To the Wild Sky

  IVAN SOUTHALL was born in Melbourne in 1921. His first published story appeared in the children’s pages of the Herald newspaper in 1933. Southall left school at the age of fourteen, following the death of his father, and worked in various jobs, including as a copy boy at the Herald. He captained a Sunderland Flying boat in the RAAF during World War II and was awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross after sinking a German U-boat. (He was always grateful that forty-one members of the crew were rescued.) Many of his early books were based on his wartime piloting experiences.

  Southall met his first wife, Joy Blackburn, in England, and the couple returned to Australia after the war and lived in various semi-rural Melbourne suburbs. They had four children.

  Southall’s first children’s book, Meet Simon Black, was published in 1950, and he went on to write more than thirty works for young adults and several for adults. To the Wild Sky, published in 1967, followed Hills End and Ash Road in exploring realism and a stream-of-consciousness style of narration—a new direction for Southall and for Australian children’s literature.

  Southall’s books were published widely and he won more than twenty international awards including the Carnegie Medal in 1971 and four Children’s Book Council of Australia awards in the 1960s and ’70s for Ash Road, To the Wild Sky, Bread and Honey and Fly West.

  In 1976 Southall married Susan Stanton. In 1981 he was awarded an Order of Australia, and in 2003, the Dromkeen Medal for services to children’s literature. He died in 2008.

  KIRSTY MURRAY was born in Melbourne in 1960. She has written eleven novels for young adults, including the much-loved Children of the Wind books, as well as non-fiction titles and junior fiction novels. Her first novel, Zarconi’s Magic Flying Fish, was published in 1999 and won the Western Australian Premier’s Award for Children’s Books in 2000. kirstymurray.com

  ALSO BY IVAN SOUTHALL

  Simon Black series (nine books)

  Hills End

  The Foxhole

  Ash Road

  Sly Old Wardrobe, pictures by Ted Greenwood

  Let the Balloon Go

  Finn’s Folly

  Chinaman’s Reef is Ours

  Bread and Honey

  Josh

  Benson Boy

  Head in the Clouds

  What About Tomorrow

  King of the Sticks

  The Golden Goose

  The Long Night Watch

  Rachel

  Blackbird

  The Mysterious World of Marcus Leadbeater

  Ziggurat

  Fourteen works of non-fiction

  Seven novels for adults

  textclassics.com.au

  textpublishing.com.au

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House

  22 William Street

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  Copyright © The Estate of Ivan Southall 1967

  Introduction copyright © Kirsty Murray 2014

  The moral rights of the authors have been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published by Angus & Robertson Publishers, Australia, 1967

  This edition published by The Text Publishing Company 2014

  Cover design and illustration by WH Chong

  Page design by Text

  Typeset by Midland Typesetting

  Printed in Australia by Griffin Press, an Accredited ISO AS/NZS 14001:2004

  Environmental Management System printer

  Primary print ISBN: 9781922147868

  Ebook ISBN: 9781922148858

  Author: Southall, Ivan, 1921–2008 author.

  Title: To the wild sky / by Ivan Southall ; introduced by Kirsty Murray.

  Series: Text classics.

  Subjects: Aircraft accidents—Juvenile fiction.

  Airplane crash survival—Juvenile fiction.

  Castaways—Juvenile fiction.

  Survival—Juvenile fiction.

  Dewey Number: A823.3

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  Long Flight into Darkness

  by Kirsty Murray

  To the Wild Sky

  Long Flight into Darkness

  by Kirsty Murray

  SOME books are so vivid that you remember exactly where you were when you read them. The first time I read To the Wild Sky I was eleven years old. My mother had bought a copy of the novel in the winter of 1972. I was home from school with the flu, tucked up in bed, but not sorry for myself at all. One of the nice things about being ill when I was growing up was that my mother always provided me with comic books to read, on the premise they were easier on the feverish eye.

  I was distinctively unenthusiastic when she presented me with To the Wild Sky instead of an Archie comic. Decades later, I’ve forgotten most of the plotlines of Archie and where and when I read them, but I will always recall that first experience of reading To the Wild Sky. How could anyone forget the tense horror of six children’s flight across northern Australia with the dead body of their pilot as cargo?

  I could feel thirteen-year-old Gerald Hennessey’s anxiety in my bones as he flew, blind, into the night. I was airborne beside him, as taut with dread as he was on that long flight. I can’t separate the intensity of the story from the fever of my illness. Or perhaps I wasn’t very ill at all. Perhaps I had no fever and it was Southall’s powerful writing that seared my mind and kept me awake all night. My bedroom became the interior of the Egret, the small, high-winged monoplane in which the six were journeying to their fate. This is what powerful fiction does: it merges your own experience with those of its characters. Southall knew how to make his readers feel every lilt and jab of the action.

  To the Wild Sky has stayed with me and proved no less impressive on successive re-readings. The writing is taut, the action almost claustrophobic in its insular intensity. Gerald and his friends are heading to Coonabibba for Gerald’s fourteenth birthday party when their pilot dies at the controls. It’s characteristic of Southall not to pull his punches. The reader experiences every visceral detail of the appalling circumstances inside the plane, from the sick bags full of vomit to the horrific moment when the plane begins to pitch out of control.

  Gerald tore his seat harness away and plunged into the cockpit…falling to his knees in sharp contact with the dead man’s back.

  It would be easy to think that the appeal of this novel is in the nobility of its young characters, that Gerald’s courage in taking charge of the plane contrasts vital youth with jaded (dead) adulthood. Adults in Southall’s fiction are often ineffectual. They invariably fail their young charges. But Southall’s child protagonists aren’t necessarily laudable either. His characters are not so much cruelly rendered as painfully real. The children, on the cusp of adulthood, are tested beyond the conventional boundaries of childhood. Though they rise to challenges, they also reveal dark and disturbing aspects of their inner selves. Gerald saves the lives of the other children but swings from barely suppressed hysteria to sullen brooding. Kind, likeable and self-sacrificing Colin contemplates leaving Gerald to drown. Neither Carol nor Jan can overcome their hostility towards each other to feel any female solidarity, even when it would be to their advantage. When faced with a crisis, no character behaves with uniform heroism.

  The term ‘young adult fiction’ hadn’t been invented when Southall began writing the books for which he would be most celebrated. He maintained he wasn’t writing for children but wr
iting stories about young people that revealed the truth of universal experience. In the 1960s, his novels represented a new direction in fiction for young readers. Reality wasn’t sugar-coated to suit the sensibilities of the gatekeepers of children’s literature. He wrote gritty, often bleak, fiction that set a new benchmark in writing for young adults.

  Southall was a master of the language of flying. His years as a pilot in the RAAF during World War II informed much of his writing and was the cornerstone of his Simon Black series of boys’ own adventure books, published in the 1950s. His original title for To the Wild Sky was The Egret, and one of the key strengths of the novel is the way he describes the technical intricacies of piloting a small plane, rendering the drama inside the Egret utterly convincing.

  All Southall’s characters prove resourceful at some point, but the gender roles were clearly defined, much to the irritation of my young feminist sensibilities. Boys were to be men and girls were painfully aware of their limitations. Although there are female characters in most of his novels, the boys dominate the narratives. Yet despite the intense masculinity of his books, Southall’s female characters often have a powerful presence and never more so than in To the Wild Sky. Janet (Jan) Martin, the plain, twin sister of Gerald’s friend Bruce, is sulky and airsick at the beginning of the novel. By the end, she has proved to be a pragmatic, resourceful heroine. Thirteen-year-old Carol Bancroft is Gerald’s would-be girlfriend. She’s stylish, beautiful and the object of the boys’ admiration, yet she struggles with both her burgeoning sexual maturity and her terror of the others finding out about her Aboriginal heritage. There are layers and depth to Carol that many of the boy characters lack.

  Carol’s longing to feel a sense of connection with her Aboriginal ancestors provoked ire in some of Southall’s critics. Tom Roper, writing in Melbourne’s Sun newspaper accused the book of ‘adding to miseducation about Aboriginality’. Roper believed the notion that Aboriginal spirituality could be conveyed across generations was ‘rubbish’. In retrospect, Southall was ahead of his time.

  To the Wild Sky, published in 1967, was the third title in what Southall described as his ‘elements trilogy’—water, fire and air. In the first, Hills End (1962), a group of children face the elements in a town cut off by a cyclonic storm and flood. The second, Ash Road (1965), confronts its young protagonists with a terrifying bushfire. The ethereal nature of air is beautifully captured in To the Wild Sky:

  All the world was grey except for a red mist below. Cloud above him, open air around him, and wind-driven dust beneath. And 9,400 feet on the altimeter.

  The novels in this loosely linked series were successful on an international scale that few Australian children’s books before or since have matched. Collectively, the three novels have sold hundreds of thousands of copies worldwide. To the Wild Sky was released in England and America, translated into ten languages and won the Australian Children’s Book of the Year Award in 1968.

  In 1984, long after the first generation of readers of To the Wild Sky had attained adulthood, Southall penned a sequel, A City Out of Sight. Many readers had written to him begging to know what happened after To the Wild Sky ended. But for me, in 1972, the book ended on a deeply satisfying note, as plucky, resilient Jan, Prometheus-style, signals the potential survival of the group by bringing them the comfort of fire. It was an ending that allowed me to switch off my bedside light, tuck To the Wild Sky under my pillow, and fall asleep with Ivan Southall’s characters and his visions of the far north embedded deep in my imagination.

  To the Wild Sky

  1.

  Bert

  The Egret – she was rugged rather than beautiful – thudded down on the landing strip beside Lake Ooleroo shortly after midday.

  Jim Butler put her down like a ton of bricks – as pilots went he, too, was sometimes rugged rather than beautiful when no one was there to watch – but she could take it; she was used to rough strips and treacherous clay-pans and rock-hard plains. Her designer had intended her for the bush. One thing was sure: had she been able to make her voice heard she would have protested bitterly about the name they had painted on her side. ‘Egret?’ she might well have said, ‘am I a spindly bird? Am I adorned in fine plumes? Am I a pretty, prancing thing?’

  She was early and the children who were to fill her up were not due until one-fifteen. Jim Butler had reckoned on strong head winds – Hennessy had warned him that they were a certainty – but they hadn’t happened, so now he was left with about an hour to kill; too short a time to ring for a taxi and run into town for lunch; too long a time to sit and merely think.

  Jim was an energetic man, a busy sort of man, the sort of man who found it difficult to do nothing, so he walked over to the phone box that was attached to the windsock mast and rang through to the agent at the oil depot. ‘How are you set for aviation fuel?’ he said.

  ‘O.K.,’ said the agent.

  ‘I’m out on the strip. Can you top up my tanks? Say thirty gallons.’

  ‘Sure. Who for?’

  ‘Hennessy. The Coonabibba Hennessys. Are they good for credit with you?’

  ‘Credit! Don’t you carry that much with you?’

  ‘Never,’ said Jim, ‘on principle. Do you give credit or don’t you?’

  ‘Sure. Hennessy’s good with me at any time, though we haven’t done business for a while. How come he’s not flying it himself?’

  ‘I haven’t pinched it, mate,’ sighed Jim, ‘if that’s what you mean.’ It was a question he had tired of. He had met it of late in a dozen mid-western towns. ‘The name’s Butler. I’ve been flying for Hennessy since his horse threw him. Or hadn’t you heard?’

  ‘Hennessy’s big in his way, Mr Butler, but he’s not national news, is he?’ However, the agent must have been satisfied, for he said, ‘That crate holds more than thirty gallons, you know.’

  ‘I know, mate! I know how much she’ll take to top her up.’

  Jim banged the receiver down, paced back to the aircraft, and wondered why he was so irritable, so unusually restless. If he had known why, he might have gone into town and had that lunch, but he would hardly have bothered about extra fuel. On the other hand . . . but it is difficult to predict what he might have done. It is just as well that the future is hidden from men.

  Mark was at the window with the curtains held back, waiting impatiently for the car; his mother’s voice, nagging at him from the background, was a sound he scarcely bothered to listen to. He knew quite well what she would be saying, because she had already said it a dozen times. Colin was listening, anyway. Colin was like that. He always managed to wear a look that expressed the proper degree of attention. Even Mark appreciated that Colin was the type of boy grown-ups liked.

  ‘When you get to Coonabibba,’ Mrs Kerr was saying, ‘you are to remember that you are guests. Particularly you, Mark. You are to remember that you are not in your own house.’

  She wished with all her heart that they hadn’t invited Mark. He was too young, too wild and too thoughtless. The Hennessys had invited him only out of courtesy, so that he should not feel left out of it. Colin was Gerald Hennessy’s friend, not Mark. Mark was only just eleven.

  ‘The Hennessys,’ she went on, ‘are very wealthy people and there are many beautiful things in their home that are easy to break, things they have brought back from all over the world.’ (She didn’t know for certain; she had never been in the Hennessys’ home; but it seemed a reasonable supposition to make.) ‘Do be careful, Mark. Please don’t run from room to room. Walk! Lift your feet! Look where you’re going. And for heaven’s sake don’t go to bed with your singlet on.’

  Mark nodded absently but Colin gave the right sort of smile and the right kind of reply. (After all, it was expected of him.) ‘I’ll keep an eye on him, Mum.’

  ‘I’m relying on you, Colin. He’s to keep his hands clean and his hair tidy and he’s not to belch after meals.’

  ‘I’ll flatten him if he does!’

  ‘I’m sure it
won’t come to that! You are merely to remind him of his responsibility to behave. Mrs Hennessy will have enough to do without contending with an eleven-year-old savage in the house. With six children around for the whole week-end her hands will be full.’

  ‘More than six,’ said Colin, with a feeling of satisfaction that his mother failed to notice, ‘ten, more like it. There are the neighbours, you know, and they’ve so far to come that they’ll be staying, too.’

  ‘I’m not worried about the neighbours. Any neighbours the Hennessys might have will know how to behave. They’re used to that sort of living! And there’s one thing I’m bound to ask of you, Colin. Be nice to Jan. Don’t be rude to her.’

  ‘Huh,’ said Colin, for there were areas of hostility even in the life of a well-mannered boy.

  ‘Colin!’ said Mrs Kerr sharply.

  ‘All right, all right. But what did they want to go and ask her for?’

  Janet sat disconsolately in front of her dressing-table mirror staring at herself. Her week-end bag was packed and waiting on the bed; in the next room was Bruce warbling for joy like a Swiss yodeller, and her mother was yelling from the back of the house, ‘Come on, you two, or the car will be here before you’ve had your lunch!’

  Honest to goodness, Janet knew that lots of girls got all the pleasure in the world out of looking at themselves in the mirror. Even some downright ugly girls (of limited powers of observation) could regard their own reflections with gratitude and admiration. But Janet was either too frank or too critical or too easily depressed. Whenever she felt miserable and wanted to feel worse, she usually made her way to her room and shut the door and said, ‘Mirror, Mirror on the Wall; who’s the crummiest of them all? Tell me, and I’ll put a brick through you!’

  Janet never looked at herself critically when she was happy, of course. She didn’t think about it then. If she had, she might have discovered that a snub nose, freckles, high cheek bones, a broad brow and an impish disposition had a very real charm all of their own. But Janet wasn’t even faintly vain, so she would probably remain unaware of herself until some nice young fellow in a few years’ time made the discovery for her.