Sometimes inspiration really does strike like a bolt from the big blue. For Where Light Meets Water, that bolt came upon the unexpected discovery of the death certificate of my great-great-great grandfather, Captain Thomas Robertson, a sea captain and maritime oil painter who died in Yokohama, Japan, in 1873.
On a visit to Sydney, my mum and I went to visit her cousin, a biographer and family historian, who over an afternoon of tea and family chatter happened to share the document with us. I was vaguely familiar with the relative we now call ‘Captain Tom’ from a painting that hangs in my mum’s home – not painted by him, but given to him and said to have hung in his cabin – but otherwise at the time knew little of him.
As I held the death certificate in my hands, however, I was struck by an insistent and unexpected feeling of geographical confluence – a kind of mirroring of journeys across the seas. Captain Tom had emigrated from Scotland to Melbourne, where I have now made my home, and then to Port Chalmers, the port of the city of Dunedin, New Zealand, where I grew up. We were about to celebrate the wedding of my brother to my Japanese sister-in-law.
As strange as it was, in that moment, I knew I had found the seed of a novel. I had no idea what the story was, who the characters would be or what would happen to them, but there was something vast implied by the piece of paper in my hands, and I had a thrilling intuition of both the expansiveness and the emotional wilderness of long ocean voyages. The many artworks painted by my relative – which I would go on to discover in galleries, libraries and museums across Australia and New Zealand – would become part of that inspiration and journey of discovery, too.
Despite this strike of impulse and knowing, Where Light Meets Water was not an easy novel to begin. Early on I was confounded and overwhelmed by the amount of research that would be required. It would be eight years after discovering the death certificate before I had gathered enough confidence to begin my work seriously, before I was able to learn the dance that exists between research and story. It would then be another eight years of writing, revising and editing until it became a book.
That initial moment of inspiration didn’t write the book, but it did continue to provide the fuel for all the effort involved in the novel’s creation.
Susan Paterson
I have just finished reading your novel, Where Light Meets Water, and have been transfixed. I feel the many emotions that have emerged as I read it. It is an engrossing story, written with such gentleness and tenderness.
I will recommend it to my cousin, artist Neil Emmerson, who lives in Dunedin, NZ.
Thank you Susan, I’ve so enjoyed reading this story.