Sarah Rossetti

Dr. Sarah Rossetti lives in Perth, Western Australia and in Uki in Northern New South Wales. In 1988, she completed a Bachelor of Arts with a Creative Writing major, earning a Distinction in Communication & Cultural Studies at Curtin University, WA. She has credits in a wide variety of genres and has won five national awards for screenwriting. Sarah writes commissioned TV dramas and feature documentaries, works as a script editor and assessor, and has lectured in screenwriting at three WA universities and at SAE in Byron Bay, NSW. In 2007, Sarah was appointed board member of the Australian Writers’ Guild, a position she held for three years. In 2009, she completed her PhD in Media Studies at Murdoch University, WA. Nullarbor Pearl is Sarah’s debut novel, which she believes could easily to be adapted into a feature film, by enhancing her early film script with the novel’s further development.

Sample

from Chapter One

The noonday sun burns Pearl’s head through her frizzy brown hair as she splashes sky blue paint on a crumbling asbestos fence. She takes a step back, paintbrush in hand, liking how the ragged top of her ‘mural’ blends seamlessly with the cloudless sky. Pearl wonders how long it will be before old Piss-Pot-the-caretaker notices and tells her off. She glances past the mural to the Cockburn Cliff Caravan Park office, with its tattered curtains drawn. He’ll be okay with her giving the driveway a lift, she hopes, as she uses her t-shirt to wipe the sweat off her top lip, but Mum? Different story.

Pearl works close to her mural so the power of it can’t hit her like remembering does. Up close, it’s just laid down colours that rests her mind rather than disturbs it.

Gutless, she thinks. A mural can be painted in bits, but you have to stand back to see if it works.

Pearl closes her eyes, takes a few big steps back and opens them. She likes that she got her cringe-worthy, adolescent dorkiness right, plus the excitement of beachcombing with a metal detector. She looks up at her freckle-faced dad, Big Red, who’s giving her younger-self a lop-sided grin. Pearl can still feel the love in that grin and it kills her, like a punch she can’t get out of the way of. Her heart flips as she remembers him singing to her that day as they hunted for treasure.

“You’ve got to get a bit of dirt on your hands, Pearl. You’ve got to get a bit of dirt on your hands. If you want to grow up to be a big, big lady, you’ve got to get a bit of dirt on your hands.”

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