IN the same year Yackandandah featured in the movie Strange Bedfellows it inspired the setting for a murder mystery hitting book store shelves.
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If you read an Agatha Christie today they feel artificial and old-fashioned. I thought I’m going to write a contemporary one and it’s going to be fast-paced and page-turning.
- Joanna Baker
But the crime novel Devastation Road did not overtly showcase the North East town, a la the Paul Hogan comedy.
Instead Albury author Joanna Baker rebadged Yackandandah as Allandale for her book about a teenage boy and girl who investigate how a bakery shop assistant’s body came to be in a creek.
“I couldn’t make the setting exactly true to Yackandandah, so I thought I better not call it Yackandandah, I’ll call it Allandale,” Baker said while sitting in the town’s library.
But now, 14 years after its original publication, Devastation Road has been republished without Yackandandah having a nom de plume.
And there are two follow-ups, The Elsinore Vanish and Evermore, to be published next year with the same two central characters and set respectively in Beechworth and Bright.
“I thought this is silly, I don’t have to call it Allandale,” Baker said.
“I want the world to know these books belong in this part of the country and I’m proud of the country and I want others to know about it.”
The change from fictional to factual town did not involve major revisions.
Real street names, such as Butson and Windham appear, the body is found in the Yackandandah Creek and the town’s motor garage, best known for its peeling paint facade, is a setting.
The streets of Yackandandah are really just country roads – narrow strips of bumpy bitumen, crumbling at the edges into dirt. At the sides there’s usually a bit of patchy grass under big trees, and then someone’s front fence, and that usually needs fixing. Visitors think this is great. They stay at the B & B’s and say how lovely it is. It makes you wonder how bad it must be where they come from.
Baker says not all the places in her novel are real life replicas.
The book’s name is a play on Station Road, where a shocking incident occurs, and there is a Station Lane on the edge of Yackandandah but “it’s just an unfortunate coincidence”.
“You can go around Yackandandah and you can spot the differences,” Baker said.
“I can’t have houses or businesses the same for obvious reasons and no-one in the book bears any resemblance to people in Yackandandah.”
The other significant alterations to the original work reflect fashions moving on, with the music streaming service Spotify replacing CDs and television tastes changing.
‘What about The Bachelorette? That’s on Ten isn’t it? You must have watched that. Everyone does.’
Of course when you think about mystery fiction there is a long shadow cast by the genre’s colossus, the English penwoman Agatha Christie.
The intricate plotting of the creator of Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot left Baker awestruck as a girl in Hobart.
Her first taste of Christie was Appointment with Death, the tale of a woman fatally poisoned in the Middle East.
“When I was 13 or 14 I read an Agatha Christie novel (from the library) and I was thrilled with the way I was tricked and how it came together,” she said.
“These days murder mysteries are everywhere, but there’s very little that’s done as cleverly as Agatha Christie can do it.”
With that experience filed away, life then took several deviations before the moniker of mystery writer could be attached to Baker.
She headed to the Australian National University and undertook a psychology degree.
Also on the Canberra campus in 1976 was a young man from an Albury car-dealing family, who was studying economics and science.
That fellow, Martin Baker, became Joanna’s beau and they moved to the Border in 1981, married and had three children.
It was while two of her offspring were teenagers that the genesis of Devastation Road emerged after what had been a trying stage.
“For 10 years I wrote really awful things and they all went in the bin,” Baker said.
“There were poorly structured plots and unconvincing characters.”
Then after a PhD in creative writing at RMIT University in Melbourne and mentoring from Wangaratta-raised young adult writer Isobelle Carmody she embarked on a Christie novel for the 21st century.
“If you read an Agatha Christie today they feel artificial and old-fashioned,” Baker said.
“I thought I’m going to write a contemporary one and it’s going to be fast-paced and page-turning.
“I wanted a village to set it in, a peaceful, nurturing place and there was one on my doorstep – Yackandandah.”
That original Devastation Road scored Baker a Davitt Award for best young adult novel from Sisters in Crime Australia, an organisation that celebrates women’s crime writing.
The prize is named after Ellen Davitt, who in 1865 wrote Australia’s first mystery novel Force and Fraud.
“It was huge, it changed everything,” Baker said of the recognition.
“A writer is always wanting someone to read their book and talk about it and engage with it and say ‘I don’t like that bit’ or ‘I don’t like that character’.”
Along with Christie, Baker admires crime specialists PD James, Ruth Rendell, Peter Temple and Kerry Greenwood.
The category’s appeal lies in a combination of plotting and profundity.
“They make us think about death and they are a way to play out a sense of mystery and we go through life with a great sense of mystery,” Baker said.
“There’s a lot we don’t know.
“I write in the domestic sphere, I don’t write about mob criminals or corruption, I write about terrible things that affect families and I look at what’s going on in their hearts and minds.”
Baker writes four days a week, with up to five hours each day spent in front of her laptop.
Her first novel aimed at adults, The Slipping Place, will be published in November.
The whodunnit is set in Hobart with Baker saying it differed from her juvenile work by going to some darker areas and exploring big questions with more sophisticated language.
The Tasmanian capital and North East are her two pet places and having a teen character, Matt Tingle, at its heart made Yackandandah natural for Devastation Road.
“It’s very true to the spirit of Yackandandah, it’s atmosphere and aesthetic,” Baker said.
“It’s a caring community and this kid is nurtured by this community, which he doesn’t get because he’s 15 and he wants to see the wider world.”
- Devastation Road is being sold at book stores in Albury, Beechworth, Bright and Wangaratta and the Yackandandah newsagency.