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Books and Writing with Ramona Koval Radio
National Sunday 12 May 2002
TranscriptThe Arthur
Upfield Mystery - BonyMeet Detective Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte, Bony
to his friends... an Aboriginal detective roaming the outback from the 1930's
to the 1960's in some thirty novels, from the pen of Arthur Upfield. Talking
about his life, work and astounding popularity, Mireille Vignol is joined by journalist
and friend Pamela Ruskin, publisher Michael Duffy, researchers Joe Kovess and
Travis Lindsey, crime fiction specialist Lucy Sussex, Aboriginal writer Philip
McLaren, and American fan Jan Finder. 'They were probably the
most accessible body of writings about outback Australia that I’d ever come upon.' 'He’s
less good on character, but what he is, is a superb landscape painter.' 'Well,
to have a banshee, you know, an Aboriginal person living in fear that the banshee
was going to lure him back to his wild ways was a little bit too much for me to
overcome.' 'As a writer, he was pretty weak on plot, but he gave a picture
of Australia. You get a feeling for it. You get a feeling for the heat. You get
a feeling for the dust.' Ramona Koval: Hello, and welcome to
Mystery Books and Writing. I’m Ramona Koval, bringing you a program on the life
and works of Arthur Upfield, a writer of thirty-three novels. A man who came to
Australia from England at the age of twenty and who, believe it or not, may well
be one of the best-known Australian writers for an international audience. So,
who was he? Detective Inspector Mireille Vignol investigates. Mireille Vignol:
What is it about the books of Arthur Upfield that make them still popular some
forty years after the last one was published and nearly eighty years after the
first one came out. What is it? A mystery? And who is he, you may well ask. Although,
if I mention Detective Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte, Bony to his friends, maybe
you’re old enough to remember the nineteen fifties radio series.
‘You get a lift back to Goulburn and phone headquarters. Tell them that Leo
Tolstoy has broken gaol and murdered. Tell them I’m after him. Tell them to send
for Napoleon Bonaparte.’ ‘Ininja the Avenger. An all-Australian program
starring Arthur W. Upfield’s creation, Detective Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte
The Man of Two Tribes.’ Or the seventies Bony television series.
You may even remember the books: twenty-nine of them for the Bony mysteries, set
all over Australia. I remember reading my first Bony novel when I went to visit
my sister in Broome. I borrowed The Widows of Broome from my local library. I
thought it was well, hilarious and quaint but I tell you what, it gave me a fair
idea of what sort of town it used to be. And then just a few weeks ago a visitor
from France exclaimed, ‘Arthur Upfield? Of course I know him. I’ve just read The
Bone is Pointed (l’os est pointé). Arthur Upfield books are available in
some thirty languages. The Germans have loved them since the fifties. The latest
customers are East Europeans and the French publisher, a latecomer in the nineties,
used beautiful Aboriginal paintings on their covers. A very clever strategy. And
the Bony series were incredibly popular in America in the forties, when the families
and friends of GIs posted in the region were hungry for local knowledge. But
what about back home in Australia? What should we make of Bony in 2002? Four years
ago, publisher Michael Duffy, of Duffy and Snellgrove, published two of his best
books: Death of a Lake and Man of Two Tribes. Michael Duffy: I just thought
it was great to have some books that had actually been written about frontier
society by someone who’d actually lived there. If you think about the main books
that most of us have read about Aborigines and the outback, you’re probably looking
at Henry Lawson or Bruce Chatwyn. And both of them, they only actually experienced
the outback for a month or two, while Upfield actually lived there for decades,
and he knew what he was talking about. So even though his work is often by our
standards politically incorrect, he shows an enormous amount of experience and
knowledge in the books, which I think is important. Mireille Vignol: And
why did you choose those two titles, Death of a Lake and Man of two tribes out
of the twenty-nine, I think, Bony thrillers that were written by Upfield? Michael
Duffy: I think there is a phenomenal environmental aspect of the books, which
I’m not sure if many people have seized upon before, but the whole beauty of the
books to me is their descriptions of the outback and the way that Bony is a character
who succeeds through his ability to understand the environment, whether it be
ants in the dust or a view of the horizon and what’s happening to the weather
up there. And I just love the environmental aspect of Death of a Lake, which is
all about an enormous drought. It’s probably the best book I’ve ever read about
drought in Australia. And the whole story involves a lake that’s shrinking , due
to evaporation, and there’s a body hidden in it. Mireille Vignol: There’s
some great and horrifying rabbit stories, as well, aren’t there? Michael
Duffy: Well this is it. I said before that Upfield just actually knew stuff about
the outback that most writers don’t. Most people with the sensibility of writers
are not drawn to live in the outback. And in Death of a Lake, of course, as the
lake shrinks, all the animals that have come to depend upon it, start to fight
each other for access to the water and you just have literally thousands, possibly
hundreds of thousands of rabbits dying in a huge band of fur around the lake,
while some are climbing over others to get to the shrinking water. And it just
introduces you to realities of the harshness of the Australian environment, which
most of us have no sense of. ‘The first rabbit appeared to their
right, running over the sandbar, running fast and direct. never pausing to look
for possible enemies, flogged by the craving for water after the hours of terrible
heat. The fence stopped it, flung it back, and it crouched obviously not understanding
what had barred its progress. ‘The animal was recognisable only by its colour
and shape, all its natural attributes of caution, of swift alertness, of gentle
and graceful movement having vanished during the hours of its torture by the sun.
It pawed the netting, frantically, standing on its hind legs, and not having the
sense to climb the netting like cat. It tested the wire with its teeth before
running along the fence, to reach at last an inward pointing V, and so finding
the hole to pass through. It thrust indignant birds aside to lap the water. ‘Carney
touched Bony’s arm and pointed over the depression. ‘"Fence won’t stand
up long after dark," he worried. ‘Beyond the birds the kangaroos were
gathering. The nearest were squatting, erect, ears attuned to catch the sounds
about the trap, nostrils twitching to register suspicious scents. Beyond them
others came loping over the dry lake bed, and already the dust rose from their
passage. ‘The birds maintained their uproar, filling the air about the men.
Birds were drowned in the Channel. Birds were staggering about on the marge inside
the fence, their feathers wet, shrieking anger and defiance, being buffeted by
others and by rabbits. ‘There were now a dozen rabbits drinking. There were
a hundred outside. They came like speeding drops of brown water over the dunes,
over the flats, never halting, minus caution, motivated only by the urge to drink.
They joined those at the fence, trickled through the holes to the water where
they parted the birds to drink. The men watched the first waterladen rabbit enter
a trap-yard. ‘An eagle appeared floating through the bird cloud. It tipped
a wing and side-slipped to snatch a running rabbit. The rabbit hung by its rump
from the iron beak, and they could see its pink mouth widen in a scream when,
to stop its struggles, and to clear the lesser birds, the eagle drove its talons
into its vitals. Through the birds on the flats, like a ship moving at sea, a
dingo loped, betraying exhaustion, its red tongue lolling, its flanks tucked to
its backbone. The dog took no notice of the rabbits or they of it. It butted the
fence as though it were blind, sat and stared. The lolling tongue was drawn up
under the snarling upper lip, and with the resolution of despair the animal drove
at the netting, rose on hind legs to paw its way up and over. It plunged into
the water and drank as it swam. ‘"I better fetch the guns," Barby
shouted. ‘"Bring mine, George!’ requested MacLennon. ‘And that red
box of cartridges on top of me swag. We gotta keep them ‘roos off, or they’ll
flatten the fence." ‘[…] Bony made his way back to the extremity of
the Channel … made his way because he had literally to kick the rabbits from his
path. The dusk was eating the salmon-pink dunes and the eagles were compelled
at last to seek roosts on the topmost limbs of dead gums … that is, if they roosted
at all which Bony, like many bushmen, doubted. ‘He waved his gun and shouted,
and the Channel behind him was now itself a living thing. It actually appeared
to breathe, to pulsate, to moan and heave. Rabbits surged over the now invisible
ground like ocean waves on shingle.’ (Death of a Lake pp. 166-170) Michael
Duffy: Man of Two Tribes is about another angle of Upfield, which is the fact
that Bony obviously has a mixed heritage, and in this particular book he has to
draw upon his Aboriginal background and his white background to succeed, and there’s
a tension between the two which I think is very well described in that book.
‘A change had taken place in this man of two races, [ … ] Ever the inherited
influences of the two races warred for the soul of Napoleon Bonaparte, and it
was the very continuity of this warfare which had created Detective Inspector
Bonaparte, and which time and again prevented him from sinking back into the more
primitive of the two races. When Constable Easter and his wife met him he was
suave, outwardly arrogant, inwardly humble, conscious, and justifiably so, of
his long succession of triumphs, not only over criminals but over that half of
himself he feared. Now the Easters might not have recognised him. ‘When
at Mount Singular, he had acted the character of the half-caste to perfection.
Now he acted, without conscious effort, the character of the full-blood Aborigine,
for his maternal instincts were in the ascendant. ‘Today his eyes were never
still. From his face was gone the usual expression of calm confidence. He glanced
constantly to the rear, jerking his head when normally he would have made the
movement with deliberation. The plain was at long last making itself felt, as
it had made itself wholly felt on the full bloods, to the extent that they would
not spend a night on it.’ (A Man of Two Tribes p.60) Michael
Duffy: The books that we published have not done terribly well. I think we were
the first people to reprint the books for many years when we did so. And the fact
is, there’s almost no audience left in Australia for Arthur Upfield books. Partly
because they are old-fashioned crime books they move too slowly and partly because
they are often politically incorrect, I think. Although one has to say in his
defence that to make his hero a part-Aboriginal person, back in the late nineteen
thirties, was actually a very brave decision. And the fact that those books found
an audience in Australia quite a big audience for many years I’m not sure if that
suggests that we weren’t quite as racist as people say, or maybe it just shows
that we were looking for a more romanticised view of an Aboriginal person. Mireille
Vignol: Or we’re ready to accept anything for a good yarn. Michael Duffy:
Yeah, I think that that whole aspect of racism and race would have probably knocked
out the good yarn if there wasn’t something in what he was doing with race that
was appealing to people at some level. And I’m not sure, having said that, I haven’t
talked to many Aboriginal people about this. I say it was appealing to people
but I mean white people. Mireille Vignol: Yes, it’s time to introduce an
Aboriginal perspective. Philip McLaren, in the nineteen nineties, the Koori detectives
that you created for Scream Black Murder, Gary and Lisa, were fighting to be accepted
in the mainstream police culture and to be trusted by the Koori community as well.
So what do you feel when you see Inspector Detective Bony in the thirties, an
educated, confident, Aboriginal man who travels easily from black to white cultures? Philip
McLaren: Well I don’t find him believable, to tell you the truth. And I don’t
really believe that Upfield has painted him very well. He could have done a little
more research. There were lots of work about at that time on the Aboriginal people.
There were a lot of anthropologists in the field who were well-published and he
really didn’t do his homework. Although I know that he live in the country and
that he did work with Aboriginal people or we presume that he worked with Aboriginal
people when he worked as a stockman in the outback. He tried to put an Aboriginal
person into a position that they hadn’t really achieved in society, which you
know I tend to do quite a lot, to try to break down the stereotypes and erode
some of the barriers. But just the guys’ names: Robbie Burns and Napoleon Bonaparte.
Imagine being saddled with those two names that he chose to use for his characters.
Also, the dialogue that he gives the characters is just totally unrealistic and
far too verbose for anybody. In an effort to be really eloquent, he’s just made
it totally unbelievable. But there are many good things that he exposed,
in the acceptance of Aboriginal people. In Death of a Swagman I read that he posed
as a layabout and an attitude was adopted right away by people who saw this half-caste
just sitting around the town and you know he had to be picked up by the cop which
was one of the first things that happened in the early part of that book, which
really did set a tone which rang true to me, but most of the other things that
he applied to Bony made me wince. He lived in fear that the banshee of the bush
were to lure him back my heavens and the banshee is not an Aboriginal, it’s not
an Australian thing, either; it’s an Irish or Scottish concept. It’s the call
of death. Mireille Vignol: But isn’t it just sort of a bush story, though? Philip
McLaren: The banshee? Well I guess it is. The banshee came out of the forest or
the woods in Ireland and Scotland. Mireille Vignol: And made its way to
Australia. Philip McLaren: Well to have a banshee you know, an Aboriginal
person living in fear that the banshee was going to lure him back to his wild
ways, was a little bit too much for me to overcome. Mireille Vignol: The
interesting thing, I suppose, is that Bony’s not quite the Noble Savage. That’s
been an argument, that it’s so typical of the Noble Savage perception. But he
really lives in the white man’s world. He’s really the man of two tribes in Upfield’s
imagination, and he’s at ease in both cultures. And when we think of the policy
of assimilation that was in place at that time, it seems to me that in a very
funny way, he is a bit of a modern hero. Philip McLaren: Yes, I could agree
with that. Well that was his intention, I think. To create an unusual or an original
character I think was his original intention. He set about to create a detective
that would be unique. We have to remember that crime writers were just raging
at that time. The Agatha Christies and Conan Doyle and the Americans were really
churning the books out. So he wanted to get in there with some sort of a character
that struck a nerve of originality that the reader might enjoy taking a look at.
I quite enjoyed it, as a read. I think that he structured his work very well but
I don’t think he scratched the surface of what he could have done with Bony. Mireille
Vignol: But the thing is that his books were hugely popular in the States. For
a lot of people who are in Germany, France, Poland, America; this is their first
approach of Australia and Aboriginal Australia. Philip McLaren: Yeah. That
bothers me. It always bothers me when non-Aboriginal people take on the Aboriginal
culture or appropriate the territory or colonise the culture these are catch-phrases
that pop up every now and again through Aboriginal society here. And you know
I’m in two minds about it. I want to be able to write what I want to write about.
If I want to write about a Russian and Russian life, I would like to think that
I could do that freely. So I’m not really with the mainstream of the Aboriginal
communities on this, because I just like the freedom to write what I want to write
about myself. But I know that Thomas Keneally, for instance, has trouble with
that, and with his own Jimmy Blacksmith he really worried a lot about that and
said recently he would never write that book today. He didn’t have any qualms
about writing it at the time. He also was lured back into this wild, savage you
know, the wild beast took him over that’s really bothered me a lot and kind of
reminded me of the old John Wayne movies in America, where they did the same thing. Mireille
Vignol: It’s interesting, because in Upfield definitely you have the sense that
Bony is really trying to calm down this wild part of his heritage but that he
really respects the part of the heritage. Philip McLaren: That’s exactly
right. He does do that. He sits on the fence quite well. He falls over to the
Aboriginal side when it suits his character and it’s quite clever, the way that
he does that. ‘" […] I once read a book about a very successful
man who discovered that his mother was a quarter caste, and he so despaired that
he hanged himself. How stupid! Why, he had every reason, in fact, to be proud
of his success, like me. I am at the top of my chosen profession, Easter, despite
all the handicaps of birth. Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte, Easter. With never a
failure to his record. I never knew my father, and in any case it’s a wise man
who does, according to someone. I never knew my mother either. She was found dead
under a sandalwood tree, with me on her breast and three days old. As you know,
few go far in this country without the push of family, money, and social influence,
but I have found my road in my own way, at my own pace, and no one tells me to
do this or that." ‘"You have to admit, sir, that you’re unusual,"
commented Easter. ‘"I know it. In spite of parentage, I am unusual.
Or is it because of my parentage?"’ (Man of Two Tribes pp. 22-23) Philip
McLaren: Well, yeah, it is strong. But you know the whole character of Bony, the
way that he’s portrayed, is strong, but it’s unrealistic. You have to make that
leap. It’s like I remember the advertising when the movie of Superman was being
released, you have to believe a man can fly if you want to go on with the story.
So with Bony, you accept all of the jarring pieces that were not really well-drawn
or well-characterised. For instance, there is no other black person in Death of
a Swagman. I think he would have had difficulty in trying to see how Bony might
interact with similar people, or Aboriginal people. Mireille Vignol: There
is a few stories of Bony interacting, and you would cringe even more, I think. Philip
McLaren: Yeah. But you know it’s the appropriation of the Aboriginal character
that most Aboriginal find offensive. But I can’t agree, particularly in literature,
where I want to be able to write about whatever I want. I don’t want people to
tell me what I can and can’t write. Mireille Vignol: Okay. We’ll trust Philip
McLaren to keep writing what he wants. Now I also played the excerpt we heard
a minute ago to writer and researcher of Australian crime fiction, Lucy Sussex,
who has written on Arthur Upfield’s Barrakee Mystery. Here is what she had to
say about Bony proclaiming his superiority because of his mixed parentage. Lucy
Sussex: That’s fascinating. The thing is it actually sounds a bit like a description
of Upfield himself, without the race element. Mireille Vignol: Why is that?
Tell us about that. Lucy Sussex: Because he came to Australia as a migrant
from England and he basically found himself an outsider and despite being a Pom,
went to the outback, did years and years of manual work, a great deal of isolation.
A self-taught writer, he had nothing to do in his shed when the day’s work was
done, so he’d be scribbling away, and learned that way and was very much the self-made
man without benefit of education. Mireille Vignol: And this is a description
of the ‘fair go’, isn’t it, that also anybody can make it if they really apply
themselves and if they’re very strong-willed. Lucy Sussex: And I think that
very much applies in Australia. Upfield coming from England would have been aware
of the class system but it’s not quite so visible in Australia and there was the
theory that in principle you can do anything. If you want to be, you can be prime
minister. Mireille Vignol: Of course the reality was quite different insofar
as Bony goes to university I think the first Aboriginal it was forty years later
that Lucy Sussex: There’s a very interesting explanation for that and I
didn’t realise it at first. I thought, well this is Upfield fantasising, it’s
impossible. It was to do with racial theories that were current at the time. They
were believing that negroid races had atavistic tendencies. So that the half-castes
would return to type, or the call of the wild in adulthood. As The Barrakee
Mystery, his first novel, makes clear, during Bony’s student days at UQ he would
have been perceived as white. But his aversion occurs and actually, of course,
he does pass as white, because he’s just seen as a dark-complexioned man with
blue eyes so he would have been perceived as white in his student days, but then
he reverts subsequently, which gives him his superior sleuthing skills and his
ability to read the landscape so well. He’s a figure of fantasy but he’s
positioned between the two cultures and he does mediate between them quite successfully. Mireille
Vignol: When you wrote a paper on The Barrakee Mystery and that was published
in 1929 not your paper, but the mystery you argue, and I quote you here, that
‘to privilege a figure like Bony in The Barrakee Mystery was radical for the white
Australia of 1929. However [nowadays] the book is genuinely cringe-making.’ So
should we cringe at the stereotypes or should we admire the radicalism of the
choice in the context of the time? Lucy Sussex: Well a bit of both. Australian
crime fiction has had series detectives since the 1860s, when James Skip Borlase
and Mary Fortune were writing for The Australian Journal. But they’ve all been
white. Occasionally they’ve been female. In the 1890s there was a Chinese detective
called Wang Ti by an author called Louise Beck, but he was definitely anomalous.
And when they appear in crime stories they are comic stereotypes or rapacious
savages. So Upfield is presenting Bony sympathetically but he gets so much wrong
and it is a kind of patronising view in the end. And what is also alarming is
that Upfield would have been in the outback and the stolen children generations
would have been happening. He would have witnessed that going on and yet it’s
not described. It doesn’t appear in the book. ‘"You are
Nambuck?" "And you have no name. For your skin tells me that you are child
of a woman who broke the law. You are a man of two tribes and therefore of no
tribe. What do you want with me? Before you speak, do not forget that I am chief
of the Murramgatta Nation." ‘"I do not forget. Nor do I forget
that we are brothers in blood." ‘"That is not true speaking." ‘"It
is. Look at my shoulder cuts." ‘"Ah. Brother, I am sorry." ‘"Let
there be no falsehood between us. I do not come as your brother, but as a servant
of the white man’s law." ‘"Ah. Then you are him they call Bony.
I have heard of you. And it is now known to me how you got your shoulder cuts.
You, too, are a great chief."' [from the radio series] Lucy
Sussex: Bony does deal with racism, but Upfield really can’t look beyond the stereotype
of the Noble Savage. That’s better than the ignoble savage. There are embarrassing
things, and yet you have to respect him for knowing Aborigines and treating them
with respect. The thing about Upfield is that he’s a great writer of the Australian
landscape. He’s less good on character but he’s a superb landscape painter. And
if you go to the Red Centre it’s all there, it’s what he’s describing. Mireille
Vignol: And how do you read the dialogue of the characters? Lucy Sussex:
A bit lumpy, but effective. He’s got a very plain style. He doesn’t write dialogue
as well as, say, Ed McBain, or a modern crime writer; but it’s effective for its
purposes. And this is actually one key, I think to his overseas success: because
he’s got a plain style with no frills, he’s very easy to translate. And also the
Americans found it quite comprehensible. ‘I have always tried
to put into my books that addition to crime which gives pictures of this Australia…I
was born and reared in the south of England, and came out here before I was twenty.
I believe it takes a foreigner to see a land more clearly than the native born.’
(Arthur Upfield, 15 May 1958) Mireille Vignol: He was, indeed,
born in Gosport, England, in 1890. And to follow in his footsteps to the Australian
outback, here is researcher Joe Kovess. Joe Kovess: His father owned a drapery
store. There were quite a few problems in the family. At various times he went
to live with his grandparents or his aunts, so he didn’t have a very stable childhood.
When he finished his schooling his father apprenticed him to become a real estate
agent, which didn’t last very long, because Arthur was more interested in writing
stories about the Yellow Peril rather than studying for the exams to become a
real estate agent. And very quickly his father realised that the money he’d spent
in getting him apprenticed was a waste of money, and decided when Arthur was about
20, that he’d ship him off to Australia, because he thought he’d never come back
from there and he wouldn’t disgrace the family. So in 1910 Arthur arrived
in Adelaide with a few letters of introduction to various people. He tried doing
some work out on a dairy farm but that only lasted one day when he was woken up
at three o’clock the next morning to go and harness the horses to start the ploughing.
He decided that was a bit too much like hard work. But he then spent four months
at another farm, before he discovered the advertisements in the paper asking for
boundary riders in the outback. Now that really tickled his fancy, and he spent
a lot of time trying to convince the person who was doing the hiring that yes,
he should take a chance on him. Eventually he got fed up with Arthur always asking
him for a job every day and he was given the train ticket to Broken and a ticket
to hop on the stagecoach to take him off to Wheelers Hill past Wilcannia and Broken
Hill. Mireille Vignol: And there are quite a few of his stories that are
set around that area, aren’t there? Joe Kovess: Oh yes. The majority of
his stories would be centred around central New South Wales in that period, but
Arthur travelled a lot and everywhere he went he always used to take notes and
when he took a trip out to Broome, for instance, that ended up in the story Widows
of Broome. He visited Perth and Kalgoorlie and all those areas and everywhere
he went there’d be a story location. Certainly one of the early jobs that he had
was riding the rabbit-proof fence, and he would have a couple of camels and a
wagon that was pulled along by one of the camels, and after he’d done his work
there was nothing else to do. He would go weeks without seeing another person
out there, so he had to find his own entertainment. And what he used to do was
sit down and write. Either reading or writing. Mireille Vignol: Certainly
in Man of Two Tribes, we can see that he describes working with the camels and
the animal psychology quite incredibly. Joe Kovess: Absolutely. And the
interesting thing is that the camels, Millie and Curley were the names of the
camels he was working with on the rabbit-proof fence in Western Australia.
‘Before sundown, Bony went after the camels and brought them to camp,
where he tied them to stout scrub-trees for the night. The slight westerly wind
dropped, and only the occasional clank of a bell disturbed the complete silence.
This land was deserted, even by the birds. ‘They left camp the next morning
before sunrise, both camels still resentful. [ … ] Immediately they headed northward,
the camels became Little Lord Fauntleroys, although they were hungry and had no
cud. Lucy expressed her happiness by trotting ahead. The sun shone warmly, the
flies were less irritating, and thus all was well. Bony was able to ride, and
Millie walked with a swing like a girl taking pleasure in swirling her skirt to
best advantage. Curley swung along behind her, head high, eyes bright, hungry
and no longer rebellious. ‘Toward four o’clock they reached open grassy
spaces, and narrow belts of wattles in late golden bloom, [ … ] and half an hour
later, he sighted five sandalwood trees beyond which was nothing but the sky. ‘These
five magnificent trees appeared to be guarded by great boulders, and amid these
boulders Bony found evidence of a camelman’s camp. ‘The place was on the
point of a promontory overlooking the Nullarbor. Here were the everlasting daisies,
flannel bush, luscious waitabit and other delectable feed for camels, and Bony
could not unload and hobble fast enough for Millie and Curley.’ (Man of Two Tribes
pp. 46-47) Joe Kovess: After he’d finished his apprenticeship
at Wheelers Hill he then travelled around the countryside as a swaggie, and at
the outbreak of the First World War he was actually in Queensland and signed up
pretty quickly. He was taken over to Egypt and that’s where he met his first wife,
Ann. She actually came from a town called Barrakee in western Victoria. They came
back in 1921 and Arthur didn’t find any real work, so he then left his wife and
child, presumably at Barrakee, while he went on the tramp again. However, at some
stage they got back together again, because in 1930 or so they opened a boarding
house just outside of Perth. Unfortunately, it was just before the Depression,
so things weren’t terribly good and when Arthur was offered a job back in Melbourne
with the Melbourne Herald, he took that and he left Ann and his son James over
in Perth. After about six months he managed to persuade the Herald to pay
their train fare over so they could join him, and they were together then right
up until about 1945, when Arthur and Jessica got together. Mireille Vignol:
While in Melbourne, Arthur Upfield also met journalist Pamela Ruskin, who became
a great mate, and also his literary agent. Pamela Ruskin: Yes. I wasn’t
an agent for his books, but I was an agent for his serialisation of his books
in periodicals and newspapers, and also I’d written scripts for Morris West, before
the days of his fame, and Man of Two Tribes, or that’s what they called the series,
was one of them. Mireille Vignol: Did he like Arthur Upfield’s work? Pamela
Ruskin: I think he saw it with a commercial eye rather than liking it. They’re
not necessarily the same, as you know. ‘You have been listening
to a presentation of Ininja the Avenger, a program based on the best-selling stories
of Arthur W. Upfield and introducing Detective Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte. The
artists you heard were Douglas Kelly, John Morgan, Robert Beech, Richard Davies,
Keith Eden, Elizabeth Goodman; with Frank Thring as Detective Inspector Napoleon
Bonaparte. The music was composed and conducted by William Flynn, and the program
was directed by Morris West. An Australasian Radio Production.’ [from the radio
series] Pamela Ruskin: They cast Frank Thring as Bony and I
really can’t think of anything more improbable or unsuitable than Frank Thring,
who had a very, very fruity voice and was a very flamboyant character. He was
not, certainly, the clipped man of two tribes that Bony was who was at home in
the outback and hated the city, whereas I don’t think Frank Thring had ever seen
the outback, but I could be doing him an injustice. Mireille Vignol: Did
a lot of people feel this way? Pamela Ruskin: Well everyone in the arts
world, or everyone who read the Bony books thought it was hysterical. They just
couldn’t believe it. "Oh, forgive the intrusion. I was
told I’d find you here."
"Inspector Bonaparte…"
"Sergeant
Cain? I’ve a chit here from your superintendent.
"Thanks. I’m Gold, Inspector"
"How do you do, Mr Gold."
"So you’re taking the case over,
Inspector. Well I’d better put you right on what’s been done. There’s a man outside
called Reid, who tells a story about…"
"Yes, yes, I’ve heard it,
Sergeant. I took the liberty of talking to him on my way in."
"I’ve
arrested him, of course."
"Your manifest duty, sergeant. I have
set him free."
"What! But, surely…"
"What you did
was right and good police procedure, Sergeant. I am the worst policeman in the
country."
"Your reputation says you’re the best, Sir."
"Oh. Oh no. No, the best detective. The worst policeman. Ask my commissioner."
[from the radio series] Mireille Vignol: Pamela, tell us how
you came across Arthur Upfield. Pamela Ruskin: Well, I’d always been a freelance
for ... that’s a lot of years and Heinemann asked if I would do an interview with
this very difficult man. He was known to be very tetchy. And I went in and there
was Arthur, sitting bolt upright with a cigarette clutched in one hand and a whisky
in the other and his grey homburg hat on the chair beside him, looking absolutely
petrified and very grumpy. But somehow I had a half an hour interview that stretched
to two hours and we got on famously. And he was a very, very shy man and that’s
what made him a little cranky. He absolutely hated coming in to Melbourne. Mireille
Vignol: Did he make much money from his books? Pamela Ruskin: Not initially.
But yes, he did, once his books took off, because his sales in America absolutely
soared and he was selling thirty thousand and fifty thousand copies of a single
title. And then there were translations all over the world from Japan he said
he didn’t know what the Japanese would make of Bony to Mexico. He said in Europe
his best sales were in Germany, and from America he had two or three professors
of anthropology, particularly Professor Hooton, who said he was a non-academic
anthropologist because he knew and understood it better than most academics. And
Arthur was terribly tickled by this. He said he hadn’t ever visualised himself
as an anthropologist. Mireille Vignol: Well yes, I think it’s a bit of a
stretch. Pamela Ruskin: Yes it was, a great stretch. And as a writer he
was pretty weak on plot. He couldn’t spell, but that didn’t show, and he wasn’t
really on the whole a great writer. But he gave a picture of Australia, all over
Australia, I have a map here which has numbers where all his books have been set;
which state, and where. He probably knew Australia, the outback, certainly better
than all the literary writers whom he hated. It was because he said, ‘I’m a storyteller.’
And because his writing wasn’t all that hot as a literary person, they
turned up their noses at him. He said the literary establishment worked on the
principle of ‘you pat my back and I’ll pat yours.’ And they read each others’
books, but nobody else read them, or very few, according to Arthur. And that hasn’t
changed all that much. And he got no recognition, no awards in Australia of any
kind. I don’t think there were crime awards in those days. But in America, of
course, he did get a lot of recognition. He was the only foreigner at that stage
to be made a member of the Mystery Writers’ Association of America. And when he’s
been a member for twenty years, they sent him a pair of gold cufflinks with manacles
engraved on them. Last time I heard which is a few years now his grandson, Bill
Upfield, wore them very proudly, those cufflinks. Joe Kovess: Arthur never
liked the Palmers and the Palmers were the head of the literati in Melbourne.
There was an ABC character who used to read these stories, called The Scribe,
and he read a number of the Vance Palmer books, so Arthur said, ‘Well, I can write
a much better story than that,’ and got in to see the Scribe. And The Scribe actually
read Wings Above the Diamantina and they got such a response to that, that he
then read another one of Arthur’s books. From then on there was a continuing battle
between Vance Palmer, certainly trying to get more of his books read as being
‘the literature’ of the country and Arthur trying to get his stories on. Obviously
the audience much preferred the Arthur Upfield novels. Mireille Vignol:
Upfield also hated Nettie Palmer, and he took a writer’s revenge on the pair by
writing the satirical novel An Author Bites the Dust. To tell the story, here
is Travis Lindsey, who wrote his masters dissertation and is now writing a PhD
on Arthur Upfield. Travis Lindsey: His first brush, really, was with Nettie
Palmer. She was a very capable essayist and a woman of letters and she had a strong
influence on Australian literature. And unfortunately she also had a strong influence
on Arthur. His second Bony novel, called The Sands of Windee, came out in late
1931 and in September of that year, Nettie Palmer reviewed in the magazine modestly
called, All About Books for Australian and New Zealand Readers. She sort of entwines
it with another book and I’m quoting here ‘Looking at two new
novels written in Australia, and somehow purporting to be Australian: The Sands
of Windee by Arthur Upfield and The Butterfly with Big Feet by Neville Smith,
one is firstly to ask one question is it absolutely necessary in order to attract
English readers, for an Australian book set in the present day to have an English
hero? It seems a pity because an Australian writer is unlikely to be skilled in
the presentation of English characters and the result is something artificial.’ Well
Arthur did have apoplexy over the critique, and he might have wondered whether
his part-Aboriginal, part-European hero was an ‘English hero’. Most readers would
have thought not. She picks up on Arthur’s writing in the story (and Arthur’s
quite guilty of that, he couldn’t help himself): there’s a page on arbitration
of court awards for station hands, because he didn’t think that they were paid
enough and he was quite anti Aboriginal station hands not receiving white wages.
Anyway, Nettie does pick up on this and she says, ‘This simply cannot be
done. A detective story is by nature as unreal as a game of chess and any social
or moral issues that arise in it must be handled lightly and satirically.’ Now
this next bit contains what I think is a beautiful line: she says, ‘It is, of
course, very difficult to write a light novel and to keep it on the same plane
all through. The number of detective novels turned out today must be unimaginably
huge, but are their writing, with all their experiments, anything more about how
things should be done?’ Well Arthur felt himself very patronisingly dismissed
and later, in a letter to his friend, J. K. Ewers, he was to say of Nettie, very
ungraciously, ‘One day I’ll cut her throat.’ Nettie did, I think, die peacefully.
Joe Kovess: For the rest of his life, he had a deep and burning hatred
of Nettie Palmer, and thereafter it was always ‘that blasted woman,’ and he’d
ask Angus and Robertson not to send books to her for review. Pamela Ruskin:
But the book An Author Bites the Dust was very savage and they were furious. And
they were talking about suing him, and he was praying hard that they would, because
he knew very well that if they sued him, his sales would go shooting up. But unfortunately
for him, they didn’t. Mireille Vignol: And there is another, and an even
better story to The Sands of Windee and we are in true crime territory now. Pamela
Ruskin, with a little help from Jan Finder. I’ll tell you more about him in a
minute. Pamela Ruskin: The book that created the biggest sensation was The
Sands of Windee. Arthur was constructing a rabbit-proof fence, actually as a camel
driver, and one night round the camp fire he offered anyone there a quid a pound
if they would give him an idea of how to dispose of a body, leaving no trace.
One of the men said he knew, that he would kill the man, burn the body, take the
bones, get them to powder in a dolly pot like gold dust, and that would be it.
And one of the people listening to that was a fellow who’s actual name I think
was Smith, but he called himself Snowy Rowles, and he did have a police record
but that didn’t come out at the time. Jan Finder: And about six months to
a year later, he went and killed three people or they assume he killed these two
people because they never found any of the body or anything he apparently used
the method that they’d been discussing to get rid of two of the bodies and then
shortly thereafter he supposedly killed a third person. Pamela Ruskin: He
wasn’t quite as thorough as you should have been. Jan Finder: And after
about a two-year trail, Sergeant Manning I believe is the gentleman’s name, tracked
down Snowy Rowles and he was convicted and met the hangman. Pamela Ruskin:
But the book came out at the same time that the trial was held. And a serial of
it ran in the Western Mail and they had the report of the trial and the serialisation
episode in the same issues of the Western Mail. Not quite side-by-side, but that
was more or less how it was. So of course everybody was rushing to buy The Sands
of Windee, as you can imagine, it was sensational. Jan Finder: Terry Walker
did a book called Murder on the Rabbit Proof Fence. Its subtitle was ‘The Strange
Case of Arthur Upfield and Snowy Rowles.’ Mireille Vignol: If John Finder
knows all this, it’s because he’s passionate about Upfield. He publishes a fanzine,
Marsupial Mutterings, devoted to Bony’s father. He has toured around Australia
over 35,000 kilometres tracking the divers locations of Bony’s novels. He even
made the trip to Upfield’s birthplace in England, and he’s the one who discovered
that he was born in 1890 and not 1888 as most records show. But let’s get back
to Joe Kovess, Travis Lindsey and insights from Pamela Ruskin, to discuss the
need for a new biography. Travis Lindsey: There are actually only two books
totally devoted to Upfield, and one was Jessica Hawke’s Follow My Dust, which
is a biography of Upfield. It’s essentially derived from Upfield’s own manuscript,
The Tale of a Pommy, but that was published in 1957 and Jessica Hawke was living
with Upfield from about 1946 on. The other book was by Professor Ray Brown, called
the Spirit of Australia the Crime Fiction of Arthur W. Upfield. That was published
in 1998 in Bowling Green Ohio by the Bowling Green State University. I think really
that work was intended more for an American audience than for an Australian one.
In the seventies and eighties, people like Stephen Knight, Humphrey McQueen, Geoffrey
Dutton amongst a number of others wrote of Upfield in papers in academic journals. Pamela
Ruskin: His biography, called Follow my Dust, supposedly written by Jessica Hawke
Mireille Vignol: What do you mean, ‘supposedly?’ Pamela Ruskin: Well,
because everybody was pretty well aware that Arthur had written it. It says ‘with
Arthur Upfield’ but Arthur was the writer; Jess wasn’t a writer. Joe Kovess:
Arthur was a very private person in many respects, and the biography is really
a collection of stories. While there is some fact in there, he never let the facts
get in the way of a good story. And so when you go through Follow my Dust, you’ll
find there are very few dates. The dates that are there are sometimes wrong and
there are very few people that you could actually identify. It was based
on a lot of his notes. Arthur had an unpublished biography called Tale of a Pommy,
and quite a few of the stories from that appeared in Follow My Dust. You know,
like his first marriage, he described it in one line as, ‘I got married, we had
a kid, it didn’t work out.’ Mireille Vignol: Well, knowing the man and his
life, what do you think of the biography? Pamela Ruskin: It was very much
like the books. No great depth to it. But an account of part of his life, with
his life in England and how he came here and how he had to fight for recognition
and how America really made him an international name. I don’t believe that they
were wrong, because I can’t think of any other writer better writer, I’m quite
sure but who knew what he would call ‘the book of the bush,’ because he’d seen
it from the bottom up, not as a station owner, not as a luxury traveller; nothing
like that. And he did it for many, many years, so he knew the country. You get
a feeling for it. You get a feeling for the heat. You get a feeling for the dust,
a feeling for the Aborigines and their customs not in all his books, he didn’t
create wonderful characters, especially women, as I say, they were all so high
up on a pedestal that they didn’t get a chance to really be anyone. He could create
the characters of the people he really knew, but as a general rule he didn’t have
a great deal of depth. Well he wasn’t very much educated either, but he loved
Australia. He loved the bush. He loved all the discomforts and the blazing heat
and dust storm and rain and cold and sleeping out all those things. He was happy
with the people he knew. And he was proud that he was one, he said, of only three
or four Australian novelists who made their living entirely from the proceeds
of their books and managed to live very well indeed from them.
‘Bony felt the satin smoothness of wood, was reminded of the red sand of inland,
the real heart of Australia which fools continue to claim dead.’ (from The New
Shoe, 1952) Michael Duffy: I wouldn’t seek to defend him. If
attacked by the standards of today, Arthur Upfield is a very vulnerable writer.
And I’m sure many of our current crime writers, that are writing now, will be
similarly attacked in a hundred years for problems that you and I have no awareness
of at the moment. Jan Finder: Take it as a mystery story, and leave it at
that. Pamela Ruskin: People should remember that if they really want to
understand this country, as it was probably not as it is now they could do a lot
worse than getting a Bony book; one of the better ones especially Death of a Lake. Ramona
Koval: Many thanks to everyone who participated in the program, and especially
Jan Finder, who provided many contacts, and is always happy to hear from other
Upfield fans. You can email him on wombat at sff net. The passages from
Upfield’s books were read by John Bayliss. Death of a Lake and Man of Two Tribes
are published by Duffy and Snellgrove. Most other titles are published by Scribner,
and archival material was from Screensound Australia, the national screen and
sound archive. |
