Sylvie Haisman

ABOUT

In Brief

Born in New Zealand in 1973, Sylvie spent most of her adult life in and around Sydney, where she went to art school and worked as a technical writer. She recently returned to live in her hometown, Paekakariki.

Her short fiction has appeared in various Australian and New Zealand publications, and she was a prize-winner in the 2008–09 Commonwealth Short Story Competition. This Barren Rock: a true tale of shipwreck and survival is her first book, and was published by HarperCollins in June 2010, when it was #7 on New Zealand’s international non-fiction bestseller list.

In Detail

A full-time writer, Sylvie is currently working on short fiction and a radio feature. She was awarded the 2010 Asialink Literature Residency to India, and will be resident in Shimla from April - July 2011.

This Barren Rock: a true tale of shipwreck and survival grew out of Sylvie’s 2008 Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio feature, Tell Me a Shipwreck. The book tells the story of her great-great-great-grandmother Fanny Wordsworth, who was shipwrecked in 1875: 

Imagine one woman, forty-seven men and a three-year-old boy, shipwrecked on a tiny sub-Antarctic island. For seven months they eat albatross and burn penguin skins for fuel, before a passing whaler picks them up.

The woman was my great-great-great-grandmother Fanny Wordsworth. She and her twenty-three year old son, Charlie, were migrating from Scotland to New Zealand. Two months out, their ship struck a rock in the Roaring 40s, halfway between Antarctica and Madagascar…

In the middle of a bitterly cold night, the good ship Strathmore ploughed into the jagged rocks of the remote Crozet Islands, drowning half her passengers and crew. 

The forty-nine survivors landed on Grande Île, a treeless rock inhabited only by seabirds. For the next seven months, battered by gale-force winds, rain, sleet and snow, they struggled against starvation, disease, freezing temperatures and waning hopes. They built shanties from mud and stones, hunted and ate albatross and other seabirds, and made bird-skin shoes and clothes. They formed alliances and enmities, cared for their sick and buried their dead. To keep up their spirits they told yarns, watched the antics of penguins, and dreamt unusually vivid dreams:

often about something to eat, often about being at home and the ship that was to take us off the island—always pleasant. Dreaming, in fact, was by far the pleasantest part of our existence on that miserable island.

—Charlie Wordsworth

In this account of her ancestors’ shipwreck, Sylvie draws on letters, diaries and historical records to examine the lives and dreams of the migrants and crew on a nineteenth century sailing ship. Telling the story through the eyes of Fanny and Charlie Wordsworth, Black Jack the sailor and three-year-old Wattie Walker, Sylvie follows the journey of these human beings pushed to the limits of their physical and mental endurance, and explores the effects of the ordeal on the survivors’ later lives.

With the exception of two rings and… [my] rosary, I have not a relic of my past life.

Even when I thought I was going to the bottom, I regretted our lovely picture of my dear father (a life-size painting of my father when a boy, with his favourite pony—the figure by Sir Henry Raeburn, and the animal by Howe).

However, we have ourselves, and it has been Almighty God’s will that we should lose the rest.

—Fanny Wordsworth, writing to her daughter after being rescued