Spotlight is on Jennifer Scoullar this week
and we’re showcasing Currawong Creek.
Australian rural fiction – A love affair with the wild…
Author Jennifer Scoullar
Writing is in Jennifer’s Scoullar‘s blood. Her grandfather was editor of the newspaper at Wood’s Point in its heyday. Her mother, Alice, was a great story teller. Her great aunt, Mary Fullerton, was a novelist and poet, and a friend to Miles Franklin.
“But a greater influence was my father, Doug Scoullar, who had been a jackeroo in Queensland. Later on he began a nursery specialising in native plants, long before it was fashionable to do so. Dad was a man ahead of his time. He passed on to me a lifelong love of horses and the bush.”
Jennifer’s CURRENT RELEASE
Can Zoe protect the reef she loves? Or will fighting to save it mean she loses everything?
Unlucky-in-love zoologist Zoe King has given up on men. Moving from Sydney to take up an exciting new research role in the small sugar town of Kiawa is a welcome fresh start. She is immediately charmed by the region’s beauty – by its rivers and rainforests. By its vast cane fields, sweeping from the foothills down to the rocky coral coast. And by its people – its farmers and fishermen, unhurried and down to earth, proud of their traditions.
Her work at the Reef Centre provides all the passion she needs and Zoe finds a friend in Bridget, the centre’s director. The last thing she wants is to fall for her boss’s boyfriend, cane king Quinn Cooper, so she refuses to acknowledge the attraction between them – even to herself. But things aren’t quite adding up at the Reef Centre and when animals on the reef begin to sicken and die, Zoe’s personal and professional worlds collide. She faces a terrible choice. Will protecting the reef mean betraying the man she loves?
Turtle Reef is available in eBook and paperback from all good retailers.
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Jennifer has chosen to share an excerpt from Currawong Creek
(This book was a finalist in the Romance Writers of Australia R*BY Awards in 2014.)
Brisbane lawyer Clare Mitchell leads an orderly life. That is, until she finds herself the unlikely guardian of a troubled boy. In desperation, Clare takes Jack to stay at Currawong Creek, her grandfather’s horse stud in the foothills of the beautiful Bunya Mountains.
For Clare it feels like coming home. Her grandad adores having them there, Jack loves the animals, and Clare finds herself falling hard for the handsome local vet.
But trouble is coming. The Pyramid Mining Company threatens to destroy the land Clare loves – and with it, her newfound happiness.
Excerpt from Currawong Creek by Jennifer Scoullar
CHAPTER ONE
Friday morning. Clare finished the interview and sized up her client. Too thin, junky thin. Red eyes, more than a hint of the shakes and she couldn’t stop sniffing.
‘I advise you to plead guilty,’ said Clare. ‘We’ll present a plea in mitigation and ask for a bond or for a community-based order. It will be better all round.’ This week she’d seen too many cases just like this one. The young woman was going to make a bad impression on the court without even opening her mouth.
‘Can we nick out for a smoke?’
‘Of course.’
The boyfriend was already out the door, and the girl wasn’t far behind. Clare started making notes on the file, then looked up. Their little boy was still sitting there. Clare walked to the door and called after the two figures retreating down the hall. ‘Haven’t you forgotten something?’
The boy regarded her with solemn eyes, peeking from beneath cartoon-perfect lashes. An uncommonly pretty child in spite of his snotty nose and soiled, shabby clothes.
‘Mummy and Daddy will be back soon.’ Clare’s tone was bright and encouraging, but the boy’s expression didn’t change.
‘Daddy’s dead,’ he said in a small voice. His bottom lip began to quiver.
Oh.
Tiredness and guilt washed over her, along with a feeling that she couldn’t name. A vague dissatisfaction that had troubled her all week, each time she’d looked out of her narrow window to the view of the stunted Coolabah tree, and beyond it, the barren car park. A missing. Or perhaps a wishing for something indefinable Clare averted her gaze both from the tree and the boy, and rifled through the files on the desk. What on earth was his name? It was hard to concentrate with him looking at her like that. She glanced down at the interview sheet. The mother was Taylor Brown. But that was it, no mention of the child at all.
‘What’s your name?’ she asked.
He didn’t answer. He just maintained that unsettling stare. It didn’t matter. How long could it take to smoke a cigarette? Clare turned back to her work, reviewing her record of the interview so far. It was clear that the plea in mitigation would be simple. Taylor had a depressingly familiar tale: growing up in a series of broken homes, women’s refuges and foster care placements. She ticked all the boxes for a history of domestic and sexual abuse – and she was a heroin addict, although currently on methadone replacement.
Clare reread the charge sheet. Theft of a Bull Terrier puppy. Cute, really. The rest wasn’t so cute. Around three o’clock in the morning of May the second, police had stopped and searched her vehicle on Wickham Street in Fortitude Valley. They’d found cannabis, money and various stolen items. The boy had been unrestrained in the front seat. Clare looked up and surprised herself by imagining him with a puppy on his lap. Would the puppy have made him laugh? Put a smile on his serious face? Had Taylor wanted to see that smile?
Time ticked by. Her next appointment would be here soon. Clare day-dreamed out the grimy window. A bird sat in her poor excuse for a tree. She’d never seen a bird there before. A currawong, big and black, with bright yellow eyes and startling white crescents on its wings. It looked straight at her and uttered a wild, ringing cry. The call sounded disturbingly out of place in a city carpark.
With a wrench Clare returned her attention to the boy. What was Taylor’s mobile number? The digits on the legal aid form were a series of uncertain scratches. A quick glance over the rest of the largely incomplete application, revealed her to be barely literate. Under date-of-birth, Taylor had laboriously written 20. Only twenty years old. Jesus, how old could she have been when she had the kid? Clare began to key the numbers into her phone. There were only seven of them. Oh god. Taylor had listed only seven numbers.
Currawong Creek is available in eBook and paperback from all good retailers.
BUY NOW
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Read more about Jennifer and her books on MEET JENNIFER SCOULLAR
Visit Jennifer on her website JenniferScoullar.com
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And on Twitter @Jenscoullar