Writer awaits Wyld reaction
About 12 years ago, young author Evie Wyld was on a road trip from Broome to Perth.
Along the way her troupe pulled into Port Hedland at 2am in the morning tired eyed and exhausted to find the only place open was a pizza place that appeared to be an illegal brothel.
It was a remarkable location and it makes an appearance as one of the settings in her 2014 Miles Franklin Award winning book All the Birds Singing.
Wyld said in the book Hedland got a bit of a bad wrap in part because of the one night she spent there described as being especially awful.
"We could hear the punters through the wall," she said.
"I visibly remember going to have a shower in the morning and using one of their towels which I thought was yellow, but it was actually nicotine-stained so when I dried myself my skin went yellow."
Wyld confessed to not actually having a vendetta against Hedland, but said she wasn't quite sure what she could say to the residents other than that every town and city had its dark crevices.
"(I'm) always worried someone from Port Hedland is going to call me on it.
So far I've just had people nod at me, (but I'm) ready for it, ready for a massive apology," she said.
Wyld said her book was set in a vague WA setting, though with a mixture of real places and pinch of fiction.
"I did consider giving Port Hedland a different name and making it completely fictional," she said.
"There's a white galah which don't really exist… there's a monster in it… (it's) almost like a parallel Australia."
All the Birds Singing is the story of a woman called Jake who lives on an island off the coast of England with her dog.
In her isolation she runs a few head of sheep, but a mysterious animal starts killing off her flock.
The greater mystery though is her past.
The book jumps from the present to different stages of Jake's life on a sheep station out of Kalgoorlie, a psychologically terrifying relationship in Marble Bar and prostitution in Hedland.
All these experiences stem from one act Jake committed a long time ago, and as a consequence it manages to dictate her whole life.
Wyld said the idea of the book was of a woman, who felt like she had no one who could forgive her, grappling with a small unthinking act.
"That's the key really, tiny things emerge into these massive branches and you kind of can't put them back in the box," she said.
"It's sort of the small things that dictate where we go."
Wyld, who now resides in London, said the east coast of Australia, where her family lived, sometimes reminded her of being in England, but she used towns in WA for the book because of how different the State seemed.
"(I) was really struck with how it's (WA) just a totally different country, and how it's full of Australians," she said. "The east coast feels like England has mobbed over there, as well as Sweden."
In the book Wyld captures some intriguing Australian characters, and introduces the reader to strongly written male and female characters.
Wyld said after her first book, where the lead characters were three Australian blokes, a lot of people asked her how she got into the mind of a man.
The answer she said was "genitals are the only bits that are different".
