Queensland: the sunshine state. The tourist brochures tell me that my home town, Brisbane, boasts an unrivalled three hundred days of sunshine in a year. And yet I spend my time writing stories about shadowy old buildings, wintry clifftops, and snowy cemeteries. People always ask me: how can I live where I live, and write what I write? The climate seems directly at odds with the atmosphere I try to create in my stories.

But the imagination is not formed in direct relation to the weather. In fact, the imagination often finds itself through resistance to what surrounds it. Like so many other children who were avid readers, I used books as an escape from a miserable childhood: growing up in a depressed suburb with an alcoholic father, unimaginably unpopular at school, very little (it seemed) to hope for in the future. In books, I could make the world around me cease to be, and I could become someone else, live somewhere different. Total escape required a completely antithetical geography to fantasise about. So it was always the books with dark places that captivated me: here was a world where not everything was laid bare under the cruel eye of the sun, where secrets could be kept, where bodies could be wrapped up safe against the cold, where the tide washed sorrows far out into the freezing ocean. These things defined the landscape of my imagination.

At the end of 1998 I went on a research trip to England. I had been contracted to write a novella, a Medieval horror story, for a collection. No problem, I thought, I'll write it in England, in the land of half-ruined cathedrals and windswept moors. But every time I sat down to write, nothing would come. It was as though my imagination had ceased to function; perhaps had lost its need to function. While surrounded by the geography of my fantasies, there was no compulsion to create it on paper. On a hazy January morning, I sat with notebook and pen on the grass at Whitby Abbey on the North Yorkshire coast, and not one word would come. As soon as I came home to Brisbane, the last El Niño summer still wrapping its sticky blanket around my flat, the bald blue sky making my eyes ache, the story poured out. Medieval castles, underground chambers, dungeons and diabolical saints. Easy. I agree with Thomas DeQuincey: summer weather provides the best conditions to contemplate dark things, because "the exuberant and riotous prodigality of life naturally forces the mind upon the antagonist thought of death, and the wintry sterility of the grave."

I don't mean to claim, however, that Brisbane is without its own dark side: every large city has its haunted spaces. Wherever there are cemeteries and old buildings, there is room for a Gothic tale. Brisbane boasts a number of haunted sites: Boggo Road Jail, the Royal Brisbane Hospital, Newstead House, City Hall, and Brisbane Arcade. And outside of Brisbane, Maryborough is virtually spook central in Queensland, with Mt Isa not far behind it for reported supernatural activity. The Satanists still hang out at Toowong cemetery, the occultists buy their books at The Circle and learn their Hebrew alphabet, the Goths still flock to the annual Bloodlust Ball, and the Tori fans write their tinkly, girly poetry and long for it to be cold enough to wear sleeves. I am in good company: Brisbane is full of magicians and melancholics. You just never see us because we only come out at night, or on the coldest winter mornings.

Without a doubt, the summers here get me down, and I can't afford to escape to Europe every January. So perhaps one day I will make a permanent move to a windswept coast somewhere, though it seems an awful lot to give up. Not just friends and family, but the possibility that my imagination runs on sunshine, that rain and gloom are only appealing because they are different from what I see every day. For now, I'm content to remain in the sunshine capital of the world. But, if you don't mind, I think I'll keep to the shady side of the street.

(© Kim Wilkins 1999)