I always feel guilty about Colin Thiele. My first encounter with his work was the movie of Storm boy and I loved it. I then promptly read the book and remained a huge fan. The movie starred the elder brother of a boy in my class (he lived just up the road) and it featured the Coorong - one of my favourite places. It also introduced me to pelicans and I have been in awe of them ever since.

So therefore I want badly to like Colin Thiele's work. It doesn't hurt that he's also South Australian. And I have to admit that he tells good stories with believable characters - his narrative is dramatic and even powerful. I certainly won't forget February dragon in a hurry. But he tends to wax just too lyrical at times and the "dramatic" can tend to the melodramatic. And, he commits what is, for me, the worst crime of all: he preaches. His books are dreadfully "educational". In The fire in the stone he covers not only life in the opal mining areas, but race relations, the environment, and even the importance of courage and moral fibre.

I remember that as a budding teenager, when I became determined to write, I started producing endless idealistic, well-intentioned stories etc all aimed at getting across a message to help people to "understand". It took a while for my teachers to help me to understand that as a result my writing was heavy and bogged down, losing any real story. I finally got the point and ended by writing just two lines:

My heart would sing the glory of the mountains,
But the words come frail, tainted with intent.

I've had writer's block pretty much ever since and have never really been able to write from the time of that realisation on. Perhaps that's why I find it so hard to forgive "educational" writers who put message over story. Sour grapes on my part I guess!

Still, I like the characters in this book, and once I got past all the overly lyrical bits to the real "story", it was one worth telling. It certainly succeeded in giving me a flavour of the opal mining life. I learned a lot - ironically! ( )