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Wendy's Comments: Arabella
 Wendy's Comments:
Throughout my childhood my father told us stories of his father's days at sea, especially during the 1920s, when he was a mate on a fast, three masted ship - a rum runner sailing out of Vancouver, on Canada's west coast, to the dry American states during Prohibition. Although I don't remember Grandpa ever telling me any of these stories himself, I always associated him with the sea - the rocky beach was only a steep twenty metres away from his house, and the house itself was so small that there wasn't quite enough room for the whole family to sleep, so when we stayed the summer that I was 7, I slept out in a tiny cottage that had been my great-grandmother's - perhaps that feeling of blissful independence also influenced Matthew's growth in Arabella. Inside Grandpa's own house were mementoes from his days at sea, such as the ships in glass bottles that he'd made when stuck in the Arctic one winter. The Arabella herself does not exist, but is a combination of Grandpa's ship in a bottle, a painting of the ship he sailed on, and a wooden model of the schooner Bluenose.
As I was writing the first draft, I realised that I saw Matthew as paraplegic. The roots for this go back twenty years, to my days as an occupational therapy student in London, England, when the public's reactions at students being sent out to the shops in wheelchairs, led me to write an article for the women's magazine 'She.' In the same issue, I read an article written by a paraplegic who had just started sailing, which I found inspirational.
It's undoubtedly also relevant that I wrote the first draft of Arabella, a few years after a serious accident, when I could only walk short distances with the aid of a walking stick. Ironically, some of my other injuries left me with a constant feeling of motion-sickness, so that although sailing is quite feasible for my young Matthew, it is still not something I can enjoy. There is probably a fair dash of wish fulfilment in Matthew's exploits!
Matthew's grandfather's island is based on a small island where my sister and her husband lived for several years, on the west coast of Canada: rocky and wild, very lonely in the winter, but with the advantage of being able to watch whales and eagles. Of course this scenery is very different from the Australian scenery in the book. I found this quite exciting, because the importance of the story to me had nothing to do with the colour of the ocean or the types of trees. One of the wonderful things about writing a picture book text is that, trusting the artist as I do Kim, I knew that his art would be much more than simple illustrations of exactly what I'd written, but would add a new dimension and depth to the story. Even so, I was deeply touched when I saw the beauty of what he'd done.
The finishing touches to this story, for me, came a month after it was published, when I spent a few weeks with my parents. On the way to the airport to return to Australia, we had lunch at a restaurant overlooking the cove where I had played and fished for crabs as a child. One point of the cove was formed by the beach of my grandfather's house, and the other by the marina where his good friend lived in a rickety old house on stilts, with the woods on one side and leaning right over the sea on the other. It was a very special moment, as I realised how many different happy memories had distilled into giving me the Arabella.
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