ABOUT THIS BOOK

I was eighteen when I first saw Italian prisoners-of-war who’d been captured in North Africa and sent to Australia. Until then I’d enjoyed nearly two years as a teenage writer in wartime Sydney, surviving those polite but lethal letters that said “The Editor regrets,” until receiving the inevitable letter that was an army call-up. We recruits trained at Cowra not far from the Italian POW camp, and it was there I first became aware of the camaraderie between Italians and their Aussie guards. Many POWs who worked on local farms were trusted to return unescorted each day, a privilege never given to Japanese or German captives.

The Italian sector was a surprising place. It had an orchestra and a choir as well as workshops where sculptors crafted miniature sculptures of Roman icons, like the Coliseum and Pantheon. There were also painters, some of whose work is still in local galleries, and in my research for this book over the past two years I kept meeting people who recalled the friendly Italians of those days.

The war ended while I was at Cowra and I returned to civilian life and scripts for radio, until television began in 1956. The TV moguls imported shows from overseas at first, so my wife and I sold everything we owned and, with our two children, ages five and two, tried our luck in England. We planned on a visit of two years, but stayed 20. London was a great place in the sixties. I wrote for British and American television, as well as stage plays and feature films.

One of the films, The Liquidator was directed by renowned cinematographer Jack Cardiff, and we became close friends. Jack and his wife had lived in Rome, and on one of our visits there we spent a day in the Villa Medici, the French-owned galleria. By the time we left that artistic treasure trove near the Spanish Steps I had the start of an idea about a young Italian painter, and how Rome’s most famous gallery changed his life. That visit to the Villa Medici triggered the long ago memory of Cowra’s wartime POW camp, becoming this novel some 70 years later.