On a rainy Tuesday, Australian author Rosalie Ham stopped by Unity Wellington for our first lunchtime event of the year. After a warm Unity welcome and a few words from Macmillan’s Joanna King, Rosalie took the microphone. Tacking a little bit of publicity onto the tail end of a New Zealand holiday, Rosalie remarked on the beautiful scenery she and her family had seen on their drive down from Auckland. She then launched into an enlightening talk on her influences, her debut novel The Dressmaker, and its recent film adaptation that saw her brushing shoulders with the stars.
A personable and forthcoming speaker, Rosalie told of how The Dressmaker was influenced by her upbringing in a small Australian town of 800 people. Bigotry, competition, hypocrisy, and secrets were rife in the environment of her childhood. Rosalie’s mother was a seamstress, and Rosalie would help out by holding the pin tin as she administered to the women of the town. “I heard a lot of things”, she said wryly. In later years when Rosalie took a novel writing course at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, it is these memories which informed her storytelling and resulted in The Dressmaker, which was first published in 2000.
When Rosalie was approached by film producer Sue Maslin about adapting The Dressmaker for the screen, she instantly agreed, on one condition: that she and her friends could be extras in the film. She told of meeting Kate Winslet and Liam Hemsworth, describing the latter as a “polite and well-brought up boy”. The film was released in late 2015, and Rosalie was effusive about the support that New Zealanders had given both the book and the film.
Rosalie spoke briefly about her two other novels, Summer at Mount Hope and There Should Be More Dancing, mentioning that a fourth is currently in the works. After a Q&A, she signed books for an admiring audience.
