The Central Coast and particularly the Yarramalong Valley feature strongly in a new biography of the late award-winning author Bryce Courtenay, written by his wife Christine.
With the book providing an overview to Courtenay’s life and career, significant chapters are devoted to his property at Yarramalong, which he built and lived in for six years until 2008.
It was at Yarramalong that Courtenay’s romance with his second wife finally transpired, after they had known each other for 20 years professionally.
While Christine Courtenay said living in the isolated rural community needed quite a bit of adjustment, she had long had an affection for the Central Coast.
“I remember holidays as a child spent with friends of my parents who had retired to Avoca Beach when it was a very quiet little place,” she said.
“I had always loved going there – it had a sense of paradise – and I was thrilled to be back on the Central Coast when I moved to Yarramalong to be with Bryce.”
Christine moved to Yarramalong on Christmas Day, 2004, and she and Courtenay would remain there until his failing health precipitated a move to the Southern Highlands in 2008.
“There were some problems to be overcome at Yarramalong,” she said.
“Bryce had heart problems and was reluctant to have medical help and we had a bushfire break out a few days after I’d arrived.
“It was very isolated, which is one of its advantages, but in other ways it was a challenge; one I’m glad I met.
“Sometimes we give up on things too easily.
“I love nature and wildlife easily seduced by the beauty of Yarramalong.
“We had some very nice friends in the area and I fondly remember walks along Terrigal Beach and shopping all over the Coast.”
Christine said her husband had always wanted to create a water garden.
“He had seen them on citrus estates in South Africa and he fulfilled his dream by establishing a beautiful garden At Yarramalong with a gorgeous waterfall, boulders and Japanese inspired and local plants on what had been a bare paddock when he went there,” she said.
“Bryce inherited a passion for gardening from his maternal grandfather and having a home and a garden were at the core of him being able to write.
“He was very much a homebody and led a structured lifestyle.
“Bryce loved nothing more that feeding the chooks and taking the dogs for walks at Yarramalong.”
christine courtenay
Following a significant heart scare, Courtenay announced to his wife that he realised Yarramalong “wasn’t the place for him to grow old” and the couple sold up in 2008, relocating to the Southern Highlands, where they lived until his death in 2012.
“I moved out a few days before Bryce came to join me,” Christine said.
“He wanted a few days alone to walk through his garden and by the creek.
“But once he had made his decision, he never looked back; I think he returned only once.”
The Yarramalong years were only a very small part of the extraordinary life chronicled in Christine’s book.
Always aspiring to be a world-famous writer, Bryce did not publish his first novel, The Power of One, until he was 52, after enjoying a dazzling career in the advertising industry.
Christine said she had written the biography originally for Courtenay’s grandchildren.
“I had written some travel articles and press releases for the PR/strategic planning company I had owned and had always loved writing,” she said.
“When I would talk to Bryce about writing a memoir he would say ‘don’t you think one writer in the family is enough?’.”
It as when Christine found letters in 2020 from Courtenay to his mother spanning the years that she decided to forge ahead with a biography on her husband.
“I also learnt a lot about his life through visits with his sister and by re-reading his novels and became obsessive about checking everything,” she said.
“I wanted to write the true story of Bryce’s life – it is not sugar-coated but it is a gracious, dignified sensitive true story – my love story to Bryce.”
Bryce Courtenay – Storyteller is published by Penguin Random House Australia.
Terry Collins