John Bailey explains his approach to writing

John at the launch of Lost German Slave Girl in Australia.

My purpose in writing is to get people interested in what I am interested in. For example, the law of slavery, like all law, is complex and some would say, tedious. It would be impossible to get the average reader to read about slave law. But if the injustice of the law is exemplified in an individual case, then it becomes interesting and vital.

For me, one of the attractions of writing about Sally Miller, was that I could use her story to illustrate many of the issues I had been attempting to put on paper in my book on slave law, particularly how judges decided issues according to principles of property when that property was human, and how it was possible for white-looking people to be regarded as slaves.

I saw myself as writing not so much about slavery, but about injustice. I have a theory that when injustice is given cerebral form by the leaders of a community, be they judges, politicians or newspaper editors, it becomes entrenched in the soul of a nation. It is the seductive nature of injustice that often we don’t recognise it for what it is. We are so busy doing what interests us, be it making money, furthering our career and caring for our family, that injustice around us is ignored. When politicians, priests, judges, academics, and writers arrive at a loose consensus to demonise a helpless minority, the climate is ready for acts of exploitation. But it takes something more - the presence of an accommodating middle class which is prepared to reap the economic advantages of suppressing others. When ordinary people became fearful of a minority which is different in colour or religion, and ordinary people become ready to accept moral theories which they know in their heart of hearts cannot be right - by such means is evil justified. By such means are people locked up in Guantanamo Bay without trial. By such means Governments imprison people seeking refugee status, and hold their own citizens without trial for periodic detention.

My intended audience is the general public, the average reader. Thus in all my books, I make detours to expand on bare historical sources to inject a sense of the times and to reflect upon the thoughts of the persons involved. All historians do this; I do it more than most. Academics claim they never do it. This is not to say that I have let fancy fly. My books are not works of fiction. They are as true as I can make it, as I understand the truth of what happened. The fascinating characters that I write about lived in a bewildering, confused, inconsistent moral haze, just as we do, and rather than standing outside that haze, looking in, I plunge inside so I could imagine what it was they were looking at.

I also question everything previous writers have said about the topic of my book. In this regard, being a lawyer was both an advantage and a hindrance. An advantage because the courtroom experience encourages one to question the obvious and doubt the glib. Thus I was used to digging deeper. A hindrance because lawyers are often the most tedious of writers. They are taught to write legal opinions that cover every eventuality and often drown their conclusions in qualifications and exceptions. They use jargon when a smaller word would do just as well. All this had to be unlearnt.

I make a number of false starts in my writing. For example I never intended to write a biography of John McDouall Stuart. My publishers suggested I put together the story of the Ghan railway which goes from Adelaide to Darwin. I began this project thinking that I would describe the way of life of the Aboriginal people who had lived in the desert since the Dreamtime, the building of a telegraph line across the continent, the path taken by explorers, particularly John McDouall Stuart in 1858-1862 and the creation of an intricate network of camel-pads into the interior by Afghan cameleers from about 1865 until 1929 when rail and motor trucks put them out of business. In fact I wrote such a book, but in the process Stuart in his rumbustious, alcoholic way began to push everyone else out of the way. Here was a character, larger than life, yet complex and bewildering in his self-destruction. In the end I surrendered to him and let him take over. Hence he became my latest book: Mr Stuart’s Track: the Forgotten Life of Australia’s Greatest Explorer.