What is ‘The Rarest Thing'?

Illustration: DOB

‘To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.'

Oscar Wilde

A novel inspired by a possum? Well, this is a very special possum – a mountain pygmy possum. Scientists call it Burramys parvus, which translates as ‘little rock mouse’. Until 1966 everyone thought it had gone the way of the dinosaurs. In fact, the only evidence it had ever existed were some fossilised bones which were so tiny it’s a wonder they were ever found in the first place!

The catalyst for my new book is the discovery of a live Burramys (pronounced burra-mees) in a ski lodge at Mount Hotham exactly fifty years ago. After the cute little marsupial was transported to Melbourne and its identity confirmed, the newspapers dubbed it ‘the world’s rarest creature’, while scientists came from far and wide to see the celebrity possum. And that’s what gave me the title and starting point for the book.

Other than those facts, the story is totally a figment of my imagination and everyone in it is fictitious. Except for the possum. In my earliest draft I called him ‘Tiny’ because I didn’t know the name he was given back in 1966, or even whether he was assigned one at all. At that stage I had very little historical material to help me ‘flesh’ out the story.

Then I discovered a charming book by June Epstein called ‘The Friends of the Burramys’. That allowed me to correct the obvious mistakes, and Tiny became George.

An early reader has called my novel The African Queen meets the Victorian High Country’ and although there’s no boat in my tale, and you won’t spot a single possum in the film, I’m rather chuffed with the comparison. The African Queen is one of my all-time favourite films and I named my leading lady after Katharine Hepburn, its female star.

Dr Katharine Wynter is a thirty-year-old palaeontologist, who's more comfortable with ancient fossils than live human beings, especially men – an exotic species of which she has little experience, apart from a predatory professor who has made her life hell, and a dashing wildlife photographer who seems too good to be true.

I'll be publishing ‘The Rarest Thing’ in two formats: as a special limited gift edition paperback and as an ebook. 

The limited gift edition ebook is SOLD OUT but the ebook is available on KOBO.

Deborah O’Brien