How I came to write "The Red Shoe"

I’d been visiting a primary school in Bankstown, Sydney, to talk about my books and got lost driving home.  On the car radio, as I was driving around and around Bankstown , the news came in that Mrs Evdokia Petrov had died in Melbourne.  Mrs Petrov was the wife of spy Vladimir Petrov, who defected from the Soviet Union to Australia in an atmosphere of spectacular international publicity in 1954.

People were ringing into the radio to give their personal memory of the events of the Petrov defection.  One woman rang in and said that she believed that the ASIO “safe house” that Mr Petrov was kept hidden in for some weeks, was actually the house next door to where she lived as a child in Palm Beach. (The woman was possibly mistaken – the particular whereabouts of this safe house has apparently never actually been identified, although there were many rumours).  In any case, she said that the arrival of black Commonwealth cars in their remote sandy beachside suburb made a great impression on her coming up and down the graveled roads, especially when they used to stop and give her and her barefoot sister a lift up to school. 

At once I thought - that’d be a great thing to write about – a family of girls (my vision was of three daughters) living next door to a hidden Russian spy.  It’s hard to know what exactly it is about something you hear that makes you want to write a story about it – it’s just that you immediately recognize it as something that will work for you.  I think I was attracted to the idea of the private domestic family literally juxtaposed with the big grand international public event next door without even knowing it, and all that that suggests about how we experience the world.   

I actually knew very little of the Petrov affair, apart from the famous black and white images of the scenes at Mascot airport as Mrs Petrov attempted to leave Australia.   But as the radio program continued, people ringing in kept mentioning Mrs Petrov’s missing shoe, purportedly red, that came off as she tried to board the plane.  So the title “The Red Shoe” slipped into my mind, with all its resonances of the Andersen fairy tale of the red shoes that never  stop dancing, and of Cinderella’s lost slipper. . 

While writing the book I read quite a lot of material about the Petrov defection, including the Petrovs' own accounts, and I also visited the marvellous exhibition that was put on at Old Parliament House in Canberra in 2004/2005, commemorating the 50 year anniversary of the events. But perhaps most influential were my visits to the NSW State Library, where I sat and read several months worth of The Sydney Morning Herald of 1954, excerpts of which I’ve included in the text of the novel. It was a fascinating experience, reading those papers and the image of Sydney that was conjured up in the calm nurturing quiet of the library fifty years later. Part of it was very recognizable - all the  pagan pleasure seeking aspects of Sydney life were there -  the football, the races, the crowds, the Show, the beach, the picnics and so on.  But there was also a bizarrely gothic side to the city   – escapees from mental hospitals, children dying from polio, detailed bizarre divorce court proceedings, strange suicides, even stranger murders,  a sex change operation saga, the ever present H-Bomb….   And of course, World War Two was not far away.  In many ways it must have been a very terrible time as people struggled to recover from the bereavement, separations and traumas of an appalling and prolonged world war, as well as being a time of joy that it was over, of great courage and of fierce and deliberate looking forward, to find the energy to try to make the world beautiful again.