All this a background to what is happening in the young Anna’s life, with her pregnancy and unhappy marriage. Research for the book was four-pronged, all of it fascinating.įirst the Germany of the second half of the nineteenth century: politically dynamic, with nation-building by Bismarck, carefully engineered foreign wars to create national identity, the development of steam power and railway systems, domestic upheavals with growth of industry and attempts like the Weavers’ Revolt to stem the changes that were destroying incomes. (Heartfelt apologies to the husband I gave her, my great-grandfather, who probably was a kindly, decent man, the antithesis of the Otto I have drawn.) The early chapters of the book have no basis in fact, but they serve my purpose well, putting her in contact with a way of life totally different from her home. The young real-life Anna is still unknown territory I had no material on her early days, so was free to be as inventive as I needed to be. From a rural family background, an early out of wedlock pregnancy and a marriage to a drunken and abusive husband, the Anna I have created has her own journey of discovery to make, into who she really is and what she might yet become. Primarily her search for her son, but even more fundamentally a woman’s search for herself. The book was no longer my search for Anna the focus became her search. That changed as I became more absorbed in her story, and realised how many unanswered questions there were.Ĭentral was the ‘why?’ Why would a very ordinary woman undertake an enterprise like this, to the horror of her family and friends? Other questions followed: how could she afford such a trip? How would she go about finding one young man in the scattered colonies that would later become Australia? As I began, the emphasis changed. The book’s title, In Search of Anna, perhaps reflects my initial intention, a research book about my own quest to find more about this intriguing woman. My own journey into the book was in itself a search. I’m pleased that Wakefield Press was willing to bring the project to fruition. Writing this book was a long-held ambition, and to see it finally launched early last year was in many ways the realisation of a dream. Their final reunion, in a small Riverina community of German settlers, is, however, a matter of fact. I know a little of how she traced him (family legend again), but most of my book you could call creative speculation. It was an almost unthinkable challenge for her. Her arrival in Melbourne – to face what? The last letter from her son, two years earlier, had been from Melbourne, saying that he was planning to head north to Queensland. Then the long steamship journey south – a voyage that was beset with difficulties and had problems that caused lengthy delays, creating a journey of almost 14 weeks. First the long trip from a little village in Silesia, train travel across Germany, through Berlin, westward to Hamburg and the shipping yards. I still marvel at the courage she showed. She must have been, because this farming woman of southern Germany set off, alone, on an unheard of journey in her way of life, to search for the son who had gone missing somewhere in the Australian colonies. Family lore tells me that she was intrepid, resourceful, and well in advance of her period, the late 1800s. I’ve lived with an old family story about her that fascinated me even more. She is the only one from an earlier generation, my great-grandmother, and her face has always intrigued me. She has lived in a sepia-toned print on the walls of my stairwell, in the company of assorted parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts. This search culminated in Valerie’s novel, In Search of Anna, a story that Valerie describes as a journey book, historical fiction, a study of motherhood, a detective novel, and a romantic tale all rolled into one. This week, Valerie Volk writes about her search for her distant relative Anna Werner, who in 1889 left the German town of Lewin to search for her son in the distant colonies of Australia. In a new series on the Wakefield Press blog, we’ve asked authors to write about the background, inspiration, research and work that goes into writing a book.
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