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How Australia's historic railway libraries inspired a novel: Reading the Rails
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How Australia's historic railway libraries inspired a novel: Reading the Rails
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Trade Publication Article
How Australia's historic railway libraries inspired a novel: Reading the Rails
2016
Overview
I was fortunate to grow up with a school library, a local lending library, and--an hour or so up the coast by train in Sydney--the New South Wales State Library and its fabulous Mitchell Reading Room. Discovering that place was like finding Narnia in the back of a wardrobe. My grandmother is not Anikka Lachlan, the central character in The Railwayman's Wife, although I did take Anikka's husband, Mac, away from her in a train accident similar to the one that took my grandfather from my grandmother. And I did give Ani my grandmother's job--my grandmother became the local institute's librarian after her husband's death in 1951, and I've heard extraordinary stories, since the book was published in Australia in 2013, about widowed women employed by the railways as librarians, as station mistresses, as laundresses. Yet that Ani could be a librarian.
