Red Dog

In early 1998 Louis de Bernières went to Perth in Western Australia in order to attend the literature festival, and part of the arrangement was that he should go to Karratha to do their first ever literary dinner. Karratha is a mining town a long way further north. The landscape is extraordinary, being composed of vast heaps of dark red earth and rock poking out of the never-ending bush. De Bernières went exploring and discovered the bronze statue to Red Dog outside the town of Dampier. He felt straight away that he had to find out more about this splendid dog. A few months later De Bernières returned to Western Australia and spent two glorious weeks driving around collecting Red Dog stories and visiting the places that Red Dog knew, writing up text as he went along.