ANYONE who has experienced the beauty and tranquillity of Boonah and Kalbar in the Scenic Rim will understand why the fictional works of author Gillian Wells revolve around these localities.
Mrs Wells lives at Kalbar in a house on a hill with panoramic views of the Great Dividing Range.
It’s a vantage point that enables her to see over the endless rolling greens of perfectly planted crops, vast farmland and paddocks.
With this vista, it’s no wonder she found inspiration to write fictional novels that play out on landscapes just like these.
Adult fiction was not her first foray into novel writing, the start was made with a children’s story titled The Amazing Adventures of Bub and Tub.
The elegant, softly spoken Englishwoman said she had always wanted to be an author, but it took decades before she found time to make this happen.
Her own story begins in Suffolk, the United Kingdom.
“When I completed my schooling my father asked me what I wanted to do and I said very grandly as you do when you are 17 and the worlds your oyster, ‘I am going to be an author’ and bless him he did go out and buy me a typewriter,” she recalled.
“And I started to write but life got in the way.“I was married by the time I was 21 and had two children by the time I was 23 so it didn’t happen.”
Her journey from the UK to Australia began in 1988 when she joined her husband on trips to Canberra to visit his eldest brother.
She said they then became ‘hooked’ on visiting Australia every UK winter to escape its cold weather.
“We were spending six months here and six months there, and [husband] had retired from farming anyway so we moved permanently into our home at Kalbar,” she explained.
Her writing career began with a tale she’d told her children, The Amazing Adventures of Bub and Tub.
When her daughters had children of their own, she retold the tale leading them to say ‘you should write this down mum and get them published’.
She took their advice and the world opened up.
“After Bub and Tub had been published, I decided to write adult fiction,” she said.
“I had always wanted to write an adult book but hadn’t been disciplined enough, I suppose I led such a busy life I never had the time, but I have time now.
“I wrote four books I had published in the UK, but I wasn’t happy with the publisher.
“I found an Australian publisher and now it’s really taken off.”                                                                                                                                                                                                  Mrs Wells’ novels are not whimsical tales of romance, rather they involve interesting plots with twists, turns and oftentimes dark outcomes.
The softly spoken author blends her personal experiences with narratives involving scenes that have the reader second guessing outcomes.
This darker side to life is a world far from the one she occupies but through writing she is able to live a hundred different lives.
How she comes up with the scenarios is something even she is uncertain of.
“I am always dogged by self-doubt...it sounds funny, but I am,” she said.
“I will write something, then think ‘who’d want to read that’ but then the publishers say they love it.
“I did a podcast of Lost and the publisher was asking me ‘how do you do this?’ and ‘how do you do that?’ and I said, ‘well I don’t know, it just comes to me really’.
“When I’m writing I am actually inside the story...I am leading two lives because there is reality and then there is make believe.
“With every book that anybody writes really, a little piece of them is left within its pages.
“Now I can’t stop, I have completed 15 manuscripts altogether now and I am writing my sixteenth.”
Titles include Inheritance, Alone, Consequences, Lost and its sequel Returned, as well as Belonging, Travelling and many others.
Her work has been recognised with nominations for the Miles Franklin award in 2021 and 2022.