Isolde: Years ago, I came across John S. Goodall’s The Story of an English Village and how the village marketplace and the inside of one particular house changed every hundred years. I thought that was really excellent. Years later, when it was my job to research nearly every town in Australia for the Bicentenary, I had the idea of a picture book of a Australian country town. It’s taken a lot of research and it’s been a very long term project. I am hopeless at art so it was good to be able to work with Louise. She has been marvellous at making all the ideas come alive.

Isolde: I would make a list of changes for each decade and then we would sit down together and decide what should go in the picture. Not just showing how the town had changed but brainstorming little stories of what the people were doing.
Louise: I’d tell Isolde if I needed any picture references for buildings, machinery, clothing. As we got into the era of photography, it became easier.
Isolde: When we first started this project, I used to go into libraries, especially the Mitchell Library in Sydney, and photocopy pages from town histories and other reference books. I also took lots of photos when I visited country towns.
One thing we did together was visit the Powerhouse Museum Library. The costume curator kindly took us down into their behind-the-scenes area and showed us their costume collection.
Louise: When the internet arrived, it got much easier. There is so much helpful visual material now available.

Louise: Too long. It wasn’t easy and at times it was overwhelming. Changing the angle of the view helped a lot. Sometimes I could see Isolde was just longing to get onto the next pages.

Isolde: Because I didn’t want it to be in a particular state. What we wanted to show was the typical experiences of Aussie towns; events like bushfires, droughts, floods, goldrushes, rabbit and mice plagues, railways and by-passes, annual show days. That sort of thing.

Louise: You are quite right but it would have taken up too much room. Some country towns like Kalgoorlie have streets wide enough for an oxen team to turn around. We had to keep our streets narrower so we could give the sense of a town not just one main street.