Life with a large family on a farming property has left 87-year-old Margaret Dwyer with a treasure trove of memories and scenarios to help inspire her third book to be released on 14th May. “I’d like to call it factual fiction,” said Margaret, a mother of seven who dedicated ‘A Chain Of Dreams’ to her husband and children for providing her with the inspiration to write her first work of fiction.
Proudly holding the finished product in her hand, Margaret’s eyes light up when she recalls how she has always enjoyed writing. She was busy dusting in her father’s office once day when he opened his iron safe and took out a little exercise book of hers from third grade. Inside was a conversation she had written between a Mater lorry and a draught horse. In the tale Mrs Horse met Mater lorry and said she had not been very well lately as she had given birth to a little foal, to which Mater lorry replied he had given birth to a baby Austen.
“I suppose I’ve always had a little streak of it in me” says Margaret. However it was many years before Margaret published a book, releasing the autobiography ‘With a Song in my Heart’ at the age of 82. “I was always just too busy with seven children and cooking for shearers on the farm.” The serious writing began five years ago
when she and husband Frank moved to Parkes and Margaret had to nurse him through his illness. “I would put my husband to bed at night and start writing until two in the morning, often waking him to check a fact or date.”
In 2014 her second book ‘Jewels Along The Newell’ was released focusing on funny, tragic and inspiring stories of the people who have made their home along the Newell Highway over the past 100 years. It took Margaret only 12 months to complete her third book, but a very long time to find a publisher, which she accomplished mostly by herself.
‘A Chain Of Dreams’ is the story of an ordinary Australian farming family told through protagonist, Tish O’Reagan, who accepts a scholarship to study at the Trinity College of Music in Dublin where she moves to with her parents and spirited sister Louise. “I have become very fond of this family, and would love to write a sequel,” said Margaret, who already has the beginning formulated in her head. She is quick to admit that she loosely based some of the family members on the characters in her favourite book ‘Little Women’. ‘A Chain Of Dreams’ is available to purchase in softcover or as an e-book via Balboa Press.