Maldon locals are most likely to know Anita Sinclair as a puppeteer, a cartoonist or an artist. Indeed, she ran a cartoon column for the Tarrangower Times for a spell. But Anita is also a writer and retrospectively, she always has been.

As a child, she recalls making illustrated books for a sick friend during hospital stays. As a young adult, she vividly recalls being visited by a muse on the descent climb of Mount Kosciuszko, where lines of poetry arrived fully formed.

Growing up in London, there are things that Anita says she took for granted as being a part of life anywhere in the world. London, she says, was “full of parties and street parades, costume and performance. Indeed, the English are quite mad when it comes to celebrating!” And from these fertile and artistic roots comes a true Renaissance woman.

Anita’s first published work was on a subject she knows a lot about: puppetry. Anita had an illustrious and influential career as an arts teacher, where she cemented the ancient craft of puppetry into the curriculum. When she owned a puppetry and mask shop, she was approached by a publisher to write a book.

For all its success, the Puppetry Handbook ensured Anita that she could undertake a project of greater magnitude. Anita’s first memoir was published in 2021. The Kite Makers explores a young child’s perspective on war. Based on her real-life experience of being bombed and living through the Second World War while living in London with her family, it’s a unique perspective, sometimes quite literally, as with a child’s POV, on the impacts of conflict.

Now she’s releasing her second memoir, A Wild Surmise – A dream of migratory birds, which follows Anita as a new migrant arriving in Australia at the age of 12 through to finishing her painting and sculpture degree at the age of 20. It traverses a nine-year passage of time and inadvertently tells a coming-of-age story, detailing a journey of migration into an unknown future and the impacts of that experience. “All those abandoning the familiar know to expect the unfamiliar,” Anita says in the book’s forward.

When it comes to writing memoirs, Anita discusses the challenges of recreating the emotional impact of an experience in the past and bringing it to life in the present. Essentially, Anita is here to tell a great story, not outline a series of events. She calls the process of turning lived experience into story ‘housekeeping’, but rather it refers to craft. There’s a vast difference between reconstructing the details of the past or telling an historical anecdote and the weaving of words into a captivating read.

“Be sure that within the crafting, the stories are all quite true,” she says.

When it came to writing about a key moment in adolescent or young adult life, losing her virginity, she says, “We don’t need details. Everyone knows something about sex, and it’s a participatory sport.” So, in answer to how she could divulge the particular rite of passage, she came up with using some well-worn fairy-tale tropes.

The one detail Anita does admit to, is that as a 16-year-old in Wangaratta, her paramour “lay down a rug under a tree, with some sort of mound that worked as a pillow. Turns out, it was the carcass of a dead sheep.” You can’t get a more antipodean fable than that.

Anita’s wry wit and deadpan humour is sure to accompany your read as she discusses split nationalities and the experience of not feeling entirely Australian. This is a sentiment Anita suspects many Anglo-Australians feel. She says it took her a while to attune to a landscape palette so very different to that of her homeland. “For me, I left vibrant London and emerged on the other side of the planet at a dump in Eldorado. It’s been a wild ride,” she says.

Anita is launching A Wild Surmise on Sunday 11 June, at the Kangaroo Hotel at 2pm. Local musician Chris Green will play 50s jazz on trumpet, and passionate arts supporter, Bendigo West MP Maree Edwards, will open the launch. Don’t miss out on celebrating a local legend.

This article appeared in Tarrangower Times, 9 June 2023.