Smith, Helene 1937-

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SMITH, Helene 1937-

PERSONAL: Born March 14, 1937, in Manjimup, Western Australia, Australia; daughter of James (a wood craftsman and farmer) and Julia Petronella Delores (a teacher; maiden name, Brailey) Lee; married Thomas Latham Wallace Smith (a teacher), December 29, 1956; children: Deirdre, Sari, Peta, Sally, Marais, Larry, Sean. Education: Edith Cowan University, B.A. (education, English), 1990. Hobbies and other interests: "Welfare of children and young adults. Equality for All. Environmental health-planet. World peace."

ADDRESSES: Home—5 Barnes Ave., Australind, Western Australia 6230, Australia. Agent—Stephanie Green, Fremantle Arts Center Press, Box 158, North Fremantle, Western Australia, Australia. E-mail— [email protected].

CAREER: Writer. Has worked as a nurse; swimming teacher, 1968-86; worked in community welfare, 1979-81; special needs teacher, 1984-85; writer in schools, 1995-2002; writing facilitator in schools, libraries, and the community; Curtin University, Western Australia, Australia, teacher of creative writing, 2001.

MEMBER: Victoria Federation of Australian Writers, West Australian Literature Centre, Fremantle Children's Literature Centre, Milligan House Community Centre, Millie-Millie Writers.

WRITINGS:

Operation Clancy (crime fiction), Fremantle Arts Centre Press (Fremantle, Western Australia, Australia), 1994.

Leaping the Tingles (adventure fantasy), Fremantle Arts Centre Press (Fremantle, Western Australia, Australia), 2001.

Children of Morwena (futuristic adventure), Fremantle Arts Centre Press (Fremantle, Western Australia, Australia), 2002.

WORK IN PROGRESS: A junior novel, Dreamstone; Yes, a novel for teenagers on the theme of friendship.

SIDELIGHTS: Helene Smith began her writing career with a crime novel, but then began to write the fantasy novels for which she is better known. Smith told CA, "My love of literature and story was nurtured by my mother, Julia Lee. Along with my peers and siblings, I was spellbound by her tales and would beg for stories about her early childhood in South Africa and her family's pioneering days in the timber forests of Western Australia. She would also retell film scripts, novels, recite reams of poetry, and elaborate on our lives as they were lived in a way that was always dramatic and layered with meaning. Our relative isolation was offset by my parents' interest and consciousness of the wider world always. Reading was encouraged from an early age. We also enjoyed exceptional freedom, physical, intellectual, and artistic.

"My memories of those years are vivid and sensual. I remember running joyfully through flooded low-lying fields on our farm, swimming in fresh-water lakes, hunting for crustaceans and turtles, picking aromatic boronia for scent making. I remember the silent productiveness of my father in his workshop and always at the end of the day sitting around a wood fire telling stories and generally wondering about life and what it meant.

"My mother, though not religious in a conventional way, encouraged selfless service within one's profession. This probably influenced me to choose nursing as a profession. After a brief career, I married a school teacher and raised a large family. Once again, interaction with the natural environment became an important part of family life and the storytelling tradition continued in spite of television.

"When my children grew up, I attended university where I studied education and English. After graduation, my interest in the reading process and storytelling prompted me to write a fast moving, easy-to-read thriller for reluctant readers. Operation Clancy was subsequently published by Fremantle Arts Centre Press. In producing my first 'book,' I had been hooked by the sheer joy of invention, but I wanted to explore more serious themes."

Smith followed Operation Clancy with Leaping the Tingles, a story about Celia, a girl who knows she is different; her feet are so light that sometimes she is sure she can fly, but other times they are so heavy it hurts her to walk. Her parents seem to know the secret behind her differences, including the reason she feels an affinity for the tinglewood trees, but won't give her any answers. Neville Barnard, in a review for Magpies, explained that there is no real villain or "ultimate source of evil" in Leaping the Tingles, "just different creatures protecting their own kind. As such it is a gentle story about being different."

Smith told CA about writing Leaping the Tingles: "I have long been concerned for the individual who is different, who feels misunderstood and isolated because of difference. I am also painfully aware of our separation from the world of nature, and in particular, our destruction of forests like the tinglewoods, unique to Western Australia. Put these together, and you have a person whose very life depends on the forest, a factor not recognized or known to those around her. This became the basis for Leaping the Tingles. It soon became a labor of love in which I was able to fuse the many images, memories, and imaginings derived from my own family history with elements from tales told to my own children while camping under the tingle-wood trees in the Normalup National Park at Walpole."

In Smith's next novel, Children of Morwena, she creates a post-apocalyptic world where a girl named Leila is separated from her family when the Technocrat political party uses their weapon, the Killer, to flood and destroy the town where Leila lived. In Viewpoint, Ronda Poultney commented, "All too often novels set in a post-apocalyptic world center on the horror of aftermath so it is refreshing to see in Children of Morwena a world beyond the aftermath, where humanity has attempted to re-establish itself."

Smith explained to CA, "Children of Morwena has also been very much a labor of love for me. The images for this story came to me by the river near my home in Australind, Western Australia. I had been watching young people playing in and on the water. It was a picture of youth mastering the physical environment with joy and energy. It contrasted starkly with global forces destructive of youth which are ever present in my mind. Slowly and rather painfully, the story took shape. I knew it was about physical, psychological, and spiritual survival, but it didn't come easily. Instinctively, I used elements of epic and fairy tale which seemed to suit the metaphoric language I needed yet embrace all of those issues that are so real to young people in the present and into the future. As in my other novels, there is a great deal of myself in my work. I look upon fiction as something like a dream. Like our dreams, the raw material comes from our impressions, memories, desires, fears, and reflections in a more or less understandable whole. These are tempered then by the demands of literary conventions and the expectations of a young audience."