RESEARCH IS A WONDERFUL THING
The name, ‘Fyshwick’,
intrigues me and submitting it as a prompt topic for my writing group was, I
confess, a piece of whimsy on my part. I thought it would be great as part of a
title for a short story. Having read some Graham Greene recently, I decided ‘Our
Man in Fyshwick’ had a certain ring to it.
I sat down with a coffee and googled
‘Fyshwick’ expecting to ramble through any number of bonny references to The
Auld Country. To my dismay, there were no references to the British Isles whatsoever.
There were no quaint villages so named, no colourful fish markets carrying its
moniker and no character, male or female, rejoicing in its eccentricity.
Fyshwick is entirely about a commercial suburb of Canberra notorious for the highest
percentage of burglaries in the ACT and the only place in the Territory where
prostitution may be conducted legally. I felt like a balloon five days after a kid’s
birthday party.
The name is a contrivance; a
combination of ‘Fysh’, after Sir Philip Fysh, a Tasmanian politician who
contributed to the establishment of Australian Federation, and ‘wick’, an Old
English term for a dwelling place or village. I had no idea how I was going to
make a story out of that, but a story I had to have. I had chosen the topic; I was
determined to make it work.
So I rambled some more with Google
and found myself reading about the history of Fyshwick. The land was originally cleared and developed
as the site of Molonglo Internment Camp, built in 1918 to accommodate German
and Austrian nationals who had been expelled from China. Due to diplomatic intervention, these
internees never arrived in Molonglo but were deported to Germany. Several German families living in Australia were
finally interned at the facility, but numbering only a couple of hundred, they
rattled around in premises built for three and a half thousand souls.
From 1942 to 1946 Molonglo was used
as a naval auxiliary wireless station. Managed by fourteen WRANs, it operated receivers for
strategic radio links between Australia and Whitehall. Petty Officer Marion
Stevens, who was in charge for all but the first year of operation, was famed
for being the only woman appointed to run a transmitting station during the
War. I couldn’t hope to do this material justice in a short story, but I found
myself day dreaming about a TV mini series built around it.
In the meantime, I still have to
come up with a story about someone’s man in Fyshwick. At the moment I’m playing with some ideas based
on its reputation as the burglary capital of the ACT.
I have just three
weeks to get my act together.
