Robert Hillman’s latest book, The Bride of Almond Tree, is set in what he describes as an “absorbing” time of Australian history, bringing together a Quaker and a pro-Communist in the mid-20th Century.
The prolific author, who has more than 60 books to his name, spoke to Nine to Noon about helping refugees who have suffered trauma and persecution to tell their stories.
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Hillman has helped give voice to many including Najaf Mazari who had previously failed to find a writer to tell his story. When he met with Hillman, he knew he was the one.
In The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif, he helps Mazari tell of his early life as a shepherd boy in Afghanistan, his capture and torture by the Taliban and his time in an Australian detention camp.
“All the biographies that I write, I write them as if they were auto-biographies, I write them in the voice of the subject and I fashion the voice of the subject,” Hillman says.
“I listen to them very carefully and work out what voice I can put on paper, because you can’t just simply transcribe. I never record anything; I just make notes.
“You know you’ve succeeded when the subject reads the chapter you’ve sent and says, ‘yes this is me’. Writing Najaf’s story led me to another and another, and I become the go-to guy for people who suffered miserably in getting to Australia.”
He says he might do about 50 interviews with his subject, listening to their story with ambition as a writer and empathy as a human.
“[It’s] terrifically moving and at the same time terrifically exciting to me as a writer.”
He says he stays in touch with them.
“Because they feel that the voice that I’ve created for them and story that I’ve told, is exactly what they would have done if they had been able to, if they had the ability to write a 250-page narrative drama of telling a story of their life.”
The Bride of Almond Tree
Hillman has also written a number of works of fiction, and his latest novel is The Bride of Almond Tree, set in post-World War II Australia and Russia.
“I was very attracted to the period of Australian history I was writing about 1947-1956, because at this time, when Australia’s allegiance to United Kingdom had exhausted itself, we were still sentimentally attached and we still are.
“People in Australia during the war had a sympathy for the Soviet Union, but after the war, anti-Communism came back.
“At that time, 1947-1956, was a time when Communists were vilified and persecuted. There are certain points of continuity between blest of Quakers and blest of Marxists, and I bought those two … together and looked at the impediment that their relationship had to face and overcome."
