Tasmanian author Kathreine Scholes has a new novel out, The Hunter's Wife. As it is released she is interviewed by Christopher Bantick for "The Courier-Mail".
Scholes had finished the manuscript for The Hunter's Wife before she returned to Tanzania last year. What readers will find is a novel written by someone who knows the country intimately. She says that even after more than three decades, there was a profound sense of belonging."I really felt incredibly strongly connected to the landscape," she says. "This was interesting as we landed in Zanzibar on the coast which is tropical and nothing like where we grew up. Just as Tasmania has become such a part of me, I was often puzzled how this far inland area of East Africa on a flat dusty plain, how that could feel like home to me. It did; right down to the smell of the dust."
So notwithstanding her evocative return to the land of her childhood, does Scholes feel more African than anything else?
"I do," she says without hesitation. "I actually came home to Tasmania feeling I was a born-again Tanzanian. When I went back, I was welcomed as a Tanzanian. I was referred to as a child of the land. It felt very special."
