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WHO ARE WE? | TESTIMONIALS | LINKS | CONTACT DETAILS |
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for books by or about
for books about
to read our ANECDOTES Dame Mary Gilmore (1) Dame Mary Gilmore (2) Frank Hardy Norman Lindsay Nettie Palmer & Friends Hill of Content George Robertson Miles Franklin E.J.'Ted' Banfield Frank Dalby Davison Henry Lawson Joan Lindsay
Peter Carey Bryce Courtenay Thomas Keneally John Marsden Colleen McCullough Ruth Park
for books by or about
for books about
to read our ANECDOTES Dame Mary Gilmore (1) Dame Mary Gilmore (2) Frank Hardy Norman Lindsay Nettie Palmer & Friends Hill of Content George Robertson Miles Franklin E.J.'Ted' Banfield Frank Dalby Davison Henry Lawson Joan Lindsay
Peter Carey Bryce Courtenay Thomas Keneally John Marsden Colleen McCullough Ruth Park
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But Upfield, who had always been a keen reader and writer, had other ideas.
Despite his lack of experience, he eventually talked his way into becoming a
boundary rider on an inland cattle station at Momba, some 140 miles north-east
of Broken Hill. (In the 1957 book Follow My Dust!, Arthur Upfield recalled his
30-hour Cobb & Co coach trip from Broken Hill to Wilcannia in 1911 - and Broken
Hill is almost 300 miles from Adelaide!)
Over the next couple of years, he worked at odd jobs in the bush - trying his
hand at gouging for opal, boundary riding, droving, rabbit-trapping, and as a
station cook. He became enamoured of Australia's wild landscape, the freedom it
provided, and the outback characters he met.
By August, 1914, when Australian Prime Minister Joseph Cook announced
"Australia is now at war", Arthur Upfield had ventured north into central
Queensland. He went to Brisbane and quickly enlisted, joining the 1st Light
Horse Brigade Train (5 Company, Army Service Corps). Forty days later he
embarked on HMAT Anglo Egyptian for the Middle East. Upfield saw service in
Egypt, United Kingdom and France. Whilst in Egypt, he met an Australian nurse,
Anne Douglas, who was to become his wife.
John Hetherington tells us in his 1962 book Forty-Two Faces, that Arthur
Upfield during the First World War wrote several short stories set in the
Australian outback and sold them to English magazines. At war's end, he
returned to Australia. "I went bush like a homing pigeon," he was quoted as
saying, "[I] loaded up a push-bike - minus its pedals - and carried my swag all
over the country."
During the next decade, Upfield started to take his writing seriously.
Journalist Pamela Ruskin, who knew the writer well, writes that 'he took a job
in Queensland and found in his employer's wife someone who took an interest in
his writing and urged him to keep trying' ('Mean Streets' February 1992).
Geoffrey Dutton, in describing Bony's attributes, says: 'He has the white man's
capacity to cope with theory and planning. He has the Polynesian's warmth and
human sympathy, and capacity to include all types in the human family. Finally
he has the Aboriginal knowledge and love of the earth of Australia, and the
capacity to listen and respond to the spirits of the country. And he has the
traditional Aboriginal skills of tracking and survival.'
The first appearance of his part-Aboriginal police inspector was in The
Barrakee Mystery (Hutchinson, London) in 1929, renamed in the later US edition
as The Lure of the Bush (Crime Club, New York, 1965).
Arthur Upfield's second Bony novel, The Sands of Windee (1931), attracted
sensational attention when it became entangled in a real murder mystery which
resulted in the writer giving evidence in court, and the conviction and
execution of the murderer. These 'stranger-than-fiction' circumstances arose
when Upfield was working on patrol of the Western Australian vermin fence in
1928/9. Around the camp-fire one evening, Upfield sought help from his mates
for the plot of his next Bony story. How can a human body be disposed of
without leaving any trace of its existence, he posed. Their solution was
ingenious: shoot the person, burn the body, filter the ashes for small bones,
teeth etc, then dissolve them in acid and pound anything remaining to dust in a
gold-seeker's dolly pot and, finally, disperse what remains to the winds.
Unfortunately, one of those present at the camp-fire, Snowy Rowles, put the
plot into real-world action in 1930, while Arthur Upfield was busy employing
the identical methods in his fictional Bony text.
Several accounts of this famous multiple-murder case are available. Terry
Walker published his Murder on the Rabbit Proof Fence (Hesperian Press, 1993);
Judge Eric Clegg includes it in his Return Your Verdict, Studies in Australian
Murder (Angus & Robertson, 1965); Alan Sharpe devotes seven pages to it in his
Crimes that Shocked Australia (Currawong Press, 1982); and Jack Coulter
includes it in his 1982 With Malice Aforethought - West Australia Murder Cases
(St George Books).
Arthur Upfield prepared his own account of the murder trial and the
circumstances leading up to it. His UK publisher, Hutchinson, declined the
manuscript saying it wouldn't be of sufficient interest to the British public.
In August 1932, Upfield wrote from Perth to Angus & Robertson (A&R) in Sydney
offering his 'complete and unbiased' manuscript containing … "about thirty
thousand words on how Rowles learned the murder detail for a novel, Sergeant
Manning's investigation, and pre-trial impressions … [another] forty thousand
words on the trial published in the West Australian, with running commentary …
a selection of some forty photographs … Are you interested or not?"
They were not. Nor were they interested in his next two submissions. But in
1936, as A W Barker reminds us in Dear Robertson - Letters to an Australian
Publisher (A&R, 1982), "he submitted Wings Above the Diamantina, with which he
began a long association with A&R."
Eventually Upfield found an Australian publisher for his authentic account of
the Rowles murders - the little-known Midget Masterpiece Publishing Company of
Sydney. They released his The Murchison Murders in 1934, two years after the
culprit was hanged at Fremantle Gaol. Incidently, a pirated edition of this
book was released in America in 1989; because of its short print run (some 600
copies), collectors at the beginning of the twenty-first century are paying
three-figure sums for a copy, just to complete their Upfield holdings.
The period between The Sands of Windee and the commencement of World War Two
(1939) was often financially difficult for Arthur Upfield. Australia was in the
grip of the Depression, his marriage was rocky, and there was little
opportunity for writers; but Upfield kept doggedly writing his Bony
murder-mysteries and other books.
While he had many books published during the 1930s - A Royal Abduction (a
non-Bony title), Gripped by Drought (another non-Bony book), The Murchison
Murders (non fiction),Wings Above the Diamantia, Mr. Jelly's Business, Winds
of Evil, The Bone is Pointed, and The Mystery of Swordfish Reef - sales were
not sensational, despite being issued in several countries.
He accepted an offer to join the Melbourne Herald newspaper in 1933 to write a
serialised, non-Bony, horse racing story called The Great Melbourne Cup
Mystery. Sixty-three years later, long after the author's death, this material
was published, for the first time in book form, by Tom Thompson of ETT Imprint,
Watsons Bay, Sydney (1996).
Each Bony book is set in a different part of Australia, all described in
accurate detail by a writer who had spent time there, one who carefully studied
his surroundings and its inhabitants. Hetherington observes "He [Upfield] likes
to feel that even the most carping veteran living in some small town or
district he writes about could fault him on the finest point of topography or
idiom." But it was Bonaparte's skills as a tracker, his ability to identify
obscure clues and reach rational conclusions about them, which truly set
Upfield's crime novels distinctively apart.
Aged nearly fifty, Arthur Upfield enlisted during the Second World War
(perhaps, it has been suggested, in military intelligence). He literary
fortunes changed dramatically during this time of international unrest - his
American agent placed his works with Doubleday, New York and various US book
club publishers. "My books have earned big money only since 1943,' Upfield once
said.
"Arthur Upfield's marriage had broken up soon after World War Two," according
to the Mean Streets profile in 1992.
Around 1945 he met a recently-widowed store-keeper from Kalorama in the
Dandenong Ranges, east of Melbourne, Jessica Uren (nee Hawke) [later to become
the supposed author of the Upfield biography Follow My Dust!]. Upfield "was
unable to get his estranged wife, Anne, to agree to a divorce but, despite
this, he and Jessica lived together as husband and wife from 1946 until his
death in 1964," Kay Craddock, Melbourne antiquarian bookseller, wrote in her
Introduction to her sale catalogue of Upfield's books and papers (199?).
From the end of the Second World War until his death in early 1964, Arthur
Upfield had nineteen new titles published, plus 49 editions of these and
earlier books - that is an average of four books a year for seventeen years.
He and Jess had at least four homes during this period: at Yarra Junction, and
Airey's Inlet, in Victoria, and at Bermagui South and Bowral in New South Wales.
An Author Bites the Dust (1948) is set in the Dandenong Ranges and the Yarra
Valley where the couple lived during the late 1940s. The New Shoe (1951) has
the white granite Spit Point Lighthouse in a scene at Airey's Inlet, where they
also lived.
Journalist Pamela Ruskin recalled her first interview with Arthur Upfield in
Melbourne about the publication of The Widows of Broome (1950): "He told me how
much he loathed being in the city and that he was dying to get back to Jess at
Airey's Inlet … his one real luxury was a magnificent black Daimler which he
cleaned and polished frequently … he would leave it parked at the edge of the
city and take a taxi in because he was unwilling to hazard it in city traffic"
(Mean Streets).
The Upfield home at Airey's Inlet, along with many others located in this
popular Great Ocean Road district, was destroyed in a bushfire. The family
moved to Bermagui South on the New South Wales south coast - an area made
famous by American western writer Zane Grey and his marlin fishing exploits.
Grey visited the area in the late 1930s, and Arthur Upfield's The Mystery of
Swordfish Reef - first published in 1939, twenty years before he lived nearby -
begins at this very fishing port.
Some of Upfield's books were turned into a radio serial titled The Man of Two
Tribes and broadcast over thirteen Australian radio stations in 1953. During
their time at Bermagui South, Jessica Uren (Hawke) changed her surname by deed
poll to Upfield, while Arthur concocted a little literary shape-changing of his
own.
The ruse was transparent however -
most of the material was a series of stories which had appeared previously in
magazine and newspapers written by Upfield, but it was his intention that it be
seen as her biography of him.
Unfortunately Follow My Dust! reveals
disappointingly few dates and very few identifiable people.
The book sold well
and generated a lot of interest; in the early twenty-first century even a poor
copy of it, with dust jacket, costs a three-figure amount.
Six further Bony books appeared during the author's lifetime, and a final one,
The Lake Frome Monster (Heinnemann, London, 1966) was published posthumously.
It was based on an unfinished manuscript and copious notes left by Upfield
when he died in 1964.
Arthur Upfield left Bermagui "after Jess had to be moved to a nursing home,"
Pamela Ruskin reports, "[and] took a cottage ...at Bowral [in the New South
Wales central highlands].
After a series of mild heart attacks, he had a massive one and died there on
February 13, 1964. He was found some hours later by the boy who delivered the
groceries."
Jessica Upfield died fifteen months later, May 29, 1965.
Almost a decade after Upfield's death, his highly-successful Detective
Inspector featured in his own 26-part, one hour television mini-series called
'Boney' (spelled 'Boney' - with and 'e' - so poorly-read viewers would get the
pronuncation right!). New Zealander James Laurenson playing the leading role.
Other well-known Australian actors in the series included David Gulpilil, Jack
Thomson, Kate Fitzpatrick and Googie Withers.
Upfield was one of very few Australian writers of his era able to sustain
himself entirely from his writing. Many of his books were translated into at
least three other languages. He became the first non-American admitted to the
Mystery Writers Guild of America and, after twenty years of membership,
received a pair of gold cufflinks with manacles engraved on them to mark the
occasion.
#
©
BARRY JOHN WATTS 2006
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The House of Cain
The Barrakee Mystery
The Beach of Atonement
The Sands of Windee
A Royal Abduction
Gripped by Drought
The Murchison Murders
Wings Above the Diamantia
Mr. Jelly's Business
Winds of Evil
The Bone is Pointed
The Mystery of Swordfish Reef
Bushranger of the Skies
:
Death of a Swagman
The Devil's Steps
An Author Bites the Dust
The Mountains Have a Secret
The Widows of Broome
The Bachelors of Broken Hill
The New Shoe
Venom House
Murder Must Wait
Death of a Lake
Sinister Stones
The Battling Prophet
The Man of Two Tribes
The Bushman Who Came Back
Follow My Dust!
Bony and the Black Virgin
Journey to the Hangman
Valley of Smugglers
The White Savage
The Will of the Tribe
Madman's Bend
The Lake Frome Monster
Breakaway House
The Great Melbourne Cup Mystery
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In short, a unique fictional character, well equipped to observe, absorb and be
patient. (Bony was, 50 years later, to inspire US crime writer Tony
Hillerman to create his own native North American law enforcement characters,
Navajos Sergeant Jim Chee and Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn.) Upfield's first
published book, a mystery story The House of Cain (1928), did not include the
Bony character but Upfield went on to write 32 Bony books. (see right)
Upfield was far from being a 'born writer'. "Upfield's style is never much
better than stiff and wooden, though his dialogue can be lively," wrote T J
Binyon, in Murder Will Out - the Detective in Fiction, (Oxford, 1989), "But his
plots, over-melodramatic in the first novels, improve considerably with time,
and some indeed, are masterly. The outstanding features of the novels, however,
are their setting - the Australian outback."
The biography of Arthur Upfield, titled Follow My Dust! was published in 1957
by Heinemann, London, supposedly written by Jessica Hawke, with an Introduction
by Detective Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte.
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WHO ARE WE? | TESTIMONIALS | LINKS | CONTACT DETAILS |
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