Colours of the mid-north: Red Dust and Purple Roads

For regular readers of my blog, you may know why I’ve named my third book Purple Roads.

First of all, the bitumen in parts of South Australia (where the story is set), looks really purple and secondly, the dirt roads have that look about them too.

In Purple Roads, Matt is a farmer who has taken up truck driving. If you’ve read the first two chapters on my website, you’ll know he has an accident. This photo is the exact spot I was thinking about when I wrote that scene.

He also spends a lot of time driving the dirt roads of the mid-north and between Pt Augusta and Ceduna, and out to the Nullarbor. The bitumen between Pt Augusta and Ceduna looks very much like purple to me!

And changing tack back to Red Dust, there’s a part in the book where Detective Dave Burrows and Craig Buchanan are sitting in some ruins and find a whisky bottle. This is the place I had in my mind when I wrote that. (pg 217/18)

Among these bunches of ‘Casha’ trees and native pines is where I sat (figuratively speaking) when I wrote the scene that had Craig on watch for the owners of the two dogs (pg 233/234).

And here’s another purple road, just to convice you that they do exsist!