Her young daughter has disappeared, sparking a massive murder hunt, and now her husband has gone walkabout in the bush with no plans to return.

Nothing is coming up roses for small-time gardening correspondent Agatha.

So she plants the seeds of a new life in an isolated village … in the dilapidated former home of a renowned witch.

A strange new lover and mysterious visitors from half a world away will not allow Agatha's own ghosts to rest … and her garden produces dark honey and poison as Maurilia Meehan's tale builds to a chilling climax.

Sinister flora and phantoms flourish in this rich and unforgettable work from the pen of the award-winning author of the acclaimed "Performances", "Adultery", "The Sea People" and "Fury".

Excerpt

Paperback ISBN 1-905202-12-1 £6.99

It doesn't take much imagination to see Hepburn Springs in the strange spa town of Wombat, the eerie setting for Maurilia Meehan's surprisingly playful novel of dread and whimsy. There's something of Elizabeth Jolley in her mix of the strange and the proper, and more than a whiff of Angela Carter's wicked fairytales too, all set in a landscape of transplanted oak and virulent local nightshades.
The protagonist, Agatha Hock, is the gardening columnist for the magazine Womanly You. What her readers don't know is that her verdant estate is fiction - all the garden she has is the nature strip bordering the freeway outside her inner-city flat. The charming little daughter she describes in her column is also just a prop. Her real daughter, Daphne, disappeared from the local milk bar years ago. Agatha writes her columns while watching child-abuse documentaries and imagining the worst.
But when the editor decides to offer Agatha's readers a chance to visit the famous garden, the unhappy fantasist moves to Wombat to try to grow her fantasy garden in time. The bad seeds of the title refer both to the poisonous plants that flourish in Agatha's backyard and the daughter who suddenly reappears, not to emotional reunion but further tension, confusion, recrimination.
Add to this an eccentric English couple who claim they have reservations at a long-gone hotel, a collection of witches, prophecies and coincidences, and you have a story that bubbles like the springs that sprout under the house.

Michelle Griffin, The Melbourne Age.

So, we’re primed to encounter the fabulous. As indeed we do, in a story that brings Angela Carter to mind but grows luxuriantly and defiantly in home soil, in the town of Wombat (earthy kind of name for a spa), built on the healing properties of the mineral springs on which it literally floats.

Hither flock the city types on weekends; here Agatha Hock, gardening columnist for Womanly You, discovers the blackberry-hedged cottage left derelict since the death of the local “witch”, poisoned by the gold-dust with which she self-medicated her arthritis.

In her magazine column, The Happy Hock, Agatha’s labours in her imaginary Arts and Crafts house are cutely abetted by daughter Mary Mary, while real-life daughter Daphne disappeared into thin air at age 13. As Agatha settles in her Wombat life, a quite contrary daughter reappears to turn it upside down and the garden insists on producing poisonous plants, fed by the spring that turns out to bubble under the bathroom floor. Water-loving Mrs Dewbank, an unexpected guest at Agatha Springs, see signs of the supernatural in what transpires, as prophecies made by Agatha’s sisters (12 and 13 of a large brood) at Daphne’s christening prove eerily prescient.

Fed, like the spa town by its springs, from a well of wisdom both arcane and worldly, The Bad Seed is a fairy story with teeth, about blood, birth, that waxing and waning of the life force, maternal possession and loss. Meehan brings it off with panache, creating a shrewd, poignant, tart morality tale that repays a slow, attentive read, however light her bracing prose may appear.

Cath Kenneally, The Sydney Morning Herald

Tony Maniaty, Weekend Australian

The anxieties that loom throughout the novel, largely in response to Meehan’s unheimlich touches, respond to the tensely wrought narrative, in the author’s conversion of mundane Australian landscapes into more exotic, threatening spaces and, more confrontingly, in the plot’s deliberate misdirections. The first of these concerns the character of the town’s reviled hermit, her life reconstructed by the townspeople who judge her. The life of Wombat’s witch is mysterious, and bestowed on her by the community are three tenuous identities; the first constructed by the local children, cruel and fearful; the second a reflection of the ire of the community’s affronted housewives, their offerings scorned by the object of their charity who is jaded by endless donations of dismal soups; and the final accounting of her life, more compassionately bestowed by medical professionals, those lacking both the townspeoples’ ignorance and their vindictive persecution of difference.

The misdirections, strewn by Meehan throughout The Bad Seed , are redolent of Gothic suspenses, where the reader is kept by the author in a state of disequilibrium, never entirely sure of the literary ground beneath them. Whether the ancient woman, twisted and misshapen is a witch, menacing and hostile, or simply a diseased, maligned old woman remains, for most of the novel, impossibly opaque. The narrator’s description of her, ‘like some ancient half-wrapped mummy,’ (15) casts her as something simultaneously venerable and repulsive and, being only half-wrapped, something cruelly open both to her neighbours’ hostile gaze and the reader’s morbid curiosity.

The pivotal point about which turn Meehan’s various characters is that of imposture. Meehan’s protagonist, Agatha Hock, writes her deceptive magazine articles celebrating a lush, entirely fictional garden, the star of which is her wholly imagined little girl, Mary-Mary. The child, wholesome and adorable, is merely a charming, nursery rhyme whimsy. The English couple, Magdala and Giles Dewbank, who are moved to make the long journey to Australia, are, like Agatha, more complicated than they seem. The couple’s relationship is symbiotic, each taking advantage of the frailty or abnormality of the other and, while these fetishes seem complementary, the couple have quite disparate sexual peccadillos and intellectual prejudices. Magdala is crippled by arthritis and this draws Giles to her for he has a self-confessed penchant for ‘invalid women’ (45). She, in turn, is convinced of the evolution of humans from aquatic mammals, and finds Giles infinitely more appealing because of the scars left by the surgical removal of his webbed toes and gills. These she finds irresistibly erotic and the pair find it all but impossible to enjoy each other sexually beyond the watery limits of their spa-bath.

The need looming on Agatha’s horizon to exhibit her alarmingly fictitious Eden, provides the impetus for her quest into the country, one that parallels a number of pilgrimages to the spa town of Wombat and the tiny, rundown hotel called ‘Agatha’s Springs’. The prophetic name of Meehan’s witch’s house draws Agatha to it, but the area’s natural springs become the conduit for restive, vengeful spirits and Agatha becomes just one of a number of impostors to be caught up in an older, quite poisonous mystery. The move promises at first to be therapeutic, Agatha’s flat is suffused with memories of her missing child, Daphne, who disappeared years earlier. Agatha still grieves for her and cannot separate herself from the pain caused by that loss. The earliest days after her arrival in Wombat do seem, at times, cathartic. When Agatha attempts to destroy, utterly, the towering blackberry brambles protecting the house, she becomes deeply thoughtful, even musing that, perhaps, for all their grief, she and her husband, Frank, might have conjured their child Daphne, that ‘Frank and she were both mad. Their daughter had perhaps never existed, she was a case of folie à deux brought on by five years of trying and failing to get pregnant’ (67).

Each of the characters in Meehan’s novel is likewise damaged, or physically flawed; the arthritic Magdala, seeking a magical spring; her husband with his vestigial gills, their fishiness his wife’s obsession; Agatha herself, drawn to the impenetrable, spiky fortifications encircling the witch’s house, each in turn, compelled to make their own pilgrimages to Wombat. Even Agatha’s husband, Frank, unable to sustain the grief that has consumed his wife since their daughter’s disappearance, is driven to undertake a quest of his own. Having endured his daughter’s abduction, seeing her reduced to the banner in the newspapers, ‘The Milk Bar Girl’, he plans his trek into the anonymity of the Great Dividing Trail. Ostensibly Frank leaves to find his daughter’s body somewhere in the Australian wilderness. His efforts though, to lose himself in forbidding terrain, are thwarted by the search instigated by his wife, alarmed that his regular emails had slowly diminished before falling, inexplicably, into silence. Frank, thin and dishevelled is rediscovered by a search helicopter, and returns to a wife who has found, in his absence, a new profession, home, and lover and, most amazingly of all, their prodigal daughter, a baffling restitution.

The pilgrimages and quests seem inevitably to culminate at Agatha’s Springs, where the house and its garden constitute the novel’s most alarming counterfeit. The dream Shakespearean garden imagined by Agatha, designed to stand in for the paradise described in her magazine column with its flowers and medicinal herbs, honeysuckles, lavender, and woodbine, is savaged by the realities of the poisonous belladonna, hemlock, and daphne that regenerate, exclusively but unbidden, around Agatha’s tiny hotel. The plants bring to the narrative something menacing and portentous. The presence that gestates in the dark spring beneath the house also seems destined to restate a claim to it, urging the lethal plants to extraordinary vigour. The novel’s protagonists, drawn by their various needs and desires to take up residence, move inexorably forward toward a confrontation with its power.

The connections between the lovers, parents, and the mothers and daughters in the novel are created by the author with compelling sensitivity; each relationship characterised by its own passion or yearning. The restoration of the missing daughter, like that in Toni Morrison’s Beloved , is a cause for both celebration and agitated foreboding. It seems, at times, that Meehan, like Morrison, has disinterred a malevolent and vindictive offspring, returning it to a grateful, but nevertheless guilt-ridden parent. Daphne’s return, however providential, is likewise complicated in its inexplicable, phantasmic immediacy. She seems, with her colourless skin, and her tattered black clothes, to be scarcely human, even ‘her voice was still a barely heard whisper’ (117). Daphne seems at times to have coalesced from fragments of Agatha and Frank’s memories and forebodings.

The sudden return of the mysterious Daphne, however longed for, affects Agatha and Frank in different ways, but the weight of her presence robs them of the possibility of any passionate reunion, even infantilising them, ‘in bed, they hugged like Hansel and Gretel in the woods’ (129). The authority exercised by the young woman, by virtue of her parents’ gratitude at the return of their child, five years after her disappearance, is absolute, the narrator holding that ‘a child snatched away then given back is a child with enormous power’ (116). Meehan’s narrative, contemplating the possibility of the fantastic against the mundane, of witches, dark with knowledge, and other lurking, vengeful creatures, her thickets of thorns, poisons, and old secrets, builds to a series of small revelations.

Meehan’s suspenseful confrontations between the characters that people her novel take place at ever-greater distances from the reality of the nameless, urban poseurs that inundate Wombat each weekend. The author, who began by juxtaposing the frivolous, malignant atmosphere of the city with the bucolic wonder of bush tracks and bubbling springs reshapes them in a shift toward a more malevolent view of nature. This change condenses the events of the story until the power of the narrative is concentrated almost exclusively in Agatha’s Springs. The effect of this increasingly insular field of engagement is tantalising. The histories and compulsions of the protagonists in Meehan’s story are governed by a narrator who jealously guards the motivating forces at work in the construction of each of the characters, fully revealing the power of revenge, love, and self-preservation only when the narrative is complete. That confidence constitutes the author’s final, extremely effective assertion of literary power. Of all her literary references, that which refers to Titania’s speech from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream , resonates best at the end of the novel, ‘Sleep then and I will wind you in my arms/ Fairies begone and be all ways away’ (57).

Majella Stewart
Majella Stewart is working on a PhD at The University of Queensland on representations of femininity and madness in recent Australian women’s fiction.
http://emsah.uq.edu.au/awsr/awbr/issues/141/badseed.html

But as time passes, Agatha finds herself in a quandary. She must earn her living and her hold on her gardening column is threatened when her editor comes up with the idea of having people win visits to her expansive garden. Trouble is, her only garden is a small patch planted illicitly in her yard.

Agatha accepts the challenge of finding a place where she can build this garden so her editor will be satisfied. The hunt takes her to a town with the unlikely name of Wombat where she discovers an overgrown shack she can afford.

Things don't go quite as planned. She can't make a garden grow in soil that feeds only poisonous plants and a strange couple show up, claiming they have reservations at the hotel that once occupied the land where her house is sited. An underground spring bubbles forth from under her house and she finds a chance at some happiness again. Then her daughter returns home.

The Bad Seed is an interesting study of a woman alone who seems not to know exactly what she wants to do. Join her as she tries to sort things out and what happens will surprise you. A tale with lots of little surprises that turn into big surprises. Very readable. Talented Maurilia Meehan takes the reader behind the scenes into the darker side that life sometimes offers.

Anne K. Edwards