Jennifer Bacia is an Australian author. Her first novel, Indecent Ambition, was sold for a record-breaking advance and became an international bestseller. The success of that compelling, fast-paced thriller opened the door to the boom in Australian popular fiction publishing that followed. The author of nine novels and dozens of short stories, Jennifer’s latest novel is Dark Side of the Harbour – a suspenseful tale of courage and resilience set in Sydney in the ’60s and ’80s.
Today, Jennifer Bacia is on the blog to answer our Ten Terrifyijng Questions. Read on …
1. To begin with why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself – where were you born? Raised? Schooled?
I was born in the UK. My father was Polish and my mother Scottish, though my last name is Italian in origin. We came to Australia for the warm climate (ha!) as my father had pneumonia twice in the year I was born. After finishing my degree at Queensland University, all I wanted to do was travel. I’ve seen a lot of the world and lived in Italy, the UK, and the US, as well as Sydney and Melbourne.
2. What did you want to be when you were twelve, eighteen and thirty? And why?
At twelve I recall desperately wanting to be on TV. I managed to get myself on a local children’s program and sang two songs – one, Italian opera, the other ‘Home on the Range’! Must have been my choice of material that stymied my career from the start. Two years later, I wrote my first ‘novel’, (in the back of my physics prac book, which says a lot about my devotion to that subject). I still have the story. It’s in the first person and the narrative is surprisingly good, even if the concept wouldn’t have passed muster with my mother: 15 year old girl shares house on the coast with 3 boys and is a singer in their band. Not only was she the one in charge, but I fastidiously described every scrap of clothing she wore …
At eighteen I was a blank canvas, not really sure or even the least bit concerned about what I was going to ‘be’. Then, a year later, my father died suddenly, and it was a very hard lesson about not wasting a minute of my life. When the worst happens to you, not much scares you after that.
By thirty, I had made one of my dreams come true by living in Italy. It was also the time when big blockbuster books by writers like Jackie Collins, Judith Krantz and Shirley Conran were being published. I started to think to myself … I could do that.
3. What strongly held belief did you have at eighteen that you do not have now?
At eighteen, I didn’t have any strong beliefs. I was still working myself out. Though at that age, I didn’t even know I was doing that!
4. What were three works of art – book or painting or piece of music, etc – you can now say, had a great effect on you and influenced your own development as a writer?
Well, I have to say it was The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough that had a direct effect on my career. I had just started writing, and when I bought a copy of The Thorn Birds at a literary luncheon, I asked Colleen as she was signing it, if she could give me the name of a literary agent. She did, and I became Selwa Anthony’s first female writer when she launched her literary agency! Not long after, she sold my debut novel for a record-breaking advance, and the movie rights as well. It was a thrill for us both and Selwa is still my agent, as well as a good friend.
5. Considering the innumerable artistic avenues open to you, why did you choose to write a novel?
Experience has taught me I can’t write a story just because I’ve thought out a plot line. I need to have a passion for my idea. And that was certainly the case with Dark Side of the Harbour. For various reasons I’d had a long hiatus in my career, but not a day passed in that period when I wasn’t thinking of plots and yearning to write. In the end, this latest book is the most personal of all my novels, drawing on quite a bit of my family history. A story that took me decades to unravel.
6. Please tell us about your book!
Dark Side of the Harbour is a powerful, intriguing story set in the ‘60s when Australia was undergoing radical social change. Two girls meet when they come to Sydney looking for adventure. They are opposites: Rose, naïve and country-raised, and Margot, worldly, glamorous, and making no secret of her social ambitions. Then a chance meeting with two debonair Europeans introduces them to a world of ideas and experience very different from the Australia they’d grown up in. But it’s a tragedy none of them sees coming that changes all their lives.
The story then picks up in the ’80s when a top rating media team begins investigating a long-ago murder on the Northern Beaches. From the ritzy Peninsula Club at Palm beach to the surf clubs, the locals are abuzz. Some have reason to feel nervous – including the police. Others, who have stayed silent for years, are at last tempted to tell the truth. And it’s a truth Margot and Rose could never have imagined.
7. What do you hope people take away with them after reading your work?
After reading Dark Side of the Harbour, I hope readers will have sensed the excitement of the ’60s in Australia when huge upheavals in society saw conservatism being swept aside by the young with their music, fashion, art, and ideas. While my primary aim in all my books is always to entertain with the suspense, mystery, and many twists and turns of the plot, I also hope that from this novel readers will gain some insight into how the ‘other’ was treated then in Australia– and still is today in some cases. I’ve also referred to a part of World War 2 and Cold War history that most Australians know little about and which directly touched my own family.
8. Who do you most admire in the realm of writing and why?
So difficult to pick just one writer I most admire. At different stages of life I was drawn to different authors: Agatha Christie when I was young, later Ian McEwan’s Saturday gave me a deep insight into the male mind, while on the flip side Douglas Kennedy writes from the female POV with uncanny understanding. I also read a lot of memoir and biography. But as a suspense writer, I have to pay tribute to Sidney Sheldon. When I started writing, that was the genre that influenced me. When a review in Cosmopolitan magazine compared my first novel, Indecent Ambition, to Sidney Sheldon’s work, it was heady praise. Nothing makes an author happier than a reader saying, ‘I just couldn’t put your book down’.
9. Many artists set themselves very ambitious goals. What are yours?
I think my most ambitious goal as a writer was to try to write a book in the first place. No one at that time in Australia was writing popular fiction and the big commercial books were all by British or American authors. I’m glad my success demonstrated that a local could also write an international bestseller. Trouble was, then I had to repeat the feat! But I was determined not to be a one-book wonder. It’s never easy, but here I am, eleven books later.
10. What advice do you give aspiring writers?
I established the first course in Creative Writing at Bond University and wrote a handbook for writers based on that course. In Bestseller! How to Write Novels that Sell, one of the things I do is analyse in detail how I pulled together the plot and characters in my first novel. Importantly, I demonstrate what didn’t work, as well as what did. I wanted to show that you don’t need to know every detail before you start a story, nor do you have to wait until you have the perfect start. After finishing a novel, I’ve re-written some beginnings dozens of times!
Thanks Jennifer!
—Dark Side of the Harbour by Jennifer Bacia (Booktopia Editions) is out now.
![Dark Side of the Harbourby Jennifer Bacia](https://www.booktopia.com.au/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/dark-side-of-the-harbour.jpg)
Dark Side of the Harbour
From Sydney’s deceptive glitter, to the grit of Warsaw under siege, Dark Side of the Harbour is a masterpiece of suspense, a story of courage, resilience and deadly secrets – where only the strongest bonds survive.
It’s the Swinging 60s. Post-war Australia is booming and the excitement of Sydney lures two young women, Rose and Margot, eager for adventure in these rapidly changing times. They meet through work, and country girl Rose is in awe of glamorous, worldly Margot who makes it clear her ambitions stretch far beyond the cosmetic sales counter of David Jones, Sydney’s iconic department store...
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