By LACHLAN MOORHEAD
MAUDIE Shackleford used to write on anything she could get her hands on.
As a teenager growing up in South Africa she used to write stories on brown wrapping paper because her family couldn’t afford anything else.
Having just released her sixth novel, her first in English, at bookstores in Narre Warren and Berwick this year, the Emerald resident has come a long way from those days of scrawling on discarded paper.
“I was always writing, I started writing when I was 12 years old,” Maudie said.
“When I was 12 I had nothing to write on so I’d go to shops and ask for wrapping paper to use.
“We weren’t well off and couldn’t afford anything else.”
Maudie’s new book, An Upside-Down Tale, is for young adults and combines the lives of a child from the Australian outback and a child from a shantytown, close to Johannesburg.
In this way Maudie has used her new novel to explore her South African heritage while keeping loyal to Australia, where she has lived for the past 40 years.
“I spent my teenage years in Zambia but it was politically very unstable.
“We moved to Canada for four years, first in the Rockies, North of Vancouver and then to east Canada,” Maudie said.
“Then I moved to Australia with my husband and two sons.”
Maudie wrote her first novel in Afrikaans when she was a 19-year-old growing up in Zambia.
Always keen to explore her life’s memories through her writing, Maudie has used An Upside-Down Tale to address another of her passions – wildlife.
“I started an animal shelter in Emerald in 1983 where I looked after hurt animals that came out of Beaconsfield,” Maudie said.
Returning to her love of animals, Maudie’s latest book includes a third character, a giant duck from Outer Mongolia, which leads the others across the world from Australia to South Africa.
Once in South Africa the characters find themselves in an impoverished south-west township which Maudie notes is very much like the towns that the late Nelson Mandela gave so much of his time in order to help.
“All the characters combine. They meet up and their adventures take them from Australia to South Africa and back to Australia,” she said.
“My book is very topical in that it involves a township from outside Johannesburg and it investigates what happens to the kids who live in townships like this.”
An Upside-Down Tale is now available at Dymocks at Fountain Gate in Narre Warren and Collins Bookstore in Berwick, and can also be ordered through the publisher’s website www.sbpra.com/MaudieShackleford.
