My name is Sarah-Jane Rossetti. I am a multi-award-winning screenwriter, novelist, educator, and painter of impressionistic acrylics.

They sang me “When I’m Sixty-Four” on my last birthday, and I live in Australia.

In winter, I hang out in a little rural village called Uki in the Northern Rivers of New South Wales – that’s a 45-minute drive inland from the surfing town of Byron Bay on the east coast.

In summer, I’m a city gal, living in Perth, Western Australia, just three hours’ drive north of the famous Margaret River surf break.

Here’s the unusual story of how, despite having never ridden a wave, my personal life and professional career crossed paths with surfing.

How I Started Screenwriting

Right out of school, I wanted to be a war correspondent (adrenal junkie), but that never happened, as the folks split up, leaving no money for a computer, car, or university, so I set about making some money importing and wholesaling costume jewelry, which did really well, but words were still calling to me.

I went to university at 30 to become a novelist, and that never happened either, not until my debut novel, “Nullarbor Pearl,” was released in 2024.

Doing one unit of screenwriting told me all I needed to know at 30. Screenwriting was where art met commerce, and that was exactly where my head was at.

One of my first works was for “Surfers Tension” in 1996.

It was an award-winning, semi-autobiographical radio play about growing up too fast in a seaside tourist town called Surfers Paradise on the east coast of Queensland, Australia.

Aesthetics and Influences in my Writing Style

I have always loved magic realism and writers like Gabriel García Márquez because the genre originated in places like Chile, where writers wrote playful, rambunctious literature to escape political oppression.

For instance, in one of Márquez’s short stories, “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings,” an angel falls to Earth, and the peasants put it in a chicken pen and charge admission, and nobody questions that it’s an angel.

That is magic realism. Treating the bizarre perfectly naturally. My novel, “Nullarbor Pearl,” is a work of magic realism.

In an old roadhouse on the Nullarbor Plain, beside Australia’s longest, driest bit of highway, the world’s most unlikely heroine, feisty 18-year-old artist Pearl, must stick her head in the deep fish tank to retrieve something that fell in and sank.

She’s astounded to see a vision of a trauma that is emotionally holding up the person whose item fell in the tank!

Not only does she tell, but she also paints these watery visions on the roadhouse wall, which soon gets her into hot water with the local misfits.

That is, until they realize that facing their demons is exactly what will solve their problems. It’s a fun, rambunctious read for all ages.

Ultimately, shamanic Pearl becomes a heroine by dodging the advances of a couple of love interests, while risking her life to solve the mystery that has plagued all the women in her line, starting with her long-dead Great Grandma Pearl.

An Unusual Challenge

In 2014, I was inspired to write this poem when commissioned to co-write a very different kind of surfing film, entitled “The Reef Ascendant.”

My co-writer and director, Mick Sowry, an award-winning Australian writer, producer, director, and co-editor, had already shot three similar films, which all featured his unique style of shooting surfing footage, intercut with the Australian Chamber Orchestra performing the score.

Those films, entitled “The Reef” (2012), “The Reef Redux” (2015), and the documentary, “Musica Surfica” (2008), were made in collaboration with the Australian Orchestra.

These works have been performed around the world, at venues including Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and The Barbican in London.

Interestingly, Richard Tognetti, the artistic director of the Australian Chamber Orchestra, is also a lifelong surfer.

A Poem as an Inspiring Surf Guide to Actors

“The Reef Ascendant” was to be shot without dialogue, just the score and no live orchestra footage, so the music had to support and enhance the vision by taking the audience on the emotional journey as the stages of Manhood were revealed, through the viewfinder of surfing.

From his starlit, poetic conception in the waves, different surfers and musical compositions were to feature, from the toddler’s first clumsy ride on a foamy, followed by some reckless young grommets risking their lives to prove their Manhood, transitioning into young men at their peak, demonstrating their athletic mastery.

These were followed by older, sometimes angry men, no longer at their peak, but still carving it up, culminating in the last old surfer gracefully gliding over the back of a wave into the sunset, having found peace at the transcendent end of his life on the waves.
 
So, there I sat in the development room, not a man, nor a surfer, without dialogue or voice over at my disposal, to help make sense of these stages of Manhood for an audience.

I wrote the poem firstly as a guide to myself, and then the creative team, with a view to ultimately offering its surfer actors as an idea of where they were emotionally in the imagined lifespan of one surfer, every male surfer viewer, depending on his stage of Manhood.

The poem became my framework, something to refer to, while we set to work on the script.

Sadly, the documentary has not been shot for the same reason many great films are not produced – the vicissitudes of the market, i.e., it did not attract enough production money to make it to the big screen.

A Great Feedback

I’ve had great reactions to my work, and, dare I say, freakish success.

Every poem, short story, article, and review I wrote as a prose writer got published, and now even this poem.

All the scripts, besides “The Reef Ascendant,” were produced, and five won me national awards in screenwriting.

My novel is now hitting its stride, having been shortlisted for an Eric Hoffer Award for excellence in independent publishing.

The Reef Ascendant | Sarah Rossetti (2014)

Some say the sea is like a woman,
Female – where all life began.

It’s tricky being a boy in the sea.
She takes a bit of getting used to…
And getting away from…

Boys need fathers, uncles, rituals on land and sea,
To help them become men.
Even then, they’ll do dumb stuff, risk their lives,
To prove their Manhood.
It’s tough on mothers while they’re doing that.

When he’s through, he peaks.
A memorable moment. Gold.

Stays with him like a gift,
Like a question too hard to answer,
While he’s busy chasing ego quests,
Unobtainable women,
The perfect wave, career,
marriage, kids, happiness…

When things get broken and break up
It makes him angry, frustrated.
Why can’t life be perfect, like at his peak?

Then he remembers…
Nothing stops him.
He’s a man now, a warrior, a tribesman…

Drives him back to seek answers,
But he can’t wrestle the riddle out of it,
While looking in the rear-view mirror.

Sometimes in midlife, something shifts…
his centre of gravity, and he realises…
He’s been searching his whole life for the perfect wave,
Woman, conquest,
And what a ride it’s been… a trip.

Some never want it to end,
That’s their defiant grace.

Others arrive. Their whole life tilts,
and they ascend the reef of their ego.
That’s the real trip, the art of stepping aside
To let something infinitely greater in.

The Reef Ascendant.

Words by Sarah-Jane Rossetti | Screenwriter and Novelist