Noosa River holiday inspires Hazard River series
by J.E. Fison
I admire authors who grow up with a burning desire to write - penning
novellas in primary school and signing their first book contracts in
their twenties. I'm not one of them. I took the long way round, but I
had a lot of fun on the way and don't regret a moment of it.
As a girl, I was more likely to be found at the local creek, catching
guppies, than writing or even reading a book. On holidays, I led my
brother and cousins on boating expeditions around Moreton Bay, in
Queensland - exploring mangroves and investigating the wildlife. When I
did read, it was wildlife magazines and the Atlas of the World that
kept me interested. I was into facts. I wanted to be an explorer when I
grew up. I wasn't quite sure what that meant and was disappointed to
discover that most of the world had already been explored. I had missed
my calling by a few hundred years. So, I settled on journalism.
I spent my twenties working as a television reporter in Australia, Asia
and Europe - covering the student uprising in China and the fall of
communism in Eastern Europe. I also had the chance to travel
extensively - camping with elephants in Kenya, encountering lions in
South Africa and making friends with an orang-utan at the Sepilok
Sanctuary in Borneo. Eventually I returned to my hometown of Brisbane
and settled down to family life with a job in marketing and an interest
in travel writing.
The children's fiction idea crept up on me while I was on holiday in
Noosa with my husband and two sons. Most people know Noosa's Main
Beach, Hastings Street and the Noosa National Park, but just across the
Noosa River is an unspoiled paradise that is accessible only by car
ferry - the Noosa North Shore. We spent a month there. My two sons
hooked up with friends and spent the holiday exploring sands banks,
building bush camps, making rafts, riding along dirt tracks to the
beach, dodging snakes, avoiding sting rays and generally having a Boy
Versus Wild adventure. I had to write about it.
Hazard River chronicles the holiday adventures of four children,
Jack
Wilde, the narrator, his brother, Ben, the Stink Collector, their
neighbor, Lachlan Master, the Master of Disaster and Professor
Bigbrains, Mimi Fairweather, who lives on a yacht in Hazard River. The
stories are fast-paced and fun, but each one was inspired by a serious
fact.
In the first story, Shark
Frenzy, the children find a dead
shark washed
up on the sand. It has no fins. They decide to investigate. Their
mission takes them to a marine park, where they find fishermen killing
sharks for their fins. It's up to the children to stop them.
Although the story is fiction, the issues are very real. Some experts
estimate that 100 million sharks are killed each year, mostly for their
fins. The practice of shark finning, where the sharks' fins are cut off
and the body is dumped into the sea is widely condemned as barbaric and
is decimating shark populations. It continues, however, to fill the
demand for shark fin soup, which is considered a delicacy in Asia.
In the other books in the series, Bat Attack,
Tiger
Terror
and Snake
Surprise, the Hazard River gang comes up against rogue miners,
smugglers and developers as they fight to protect ghost bats, koalas
and even a couple circus tigers. In between tracking down the baddies,
the kids fall into quicksand, get stranded on boats, find messages,
discover super-cool secret bases and abandoned boats. They play
pranks on each other, get lost, get found and get into a whole lot of
trouble.
Editor's note: All three reviewers who read books in this series
recommended them.
Pat Pledger