Addison Tiller in Sydney, January 1903

(1874–1929)

“Wot a larf, eh Pa?” howled Pete. “Wot a larf!”

From “The Night We Walloped the Wallabies” (1903)

ADDISON TILLER, RENOWNED DURING HIS LIFETIME AS “THE Chekhov of Coolabah”, was Australia’s most successful short-story writer. Famous for his humorous depiction of bush life in the tremendously popular series of Homestead short stories, Tiller was born Henry Reginald Watkins on Christmas Day 1874 at Tiller Manor, near Bath, England. He came from a prominent local family that had made its fortune from the African slave trade in the eighteenth century, and at the time of Tiller’s birth they owned twelve textile factories in Liverpool. Henry’s mother, Mary, suffered from neurasthenia and was frequently bedridden for months at a time, so the boy spent much of his early life in the company of nannies, governesses and nursemaids. His first literary outpourings were directed to his mother’s maid, Bessie, whom he begged to run away with him in perfectly scanned sonnets. (Henry’s interest in female domestic staff was to become less innocent as he grew older.) With his father, Reginald, often absent in the north on business, Henry whiled away the time after lessons with the head gardener of the family estate, Thomas Boldwood, affectionately known to all as “Pa”, and his young son and assistant, Peter. (Tiller would recall these names years later when writing his first short story, “Hacking out the Homestead”.)

In 1878 Reginald Watkins formed a plan to seek his fortune in Australia. In preparation for their new life, Watkins took an interest for the first time in his son’s education, ordering him to learn all he could about their new country. Accordingly, he purchased Harold Bachman’s Geography and Customs of the Antipodes (1877) and set his son a number of pages to memorise each day. While young Henry enjoyed the sound of the exotic words he found in the book, such as Gabanintha, Toowoomba and Gerringong, he was never able to recall them when asked, which infuriated his father. It is no surprise, then, that by the time the Watkins family departed England in September 1879, Henry already despised his new home.

The Watkins family arrived in Sydney in February 1880 and swiftly established their household in a mansion in Potts Point. To Henry’s horror, his father refused to hire a governess, and instead the boy was enrolled in the exclusive Calvin Grammar School, where his English accent and superior airs marked him out for mockery and bullying. Each day after school Henry was pursued from the school gates by a gang of boys, prompting him to learn by heart all the shortcuts and hiding places for three square miles. While retaining his native accent at home, Henry gradually adopted an Australian one at school, which served to mitigate the beatings from his classmates.

After school, Henry was expected to spend three hours a night with his father, learning the ropes of his importing business. In the little free time left to him, the boy roamed Sydney, friendless and alone. For years he was homesick for the elegant terraces and spas of Bath. Sydney seemed to him a shabby, uncouth place, its inhabitants vulgar and dirty. His abstemiousness did not, however, deter him from consorting with local prostitutes, and by the age of sixteen he was constantly making excuses to escape his father’s presence. Actually, Henry was carrying on simultaneous affairs under his father’s roof: with his mother’s maid and with the scullery maid, both of whom he made pregnant in early 1891. When his father was informed of the women’s condition, he sent them away with a month’s salary. His son he disowned and disinherited with immediate effect, and the young man found himself out on the streets with nothing but the clothes on his back and twenty pounds his mother had wrung into his hands as they parted.

Henry Watkins had dabbled in poetry all his life, and naturally his first thought was to make a living with his pen. After letting the most expensive suite at the Russell Hotel, he dashed off ten poems in the classical mode, including “Ode to a Lorikeet” and the mock epic “An English Swain in the Antipodes”. While confident his work was of a standard to appear in London’s Strand or Edinburgh’s Blackwood’s, Watkins was unwilling to wait the months such an acceptance would require. Instead, he sent his effusions to the Australian journals whose titles had caught his eye on newsstands: the Western Star, the Cattleman and the Southern Cross. To his astonishment, his poems were rejected. Watkins had been reckless with his savings, fully expecting to earn ready cash from his versifying, and within a month the money his mother had given him was spent. When he skulked back to the family home in an attempt to solicit more from her, Watkins’s father coldly informed him that his mother had died the week before, no doubt from a broken heart. The two men would not speak again.

With the last of his savings, Watkins purchased as many back issues of the Bulletin, the Stockman’s Journal and Lone Hand as he could find. Having been asked to leave the Russell Hotel due to non-payment of his bill, Watkins found a miserably damp basement room in Surry Hills, paying five days of rent in advance. He spent three of these days reading the journals from cover to cover, occasionally nibbling on a page or two in an attempt to stave off hunger pangs. The vernacular poetry of Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson was beyond him, he realised, and instead he concentrated on the short fiction. He surmised that the stories most popular with editors and readers concerned the lives of ordinary, working Australians in the bush, told in a sentimental, humorous style. Watkins knew little of ordinary life, nothing about work, and had never been to the bush, but on the morning of 5 April 1891, after three hours of furious scribbling, he produced his first short story. “Hacking Out the Homestead” introduced the characters of Pa and Ma and their sons Pete and Norm as they left the city to build a shack on their new selection in the bush. Although elements of the story were clumsy, and some of its details manifestly inaccurate (Watkins believed a jumbuck to be a kind of parrot), it is remarkable how quickly he settled on the formula that would make his fortune. There was humour, if of a primitive kind, as Pa was kicked by a cow into the local creek, and then kicked again into a pile of manure, and at the climax of the story kicked once more into a bed of thistles. But there was also pathos, as the crude cabin the family had toiled for a week to build fell down around them at the first breath of wind. The characters could not be mistaken for anything other than Australian, if only for the number of times they said “strewth” and “fair dinkum”. Moreover, the setting was positively crowded with gum trees, creeks, wallabies, possums and kangaroos. Watkins signed the story “Addison Tiller”, borrowing the first name from his favourite English essayist and the second from his ancestral home in Bath.

Unable to afford postage, Watkins walked for miles in the pouring rain to the offices of the Western Star, on the way exchanging his worn but still fashionable suit for the faded, dirty clothes of a loafer. There, he handed his story to Jim Taylor, editor of the journal. From Taylor’s editorials, Watkins knew he was no lover of the English, and so he was careful to speak to him in a broad Australian accent, brusquely demanding to be allowed to dry himself by the fire before departing. Taylor made no objection, retreating to his office with Watkins’s story. As Watkins was about to leave, Taylor came running out and embraced him. “Addison, my boy,” he cried, “you have the gum of the eucalyptus running through your veins!” When Taylor asked where Watkins hailed from, the young Englishman replied, “Coolabah”; it was the one place he could recall from Bachman’s Geography and Customs of the Antipodes. Taylor offered to buy “Hacking Out the Homestead” on the spot and any other stories of a similar kind. Henry Watkins left the offices of the Western Star as Addison Tiller, with ten shillings in cash and a contract for a further eleven short stories.

“Hacking Out the Homestead” was a great success with readers of the Western Star, as were the Tiller family stories that appeared in each issue of the magazine for the next year, all describing the travails of Pa and Pete, Norm and Ma with the same blend of farce and poignancy. These dozen Homestead stories appeared at a propitious time for the newly born Addison Tiller. Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson’s Bulletin dispute had ignited a national debate about the bush. Tiller’s work was singled out by Paterson in a stanza of his poem addressed to Lawson, “In Defence of the Bush”:

But you found the bush was dismal and a land of no delight

Did you chance to hear a chorus in the shearers’ huts at night?

Did they not meet you with the welcome of a lordly country seat?

It’s not in your precious city you’ll find men like Pa or Pete.

Lawson’s response, “The City Bushman”, was more ambivalent about Tiller’s creations:

Yes, I heard the shearers singing “William Reilly” out of tune,

Saw ’em fighting round a shanty on a Sunday afternoon,

Pa and Pete I never saw, and that’s a shame, it’s true,

But then that pair’s as likely as a talking kangaroo.

Despite Lawson’s criticism, the Bulletin debate helped establish Tiller as an important and authentic voice of the bush. Plans were made to collect his stories, and in November 1892 On Our Homestead was published by Allenby & Godwin, the country’s most successful and respected publisher. The book sold out in a week and went through a further nine printings in the next year. Tiller’s collection was a publishing sensation to rival Fergus Hume’s The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886) and Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of His Natural Life (1874). Both Tiller and his publisher were keen to capitalise on their success, and more short-story collections followed: Around Our Homestead (1893), Beyond Our Homestead (1895), Behind Our Homestead (1897), Towards Our Homestead (1898) and Athwart Our Homestead (1900). Each of these Homestead books rigidly stuck to the established formula, and was received with great enthusiasm by the public and critics alike. An anonymous 1901 article in the Bulletin, believed to be by J.F. Archibald, acclaimed Tiller as Australia’s national short-story writer; Archibald also later coined Tiller’s famous nickname, “The Chekhov of Coolabah”.

Tiller enjoyed staggering royalties from the very beginning of his writing career, but his prodigious spending on clothes and alcohol, as well as the large sums he used to pay off the housemaids he seduced and abandoned, meant he was always short of money. His finances were not helped by his uncanny ability to invest in stocks and shares that proved to be worthless. Two of the stories in Opposite Our Homestead (1903) were written as a crowd of furious creditors were pounding on the doors of his Brighton home, and Concerning Our Homestead (1904) was dedicated to “My long-suffering tailor”. If pressed by a particularly irate landlord or cuckolded husband, Tiller would apply to his publisher for an advance on his next book, claiming the need to “go bush”. These month-long “walkabouts” were largely spent in the brothels and opium dens of Kings Cross. Though Tiller was thirty by the publication of his eighth book about bush life, he had never been further west than Parramatta.

From his first appearance in print, Tiller took great pains to obscure “Henry Watkins” and preserve the fiction of “Addison Tiller”, aware of the disgrace and ruin that would follow if the public were to learn he was an English gentleman. He grew a thick beard, had his Byronic mane of dark hair shorn, dressed like a tramp and avoided all the old haunts where he might be recognised. Fearful of reverting in a moment of forgetfulness to his English accent, he relinquished it entirely. The death of his father in 1899 removed the final link with his old life, and he realised he would no longer have to worry about his true identity being uncovered. In the bars and pubs of Sydney, Tiller would encounter men who claimed they had known him in the goldfields, and throughout the 1890s he found himself fighting breach of promise suits from women he had never met, who lived in towns out west he had never visited. Though Tiller was a sociable man, he would often leave the parties thrown in his honour after an hour or so, to spend the rest of the night walking around Sydney alone. His knowledge of the city was encyclopaedic, but from time to time, to burnish his reputation, he would stop a stranger in the street, explaining he was a simple bushman who had lost his way, and ask them for help in finding the offices of the Western Star.

In 1909 Tiller was thirty-five. He had made and lost fortunes, all his books were in at least their tenth printing, and he enjoyed a literary reputation that eclipsed even Henry Lawson’s. Yet he was despondent. He could not risk telling anyone his secret, and for years he had been considering a return to England, even going so far as to book passage on more than one occasion. Yet each time something forestalled his departure, whether the loss of another thousand pounds at the racetrack, or the appearance of another attractive maid to be bedded. He had written nothing since Concerning Our Homestead in 1904 when he was approached by the theatre producer Percy Runyon to dramatise On Our Homestead. Although Tiller was sick of Pa and Pete, he accepted the commission. He excitedly told Runyon of his conviction that the Tiller family could be used to explore other, more serious, facets of human existence.

The original script of the play, which took Tiller three years to write, contained the requisite clowning of the short stories, and the most famous stage direction in Australian drama: [Exit, pursued by a cow]. It was also on occasion discomfortingly gloomy. At the end of the first act, Pa, after being boxed around the ears by a kangaroo, sits in the middle of the stage and sobs, while Pete stands beside him muttering, “Nothin’ to be done.” More troubling was the play’s final curtain, which left the two men lost in the bush, unable to find their way home. (Samuel Beckett’s debt to Tiller’s play is discussed in depth in Peter Darkbloom’s 1954 article “Waiting for Pa and Pete”.) The opening-night audience on 28 June 1914 was confounded by these serious interludes, and Runyon cut them for the play’s second night, without informing Tiller. The inebriated author was ejected from the theatre after screaming abuse from his balcony while the audience laughed at Pa’s antics.

In 1915, On Our Homestead was adapted into a 22-minute motion picture, again produced by Runyon, with whom Tiller was no longer on speaking terms. Retitled as Pa and Pete on the Farm, it was only the second motion picture to be produced in Australia. The film, like the play, was wholeheartedly embraced by a public distressed by the outbreak of war and longing for a return to simpler, more innocent times. Tiller himself claimed never to have seen the film, now lost, though his 1915 journal obliquely records a visit to the Alhambra theatre on 16 May of that year. The single word underneath this entry in Tiller’s handwriting has been interpreted by literary historians as either “Bullocks!” – a reference to the climactic stampede scene in the film – or “Bollocks!”

During the war years Tiller published only one short-story collection, Off Our Homestead (1917), which saw Pa and Pete travel to Sydney, “the big smoke”, to collect a bequest from a dead great-uncle. Through sheer guilelessness the pair is tricked out of all their money, which after many adventures they recover with interest, before returning home in triumph. Tiller had wanted to write about the city for years, and shuffled Pa and Pete off to the side in a number of the stories in order to more fully develop other characters in an urban environment. This decision perhaps explains why sales of Off Our Homestead were disappointing, though the reviews continued to resemble panegyrics. Henry Lawson, again unimpressed by Tiller’s writing, confided in a letter to A.G. Stephens in November 1917 his belief that:

The Pa and Pete stories have become a sacred cow in Australian literature, and a cash cow for Tiller. I am no friend of his, but a few of the stories in this book prove the man can write, though he has squandered his talents so far entirely in low comedy. I fear he will only stop producing his bloody awful Homestead books when the English language runs out of prepositions.

Lawson was perhaps the only reader in the country to detect the contempt and self-loathing that lay behind Tiller’s prose. “Australia may love Pa and Pete,” he once remarked to Sydney Steele, “but I’m damn sure Tiller hates them.”

After the relative financial failure of Off Our Homestead Tiller resolved never to write another Pa and Pete story. It was the last collection of original Tiller family stories to be published for seven years, and the last of his work to be published by Allenby & Godwin. Now in his forties, Tiller had lost interest in the pastimes that used to occupy him, although he went through the motions of gambling and managing his investments, as badly as ever. He was lonely; despite offering outrageously high wages, he could persuade only old women to work in his household, due to his reputation as a rake. Always an impressive drinker of beer, at this time he moved on to spirits, and by the end of 1919 he was finishing a bottle of whisky a day. Only a looming bankruptcy obliged him to write more Homestead stories. In 1924 Tiller submitted what he swore would be the last of the Tiller family collections, Outwith Our Homestead, to his new publisher, Kookaburra Books. The stories marked a departure in style for Tiller. Slapstick was all but absent and an elegiac tone had replaced the usual archly humorous one. The caricatures of Pa, Pete, Norm and Ma even became, at odd moments, human. The final story in the collection was the infamous “He Leadeth Me Beside the Still Waters”. Tiller’s publishers begged him to amend this story, or even cut it from the collection altogether, but he refused, believing, correctly, that it was the best thing he had ever written. “He Leadeth Me Beside the Still Waters” sees the Tiller family leave the homestead in their rusty old Ford to spend a day by the creek. Pa disturbs a hive of bees, but by some miracle they don’t sting him, and instead he is able to help himself to their honey. In the meantime, Pete confides to Norm his intention to leave their selection the next day to seek his fortune in the city. Pete decides to go for a last swim in the creek, and Pa, Ma and Norm watch as he shimmies up a nearby tree and dives headfirst into the water. He does not re-emerge. Pa and Norm wade into the creek and drag out Pete’s lifeless body. The story ends with Pa cradling his dead son, whispering the twenty-third psalm into his ear.

The public hysteria following the death of Pete in “He Leadeth Me Beside the Still Waters” is comparable only to that which followed the demise of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes at the Reichenbach Falls in “The Final Problem” (1893). Fourteen people in Sydney and twenty-eight in Melbourne were hospitalised with nervous prostration in the week after the book’s release, and a mock funeral held for Pete Tiller in Brisbane reportedly drew a crowd of 2000 mourners. Within a short time grief turned to anger, and the letter columns of newspapers were flooded with correspondence condemning Tiller for his cruelty and heartlessness. Pa and Pete clubs were formed across the country, and countless petitions arrived at Kookaburra Books demanding that Pete be brought back to life.

For a time, Tiller was moved by the public’s outpouring of emotion for the character he had created, but as the months passed and the furore refused to die down, it wearied him. The Pa and Pete clubs were encouraging boycotts of all his other Homestead books, and Tiller’s one remaining pleasure, his twenty-mile daily constitutionals around Sydney, had to be curtailed because librarians, booksellers and prostitutes would shout obscenities at him as he passed. Within a month, his royalties were reduced to almost nothing, and within two months the little money he had saved had disappeared. Finally, in a terse letter to the Bulletin published on 6 December 1924, Tiller announced a new, and this time absolutely final, Tiller family book, Return to Our Homestead, in which, he promised, he would resurrect Pete.

Tiller wrote Return to Our Homestead in six drunken days at the end of December. The first story in the collection, “He Maketh Me to Lie Down in Green Pastures”, is a direct continuation of “He Leadeth Me Beside the Still Waters”. As Pa mumbles over Pete’s body, his son jumps up from his arms and crows, “Wot a larf!” He had been shamming all along. The remainder of the story, and the other stories in the collection, were clumsy pastiches of previous Pa and Pete adventures. What little life Tiller had breathed into the characters in Outwith Our Homestead had dissipated. Pete’s only function was to play cruel practical jokes on the rest of his family, constantly braying his catchphrase, while Pa was sadistically pricked, gored, scratched and bitten by the local flora and fauna as Ma looked on, shaking her head and laughing. Return to Our Homestead became the third-highest-selling book in the series.

Pa and Pete’s Wireless Showcase Hour debuted in 1926 and was to run on Sydney’s Radio 5XC for the next three decades. Eager to recoup the financial losses of the previous year, Tiller had agreed to work as a consultant on the show, spending an hour each week with the writers dispensing advice on how to portray his creations. The first eleven months of broadcasts were faithful adaptations of the Tiller family stories, but after these were used up the show degenerated into a parade of bad jokes and clumsy, crude double entendres, as demonstrated in the following exchange from the 15 November 1926 broadcast:

PA: Where’s your mum, Pete?

PETE: She’s squatting on Yorkey’s Knob.

PA: I’m going to murder that Yorkey!

This was too much, even for Tiller, but his notes on the scripts were ignored, and he was no longer welcome in the studio. In a fit of rage, Tiller had destroyed the wireless in his home, and so on Saturday nights at eight o’clock, when Pa and Pete’s Wireless Showcase Hour was broadcast, he would stagger drunkenly around the streets of Mascot or Bronte or Leichhardt until he found a house with an open window, and there he would listen as the family inside wept with laughter at the inanities spouted by Pa and Pete. When the sound of Tiller’s mumbling grew loud enough to be noticed, he would be shooed away and move on to another house, and another window. In December 1926 Tiller attempted to enter the home of a family in Ashfield, in order, he said, to kill Pa and Pete, and he was arrested. A nervous breakdown followed, and Tiller was hospitalised for the first half of 1927. The doctors ordered a change of climate and told Tiller he should return to his hometown of Coolabah. The first annual Pa and Pete festival was scheduled to be held there later that year, and Tiller had been invited as guest of honour. Instead, the writer finally decided, at the age of fifty-two, to return to England.

Tiller sailed from Sydney in a first-class cabin in August 1927, remaining at the stern of the ship long after the city had disappeared over the horizon. It was the first time he had left Sydney in forty-seven years. He spent the long, solitary weeks of the voyage talking to himself in a mirror, trying to recapture the English accent he had not used for decades; he introduced himself to the other passengers as Henry Watkins. By the time the ship arrived in England four months later, Tiller had shaved off his beard, disposed of his old clothes, and had the ship’s tailor make him an entirely new wardrobe.

Tiller arrived in London during the coldest winter in sixty years, and was met at the docks by Sydney Steele. Steele and Tiller shared a publisher in Kookaburra Books, who had asked Steele to keep an eye on Tiller. Though the men were contemporaries, and often mentioned in the same breath as Australia’s two finest writers of prose, they had never before met. Steele had been warned about Tiller’s eccentric behaviour, so he showed no surprise when instead of the bearded, ragged ex-sheepshearer he had expected, there stood before him a clean-shaven, immaculately dressed gentleman who spoke in a bizarre half-Cockney, half-Cornish accent and demanded to be addressed as Henry Watkins. Tiller rented a luxurious flat in Mayfair and was looked after by a personal valet and a cook, both of whom he eventually dismissed because they could not understand his accent. Steele was asked to help find a maid from Australia, and after much searching a young woman, originally from Cronulla, was found to serve Tiller.

On a snowy morning in January 1928, Tiller took the train from London to Bath to visit his ancestral home. Steele wanted Tiller’s opinion on his novel, the high modernist Uneasy Lies the Head, and Tiller took the manuscript with him to read on the train. Upon arriving in Bath he spent hours wandering the streets of the city. Tiller Manor was gone; it had been destroyed in a Zeppelin raid during the Great War and the grounds had been sold to the council, which had erected housing for disabled veterans on the site. At the local cemetery Tiller found the grave of Peter Boldwood, the original Pete, who had been killed at Ypres in 1917. The vicar informed him that Thomas Boldwood, Peter’s father, was still alive, and Tiller went to visit him at his great-granddaughter’s house. The 99-year-old Boldwood remembered young Henry Watkins perfectly, but told his visitor that Watkins had died in Sydney in 1891, and there was a letter from Reginald Watkins to prove it. Tiller protested that he was indeed Henry Watkins, but the old man grew querulous. “Liar!” he shouted. “Listen to you. You’re a foreigner.” Tiller was asked to leave by the old man’s great-granddaughter, and as he hurried away he could hear the agitated Boldwood continue to roar, “Bloody foreigner!” Tiller left a cheque for two hundred pounds with the vicar, asking that it be given to the Boldwood family. From Bath he sent a letter to his editor at Kookaburra Books, admitting that leaving Sydney had been the biggest mistake of his life and announcing his desire to return as soon as possible. He had been in England for just over five weeks.

Tiller made his way back to London the next day with a raging fever. He fainted on the train, and in the confusion his luggage, and the only copy of Steele’s novel, went missing. He was taken home insensible with a bad chest cold that quickly developed into pneumonia. The best doctors in Harley Street were called in to examine him; all ordered complete bed rest for at least six months. Ill, forlorn and yearning for Sydney, on 3 March 1928 Tiller asked his maid to bring him paper and pen, and began to write. Sydney Steele, who remained on friendly terms with Tiller despite the devastating loss of Uneasy Lies the Head, assumed he was working on more Pa and Pete stories, but he was wrong. The Lotus-Eater was Tiller’s last book, and his only novel. A radiant, poetic Bildungsroman, the novel tells the story of Simon Buller, a callow young Englishman exiled to Australia by his wealthy but emotionally stunted family. At first contemptuous of his new home and its inhabitants, Buller learns to love Sydney, and eventually his selfishness and greed are transfigured by the city into something approaching redemption. The novel’s crystalline prose, complex, shifting point of view and indelibly evoked setting found many admirers in England when it appeared in 1934. T.S. Eliot wrote, “The Lotus-Eater is to Sydney as Mr Joyce’s Ulysses is to Dublin,” while E.M. Forster claimed that on long winter evenings he would read the novel to warm himself from its pages. The Lotus-Eater remained in print in Great Britain until after the Second World War, and was eventually reprinted as part of the Penguin English Library in 1993.

In the months he was confined to bed, recuperating and working on The Lotus-Eater, Tiller spent hundreds of pounds on maps, drawings and books about Sydney, though most of the astoundingly detailed descriptions in the novel were drawn directly from memory. On one occasion Steele visited Tiller and found him, so he thought, asleep with his manuscript spread out on the bed. But as Steele turned to leave, Tiller spoke, his eyes closed: “Wait a moment. I’m standing on the corner of George Street. I’m just crossing the road. Oh, it’s the harbour! My God, what a sight!” Transfixed, Steele listened as Tiller roamed in imagination through the city he so loved. Steele traced Tiller’s progress on a map, and when he gently corrected Tiller on some minor detail, the bedridden writer insisted that the map was wrong, as indeed turned out to be the case. One day Steele encountered Tiller’s maid in the hall. Knowing Tiller’s reputation, he expressed his wonder that she was still in his employ. The maid was puzzled: “Why would I leave?” she told Steele. “He’s a nice old gent. He just asks me to read to him, that’s all. For hours and hours I read the newspaper and things. He don’t care. He says he just wants to hear my accent.”

Writing for long hours each day, against his doctor’s advice, Tiller completed the manuscript of The Lotus-Eater in early August 1928, dispatching it to his editor at Kookaburra Books with the scribbled note, “To hell with Pa and Pete – this is fair dinkum!” Though Tiller’s publishers were initially reluctant to allow The Lotus-Eater to be published under the pen name of “Henry Watkins”, they eventually agreed upon the condition that Tiller write another Pa and Pete book after he returned to Sydney. “I care not,” Tiller recorded in his journal. “I would write nothing but the words Pa and Pete for the rest of my life if it means seeing The Lotus-Eater in print.”

The Lotus-Eater was published in Sydney in February 1929. Tiller’s wishes were honoured and his double identity remained a secret. Kookaburra Books poured money into an expensive advertising campaign, and even offered customers a discount on the next Pa and Pete book if they bought The Lotus-Eater. Sadly, the advertisements had little effect. The Lotus-Eater by Henry Watkins had sold just seventy-three copies by the end of April. Most of the print run was remaindered, and the novel was never reprinted in Australia. The book was reviewed only once, by Paul Berryman in the Bulletin, as

the work of a patronising Pom who knows precisely nothing of Australia, and less about Sydney. Mr Watkins should have taken the time to read some of our famous local authors who can tell a good yarn without using too many fancy words. But lacking a firm hand on the tiller, Mr Watkins’s novel drifts away from readability and is by and by lost from view in the straits of pretentiousness.

By a strange coincidence, directly under the review was an advertisement for Pa and Pete’s Wireless Showcase Hour with an illustration of a grinning, cross-eyed Pete shouting, “Wot a larf!”

Mercifully, Tiller never knew of his novel’s failure in Australia. In the early hours of 1 February 1929 Sydney Steele returned to his Westminster flat from a cocktail party at his protégé Graham Greene’s house, when there was a telephone call from Tiller’s doctor. The writer had suffered a massive stroke after learning his ill health would delay his return to Australia for a further six months. The doctor told Steele that Tiller had been calling for him all evening. “I can’t see Sydney anymore,” he had raved. “Where is Sydney?” Steele rushed to Tiller’s apartment and was met at the door by the doctor, who informed him the patient was now resting. But when the two men tiptoed into Tiller’s room they found he had somehow got out of bed and dragged himself across the floor to the bookcase. Tiller had died face-down in the opened pages of a large leatherbound book he had pulled from a lower shelf. After they had gently placed the body into bed, Steele glanced at the book on the floor. It was not he that Tiller had been calling for. The pages showed a reproduction of Grace Cossington Smith’s painting of Sydney Harbour, The Curve of the Bridge (1928).

Tiller’s will directed that he be cremated and his ashes scattered on the waters of Sydney Harbour, but such was the public grief in Australia that the federal government intervened, and the writer’s wishes were ignored. His body was returned to Australia in late July 1929, and he was given a state funeral, attended by the premier of New South Wales and the Australian prime minister. Thousands of Sydneysiders lined the streets to pay their respects. His remains were then taken under military escort to Coolabah and laid to rest in an ornate vault in the town’s small churchyard on 4 August 1929. The Addison Tiller Memorial Committee raised fifteen hundred pounds in just under a year, and two marble sculptures to commemorate Tiller’s life and work were commissioned. The eight-metre-tall figures of Pa and Pete were completed in 1932 and set outside Tiller’s last resting place, where they remain to this day.