by Meg McKinlay
Mum tapes the photo to the end of the sign. And there we are – me on the couch, Newt falling, Mum lunging and Dad with his mouth open, roaring with laughter.
If you drew a speech bubble around the sign, he’d be saying “Welcome to the Universe!”
Mum sits back with a sigh. Then she looks up at the sky. “It’s a shame it’s so cloudy.” She turns to me. “You still haven’t seen a shooting star, have you?”
I shake my head.
“Did you know,” Newt says, “that shooting stars are not actually stars but meteoroids?”
“I do,” I say. “I did. I knew that once, back when …”
He looks at me. “When what?”
“I’ll tell you later,” I say. “I’ll tell you lots of things.” I throw my arms up in a wide stretch. “Anyway, I saw Skylab, and that was like a thousand shooting stars.”
“No, it wasn’t,” Newt says. “What it was like was lots of pieces of metal falling through the atmosphere.”
I can’t help myself, then. I turn and grab him in a big hug, pulling him towards me, and Mum too on the other side.
Newt wriggles his way clear. “What was that for?”
“Because you’re an idiot. A perfectly Newtish idiot.”
And also because he was right, in a way. Skylab did bring Dad back to us, just not in the way he was thinking.
I look up at the night and I’m glad of the clouds, somehow. There’s something perfect about the way they blur across the sky.
You don’t always have to see the stars. Sometimes it’s enough to know that they’re there.
A Note on History, Research and the Making Up of Stuff
While Catch a Falling Star is a work of fiction, it is inspired by an actual historical event and I have drawn closely upon this in the telling.
In July 1979, Skylab, one of the world’s first space stations, fell out of orbit, showering debris across townships, farms and desert near the south-east coast of Western Australia. In the way of the times – that is, via television, newspaper and radio – this was a global media event. As the world waited, the months leading up to Skylab’s re-entry were rife with speculation, wild predictions, outlandish proposals and absurd merchandising opportunities.
Catch a Falling Star is a fictional re-imagining of this time. In writing it, I made conscious choices about which elements to fictionalise and which to represent in historically accurate terms. While I have taken small liberties with news reporting – paraphrasing, splicing individual quotes together and so on – for the most part this material is quoted verbatim from primary and secondary sources.
All Skylab-related details – the timeline and technical details, the public and media response to its decaying orbit – have been reconstructed as faithfully as possible via newspapers and other historical records. Twelve million people really did try to levitate Skylab, others took out special insurance and cardboard Skylab Protection Helmets were an actual thing. (I am now the proud owner of one!)
The story of the missing pilot who was reported to be living in the Great Bear constellation is also true. The disappearance over Bass Strait in October 1978 of a man named Frederick Valentich remains a mystery to this day. For the purposes of the book, however, I altered one small detail. The claim by an Australian psychic that Valentich would return by December 1979 was made in August of that year. I wanted to use that titbit but my story finishes in mid-July, so I did what any opportunistic writer would do, and moved the date. In the book, Newt stumbles across the psychic’s claim in June, enabling it to feed into his theory about his father and Skylab. I’ve made other small timing tweaks of this kind where I felt it reasonable to do so.
There are larger departures from fact too. I’ve ignored some events that took place during the period of the novel because they didn’t serve my purposes; I’ve emphasised others because they did. I set my story in an unnamed, fictional town, loosely standing in for, but not actually representing, the West Australian town of Esperance, over which debris from Skylab ultimately fell. Likewise, none of the characters in the book are based on any real person, even where specific events in which they are involved reflect those that actually took place. For example, while there was in fact a young man who won $10,000 by hurrying to the USA with a piece of Skylab, he was most certainly not a bus driver named Revhead Ronnie.
I’ve taken creative licence. I’ve taken poetic licence. Let’s face it: I’ve taken as many licences as I possibly could. What else would an opportunistic writer do? Skylab’s fall to Earth was a fascinating event and I’m thrilled to have been able to find a way to share it with readers. I can only hope my little story is as compelling as the real thing was all those years ago.
Acknowledgements
The earliest seeds of this story were planted in my childhood when, at something like Frankie’s age, I watched the news and the sky and wondered whether Skylab might fall in my very own backyard. But a seed is not an idea and an idea is not a story and a story is not a book. I have a head crammed full of childhood memories and that’s where most of them will remain.
That this particular memory became a book is thanks to a comic-strip character named Linus van Pelt. There’s a Peanuts cartoon I love in which Linus sits with Charlie Brown, their backs to the reader, staring up at the night sky. Linus asks whether people are allowed to take fallen stars home in buckets, and when Charlie tells him stars are too big for that, he falls silent. The rest of the strip is wordless and static until the final frame, when Linus quietly discards a bucket, and my little heart breaks.
This poignant little comic strip somehow bumped up against my memories of Skylab. It gave me the character of Newt, and with him the heart of the story. So my first and biggest thanks is to Charles M Schulz, the creator of Peanuts, and to Linus, whose quiet voice has always spoken so loudly to me that he feels real.
I’m also indebted to Colin Thiele, whose book Storm Boy, which was very important to me as a child, crept into my thinking as I wrote, and from there into the cracks of the story.
Because this is a book based on a real event, I did a lot of research in the course of its writing. I spent countless hours scouring digital records on the aptly named Trove and countless more squinting at microfilm at the State Library of WA. Resources such as these are invaluable and I’m hugely grateful to archivists, to those who record and preserve our history so we can keep returning to the well. This also includes strangers on the internet – people who write blogs about old TV shows and their favourite childhood lollies, and put together listicles with titles such as “You know you’re a child of the 70s if …”. In the same spirit, I thank the hive mind of Twitter – for spirited debate over things like whether we used to say kiosk or canteen or milk bar or deli, to give just one example. I have no idea how anyone wrote historical fiction before the internet.
It wasn’t all Sunny Boys and Gilligan’s Island, though. I had science questions too. And not just any old science. Astronomy. Astrophysics. There was only one thing to do: ignore anything I didn’t understand and write the story the way I wanted to, knowing I could bend the science to fit later.
Sadly, it turns out that’s not how physics works. And that’s why this is the part where I thank Dave Owen, aka “Space Dave”, at Te Awamutu Space Centre, and Matt Woods on behalf of Perth Observatory, who answered my questions speedily and expertly without laughing at me once.
This is probably the point where I’m supposed to say that any errors that remain are my own. But I worked very hard on this book so I would like instead to lay the blame for any mistakes, inconsistencies, typos or plot holes at the feet of Mrs Eunice Golightly, who is distressingly prone to sloppiness and inattention.
Almost finally, huge thanks to Walker Books Australia, who waited and waited and waited for this book while life intervened in more ways than I could ever have imagined possible. Thank you for your extreme patience, for the care you take with my work, for your faith that I would eventually deliver. I’d like to sa
y I’ll never put you through that again, but who would I be kidding?
Absolutely finally and endlessly forever – the biggest thanks of all to my glorious and irreplaceable editor, Sue Whiting, to whom I’ve already said all the things and I know she is totally against repetition and overly long sentences so I’ll just stop now before I say glorious and irreplaceable again and she comes along to smite me with her glorious, irreplaceable and overly long stick.
About the Author
Meg McKinlay is the author of eighteen books ranging from picture books and young adult fiction through to poetry for adults. Her work includes the much-loved No Bears, Once Upon A Small Rhinoceros and the critically acclaimed A Single Stone, which won the 2016 Prime Minister’s Literary Award, among other prizes. Raised in central Victoria, in a TV- and car-free household, Meg was a bookish kid, in love with words and excited by dictionaries. A former academic at the University of Western Australia, where she taught Japanese, Literature and Creative Writing, Meg is now a full-time writer and lives near the ocean in Fremantle, where she is always busy cooking up more books. www.megmckinlay.com
This project is supported by the State Government through the Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries.
First published in 2019
by Walker Books Australia Pty Ltd
Locked Bag 22, Newtown
NSW 2042 Australia
www.walkerbooks.com.au
This ebook edition published in 2019
The moral rights of the author have been asserted.
Text © 2019 Meg McKinlay
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise – without the prior written permission of the publisher.
A Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available from the National Library of Australia catalogue.
ISBN: 9781925381498 (ePub/mobi)
ISBN: 9781925381481 (ePDF)
COVER IMAGES: (sky) Regine Heintz © Arcangel Images;
(trees) © Nutpacha Homthanathip/Shutterstock.com;
(stars) © rungrote/Shutterstock.com
For my father,
who gave me both logic and magic, in equal measure.
There would be no stories without you.
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