only of fire but of guilt, anxiety and self-examination.

The novel is concerned primarily with the effects of disaster on individuals. Every character of whatever age, sex, or circumstance is pushed to the limits of their strength and, ultimately, to a deeper self-knowledge. The practical, down-to-earth Lorna George veers towards hysteria when her father collapses in the raspberry patch. Frightened and defiant, she shouts taunts at Wallace when he refuses to help, and orders him off the property. Wallace, ready to respond aggressively, hears his father's voice warning him to hold his strength back, control himself ‘or you'll bite off more than you can chew'.

Colin Thiele's
February Dragon
, published in the same year, was also about a bushfire. Mavis Thorpe Clark's
Wildfire
(1973) and, twenty years later, Roger Vaughan Carr's
Firestorm
—dedicated to the memory of the children of South Australia and Victoria who lost their lives in the Ash Wednesday bushfires of 1983—have an exemplary sense of purpose. But it is
Ash Road
that best conveys the sense of panic caused by fire, along with the psychological repercussions of fear and guilt.

Southall achieved this by revealing the inner lives of his characters through the stream-of-consciousness style that he developed more fully in
Josh
, five years later. He also demanded that the reader maintain a hold on parallel stories told from the points of view of different characters in short dramatic episodes, something that was not common, even in Southall's novels, until
Ash Road
.

Ash Road
may be the most emotionally tense of Southall's early novels. The sensory imagery is quietly controlled but has devastating force:

There were spirals of wind laden with leaves and dust, and the gate, off its latch, banged open and shut. And there were other sounds: giant trees along the roadside groaning mightily, and other living things that Peter could not see, screaming.

This was not how he imagined it would be.

 

Those spirals of wind become forces of change in the life of each character, but especially for Peter Fairhall. Overprotected and frustrated at the restraints on his freedom, when faced with the approaching fire he becomes fully aware of the situation: of himself, and of what could well be the plight of his Gran. And he runs as he has never run before—with elation at his newfound courage.

He knew, without being able to frame the words, that he was running into manhood and leaving childhood behind. He hated childhood. He ran away from it with joy. He was ready to prove himself a man; ready to be baptised a man with fire, whether he survived the ordeal or died from it. He didn't care about the cost, except that his Gran should live to know—and that everyone should know—that her life had been given back to her by him.

 

I remember strongly identifying with Peter when I first read
Ash Road
. Rereading now after so many years—and so many terrible fires—I was struck afresh by the universality of all of Ivan's characters. At this distance I can see more clearly bits of myself in almost every one of the characters in
Ash Road
. Each of those involved with the fire, not only the children but also the adults, face their own Golgothas—and do so courageously.