When a depot girl falls in love

For ten years, author She Hawke was on a mission to fulfil Dorothy Porter’s wish that there be more verse novelists and now she’s completed her own verse novel, Depot Girl.

Set in the Northern Rivers region of NSW, the book tells the tragic love story of Tina, the bus driver, Rose, her unfaithful girlfriend, and Tanya, the tart from North Ridge.

Hawke said she wanted to push the boundaries of characterisation and to draw on the spirit of the character rather than homogenous lesbian identity.

Tina wears a uniform for sure but that’s where any idea of butch ends. She’s a lost soul like I think a lot of people are. It’s as much about a quest for personal sovereignty as identity and sexual politics, although it does this work too, she said.

As well as the obvious themes of love and infidelity, the novel looks at the struggles of coping with breast cancer.

Breast cancer seems to be epidemic in the lesbian community at present as AIDS has been for gay men. I had nursed a few friends through the cancer, Hawke said.

After spending many years bus driving, it was only natural Hawke would choose a bus-related title for her novel.

The name Depot Girl just popped in my head one day as I was driving my bus around the Northern Rivers. I thought, I’m Depot Girl -” I spend most of my time in the bus depot, she said. I went home and told my then partner who responded with -˜Yeah you are and you should write a book about it -” it’s been a hell of a ride at times’.

Hawke wrote the book to articulate the general issues of outsiders and belonging as well as drawing attention to regional Australian writing. In 2004 she was awarded the Byron Bay Writers Festival Poetry Prize and she has been nominated for the 2009 Miles Franklin Literary Award.

Dorothy Porter once told me I had to seduce the reader with every line, that every word had to count, she said.

I hope I have succeeded in captivating the audience by following her instructions. Most people who have read it said they couldn’t put it down.

info: Depot Girl is available from the Feminist Bookshop, Kirribilli Books and the Co-Op Bookshop at Sydney Uni and from picaropress.com.