ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The genesis of this book can be traced back to the night of 5 October 2001, when I attended the Pennington Prize for Nonfiction awards ceremony in Melbourne. My provocative history of Australian short fiction, Ordinary People Doing Everyday Things in Commonplace Settings, was shortlisted, and having garnered enthusiastic reviews and generated robust critical debate was the obvious favourite. As it transpired, the prize was won by Rachel Deverall for her study of Lydia McGinnis’s short stories. I was, I admit, disappointed, but since the judging panel included two writers whose work I had disparaged in my book, I was not entirely surprised. (This experience was to be repeated in 2012, when The Weight of a Human Heart was shortlisted for the Addison Tiller Short Story Collection Award and lost under similarly dubious circumstances, this time to a book belonging to that neither-here-nor-there genre, a “linked short-story collection”.)

At the end of the ceremony, after an unpleasant altercation with Tim Winton, I went to congratulate Deverall. Rachel was then in her early thirties and already had a reputation for her outspokenness as much as for her brilliant research. She said she had enjoyed my book, but did not hesitate to tell me it was skewed too much towards men: eighteen pages on Price Warung and only one on Barbara Baynton was a travesty. I disagreed with Rachel then, as I was to do throughout our relationship, and we spent the next three hours at the bar arguing over the merits of Lydia McGinnis and Henry Lawson. During our lengthy conversation we touched on those Australian writers who had inspired us (Young, Swan) and repulsed us (Washington, Gayle), some of them famous (Tiller), some notorious (Pennington, Gunn), and others almost entirely blotted out by time (McVeigh). Walking to my hotel that night with Rachel, the idea for this book began to crystallise: a series of short biographies that would place these fascinating figures in their historical and literary contexts. Rachel and I saw each other more and more over the next few months, as I exploited her vast knowledge of Australian literature to assist me in selecting the writers to be included in my book; it was Rachel who suggested Vivian Darkbloom, her grandmother, as a possible subject for study. Aware of how much I owed Rachel, I tried, in vain, to persuade her to be my co-author, but she was too caught up in her own research.

Rachel and I were married in 2003 and we were happy, until Rachel’s fascination with Wilhelmina Campbell, an unknown nineteenth-century writer, became a mania. Our belated honeymoon in Paris was simply an excuse for my new wife to continue her research, a circumstance that became clear when Rachel refused to return to Australia with me. During many phone conversations over the next year, I begged her to come home. Finally, in June 2005 I issued her an ultimatum, demanding she choose between her husband and a long-dead writer. She chose the long-dead writer. Although forced to admit that this did not bode well for our marriage, I could not face the prospect of divorcing her.

I did not see Rachel again until after her breakdown in 2009, when she had lost everything. (Sometimes I blame myself for dissuading her from publishing her findings on Campbell earlier, but they were so incredible, I felt she had to leave no shadow of a doubt as to their authenticity.) After Rachel’s release from psychiatric care, I tried to help her, though in her paranoia she was now pitifully suspicious of everyone. In December 2011, hoping to divert her from her melancholy fixation on Campbell, I employed Rachel as an assistant on my seminal volume of literary criticism, Sacred Kangaroos: Fifty Overrated Australian Novels (2013), a book whose sales were equalled only by the number of enemies it made me in the literary world. (Geordie Williamson’s description of me as “a jackass of all trades” in his review is sadly typical of the vitriol it attracted.) Serious research was beyond Rachel by then; she was incapable of writing a paragraph without mentioning Wilhelmina Campbell. When Rachel was diagnosed with cancer, I vowed to save what small part of her I could by including her in this book, and I was deeply moved when, despite her illness, she offered to compile its index. During the long talks we had in her final months I was able to complete her life, even as her life was ending. Rachel, my darling, I owe my brilliant career to you.

I could not have written the life of Robert Bush without the aid of Patrick Cullen, whose reminiscences of Bush proved invaluable to me as I fleshed out a portrait of this singular man. Similarly, my research on Arthur ruhtrA was enriched immeasurably by Lazaros Zigomanis’s generosity. As one of the founding members of Kangaroulipo, and current vice-president of the Frederick Stratford Society in Australia, Zigomanis granted me full access to ruhtrA’s surviving letters and notebooks. Laura Elvery, Annabel Smith and Amanda Betts were the only friends of my late wife who consented to speak to me, and I suppose for this they should be thanked, even if it was only to shower insults upon myself and Anne Zoellner. I owe a great debt to A.S. Patric for his generosity in sharing the rare papers in his Matilda Young archive. Patric’s 2010 poetry collection Music for Broken Instruments is an inventive and insightful reworking of Young’s verse that, I am certain, would have delighted the Nobel laureate. My thanks must also go to Roberto Bolaño, whose Nazi Literature in the Americas (1996), a series of biographical sketches of right-wing and fascist writers, provided essential background information for the life of Rand Washington. The Australian was known to have corresponded with many of the writers Bolaño featured in his book, including Harry Sibelius and Thomas R. Murchison. I am especially indebted to Bolaño for his biographical sketch of the pathological plagiarist Max Mirebalais, which served as a model for my own life of Frederick Stratford. Thomas Mallon’s classic study Stolen Words: Forays into the Origins and Ravages of Plagiarism (1989) also provided indispensable, if sometimes inaccurate, information about Stratford. (Speaking of plagiarism, critics will no doubt use the life of Stephen Pennington to resurrect accusations that my Alexander Fernsby: The Definitive Biography appropriated large sections of Pennington’s classic work. I have always acknowledged that I owe a great debt to Pennington; if I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants such as he. I am not, however, a plagiarist.) Thanks also to my editors, Chris Feik and Denise O’Dea, especially for their forbearance in the matter of the Sydney Steele chapter. A run of bad luck, which included computer viruses, software malfunctions and my research assistant Robert Skinner being struck by lightning, plagued this piece right up to the deadline. It seemed at one point we might lose the life of Steele altogether, something that would, no doubt, have gratified those who subscribe to the legend that the great writer was some sort of Antipodean Faust. I trust that the publication of Steele’s biography here will finally lay to rest the foolish idea of Steele, and by extension those who write about him, being cursed.

I must also extend my heartfelt gratitude to the Australian Federal Police. Six weeks after my wife’s death, just before this book went to press, the police contacted me to say that, acting on a tip from an anonymous source, they had found thirty boxes marked “Property of Rachel Deverall” at a storage unit in a warehouse in Ryde. Rental for the unit had been paid for, in cash, for five years in advance, by someone giving the name John Smith. As Rachel’s next of kin, I was invited to claim her property. When I visited the unit I was flabbergasted to find the boxes comprised Rachel’s research into the life and work of Wilhelmina Campbell, including the Degraël trove, and Rachel’s priceless copies of The Summer Journey and The Autumn Journey, which had been believed lost in the mysterious fire that consumed her house in the first week of November 2009.

Finally, Anne Zoellner. I simply don’t have the words to thank you for your generosity and friendship. You were there in the good times when Rachel and I first met. You were there in the dark times after Rachel left me, when I thought my life had ended. You were there when my groundbreaking work was snubbed again and again by the critics and their “literary” awards. In countless letters and articles you defended me from unsubstantiated charges of plagiarism. You remembered, crucially, that we had dinner together on the evening of 7 November 2009, and so prevented a terrible travesty of justice. When Rachel broke apart, you were beside me, and together we tried to pick up the pieces. And you are here, now, as we embark on a new book together, one that will bring about the rewriting of every literary history of France, Great Britain and Australia.

Thank you, Anne, for everything, but especially those things of which I cannot write.