Profile: Kathryn Heyman
By Claire Barker
Published in Vogue Australia
June 2006

Kathryn Heyman used to be an actor. And it shows. Not in the glossy Hollywood way; she's more your laugh-a-minute, I-can-do-voices type. She should sell tickets (I'd buy one). Her first overseas gig was for a theatre troupe bent on "creative communication". "We went to Northern Ireland to smooth the peace process," she says with a grin. "Of course, all sides laid down their weapons soon as they saw us …"

Heyman, the author of four novels and 11 plays, may well be the most likeable—and least intimidating—literary heroine writing today. She is mates with all sorts of lit-lunch types (Mark Haddon, of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time fame, is a close friend). But that's back in Britain where she's been hiding—despite being a Lake Macquarie, New South Wales, girl at heart—for the past few years. "I married a Welshman," she says, with a giggle, of the father of her two children.

Happily, she's back home, at least for a while, "living off fried everything" in the Hawksbury River hamlet of Brooklyn. Once a week she teaches a creative writing course in Newtown, and it's in this student-filled Sydney suburb that we meet for brunch to discuss her new book, the glorious Captain Starlight's Apprentice (Headline Review, $32.95). In it, Heyman skillfully interweaves the tales of two women: Rose, an English migrant felled by postnatal depression, and Jess, a circus performer-turned-bushranger, couldn't be more different, until they both lose the thing they love most—a child. Heyman had long been fascinated by bushrangers, and happened on a mention of the real-life Jessie Hickman—a woman who rustled cows and lived in a cave—by chance. Hickman provided some inspiration, but Captain Starlight's Apprentice is pure fiction. "This is the book I've been waiting to write," Heyman says with a smile. "I hoped to mix some mastery of structure with the rawness of my earlier books, and without wanting to blow my own trumpet I think I've done that."

Rose and Jess are both remarkable. "If you're going to be Jungian about it, one represents my mother, the other my father. Dad was a horse-breaker, so there's something deeply personal in my portrayal of Jess, not quite channelling him, but connecting with that in him. And because my mother had a breakdown when I was four … Post-natal depression is in most cases a reasonable response to unreasonable circumstances. What Rose needs is support. Her husband leaves at 6am, she doesn't see him till 8pm, she has moved away from family to an unfamiliar land. Who wouldn't be depressed?" Not that the book's all doom and gloom, despite its core grit. There is a shimmering beauty to Heyman's descriptions of the Australian landscape. "And a happy ending!" she adds. "Don't forget to put that."