There are three creatures in this creative collaboration: two human beings and one (1x) giant squid named Old Bertie.
The humans are WA writers and filmmakers Vincenzo Perrella and Dan Osborn – an award-winning creative team who daylight as English teachers. Old Bertie is the enormous, man-eating squid who has followed them across online comedy, film and now into their debut novel.
“We’ve been with the squid a long time,” Osborn said, gazing into the middle-distance.
Old Bertie first appeared in their 2009 short This is Perth, which teased the city’s early closing hours, imperfect Transperth and the giant squid who lurks in the Swan River.
“We were amazed by the massive reaction online. We shared it with a few friends, but it took off overnight and opened quite a few doors in the film and TV world,” Osborn said.
The film won two WA Screen Awards and is making locals chuckle to this day.
Bertie then made a glorious return in George Jones and the Giant Squid, a short film funded by ScreenWest and shot in various Fremantle locations – including their future studio at Moores Building Art Space, where their debut novel would take shape.
Their move from filmmaking to fiction came with a breakthrough: the page removed the practical limits of production.
“When you’re working on films, you’re always constrained by the limitations of budget and time,” Perrella said, using the second-person ‘you’ to refer to himself – that literary trick to create distance from pain.
“By contrast, writing the novel allowed us complete creative freedom. We could let our imagination go anywhere,” Perrella said.
The manuscript remained fragmented until a residency at MBAS gave them the time and space to live inside its world. Returning to the same upstairs studio that had featured in their short film, Osborn knew: “It has to happen now.”
Twice a week, they met in the portside room and wrote about George Jones. The room neatly echoed the ambience of their fictional world, with aged hardwood and salty air filtering in from the window. They plotted the story’s beats across the studio wall and wrote conversationally, trading ideas and trying to make each other laugh.
“By the time the sentence hits the page, we’ve already edited it verbally,” Osborn said. “We don’t write anything down until we both like it.”
“We’re very lucky,” he continued. “It is rare to be close friends with someone who also shares your creative ambitions. And we rarely disagree.”
In perfect symbiosis, they finished the manuscript on the final day of their residency.
The resulting book, Old Bertie, follows 15-year-old George Jones, trapped on an island where everyone lives in fearful deference to the giant squid who ate her mother. When a stranger survives Bertie’s waters, George wonders whether her mother might still be alive.
The pair drew inspiration from books floating around their psychological orbit during the residency: The Catcher in the Rye, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and the fierce pursuit of the beast in Moby-Dick. These inspirations, amalgamated with their own creative vision, eventuated in a speculative coming-of-age story.
“Writing a dystopia while the world already seemed to be going wrong felt strange, so we leant into the absurdism,” Osborn said.
“There are risks and real consequences in the novel, but we tried to maintain some sense of hope.”
Except, perhaps, a contentious number of em dashes.
“We started writing it before AI really kicked off,” Perrella said. “Now, I feel like I have to rethink my use of the em dash. But I love it. What a world.”
Old Bertie, published by Fremantle Press, is available now from all good bookstores and online. You can follow the authors on Instagram at @perrella.osborn
