“I spent some time travelling through the verdant Tasmanian bush, getting to know the extraordinary landscape the tigers once lived in”
The film didn’t happen but
I always wanted to write a novel based on the story. But how to tell it? I spent the next ten years researching tigers and children brought up by animals. As I did, contemporary cases
kept cropping up, including a boy in Chile who lived with a pack of dogs for two years and a Russian child who lived with dogs and behaved like them.
I spent some time travelling
through the verdant Tasmanian bush – which is very unlike the Australian mainland – getting to know the extraordinary landscape the tigers once lived in [the animals are now thought to be extinct]. I also studied Tasmanian tigers as much as I could, trying to make my depictions of their behaviour as realistic as possible. During my
research I was intrigued by just how much of an animal we humans really are. Other questions preoccupied
me. What happens when we lose language? And can Hannah and Rebecca, the main characters of Into that Forest, ever be the same after the extreme experiences they have gone through? For Hannah herself the questions are irrelevant compared with the intense bond she has with the tigers.