As with so many of my books The Cartographer’s Secret is a mixture of fact and fiction. I’ve always had a fascination for maps, particularly those of the early Dutch cartographers. When I discovered that most of those early cartographers were women, working in their family business and obliged to sign their maps with their husband’s name, I was more than a little outraged!
However, I like to set my stories in Australia and so the fictional character Evie Ludgrove stepped onto the stage. I then started researching nineteenth-century Australian maps. What a goldmine I found, and most of them are available online. (I recommend a visit to the David Rumsey Map Collection at davidrumsey.com)
Not so strangely, nineteenth-century maps led me to Ludwig Leichhardt and the many other explorers who disappeared during that time. Imagine my excitement when I discovered that Ludwig Leichhardt had spent time exploring the Hunter before he set out on his ill-fated expedition to cross Australia from east to west.
Local historical sources informed me that many people in the Hunter had sponsored Leichhardt’s various expeditions and not only that – a copy of the map he made of his Essington expedition was in the local museum!
Off I went on my own journey of exploration. I tracked down Leichhardt’s diaries (available through the Mitchell Library and online via The University of Queensland) and sure enough Leichhardt had visited the Hunter and the Broken Back Ranges, an area I know and love, and more importantly he’d climbed Yellow Rock.
The property, Yellow Rock, does exist, though not in the manner I have portrayed. I was unable to gain access or contact the current owners, and then in that wonderful, serendipitous fashion that seems to haunt my research I was put in touch with a member of the family who had originally owned the property.
The Ludgrove and Maynard families are figments of my imagination, and I have woven their early story through Leichhardt’s travels in the Hunter.
And then there’s Andrew Hume and the Leichhardt relics. Andrew Hume is not a fictional character. He arrived in Australia as a child, his father worked as a stockman on the Halls’ property at Dartbrook, NSW and he spent many years exploring the interior. His parents did own a shop in Maitland and then moved to Largs and they are buried in the area (although for fiction’s sake I moved their resting place a few miles down the road). After that things get a little vague and varied. Was Andrew Hume ‘a rogue and a scoundrel’ or was he telling the truth about the Leichhardt relics? We’ll never know because he died before he could prove his claims. I stuck to the reported facts until almost the very end when I took the liberty of offering a totally imaginative ending.
And so to Evie’s fictional map—for the sake of continuity between the two timelines I have used the modern spelling, for example the 1883 map of NSW shows Muswellbrook as ‘Muscle Brook’. Leichhardt’s journals also include many and varied spellings and I have also standardised those.
Perhaps most importantly, I learnt from researching The Cartographer’s Secret that fact truly is stranger than fiction!