Tag Archives: Historical Fiction

Books, My Story

Get in early for The Watchnight

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HISTRIA FICTION., an imprint of Histria Books (US) has acquired global rights for The Watchnight, my second novel.

Described as a Gothic western, The Watchnight is a bold reimagining of the Methodist settlers who colonised Australia’s renowned Jenolan Caves during the Frontier Wars.

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Three lost souls – an Irish settler, a pardoned convict, and a young tutor are recruited by a religious mission during Australia’s gold rush and get caught up in a wild ride of intrigue and murder in a brutal landscape.

Acquisitions manager Dana Ungureanu said the Histria Books team is always excited to find new stories that have not saturated the market. 

“That is the case with The Watchnight, an historical tale exploring places and themes that will be new for much of the world,” she said.

“Michael Burge blended crime, history, and religion into a page-turner, and we’re very glad to work with him to bring this book to our US and international readers.”

Early endorsements for The Watchnight have been effusive.

Poppy Gee, author of Bay of Fires and Vanishing Falls, said, “The Watchnight is a deeply empathetic literary thriller that explores the complexities of human relationships. Subtle, satisfying  and gorgeously atmospheric.”

“Pitch perfect,” said Suzanne Leal, author of The Deceptions and The Watchful Wife. “Written in prose that is at once forensic, visceral and lyrical, The Watchnight is a compelling mystery, a sharp character study and an ode to the land amidst the brutality of colonial NSW. I loved it.”

Thousands of Steps

Before settling on Ngarrabul Country at Deepwater in far northern inland New South Wales, I was a resident of the Blue Mountains for over three decades. This World Heritage site is the location of Jenolan Caves, where I worked as a tour guide from 2008-2012.

STORYTELLING STEPS: Author Michael Burge by Max S. Harding

This novel is a new direction for me, after the publication of Tank Water (MidnightSun Publishing, 2021), a work of contemporary rural noir exploring homophobia in a country town.

The Watchnight is a work of fiction that took years to shape from the thousands of steps I took through Jenolan’s caverns.

Inspired by real people and events, it 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. 

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.

It has been a privilege to work with Gundungurra Traditional Owner Kazan Brown, who assisted me in depicting Indigenous characters in a way that respects Burra Burra history, place and cultural practice within the settings of this novel.

Tenderly Imagined

Like my debut novel, I created The Watchnight as a crime story that explores diverse themes in a dramatic context. In the case of Tank Water, that was the gay-hate crime wave of 1970-2010.

For The Watchnight, I set the story against the backdrop of Australia’s 19th century Frontier Wars, and included an unexpected love story between two central characters.

“Their connection is tenderly imagined, and I was utterly invested,” Poppy Gee said of this thread.

“Themes of LGBTIQA+ empowerment are not frequently portrayed in Australian literature of this era, and their relationship is delightful and heart wrenching,” she said.

The Watchnight is set for a September 2025 release.

Books, My Story

New novel coming to light

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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.

CAVE FRONTIER Devil’s Coach-house, Fish River Caves, by Lucien Henry, 1883 (Art Gallery of NSW)

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.

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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.