Canberra writer keeps close to the capital

When Karen Viggers first moved to Canberra from Victoria 22 years ago, she found it difficult to settle in the nation's capital. She had come from Healesville, where she worked in a veterinary practice and ''knew everyone''.

But moving to the Australian National University to complete a PhD in wildlife health changed everything.

''I didn't know anyone and my saviour was the mountains,'' she says.

''Here in Canberra, that's what you see, the Brindabella ranges, those beautiful purple mountains. I went up there hiking and mountain biking and I would sit on the verandah of the slab hut in the Orroral Valley and just look out at the kangaroos grazing around me, at the scabby tops of the mountains, and think about what it must have been like for the people who lived there.''

Place has always been important to Viggers and it is where she starts and centres her novels.

In her 2008 debut, The Stranding, it was the wild beaches of the NSW South Coast; for her second, The Lightkeeper's Wife, she drew inspiration from Antarctica and the rugged coastline of Bruny Island off south-east Tasmania.

For her latest work, The Grass Castle, she returns to the Brindabella ranges, the place that brought her much solace during those early years in a new city.

The Grass Castle is the story of two women: Abby, a young ecologist studying kangaroos, with a troubled past and sense of loneliness; and Daphne, an elderly woman still coming to terms with being forced from her home in the Brindabellas in the 1970s when the government reclaimed land for the national park established after the tracking station shut down. It is a story of displacement and belonging and forgiveness on many levels.

The plight of the kangaroo also figures highly in the book. As part of her PhD work, Viggers spent time tracking the animals around the Canberra region, much like the character Abby. When the ACT Government culled 800 kangaroos at Googong Dam in 2004 and then 400 at the naval transmission site in Lawson in 2007, Viggers watched the parties ''navigate the politics'' of it all. Viggers says she was thinking through all the elements of the issue but wanted The Grass Castle to be a bigger story.

''A story has to have a heart and the heart of this story came from the friendship between Abby and Daphne and the disconnection and displacement they both felt and the healing and forgiveness that occurs,'' Viggers says.

Researching the book, she read tales of brumby runs through the Brindabellas, of cattle herders and early settlers and the harsh conditions they endured, of the indigenous people, moth hunters who carved paths through the mountains. She also found inspiration in the work of acclaimed Australian author Miles Franklin, who grew up in the Brindabella Valley, and Gwen Meredith, who wrote much of the long-running Blue Hills radio series in a cottage at Koorabri in the valley during the 1950s.

Viggers wanted to be a journalist ''but I had an uncle who told me journalists weren't very nice people and all my dreams collapsed.

''So, I did my vet degree and started working, but I kept writing, journals, poetry, but nothing ever published,'' she says.

''But I was getting close to 40 and we weren't managing to have two scientists in one family with two children [Viggers' husband is an ecologist at the ANU] and David said he would support me if I worked part-time as a vet to pay the food bills and keep me in touch with reality.''

And this is where The Grass Castle touched a chord for this reader. The reality of it all. Although Viggers, like many people who move to Canberra, first found it hard to settle, it is a place she now finds it easy to call home.