Michael Trant is a WA country boy who now resides in Perth after a variety of careers ranging from farmer, marine draftsman, pastoralist, and FIFO pot washer.
He writes with an authentic rural voice, drawing on his experiences to open readers to places and lifestyles foreign to many. Trent is passionate about farming, writing and gaming, the order of which vary throughout the year. He still works on farms as a tractor driver, mainly to annoy those teachers who claimed no one would pay him to stare out a window all day.
His debut novel Ridgeview Station was released in 2017. We caught up with him to talk about his latest book Wild Dogs, which is out now.
Thank you Mike for joining The AU Review to talk about your new book Wild Dogs.
Thank you for having us, Jess.
To get started, why don’t you tell us in your own words about the book.
Okay well Wild Dogs is an outback adventure, a bit of a thriller, and it’s about an old dog trapper called Gabe who’s living and working by himself out in the WA outback, basically just trapping feral dogs and dingoes. In the process he comes across a people smuggling operation, and rescues an Afghan refugee who is about to be shot and thrown down a big hole, and the two set off to go and find Amin’s family. It’s just an adventure, a bit of drama, a bit of action, and yeah just a good little story set in the outback.
All the ingredients for a good story! Your book has been described as Australia’s answer to Jack Reacher and you even got Lee Child to give a quote for your cover. Tell me a bit about how that whole process happened.
Yeah, still reeling over that one. My publisher Bev made the comparison when she read it after my agent Alex submitted it. She said it reads a lot like a Jack Reacher novel. And I thought, well that’s a lovely compliment. And then when I ended up signing with Penguin, she said well we publish Lee in the UK, so I might see if his publisher can get hold of Lee and ask the question. Which they did and he said yes! So we sent it through and he got back to us in time for a cover quote which was just amazing and I’m very thankful to Lee that he took the time for little old me. It’s great.
That’s awesome! Did you get to see the full quote or only the bit they put on the cover?
Ah, I think he—I’m not sure how it works, but I think he provided just a— because, I mean he knows how it works so he didn’t give them a page of stuff. He just gave them a couple of quotes and they chose that.
Ah makes sense. So, there’s a people-smuggling operation going on, and you’ve got a refugee in Amin. You’ve also got some Aboriginal representation in the book. I know that you’ve done a lot of work around getting authenticity readers to look through the book. How did that process work and what sort of feedback did you get from your authenticity readers?
Yeah so, like you say, if I’m going to include subject matter which I’m not familiar with, I do like to make sure it’s accurate. So we had Raihanaty A Jalil give us a sensitivity read on the Islamic side of things. And a friend read through it, he runs an Indigenous cultural business down in Bunbury, Kooyar Wongi. So he read through it as well, and it was more about making sure that I haven’t made any obvious errors, and tried to get things authentic and accurate.
The feedback from both of them was great and they gave me some suggestions on how to improve the manuscript, and the book is just much better for that work. So yeah, you do— if you’re going to include diverse characters you need to make sure they’re accurate and not stereotypical. That’s the worse thing you can do. So hopefully I’ve done it right.
And if I haven’t, that rests on me and not them.
Of course, but it sounds like their feedback has been pretty good anyway.
Yeah. Bill said, you’ve really captured the way Country breathes, which has gotta be one of the nicest things anyone’s ever said about my work. He actually asked if the community was based on anyone, any particular place up there, which its not, but he said you’ve really captured it—so yeah you can’t get much better than that.
How gorgeous is that? You’ve captured the way Country breathes. I have to ask. Australia’s outback is so vast, how do you describe something like that? I mean, we’re used to seeing it in pictures but how do you describe it.
Probably because I’ve been out there enough that I know how it feels. So it’s not so much how the country looks but how it feels. Like stepping out of a ute is like stepping into an oven. And then at the same time, if it’s been a stinking hot day and a thunderstorm comes over it’s the exact opposite, it’s like stepping back into an air-conditioned ute. So yeah. It’s just the way, I don’t know, the air just feels crisp and clean out there. It’s just basically drawing on my own experience more than anything. And that’s where it comes from.
Like I would struggle, I’ve said this before, I would struggle to write a novel set up in the Kimberley because I’ve never been up there. So I can—I mean I’ve been up in the Pilbara when it’s been sticky, hot and muggy but I’ve never been further north into the real tropics. So I would find it hard to describe the country up there. I definitely have to be—I have to have been somewhere to be able to describe it accurately.
That’s fair enough. And I guess that, as you say, having that feel of the place, not just the way it looks but the way it feels.
That’s it. The way it feels, the way it smells and the way it sounds. That’s the main ones.
And of course, the reason you’ve spent so much time out in that area is because you are a farming boy. And I know a little bit about the way you have developed—or you think about your writing while you’re working. Do you want to tell us a bit about that?
Yeah so I’m currently working on a farm up in Three Springs and most of my job involves sitting in a very large piece of machinery staring out a window while it drives itself. So it gives you a lot of thinking time, and a lot of time to listen to audiobooks so you can study other people’s work while you’re working, which is brilliant.
And I actually have, on occasions, I will edit or even handwrite pieces depending on what I’m driving and if operations allows it. So I’m very lucky I’ve got some good bosses, and their flexible and quite happy for me to do my own thing.
But yeah it’s good. It’s long hours. It’s not much going on. So you can focus on other stuff in the back of your mind while you’re working. A lot of this book was edited in a tractor during seeding time… yeah it’s perfect.
I love that. And of course you have your famous tractor book reviews!
Yeah that all came about when Covid first took off, and all my author mates, you know their launches were getting cancelled and I just saw it everywhere. And I thought, I’ve got all these hours on audiobooks I might try and review a few, because you know everyone was staying home with nothing to do so audiobooks were a good way to kill time. So I thought for something different I’ll just do it while I’m in the tractor. I’ll just film myself on the phone. It’s a bit noisy and a bit bouncy but that sort of adds to the authenticity of it I guess.
Speaking of audio books, you’ve got your own audiobook for Wild Dogs.
Yes! That’s been really great. I actually started listening to it today on the drive over here. And yeah they sent me—Penguin sent me—three auditions during harvest actually, so I was in the header working, and I had these three narrators reading my work and I had to sort of choose which one I reckoned sounded the best. So that was amazing. That was awesome. I would have listened to those things ten times over I reckon. I was really trying to pick which one was—that would bring the best feel to the book. So yeah, Ric Herbert, he’s narrated Wild Dogs and he’s done an awesome job.
I can’t wait to give it a listen. And then, while we’re still on the whole theme of working, your first book Ridgeview Station, which came out five years ago, was based on your own experiences of managing a station. This book is quite different to your first.
Yeah, so after Ridgeview came out, I struggled a little bit getting a second one. And I ended up writing two other manuscripts based on a farming sheep dog and then some FIFO—another story based around a guy doing FIFO work, and they were very similar to what I was doing. And yeah I didn’t have much luck with them. So I thought, bugger it, I’m going to write something completely different. Something completely not based on what I was doing. And something a bit more faster-paced because a lot of the feedback I got was, it’s really enjoyable but it’s just a bit slow. Which means get a bit more snappy.
So I thought, well I can do that. And I’d read a lot of Wilbur Smith growing up and I thought well, he wrote a lot of stories based around Africa where he grew up. I could do the same thing. So I did. And a few events happened that stuck in the back of my mind, like the Sri-Lankan refugees rolling up on the shores of Geraldton foreshore a few years ago, a big drug bust in Geraldton, yeah just lots of little things pooled together to make this wildly outlandish adventure.
So yeah, that was the idea behind that. Write something different and a bit faster.
And then you’re working on a third book now, and I take it that one will be a lot more along the lines of Wild Dogs in pace?
Yeah at the moment it’s probably going to follow on from Wild Dogs with a bit of luck.
Am I allowed to know anything about the next one?
Not yet. He’s gotta survive the first one yet!
No, it’s still all up in the air. Because I hadn’t had anything planned or even written when we signed the contract for two books, so it was a sudden mad rush to think about what the hell am I gonna do now?
Is that really…
Terrifying is the world you’re looking for. Yes. Yes. Terrifying.
It’ll be interesting because I’ve never had to work to a deadline before. But, I actually work better with a deadline. So if something needs to be done by a certain time it will generally get done. It might all get done in the last minute, but it will get done.
So I did warn Bev that this second book might not be as polished as the first manuscript. Because, that had been sitting in the draw for quite a while. But yeah, it’s good. It’s going to be an interesting challenge.
Is it very different? Because when you write a book and you don’t have a publisher lined up, you kind of get given all this space and time to just explore different avenues. And now you’re working to a deadline, you know it’s definitely going to be published. How does that change the mindset that you go into with writing?
So far it hasn’t too much. I’m having more trouble getting back into the first draft mode because I’ve been editing and rewriting and editing for nearly three years now trying to get a manuscript—because I had all these manuscripts in a drawer and every time something would come up, I’d go, oh that might suit that one, so I’d fix it up and send it off and then—so we’re slowly getting back into first draft mode.
But it doesn’t change too much, because by now this will be my sixth manuscript so I like to think I might know a little bit about what I’m doing… maybe. And that’s the hardest part. I know what I’ve written so far has errors in it and needs fixing but just trying to forge ahead and get it finished so you can then go back and tidy it up.
Because what happens, I find, is that as I write, new ideas pop up. I don’t generally have too many ideas when I start writing. I’ve got an overall rough outline maybe, and then I just see where it ends up. So if I keep going back to the start and fixing, by the time I get to the end I’ve probably come up with a whole new set of ideas that work better, and then I’ve gotta go back again. So yeah, get the first draft done, reread it, try and work out what you’re going to do with it.
You clearly did enough of the editing, and rewriting and drafting and had enough experience with Wild Dogs that—well the process from being accepted to being published was very very quick on this book. So it must have been pretty polished when you submitted.
Yeah very very quick. Which is strange. Because it took so long to get it read. I sent it to one agent before who then six months later said she was still keen but hadn’t got around to reading it and then pulled out of the agenting business.
Then I re-sent it to Alex, and Alex always says she takes a long time to read things, and I said no worries, I like your style, I like what you do, I’m happy to wait. About ten months later she got around to finally reading it and went oh my god this is amazing, signed me up there and then.
Two weeks later she sent it off to publishers and two weeks after that it was a bit of a bidding war and yeah we signed with Penguin. And before I’d even signed with Penguin we had a rough outline of a cover and she’d sent back edits, and it was just nuts. It was an absolute whirlwind. So it was good. It was like September to February, signing to on the shelf, which is just crazy.
That’s just ridiculous!
Ridiculous!
So yeah, the manuscript was fairly tight because, like I say, I had just kept pulling it out, tightening it up, and coming back with a new idea. I think the scenes with the dingo in it, which sort of breaks up the story, I think I added them in last. That was the last thing I put in. It wasn’t until I read something else and I thought that’s a good idea. I might do that. That’s one advantage of not having a deadline is that you do have that freedom to just let things sit and get it out of your memory and go back to it with fresh eyes, and it makes it so much clearer what needs to be done. Whereas when you just keep reading start to finish, start to finish, you end up missing a fair bit I think.
Well, I’m so excited for this book. I cannot tell you how excited I am. Thank you so much for your time. I cannot wait to read it and I know there are so many people that are dying to read it and have already got their hands on it and are reading so my very best wishes to you and I hope it all goes amazing. And I look forward to the next book as well!
Yeah me too!
Michael Trant’s Wild Dogs is out now from Penguin Books Australia. Grab your copy from Booktopia HERE!
