Local author Sophie Green has set her eighth novel, The Frock Shop, in the Mosman she grew up in, writing much of it on the Mosman Bay ferry and its bush tracks. She is at Mosman Library on Wednesday 5 August, and we have three copies of her new book to give away.

By SOPHIE GREEN

Some people write at desks; some may have a shed or use a desk in a library. When I first started writing I had to fit it in around full-time work – and I still do – so the logical thing was to write while commuting. Luckily for me, that commute involved a ferry.

I live in Mosman, and as other locals will know, the ferry from Mosman Bay takes just over 20 minutes to Circular Quay. In those 20 minutes at either end of the day

I can write quite a bit, and when I need to stop and think about something I can lift my head and maybe I’ll see Fort Denison or Maccallum Pool at Cremorne Point, or the naval base at Garden Island or the arc of Farm Cove and the Sydney Botanic Gardens as we come closer to the city. The calm waters of the inner harbour mean that my lap can be a stable writing table, and the seating arrangements such that I am never jammed up next to anyone else.

Mosman is the suburb I grew up in, although during my childhood I took its beauty for granted – especially the stunning beauty that is Balmoral, where I was taught to swim in the Baths. Later, however, swimming laps up and down Balmoral and observing clusters of swimmers chatting on the sand gave me the inspiration for my second novel, The Shelly Bay Ladies Swimming Circle.

As locals also know, these beaches are tucked next to walking trails that wind through the different bushlands in Mosman, some of them classified as National Parks, some as Sydney Harbour Trust, some as council land. There’s no distinction to tell you where you are, though, as you stroll past towering angophoras and small native bushes that at various times of the year may carry delicate flowers, or wattle trees that from wintertime sport bright yellow puffs that herald the coming warmer months.

On these tracks it’s not unusual to find lizards sunning themselves on flat rocks in the afternoon sun, or brush turkeys plodding ahead of you, so used to humans that they usually don’t bother moving out of your way. There are rainbow lorikeets raucously chattering to each other as they pick at flowers and cockatoos ruthlessly shredding branches off trees, seemingly just for the fun of it.

One of these walks goes past Taylors Bay, with a beach that’s only accessible at low tide, by walking over rocks, and where once I waded into very shallow water only to have something – still unidentified – grab at my heel but not leave a mark.

If you follow that same walk you will eventually come to Clifton Gardens, with its netted swimming area and its naval buildings formed of sandstone. Hideouts and battlements are cut into nearby Middle and Georges Heads, looking mainly towards Sydney Heads, where guns were placed and men watched the water; these are relics from world wars and a reminder that Australia is vulnerable to attack by sea.

I’ve walked these tracks for years but they took on a different significance during the pandemic lockdowns, when no one could travel further than the limits of their local council area. It’s to the tracks I would take while I was working from home and also trying to write my third novel, Thursdays at Orange Blossom House and, as it turned out, the fourth, The Bellbird River Country Choir.

Often those walks were the demarcation between ‘day job’ and writing, because I wasn’t commuting on the ferry and, therefore, had to find a different way to work. Some days I would set off with a narrative problem to solve, and it usually was solved somewhere amongst those trees and birds and lizards, or churning up and down the water at Balmoral.

In a different part of the suburb the walking track takes you past Curlew Camp, where, in the late nineteenth century, Australian impressionist painters Arthur Streeton, Tom Roberts and their friends set up tents and painted the water and bush of Sirius Cove.

If I stand at Curlew Camp I can look across the cove to a little patch of bush, which is where you’ll find me one Sunday a month, putting my (gloved) hands into the dirt, planting native grasses and pulling up weeds, as part of Mosman Council’s Bushcare programme. I started doing Bushcare writing my fifth novel, Weekends with the Sunshine Gardening Society, and Curlew Camp features in my sixth, Art Hour at the Duchess Hotel. My Bushcare buddies – or ‘flora friends’, as I sometimes call them – are in the acknowledgements of those books.

As much as Mosman’s ferry helps me write, so does this ritual of being close to the earth, with nothing else to do for hours but care for the land that has cared for me, to watch out for a butcher bird that swoops to pick up the worms revealed where weeds are removed, and spiders that have made their homes under plants. Stories come to me here, as they have on the ferry, in the water and on the bush tracks.

Setting a book almost entirely in Mosman, as I have with my eighth novel, The Frock Shop, was likely only a matter of time. There is so much here to inspire me, in the natural world, in the suburb’s commitment to the arts. I set the novel in the early 1990s not because I don’t love the Mosman of now but because I liked the idea of a period when the inhabitants had less distracted time to just be here. To really notice it and enjoy it. That pandemic time on the bush tracks was the proverbial silver lining for me, living here – the opportunity to really take in the majesty of the place. Of course I had to write about it. So this novel is my love song to this beautiful suburb, and to the characters living here who all have their own stories to tell.

Sophie Green is the author of The Frock Shop (Hachette, RRP $34.99), available now in bookstores or online at HERE.

WIN: three copies of The Frock Shop

We have three copies of The Frock Shop to give away. To enter, make sure you are signed up to the Mosman Mail newsletter, then email [email protected] with the subject FROCK SHOP and tell us your favourite Mosman spot. Entries close Tuesday 4 August. Three winners drawn at random.

See Sophie in Mosman

Sophie Green appears at Mosman Library for Beyond the Book on Wednesday 5 August at 6.30pm. Tickets through Mosman Library events.