Jane Abbott's dystopian novel of a water-deprived future wasn't the book she set out to write. What began as a broad idea of a man who attempts to save his drought-stricken village became something much, much more.
First to emerge on paper were two powerful characters – Jeremiah, a young man with blood on his hands, and a brutal mercenary by the name of Garrick – and these men came to dominate the original narrative.
"I just let the story go, and let them do their own thing," Abbott says. "I took the landscape I know and stripped it bare. I researched aspects of this new world, temperatures, weaponry, how to distil water and the properties of urine and wove it in."
Watershed is set in a post-apocalyptic world, probably in Australia, certainly somewhere in the southern hemisphere, many years after the last rains have fallen.
Water is the lone currency on this shrinking earth. Men die on angry oceans trying to harvest rain that falls maddeningly out of reach. Seawalls have been breached by rising tides, forests turned to ash by fire, and the air is thick with suffocating dust. Civilisation has crumbled. Anarchy rules.
"I have a country property in Victoria, just a small place, and water has become increasingly an issue up there," says the Melbourne-based Abbott.
"Again this year we aren't getting any rain. I've developed this habit of watching the rainfall on the Bureau of Meteorology website and I've been noticing over the years that the rain seems to be falling more and more over the water than land. I incorporated that idea and thought, 'If it stops raining on the land what would happen? What would be the worst thing that could possibly happen?'
"I do think there would be no technology, we would go back to almost a Stone Age existence, social mores would go down the toilet and women would become chattel. I think we would revert to everything we have tried to avoid being."
Watershed is the latest in a growing sub-genre of dystopian fiction invoking nightmare scenarios around climate change. Abbott's publisher, Penguin Random House, has described this homegrown thriller as a cross between Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games trilogy and Hugh Howey's Wool.
All this expectation falls on the shoulders of a first-time author who tried her hand as a jillaroo, nurse, secretary, short-time teacher and office administrator before embarking on a reluctant career in marketing while raising two sons, now 19 and 17, alone.
"I always wanted to write, I always thought I would eventually write but it was never a priority," says Abbott, 51. "Something always would come up first that took over, or became more important, or had to be dealt with.
"I did enrol in a writing course eight or 10 years ago and I lasted two sessions. I wasn't ready and I found it hard to sit and be told how to write. I just thought if I want to write, I'll write when the time comes.
"Certainly in the last eight years there's been the concentrating on the two boys and raising them. I've been buying a house, doing it up and selling it, moving on to the next one, which the boys have found very disruptive. I thought I should stop that, so we settled and I thought, now's the time to write."
Abbott's confidence was buoyed when the manuscript was commended in the 2014 Victorian Premier's Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript.
It earned her a place in the ACT Writers' Hardcopy Professional Development Program for Australian Writers. There she met her future literary agent who eventually shopped her manuscript to publishers along with a young adult book, Elegy, based on the real-life lovers who inspired the story of Romeo and Juliet. Random House picked up both manuscripts.
Watershed tells the story of Sarah and her grandson Jeremiah, whom she raises after her daughter dies in childbirth. Jeremiah becomes a Watchman in a garrisoned city, an assassin whose job it is to put down dissent outside the Citadel.
Garrick, his boss, is one of the meanest men you're likely to meet in Australian contemporary dystopian fiction, brutalising female hostages for his own sexual satisfaction.
Abbott's ability as a female writer to get inside the skin of the young Jeremiah is one of the book's highlights.
"I've always been interested in the hero's journey," she says. "I love flawed characters and I like reading books that put a character to the test, and Jem is very much an anti-hero.
"One of the biggest themes for me is nature versus nurture in this book. To all intents and purposes Jem has had a good upbringing, he's been taught to read, he's been loved, he's been protected, he's been guided, and he still falls by the wayside."
Watershed, Jane Abbott, Vintage Books, $32.99
Linda Morris is on Facebook and Twitter @LindaMorrissmh
