Dandenong Ranges author and former secondary teacher Pauline Hosking looked to Gippsland when she decided on an eerie setting for the next in her Cinnamon Stevens children’s fiction series.
“I thought the scariest, spookiest place I knew was actually the graveyard in Walhalla,” Ms Hosking said.
As a teacher she used to take her students on camp to the former gold-mining boom town.
“The kids used to love running around in the twilight in the graveyard … and they loved spooking themselves,” she said.
Ms Hosking launched Cinnamon Stevens – Ghost Light at Traralgon library last week where a panel of students from St Paul’s Anglican Grammar School and Stockdale Road Primary School asked the author questions.
The 12-year-old protagonist, Cinnamon is a “very bright kid” wanting to prove she has the detective genes of her older brother and dad who work for Victoria Police.
When her year 7 class visits Walhalla on an excursion, she is dared to set foot in the out-of-bounds graveyard.
The book is in the form of Cinnamon’s diary as links form between a gold rush-era actress’ ghost in a Melbourne theatre and her burial in Walhalla.
After Ms Hosking joined a ghost tour in Walhalla a particular story of a young girl whose hair burnt her to death stuck with her and found its way into Cinnamon’s diary.
“Her grave is in the graveyard,” she said.
“[Cinnamon] thinks about it and she can almost see the face of the little girl peering out of the top window of a building.”
Bullying is a serious sub-plot of the book as boys in the class pick on one of Cinnamon’s good friends, Meera.
“Cinnamon says she’s got three strikes against her,” Ms Hosking said.
The author said Meera’s character was a clever girl, part-Indian and doesn’t like sport.
“If she did like sport she could probably get away with the other two,” she said.
