Questions

If you have any questions about me and the books say hello on baillie_allan (baillie_allan@hotmail.com)

   Oh, yes, details. I am living in Avalon, a northern Sydney suburb - actually I cling onto a cliff. I am married to Agnes, a Chinese-Australisn librarian, we have two grown up children, Peter and Lynne. I am 65.

    Scientists from the United States, Australia and Indonesia found a skeleton of a small human on the Indonesian island of Flores. The scientists nicknamed the skeleton 'the Hobbit' because of its size. Mike Morwood of University of New England said: 'We know from the record that these little humans, these little metre-high humans, were hunting things like pygmy elephants, were making fire and were making stone tools.' The scientists are now searching for any signs of the Hobbits around Indonesia.
    Towards the end of Songman there is a chapter called Ghost People, hunters that are as short as a young boy. 'You only hear about them,' Jago said with a shrug 'They are Toala, the forest people. Hunt with poison darts, but nobody sees them. Some villages put rice, krises. sarongs, pots outside their doors at sunset and next morning there are pelts, meat and beadwork instead. So they are ghost people.'
    Songman is fiction but I did not invent the Toala. They were on Sulawesi during the 18th century but they have disappeared...

My class was reading Saving Abbie. I was wondering, the front cover looks like a gorilla not an orangutan. What is it? - Elsie

The cover of Saving Abby is an orangutan. Several other people who thought the cover of 'Saving Abbie' is a gorilla. The mistake I think is caused by the photo is a black-and-white instead of colour, so you cannot the red hair. Below is a gorilla (left), an orangutan (centre) and the cover. The keys are the nose and the gorilla’s forehead ridge.

In The China Coin did you write the story to bring the truth out about the horror of the Tiananmen Square massacre or about Leah and Joan's journey? - Teresa

       I started with the idea of a Chinese-Australian girl searching for her roots in China. So I went into China in 1989 with my Chinese wife, son and my daughter to build up the story. My daughter, Lynne is of course a Chinese-Australian girl and she helped a great deal with the book. She is on the cover. But also on that cover is a copy of a photo of Tiananman Square that I took three days before the massacre. As we moved around China things were happening and the book began to change. The family went home from Beijing, leaving me to do some more work. I woke at night in a hotel to sounds of gunfire. From that point China Coin was pulled into Tiananman.

Did you base Leah on someone you know and what insipired you to write the book? - George

    A few years before Tiananman I was caught in a very old Chinese village and I thought it would be nice to put a modern Australian-Chinese girl in that village to compare the two life-styles and possibly to show there is no difference in the peoples. Then Tiananmen happened. Part of Leah is my daughter, Lynne, but the rest of it is imagination.

Does the coin link the whole story together? - Vicki

   Well I can tell you the coin is a McGuffin (if I've got the right spelling). Alfred Hitchcock named the element that connects incidents and pulls through a story. The McGuffin does pull everything in The China Coin together.

I am a student from Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada. What does Overseas Chinese mean? - Matthew

   In China they used to refer to Chinese people who have left China to live in another country as Overseas Chinese. However the term has become all Chinese from another country. So my wife - Chinese born in Malaysia and Australian - was an Overseas Chinese when visiting China. And also our Australian-Chinese daughter - she's the girl on the cover.

    I wrote Adrift after my wife, Agnes, found a news story about four Lebanese boys and a dog being found in a big crate in the Mediterranean Sea. They had been playing with the crate in a Beirut beach and had accidentally become adrift. Why don't you base a children's story on this?, Agnes said. Before I wrote it I had to make adjustments. Mediterranean became my local patch of the Pacific and the four kids had to be cut down to tighten the story. Flynn was a little of me, Sally was my daughter, Lynne, then aged 5, who was giving me a terrible time (so I gave her a terrible time in the book!), and the dog became our arrogant cat. I don't spend a lot of time thinking about a chapter before I write it. I spend a hell of a time thinking while I am writing. In Adrift I work out the ending first, and then write toward it. I wrote four drafts to reach the version you have read and it took me about nine months to finish it. I had another job at the time.

I was wondering what inspired you about Cambodia and South East Asia to set Little Brother there - Richard.

    I was working on tourist books on Cambodia and Laos in 1969. When I left the tragedy began in Cambodia. I wrote an adult novel The Mask Maker set in Laos and I had to return Cambodia. That second journey launched the Little Brother.

For a start Little Brother is about 70% true. I met Vithy - actually Vuthy - in Khao I Dang in 1980, the day after he fought with the Khmer Rouge soldier in the hospital. I was trying to write a book about the Cambodian (Kampuchean) tragedy. He told me he had learnt he had one brother and one sister left from a big family and he told me how had escaped - by himself - from the Khmer Rouge. He stowed away in a truck in Phnom Penh but had gone to Battambang not Siem Reap, paid a Cyclo-Pousse rider in gold for a ride out of that town. He hitched a ride in a cart walked through the forest and eventually became a hospital orderly in Khao-I-Dang. The background is largely mine. I visited Cambodia in 1969, when it was a rich, slumbering country. I went hunting with French plantation managers in Khmer Rouge territory and shot dead two coconuts. I was captured in Laos by the Pathet Lao, laughed at and let go. I travelled up the Mekong in a primitive riverboat run by a 14 year-old boy with a hand-made cigar and he became my King. I spent a week in Angkor so my Vithy went there. I spent a great deal of time in Phnom Penh and read in newspapers what the war and the terror had done to it and the country since then. In 1980 I went to the refugee camps along the Thai-Cambodia border. I wandered over Nong Samet (007) and left thirty minutes before a battle was fought there. I met Vithy in the camp hospital at Khao-I-Dang the day after he fought the Khmer Rouge soldier and he then told me how he had escaped from Cambodia.

   DragonQuest: I and the artist, Wayne Harris loved creating it. So much that we have done another picture book, Star Navigator. Now, there is a secret hidden in DragonQuest, which I can’t really tell you. But - see the knight’s shield, on the first title page? Well, that comes from an ancient Greek legend. The shield and the dragon - it’s not a normal dragon - are linked. That was Wayne’s secret, hope you can work it out,

   Glad you liked Little Monster. Ideas come from anywhere, such as that one. A long while ago I was monstering my daughter over homework and l started thinking if dad was a real monster. So there is a short story Creature, then I thought about a small puppy that could change to a dragon. That became Liz and that led to Little Monster. With all my stories the beginning is worked out to catch the reader’s attention then the ending has to be worked out before I write anything.

   Wreck! The spark for that story had to keep on glowing for about 25 years before it was written. Back then my wife and I were cruising near Noosa, in Queensland, when we saw a freighter, the Cherry Venture, driven by a storm onto a beach. The freighter had been on the beach for only a couple of months and that image stayed with me. The wreck is still on the beach. Is there a Wreck 2? Yes, Saving Abbie. I went to Borneo, into the jungles of Kalamantan and met a few orangutans.

    I wrote my first book - science fiction, full of monsters - when I was 13. Of course it was not published.

What inspired you to write Treasure Hunters, and why did you choose to structure the novel the way you did? - Jim

    I wanted to write an Australian sunken treasure. I knew that in the Gold Rush the Chinese diggers sent massive gold to China in sailing ships and I taken a course of Scuba. But then I learned of Flor do Mar and that changed the book. Suddenly I had two stories - the story of Flor and the finding of the wreck. So I needed two main boy characters to carry each story and it was important to link both stories all the time so the readers could see things like the found cannon and understand what they meant.