Shirley Barrett is chatting on her mobile phone from her home in Summer Hill in Sydney's inner west, her conversation focused on another place, another time.
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It is Eden, some 500 kilometres away, in the 1900s.
Mary Davidson lives "enveloped in the stench of boiling blubber for five months of the year", while her family does battle with the vagaries of the weather and the ever-changing fortunes of the sea.
The scene could be one from the annals of Eden's history.
It is, in fact, straight from the pages of Barrett's debut novel, Rush Oh!
Rush Oh! represents a new genre for Barrett.
Until her foray into fiction, film making had been her passion, so much so that she uprooted her life in Melbourne to move to Sydney to attend the Australian Film, Television and Radio School in 1985.
Barrett has written and directed three feature films - Love Serenade, for which she won a Camera D'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1996, Walk the Talk and South Solitary.
She has also worked extensively as a television director, commanding respect for eliciting strong and detailed performances, her work visually striking.
But what started out as a film script in 2002 metamorphosed into Barrett's 358-page novel which has been released in Australia by Picador Pan Macmillan this month and will hit the streets of the US and UK next year.
"Even after the realisation that Rush Oh! was unlikely to ever be a film, I loved the story so much that I just couldn't let it go," Barrett says.
Sustained by trips to Eden where she paid visits to the real George Davidson's cottage, Boyd's Tower and the Eden Killer Whale Museum, and hours holed up in the State Library scouring the pages of the Eden Observer and South Coast Advocate, Barrett dipped her toe into the ocean that is fiction writing.
"The archives of the Eden newspaper around the turn of the century describes whale hunts in haunting detail,” she says.
Barrett stresses that while she wanted her novel to be authentic, it remains a work of fiction.
"Hopefully Eden will forgive me for the liberties I have taken in turning what is a true story into fiction," she says.
She made a conscious decision to not contact the Davidsons so as not to "plunder" or embellish their family history.
Out of respect for the family she has, however, sent them a copy of her novel.
- The Magnet has six copies of Rush Oh! to give away. To win, be one of the first six people to visit the Magnet's office with a copy of the paper.
