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Canberra Today 16°/18° | Thursday, March 28, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

When Irma fell in love with elephants

Author Irma Gold… “You have to be prepared for your work to be held up to scrutiny.”

“I’VE always had a special affection for elephants, going back to my childhood,” says Canberra writer Irma Gold, whose newly-published debut novel “The Breaking” is largely set in the Thai elephant rehabilitation camps of Chiang Mai, Surin and Kanchanaburi. 

“I was about eight and went to a circus and we had a photo taken with an elephant. I remember that feeling of fear, [then] the elephant’s trunk brushed against my cheek and I fell in love with him.” 

Gold, an admired short fiction writer, is these days ambassador for Thailand’s Save Elephant Foundation, spreading the word about the mighty endangered animal. 

She’s also editor/creator of “The Invisible Thread”, an official publication of the National Year of Reading 2012 and the Centenary of Canberra 2013, as well as a mother of three, the author of three picture books for children, ambassador for the ACT Chief Minister’s Reading Challenge and a professional editor. 

Now known to some of her friends by the suggestive title of “the elephant woman”, she has been pursuing the endangered pachyderms for years, first in her early 20s, when she went to Kenya and Tanzania to see them in the wild, then later when she travelled to Thailand, hoping to get a closer look.

“I looked into a trek which involved riding elephants, but as soon as I googled, I realised this was not a good thing and that they go through a great deal of suffering,” she says.

In 2016 she travelled north, first to Chiang Mai, and kept a journal recording all the little details of what she saw, took a lot of videos and pictures to help her connect.

“It would immediately put me back in that place if I looked at them,” she says.

Details, for instance, include an awful lot of Chang [Thai for elephant] lager being drunk – that’s the Thai beer with cute little elephants on the bottle – a reflection of what she observed, as she doesn’t drink beer.

While she had already spent a lot of time with elephants, she needed to go back and was lucky enough to get an artsACT-funded trip to volunteer at an elephant sanctuary in Thailand.

“Writing my first novel was a lot of work, but I wrote the first draft quite quickly,” Gold says. 

“I work full time as an editor, so I devoted two mornings a week to writing 1,000 words a day and had my first draft in eight months.”

In “The Breaking”, Gold uses the first-person narrative style as she takes on the persona of Hannah Bird, a first-time visitor to Thailand.

“It happened naturally,” Gold says. 

“It was an instinctive choice to show the story through the eyes of Hannah, who is very green and hasn’t got a clue. It gives us access to a young person’s experiences in another country, where she’s overwhelmed.”

Without doubt, the most idiosyncratic character in the book is Deven, an easy, confident girl Hannah meets in a hostel and with whom she forms a love relationship. 

“The characters came to the page fully formed, it was quite a strange experience,” she says.

“Deven just arrived, full of fire, spiky and a bit hard to get close to… Hannah sees beyond that surface but Deven also shows that her bond with the elephants is much deeper than Hannah’s… I just loved writing her,” Gold says. 

“She’s a real, living person to me… I’m sure that all the things you observe go into a database and something else comes out – she’s not anybody I know, or anybody I met.” 

Gold’s same-sex love scenes may raise a few eyebrows, but as she notes, “Given that I write fiction, inevitably I’m going to have to draw on things I don’t know, but I have an ethical view that I must be respectful”.

With that in mind, Gold consulted members of the queer community in Canberra to make sure that she was accountable, yet, she says, “no doubt some readers will judge me in this respect”. 

It was the same with her use of Thai words, where she talked to Thai expats here to make sure she got them right.

“You have to be prepared for your work to be held up to scrutiny,” she says.

The end of Gold’s novel is somewhat cataclysmic, but it wasn’t planned that way.

“Part three was completely different in my first draft… parts one and two had energy, but I was forced to admit I’d gone in the wrong direction, so on my third draft I scrapped part three and re-wrote it… as soon as I read what I’d done, I realised it had the same energy,” she says. 

“I don’t plan everything, mostly I don’t know what’s coming – to me writing is an exploratory process.”

“The Breaking”, by Irma Gold. MidnightSun Publishing, March 2021, RRP $29.99.

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Helen Musa

Helen Musa

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