UTS Creative Writing academic and acclaimed author Dr Eleanor Sweetapple, who writes as Eleanor Limprecht, is releasing her new novel The Coast this month through Allen & Unwin. Her fourth, after The Passengers, Long Bay, and What Was Left.
The Coast follows nine-year-old Alice, who is sent to live in a lazaret (a leprosy colony) in Sydney’s Little Bay in 1910. Growing up in the secluded lazaret, Alice longs to escape and re-join the outside world. When Guy, a Yuwaalaraay man injured in the First World War, arrives at the hospital, Alice discovers something of the outside world she has missed.
Based on the near-forgotten history of the Coast Hospital in Little Bay, The Coast is a meticulously researched novel that aims to tell the stories of people lost in history. Eleanor says this began during research of her second novel Long Bay, when she first visited the area and became fascinated with the Coast Hospital’s Cemetery, home to 2000 graves:
It is a beautiful and eerie place to visit, as many of the gravestones are illegible, and some only have first names or Chinese characters. I learned that the gravestones with only first names were leprosy patients because they never went by their given names after entering the hospital, so their families would not be associated with their contamination. I knew I had to discover more about these people whose lives have been erased from history.
Dr Eleanor Sweetapple. Photo by Louise Hawson.
Stella-prize winning author Emily Maguire says of the novel “The Coast does that magic thing that all the best historical fiction does in brilliantly illuminating elements of now while still being wholly and convincingly a story of a very specific time and place”. The Coast won the 2020 Australian Society of Authors Blake-Beckett scholarship.
A work of historical fiction, The Coast is an example of the kind of creative writing that uses true history and stories as a starting point, using research and fact to ground a narrative with a firm sense of place and truth.
The book is available from May 31.