Pip Smith speaks with UWAP intern Reilly McGrath about 'The Pull of the Moon' and the challenges of mingling fact with fiction.

Reilly McGrath: You mentioned previously that work for The Pull of the Moon began in 2010 when you first visited Christmas Island. Could you talk a bit about this longer writing process? 

Pip Smith: Yes, of course! To be clear though, I had no intention of writing a novel in 2010. The idea for The Pull of the Moon didn’t occur to me until I went to Fiji in 2016, researching a completely different idea. 

I was on a deserted beach on the south-west coast of the main island, Viti Levu – no internet connection, no phone connection. I was feeling quite isolated when I saw some kind of flotsam or jetsam floating on the water. The whole concept came to me in that one moment. 

I thought what if that was an asylum seeker, what would I do? Suddenly I was a twelve-year-old girl, and I thought I'd probably want to keep him as my secret, because I wouldn’t be convinced anybody would know what to do; the grownups certainly didn’t know how to deal with this problem. 

I'm not suggesting this would be the right thing to do – certainly not for a food-starved, dehydrated survivor of a shipwreck – but that this is what my impulse would have been, had I been my twelve-year-old self, eager to help, and blind to the problems of the white saviour complex. 

Reilly: Following this first spark of inspiration, did your intentions for the novel change at all over the years? 

Pip: I began with a tightly formed idea, and this led me to wonder which communities, in Australia, live on the frontline between the Australian public and asylum seekers – especially in a post-Howard world. As David Marr points out in his book Dark Victory, Howard's government introduced a policy of silencing and stifling the stories of asylum seekers. Keeping the rest of Australia ignorant of the humans behind the ‘boat people’ trope was a conscious strategy, and it worked.  

But having been to Christmas Island in 2010, I knew that there were still communities of Australians who were living on the coalface of Australia's controversial border policies. I could draw on this time I'd spent on Christmas Island, from six years earlier, to round out the idea that came to me in Fiji, thousands of kilometres away. After receiving a grant from Creative Australia, I sat down and wrote the first draft in one year. That was the easy bit. I think I have over twenty-five drafts of the novel saved to my hard drive now. It took several excruciating years of redrafting and redrafting and redrafting – until I didn’t know if I was Arthur or Martha. It was a long, long, long journey.  

Reilly: That is a long journey! Is redrafting usually a big part of your writing process? 

Pip: Actually no; Half Wild is my only other published novel, and I am half-way through another novel now, but the processes have been entirely different each time. 

Because Half Wild was a bit more experimental, as far as novels go, I tried to set myself a technical challenge for The Pull of the Moon; I wanted to see if I could write a three-act drama. Lord of the Flies was a big guide novel for me, with its chunky five-thousand-word chapters, ten of them, nice and even. I wanted to see if I could write that sort of classic novel.  

I soon learned that I can’t, because that’s not how I work.  

For me, writing is very much like doing a Rubrik’s Cube. I am constantly asking how I can move the pieces of the puzzle around, the ones that I know need to be in there, until it all clicks and flows smoothly. 

Reilly: The Pull of the Moon is structured a bit like a puzzle, having six sections each corresponding to a phase of the moon’s cycle. How did you decide on this structure? 

Pip: Initially I took out the phases of the moon as I thought they were probably too pretentious for a YA novel, but then I found that the novel needed the breather that a part section can give a story. 

One of the things I knew I really wanted to have in this novel were passages from animal consciousness. I wanted to capture animal migration because what I find so interesting about Christmas Island is that it has always been a nexus of migration for humans, birds, fish and animals. 

I really wanted to foreground that, but when I had those passages from the animals’ points of view peppered through early drafts, readers, who I’d sent manuscripts to, told me to cut them out as they seemed to be a diversion from the story. I knew I really wanted them in there, though, so I refused to cut them. I just hadn't yet found the right placement for them. When I kept the six parts intact, those passages of animal consciousness worked much better; the animals could lead the reader back down into the story after the breather of a part break.  

The phases of the moon are so important for the animals on the island, to their migration cycles, and as sections they also helped to chart the three-act dramatic structure I wanted to use as well. The novel didn’t flow from chapter to chapter, you see, and sections allow the reader to come up for air, reorient themselves, and come back in again. So, even though I initially didn’t want the part breaks to be there, they kind of told me that they had to be there.  

Reilly: Animal migration, and the rhythms of the natural world, are felt throughout the novel. Was this environmental sensibility something you experienced when visiting Christmas Island?  

Pip: So much of this book came out of the three trips I took to Christmas Island. One was for three weeks in 2010, one was for about ten days as soon as I got a grant in 2018, and then I returned again to do a bird counting eco-trip. 

That incredible trip, run by Indian Ocean Experiences, has world-famous ecologists as its tour guides. David James was one of our guides, and I believe he was employed by Parks Australia to do the first scoping of the site that became the Christmas Island Immigration Detention Centre. In a way, he was there to chart the beginning of the demise of the Christmas Island Pipistrelle, which became extinct shortly after they began construction.  

During my second trip in 2018, I started having conversations with locals, and it bubbled up very quickly that there were two primary events in their recent history. One of them was the extinction of the Christmas Island Pipistrelle, which was prominent for people who worked for Parks, and the other was the 2010 boat disaster. That event seemed to shape the island; it was as if the consciousness of the island had never really recovered.  

When I first put in an application to write a book about Christmas Island, I had no intention to write about that particular disaster, but after those trips, I realised that you couldn't write about Christmas Island without writing about SIEV-221. 

Reilly: Narratively, The Pull of the Moon centres around the 2010 SIEV-221 crash. How did you go balancing the real-life facts of this disaster against the fiction of the novel.  

Pip: It’s something that I’ve never actually felt easy about: the way fact and fiction integrate in the book. For the description of the crash itself I tried to stay as close as possible to how it was described in the Senate Inquiry because I felt like I owed it that. 

In the novel's very early drafts, Ali remained alive throughout the whole book, moving to Sydney with Zara at the end. But then I thought well that didn’t happen, no survivors were found in the bush, and, in a way, it’s the uncertainty of never recovering the bodies of twenty plus people that is more important to write about; to capture that sense of ‘maybe people are still out there’, ‘maybe the Pipistrelle are still out there’. 

It was more important to document the uncertainty of loss, and the novel seemed to say more if it ended that way (having Ali remain missing and that whoever is in the jungle is either a ghost or a figment of Coralie’s imagination). It says more about her trauma; whereas if she finds him it sort of puts a nice bow around it all. It says if you are determined enough, you can recover what you've lost, but the bitter truth about grief is there is nothing you can do to bring back the dead. Even worse, perhaps, would be working out how to get on with your life when someone close to you is missing. You would have to live with perpetual uncertainty. There would always be that question niggling in the back of your brain: ‘what if?’ ‘What if they are still out there?’ 

Using fictional devices is a way of exploring the psychic resonance of the factual events – that being the boat disaster, or the extinction of the Pipistrelle – and asking how these big events, which are just dot points in a newspaper article, how do they rock a family or a whole community? 

So, that’s what I chose to explore through fiction: the psychic undercurrents of these real disasters. 

Reilly: In the book you write from multiple perspectives. How did you go about researching and representing characters from cultural backgrounds different from your own? 

Pip: Initially I set out to write from a white Australian girl’s perspective only, because I wanted to respect the feedback I'd received following Half Wild (which was a novel about a trans man). But when I wrote the first draft exclusively from Coralie’s point of view, I realised it wasn’t such a black and white situation. To write about these issues and not even attempt to understand things from other people’s perspectives is, I have come to believe, even worse, because that approach whitewashes history and makes for a very flat novel; one that is not rigorously exploring multiple sides of the themes at hand. 

So, I took a deep breath, and thought I’ve got to try this. I suspected it might make the book difficult to publish, but I just had to do it as a writer, for the book, I had to. 

At first, it was a research exercise; I was learning about the Iranian asylum seeker experience to fill gaps in my own knowledge. I didn't think I would write from an Iranian boy’s or girl's experience. After the first year of writing, in and around Covid lockdowns, and giving birth to twins, I spent another year or so throwing myself into research. I did all kinds of things: I studied Farsi on Duolingo and met online with a teacher in Iran who read passages from the manuscript; I reached out to former peers and students of mine who shared with me their stories of coming to Australia; I also met up with an organisation in support of the People's Mojahedin, and that’s how I got to learn more about the group Ali’s grandfather is associated with in the novel. 

It was a process of trying to meet as many people as possible. For me, writing is a vehicle for learning and understanding. I don’t ever want to write a book about what I already know. That’s not what being a human – what being an artist – is about for me. I’m not trying to broadcast my experience; I’m trying to expand my appreciation for who I share this planet with. 

Reilly: That is a great answer. Arising from these multiple perspectives, the novel explores a range of social and political issues. Was it difficult to translate these issues for a younger demographic? 

Pip: Again, this is something I flip-flopped over for years. There were periods where it wasn’t a YA book, there were periods where it was. 

I suppose the idea that came to me on the beach in Fiji was distinct. I had wanted it to be a children’s novel along the lines of Stormboy, where it’s slightly allegorical – something that could either be for adults or children and operate on different levels depending on who was reading it. 

But once I got into the writing of it, it wasn’t really like that, and when I finished, I wasn’t quite sure what genre the book was in. When we sent it out to adult publishers, they said it was too YA, and when we sent it to YA publishers, they said it was too adult. 

One publisher suggested I re-draft it as a middle grade novel, so I tried it different ways, but I realised that I didn’t really want to. If I re-drafted for much younger readers, I would probably have to take out the boat disaster, or change it somehow, but I knew I wanted to honour it. I couldn’t dumb the themes down – it can’t be middle-grade. 

I mean, the jury’s still out on whether teenagers will actually read it but my hope is that both teenagers and adults will read it. There’s a frustrating marketing trend in publishing which says if your protagonist is thirteen then you've written a YA novel, whereas when I was a teenager we just read books and there wasn’t any of this strict segregation. 

So yes, it is a novel, and it has children as its main characters, and I really hope you like it! 

The Pull of the Moon by Pip Smith is out now from UWA Publishing. Purchase your copy here. Teaching notes are also available for free download here.

Reilly McGrath is a former Bachelor of Arts student from the University of Western Australia, with First Class Honours in English Literary Studies.