Toni Jordan may have published eight novels to date — including her 2008 debut, Addition, longlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award — but she did not always want to be an author.
When she was a girl, she had an unusual dream for an eight-year-old: she wanted to be a greyhound trainer, like her dad.
The dogs her father trained lived under the family home, a big old Queenslander, until he eventually built them a kennel in the backyard.
He only ever had one or two dogs at a time — “It was very much a hobby,” Jordan tells ABC Radio National’s The Book Show — but his daughter dreamed of running a much bigger operation.
“I had the idea … I would have the biggest kennel in all of Queensland,” she says.
She would race the dogs by day and sleep with them by night, she loved them so much.
“Of course, that’s not what it’s like when you’re a greyhound trainer,” Jordan says. “It’s very much a serious business.”
Her father’s dogs were never particularly successful.
“We were not distinguished in any way,” Jordan says.
“But it’s a lifestyle, it’s a way of living. All my parents’ friends were bookies or worked at TABs or were somehow on the track. That’s how we spent our time.”
Jordan, raised in the twin worlds of greyhound racing and gambling, draws on this unorthodox upbringing in her latest novel, Tenderfoot, a coming-of-age tale set in Brisbane in the 1970s.
Gambling as a religion
Tenderfoot’s 12-year-old narrator, Andie, shares much in common with Jordan.
Andie also wants to be a greyhound trainer like her dad, and, like the author, her first job is at the TAB where her mother works.
It’s a world where gambling is the norm, as Andie describes in the novel:
“Gambling was more than a pastime to us. Gambling was my family legacy, an ideology of living, the way brave people expressed their optimism about the world … I was brought up to believe that people who didn’t gamble were sad cowards who hoarded their money, pessimistic and mean.”
It was the same for Jordan in real life.
She told ABC Conversations in 2024 how her father won the deposit for their family home “on a treble”, a story that quickly became family legend.
The TAB, where her mother, Margaret, worked, was like a second home. It was a hub for regular gamblers, mostly old men who spent their days there.
“It was the 1970s and early 1980s, so everybody smoked and stood around the benches all day,” Jordan recalls.
“You didn’t just nip in to place your bets and then leave. You stood; you leaned on the bench all day like a bar and kept an eye on what was scratched and what was still running.”
ABC critic Declan Fry describes Tenderfoot as “a fierce and often sobering depiction of the helplessness of childhood”. (Supplied: Hachette Australia)
For the committed punters, it had a religious quality.
“It’s like a church,” she says. “Everyone is concentrating. The next race could be the one that pays off the mortgage or takes you on a holiday. It’s really a place of worship.”
Of course, winning was the exception.
“Mum was a terrible gambler. I don’t know how you could not be in that environment,” Jordan says. “She had enormous losses that were very detrimental.”
On the nights she was flush with money from a win, Margaret would treat Jordan and her sister to a lavish meal at a fancy seafood restaurant.
But then, a couple of nights later, they would be hiding under the dining room table as a debt collector banged on the front door looking for the money Margaret owed them.
“I think that’s why I’m so square,” Jordan says.
Like Andie, she was a bookish kid, much to her parents’ bemusement.
“They never got it; I was just that weird kid who liked to stay in my room and read.”
But they were still happy to accommodate their daughter’s literary interests.
“My mum used to drive me to Carina library, my sister and I, every second Tuesday night … and she would sit in the car listening to the trots on the radio while we went in and picked our books,” she says.
The joy of an unreliable narrator
In Tenderfoot, Jordan offers an unsentimental depiction of childhood,
“The amount of agency that you have [as a child] is so limited,” she says.
A grown-up Andie reflects on this powerlessness as she looks back on her life when she was 12:
“There are people who would give anything to be young again … These people are mistaken. The number of years ahead of you is not the measure of anything at all. They forget the helplessness of being young, that feeling of being a cork tossed by waves. To be in need of protection again — that is my worst nightmare. Children have no say in anything that concerns them and if they try to exert some control over their own life; they are blamed for everything that goes wrong from that day forward.”
For Andie, childhood is a lonely place. Her father — who she always considered her hero — has left, her mother is erratic and emotionally distant, and her friends at school have cast her out.
The greyhounds — especially the last remaining dog, Tippy — are a rare and uncomplicated source of love and constancy.
“I have such sympathy for kids that age,” Jordan says.
“I remember vividly that feeling of being young and trying to figure out the way the world works and getting so many things wrong.”
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She says the common belief that childhood is a “simpler time” is often a misrepresentation of reality.
“When you’re in the middle of it, it’s just as complex as being an adult is.”
Andie’s mother wants her to be a clerk typist when she finishes school, like she was, while her teacher, Mrs Murphy, believes she could go to university.
But Andie, set on dropping out of school at 15 to follow in her father’s footsteps, is interested in neither option.
Her limited view of the world makes her a classic unreliable narrator, one of Jordan’s favourite literary devices.
She says she is drawn to stories where the reader knows more than the narrator does, both as a writer and a reader.
“I like a narrator who can describe what she sees and what she feels with all the honesty in her heart but still the reader is going, ‘That is not right,'” she says.
“I’m hoping that readers see that Andie’s plans for the future are not feasible and not the best thing for her either.”
A moment of change
Jordan set the book in 1975, “a pivotal year in Australian history”.
“So many things changed politically and socially. [It was] the year my mother came home from the grocery shopping with the zucchini and was like, ‘What the hell is this?’
“Everything was on the verge of becoming different and … I really wanted to capture that moment of change.”
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Jordan found joy in sifting through her memories of the period as she was writing the novel.
“[It] was so wonderful thinking about the music … [like] my wall poster of Sherbet with Daryl Braithwaite with his satin shirt unbuttoned down to his navel [on] the wall above my bed, and all these things we used to get up to.
“People speak very nostalgically of this, but it was a no-electronics childhood. I watched a lot of television — far more than I should have — but it was playing elastics and cards and riding your bikes that seemed so normal to us back then.”
While much of Tenderfoot draws from Jordan’s past, she allowed herself room for invention.
“I was trying to channel an emotional truth rather than a factual one,” she says.
“I believe in the power of creating things. Taking characters from life is not my area of interest. I like making people up. It’s one of the joys of fiction for me.”
An extraordinary woman
For years, Jordan thought her childhood was too boring to write about.
“I’ve never been a huge one for the trauma plot,” she says.
“I thought no one was going to be interested in this girl having her eyes opened to the world.”
Things changed when Jordan wrote about her mother after her death in 2018.
“She was a really extraordinary woman — difficult and brilliant and impossible and always unpredictable and fun and horrifying all in the one body. The more I wrote about her, the more people asked me [about her],” she says.
“The start of this story was the relationship between Andie and her mother.”
Jordan believes she could not have written Tenderfoot when her mother was still alive.
“She was very proud of me, in her way. But she would say to me all the time, ‘Don’t forget your place,'” she says.
“She didn’t want me to get hurt, I guess. She was protective in that way.”
Tenderfoot is published by Hachette Australia.