My brother has always been a special person. I might be biased, but I think there are lots of people in the world who would agree. For me, he has always been more than brother. He’s been a mentor, friend, coach, confidante, partner in crime, fellow experimenter and always a loving big brother.
 
We went to Rottnest recently for a day trip and it reminded me of countless hours spent on the island in my childhood. It was the place where I learnt to ride a bike, make phone calls to the mainland on pay-phones, buy the paper for Dad in the morning, purchase clothes at the surf shop, make lunch, dinners and breakfast, swim, surf, snorkel, be resilient, experiment, try (and fail), be scared and survive, get cold get hot, get tired and push on. I learnt to dig deep, have very sore quads after long bike rides around the island and to conquer fears. In many ways, it set me up very well for life as an adult.
 
I think these hours spent experiencing things with my brother built the foundations for the courage I now have in life, and the beginning of the ‘can-do’ attitude.
 
Talking to Roland recently he said that courage is the product of having a few key aspects in life under control. It’s sort of the pinnacle. He spent some time teaching children who were struggling in traditional schools because of dysfunctional family situations and they developed some interesting strategies. The formula for building resilience in these children began with finding which area they were strongest in and building from there.

I write because without writing, living is like scrubbing newly sunburned skin. It’s too much. Writing is what you do with the milk soft smell of babies, a soprano voice and violins, and the first perfect plum of the season. It’s what you do when feelings and other people’s stories and your own stories get stacked one upon the other, higher and higher, until one day you look up and you can’t see the sun anymore. I write because writing turns everything into words. And words bring in the light.
 
I write because stories are like splinters – they’re better out than in. Some parts of the story of my first novel Seeing the Elephant came to me when I was a year into a PhD about the Vietnam War.  I was way out of my depth… studying, parenting, running a business and almost definitely drowning, not waving.

​Water always runs to the deepest point, to where the land is lowest. For me, the same is true of writing. The words fall into the places that lie deep beneath. I think of them as the 2am places. The ones you usually hide with conversation and movement. The voice in your head that you hear because the only other sound is the hum of the fridge and your own quiet footsteps through a sleeping house.
 
For me this place is no aquifer. Words do not gush out onto the page. It is just a thin seam of honesty that can occasionally be mined for words. 
 
Sometimes I dream in words, in loops and strands across a page. My own handwriting in blue ink. But by morning, like dew, the words have gone.
 
The process of drilling down into the place where the words lie, though always hard and sometimes even painful, is also occasionally illuminating. If the events that are written about are not autobiographical, the emotions surrounding them most certainly are.
 
The passage in my novel where Frank describes his grandfather's love of horses is, in some ways, the most revealingly autobiographical:

You’re a savvy equine business owner. You know your stuff, you’re passionate about horses and you believe in your products/services (and their ability to help the horse community out there). Yet the concept of digital marketing is enough to make you run for the hills, white flag in hand.

Unfortunately, it’s an all-too-common scenario. These days, we all have less time. For many of us, money is tight. Throw expensive and time-consuming horses into the mix, and you have a recipe for discarding digital marketing into the ‘too-hard’ basket.
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For those who are less Internet-savvy, I will start out by clarifying just what digital marketing is. Essentially, it’s any kind of marketing done via electronic media (i.e. the Internet, Apps, text messaging, etc). It is both measurable and instantaneous; great for those of us wanting to ‘squeeze every cent’ and that lack the time to plan campaigns months in advance!

Not only this, but there’s a far greater chance your equine business marketing will be successful if complemented by a sound digital strategy. Think about it. The target markets of most equine businesses are riders, right? Age-wise, the majority of riders out there are from a younger demographic. And what are young people good at these days? Technology, of course!

A few years ago I decided (the sort of decision you make when blind ignorance and extreme optimism collide) that when my third and youngest child started school it might be fun to do a PhD. I was interested in Australia's involvement in the Vietnam War and the differences between that experience and popular culture representations of the war – which are mostly driven by the US experience. So, I signed up and started researching. I was working and raising a family, and such is the nature of the horse industry that I would usually get an hour or so to research before picking the kids up from school and starting afternoon lessons. The early months of my research became, for me, a series of moments of extreme cognitive dissonance – standing in the playground watching children play and thinking about Post Traumatic Stress, Ho Chi Minh and land mines...
 
During that time we went on our first family holiday to Exmouth. After about seven hours of driving I knew the Wiggles entire discography by heart and the children were starting to disappear beneath a drift of muesli bar wrappers and empty juice boxes. We stopped at the Overlander Roadhouse and as I was walking the kids to the toilets I noticed a man sitting, eating a hamburger in a white Subaru and on the window of his car a small sticker that read AATTV (Australian Army Training Team Vietnam). On the way back to the car I tapped on his window and introduced myself.
 
He was happy to talk about his experiences in Vietnam and we stood in the car park and the kids played on this scratchy little patch of grass while road trains tore down the highway. He'd done two tours of duty, the second had been worse because he'd been married by then and leaving had been harder. He told me about his experiences with Post Traumatic Stress. About ten years after his last tour things had got pretty bad and he'd decided he was going to blow up his boss. He'd worked out a way to disable the locking mechanism in his boss's car and was just working out how much chlorine he was going to need for the bomb when his wife discovered what he'd been doing and he was committed. He coughed and said that there were years when things had been hard, really hard.

Horse riding is a unusual past-time, statistically. It's one of the most dangerous sports you can play, with more fatalities and injuries per year than kick boxing, rugby and base jumping combined. Yet, the rest of the world's most dangerous sports are played almost exclusively by men. Horse riding is a statistical anomaly because in almost all equestrian disciplines, female participants usually out-number men.
 
The gender disparity in equestrian sports has long been a topic of discussion and the reasons that are given to explain women's love of horses says as much about our society as they do about the situation. "It's a nurturing sport," or, "it's a social sport" and even, "it's a sport where they get to dress themselves and their horses up." These explanations, which make me think that making stupid assumptions about the motivation of female riders is actually the MOST dangerous past-time ever, speak more to the way that gender operates in our society than to the truth. I'm not actually sure what the truth of the matter is, but I'm willing to bet that it's nothing at all to do with nurturing, because if that was the case we could all buy bunnies and kittens, and could save a small fortune on saddlery, stock feed and physiotherapy.
 
Maybe the answers are in our history, as answers quite often are. From the sixth century BC until the first few centuries AD there were tribes of mounted nomads that roamed around the lands of Russia and Kazakhstan. The Sarmatians were highly skilled horse handlers and fierce warriors. 

​My grandmother could not remember her mother-in-law's name. Sixty years since she last saw her and the pages of the past had faded. "She was very kind to me," she said, but she could not remember her name. Her husband, Herman, had been an only child and he had been gone for ten years so there was no-one left to remember the names of the dead.  My grandmother could remember the really important things though, the milky smell of a baby's skin, the song of birds at dawn, a friend's good bye – and her mother-in-law's kindness.
 
She showed me a photo of my grandfather in Sumatra as a child, his parents on either side. Dressed in white, a tropical plant in an ornate silver box and a wooden shuttered house behind. My great-grandmother, as though she is somehow already taking leave from the family history, looks without expression at the camera. She wears a thick, dark necklace and holds a paper fan. My grandmother pointed to the necklace in the photo, "I have that necklace somewhere," she said. "Maybe one day it will be yours."
 
In the photo my great-grandmother wears a white, drapey dress of lace, a wide black sash around the breadth of her rib cage. My grandfather looks about five years old, dressed in a sailor suit with woollen socks pulled up. My great-grandfather wears a white suit, his face is calm, his chest broad and a watch chain disappears into his pocket.