If it weren’t for a persistent brother, writer Favel Parrett could still be sorting mail instead of ploughing through the Southern Ocean on an icebreaker.
An aspiring writer since her teens, by her 20s she was surfing in the day and sorting mail at night and was quite happy with how things had turned out.
“My brother had done a Fine Arts degree and was doing really well as a sculptor for someone so young and he kept hassling me – ‘you used to want to be a writer, what are you doing about that?'” she said.
“In the end I gave in and enrolled in an Adult Ed course on writing and editing.
“I had some fantastic teachers and within a year they said they thought I had something worth working seriously on, and that was the start of Past The Shallows.”
Past the Shallows, about three brothers living in bleak circumstances on Tasmania’s south-east coast, is on several HSC reading lists and is still Parrett’s bestselling book.
But it’s her fascination with Australian icebreakers that’s taken her deep into the Southern Ocean not once, but twice.
Along with botanical illustrator Maura Chamberlain, Parrett was awarded an Arts Fellowship with the Australian Antarctic Program for the 2023/24 season and spent three weeks on RSV Nuyina in late May as it carried out the annual Macquarie Island resupply.
