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Not long after i started on it, when maybe a quarter of the story'd been written, i left the hills on the coastal strip of northern New South Wales, where i'd lived for most of the past nine months of so, to go and live in a community a couple of hundred kilometres inland. A few days after arriving there, i was high up on a hillside, overlooking the camp i was staying in, working on a water pipe with a couple of others. I looked around at the hills and the trees covering them and remarked to Chris, one of people i was up there with, "This would be a good spot for a pirate radio station. You could reach Brisbane from here with the right aerial and they'd never find you."
"Needle in the haystack." he said, a minute or two later.
"What?!" i was surprised, he didn't know anything about the novel i was writing.
"Needle in the haystack." he repeated. "That would be a good name for the pirate radio station. That hill over there, that dominates this whole area, is called the Haystack."
I told him that was near enough the name of a novel i was writing, but he didn't seem too surprised.
A day or two later, i was sitting on the rocks by one of the beautiful swimming holes in the river that flows along one side of the community, and chatting to Baz, another of the people who lived there. For no particular reason, he told me there used to be a bushranger who lived around those hills. "He was called Captain Starlight" he said.
"Shit!" i thought, "the Starlight's the name of the cafe in me book!"
Then, not long after that, at dawn one morning, i was working on the thatch of the humpy i was building myself, when Chris came past.
"Goonabah's here." he said.
"What?!" I did a double-take. At first i thought he meant this place was like Goonabah, the town in my book. But then i realized he hadn't read it and knew nothing about what was in it. "What do you mean?" i asked, puzzled.
"Goonabah, the aboriginal elder, who Desi went off to get."
"Oh!" I was slightly shocked by this latest connection. At some point during his stay, i told Goonabah i'd been writing his name at least several times a week for the last couple of months. But he didn't seem nearly as surprised as i was.
There was also someone there called Max, which is the name of the rather elusive character Sally and Anton were searching for in the novel.
I had to go to Sydney a couple of weeks after i'd arrived at that place and, although i'd fully intended to live there permanently when i first went there, i never really returned - except for several shortish visits. However, i kept in constant contact with the people who did live there, most of whom, like me, live a very nomadic lifestyle. One of them told me a long time later, well after the book was finished and she'd read the complete story, that a lot of other things i'd written about had happened there too.
On one level, i understand it all fully, although i could never quite work out why it was - what it was all about. But anyway, it gradually faded from my life, although the novel remained an unpublished millstone around my neck. Until a few years later, when it suddenly leapt back into my consciousness in a very unlikely place.
I was in Britain for a visit and went with my mother to stay with her sister in Dumfries, in south western Scotland. My mother's great grandfather came from Dumfries, where his father had been a friend of Robbie Burns, although my aunt never knew this when she went to live there. I felt a sort of connection with the place straight away, although i couldn't quite put a finger on it. But then something suddenly hit me - the river that runs through the centre of town and that my aunt's house looks directly onto, is called the Nith. NITH is the abbreviation i've always used to refer to the rather cumbersome title of this novel.
I can't say i understand it in a conscious way, but it makes some kind of sense, somehow!