Lisa Walker writes novels for adults and young adults. She has also written an ABC Radio National play and been published in the Age, Griffith Review, Big Issue and the Review of Australian Fiction. Her recent novels include a young adult coming-of-age story, Paris Syndrome, and a climate change comedy, Melt. She has worked in environmental communication and as a wilderness guide, and recently spent six months in a Kmart tent in outback Australia. Lisa lives, surfs and writes on the north coast of New South Wales.
Today, Lisa Walker is on the blog to talk all about the beachside setting of her new YA novel, The Girl with the Gold Bikini. Read on!
My teen detective Olivia Grace lives on the Gold Coast. Most Australians have an opinion about the Goldie. For some, it conjures up surf, sand and fun. For others, high-rises, traffic jams and cheap souvenirs. Olivia, like me, has a love/hate relationship with her hometown.
“I can’t believe I’ve ended up working in Surfers Paradise … I eye the seething mass of tourists on the beach and the high-rise towers – Horizons, Mariner Shores, Pelican Sands, Chamonix. I’m like an anthropologist, studying an exotic tribe.”
Lisa Walker
I spent a lot of time on the Gold Coast as a teenager. My weekends on the Goldie mainly involved sun-bathing, being called a Briso by the locals (because I was from Brisbane) and dressing up to look old enough to get into nightclubs. Things have toughened up since then.
My main regret about my Gold Coast period is that I didn’t learn to surf at the time – that came later. All those wasted beach days! When I was a teenager, surfing was mainly for boys. Thank goodness times have changed. In my hometown today, there are often more girls than guys in the surf. Hooray for that!
As you might expect with a story set on the Gold Coast, surfing features prominently. As it’s also set in Byron Bay, so does yoga. Since moving to live near Byron Bay, I have discovered that the yoga scene here is not for the fainthearted. You know how in Hollywood, every waiter/shop assistant is really an actor? In Byron, they are all yoga instructors. I’m pretty sure Byron Bay has the highest concentration of yoga instructors in Australia. Whatever type of yoga you’re into, there’s an instructor for you. And I do mean whatever.
I’ve been doing yoga for a long time. Theoretically, I should now be as bendy as a pretzel and as enlightened as the Dalai Lama. But perhaps you need to do it more than once a week for that to happen. Back when I started, all those years ago, you never worked up a sweat doing yoga. You just used to lie around under a blanket with incense wafting over you. Not anymore. If you don’t leave a class feeling like you’ve run a marathon, then you haven’t been doing it properly.
Lately, I’ve been doing yoga at home using an app on my phone. It’s convenient, there’s no need for fancy yoga-wear, I can go at my own pace and I can listen to an audiobook while I do it. I know this isn’t very yogic, but it works for me. The only downside – and my protagonist Olivia knows all about this – is that there’s no-one to save you if you get into difficulties …
The Girl with the Gold Bikini
Eighteen-year-old Olivia Grace has deferred her law degree and ducked out of her friends' gap-year tour of Asia.
Instead, she's fulfilling her childhood dream of becoming a private investigator, following in the footsteps of Nancy Drew and Veronica Mars - who taught her everything she knows, including a solid line in quick-quipping repartee, the importance of a handbag full of disguises, and a way of mixing business with inconvenient chemistry...
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