ONE OF THE best day jobs I ever had was working as a tour guide at Jenolan Caves, the renowned limestone formation in the World Heritage-listed Greater Blue Mountains region of New South Wales, Australia.
Sixteen years since I earned my guiding boots, I’ve landed an international book deal for a novel that emerged from the thousands of steps I took through the tunnels and chambers of the oldest-known open cave system in the world.
Titled The Watchnight, this historical crime novel is inspired by real people and events and cuts through 150 years of tourist tales to recreate a time when the caves sat on the colonial frontier, a place settlers viewed with suspicion, not wonder.
Extrapolating a story from this intriguing place has been a long-term challenge. When I trained as a guide in late 2008, there was little written material on hand for new recruits. I was left, like many before me, to glean the stories of the caves from my more experienced peers in the guides’ office.
What drove me were the stories few wanted to talk about, particularly the lives of Jenolan Caves’ traditional owners, the Burra Burra clan group of the Gundungurra people; the cattle farmers who gradually occupied the same countryside; the Wesleyan Methodist community of the nearby region once known as Fish River Creek, now Oberon, and the role of women in early cave exploration.
Crime was never far from the colonial experience of this region. The massacres and random killings of Aboriginal people and reprisals against settlers, now referred to as Australia’s Frontier Wars, included widespread violence against women, both Indigenous and settlers. The occupation of the land was not possible without the importation of convicts to build roads and towns, a mounted police force to impose British law, and Christian missionaries to impose ethical standards.
It’s from within this volatile battleground that The Watchnight emerged.
Cave Girls
I undertook years of research as The Watchnight came together, and wrote a few articles along the way about my explorations into Jenolan’s past. The first saw me capture the many tales about a young cave explorer called Katie Webb (and her gang of ‘Cave Girls’), whose discovery of a chamber in the Chifley Cave in the 1880s has long been a source of speculation.
A never-before-published collection of letters by English crime writer Agatha Christie was a source of great delight when it appeared in 2013, since it detailed her visit to Jenolan in the 1920s. I published an article about the links between her world tour with husband Archie, their slightly fraught jaunt to Jenolan Caves, and her notorious 11-day disappearance in 1926 back in England.
My guiding days ended in 2012 when I moved interstate, but I was lucky enough to return in 2017 for a private tour of the Arch Cave with a former colleague, in search of historical signatures, including one of early female cave explorer Jane Falls.
The Watchnight’s heroine Oona Farry is inspired by Jane’s explorations, and those of other real-life figures in Jenolan’s history.
This story is unique because it explores crime, punishment and forgiveness in the context of charismatic faith; tackles stories of the Frontier Wars that don’t often get aired in fiction, particularly toxic masculinity, and emphasises female, LGBTIQ+ and Indigenous empowerment at a time when they were not afforded much agency.
Michael Burge Media 